No Man's Nightingale (31 page)

It was a relief too. He didn’t want to be right and now thinking that he had been right, thinking that no more than ten minutes ago, seemed absurd. It was all very well to tell himself that people do such things. It still remained true that people like Arkwright don’t. In any case, Arkwright would not have killed Sarah from such a motive and he could have had no other. He, of all people, would have known that his lover was Sarah’s child’s father and that once Sarah was dead Christian Steyner would tell Clarissa the truth. He, of all people too, would have been told by Christian all the details of Sarah’s intention to tell Clarissa that truth on her eighteenth birthday. Timon Arkwright was nice and polite and pleasant to Clarissa because he loved Christian and wanted above all for him to be happy.

He, Wexford, had been fantasising and as a fabulist he wasn’t a patch on Thora Kilmartin. Reality was Martin Dennison and Arben Birjar. His phone was ringing. Burden. He was on his way home. Could he pop in for a chat? Wexford welcomed the prospect of a visit, all the more because he could no longer make a fool of himself proposing an eminent and respected company chairman as Sarah Hussain’s killer.

‘He hasn’t left the country,’ Burden said. ‘We know that. Border Control have kept a watch for him and there’s been no sign. A new development, if you can call it that, is that Janet Corbyn-Smith – remember her?’ Wexford nodded. ‘She called us, said she’d just remembered seeing Dennison’s passport. He left it in his room one day and she looked inside. Not that it’s been much use.’

‘What’s new about it then?’

‘He really is called Martin Dennison. As you know you don’t have an address in your passport or the names of your parents. His date of birth is 1981. All those interesting things that used to be in passports like hair colour and height aren’t there any more, haven’t been for ages.’

‘So all your new development has told you is his age and that he really is who he says he is.’

‘That’s right,’ said Burden. ‘He’s got two previous convictions which the passport of course didn’t tell Ms Corbyn-Smith but records did tell me. Actual bodily harm in 2007 and breaking and entering a year later. You know, people think that with all the technology we’ve got now it’s impossible to hide for long. A car can be traced in seconds, a mobile phone locates you, innumerable records list you. Your name is on various databases. But suppose you’re not what we’d call respectable. You’ve no fixed abode, any car you drive you’ve stolen. You can change your name when you like, there’s nothing to stop you, you’re free to call yourself what you choose. Pity we don’t have what they have in the US where it’s extremely difficult and time-consuming to change your name. You can’t even change the spelling of your Christian name without a lot of bother. Taking it that you’re a man, and you’re more likely to be, there’s always some woman somewhere who will give you house-room. You can get in your stolen car and drive off up some motorway until you come to a turn-off that goes to a place you’ve never been to but like the sound of. Find a Holiday Inn, for instance, dump the car and go off next day to find another place and another car to nick. It’s advisable to pay your hotel bill, of course . . .’

‘Yes, Mike, right, I get the picture.’ I’m not yet in my dotage, Wexford thought. Most of this has been true since I first got the job you’ve got now. ‘We do have one advantage,’ he said, hoping Burden wouldn’t object to that ‘we’. ‘We know what he looks like. We know about the tattoo on his hand, we know he’s a tall big man with dark hair. I don’t suppose Ms Corbyn-Smith thought of taking a photo of the passport on her phone, did she?’

‘It would be difficult with an ordinary mobile. Anyway, she didn’t.’

There were one or two things Burden had said which alerted Wexford but he said nothing about them. He had to think, maybe write those things down and give them some thought. They might mean nothing. He gave Burden another drink – he would be walking home – and they talked some more about hiding places for those seeking bolt-holes.

‘If you hid with an old girlfriend or a relative, all you’d have to fear would be recognition by a neighbour.’

‘And that’s no small thing, Mike,’ Wexford said. ‘Few people will give their support to a neighbour who has a suspicious friend staying with him or her, someone they’ve never seen at the house before but who’s now there all the time.’

‘And if that suspicious friend never goes out once he’s arrived? If he’s not been seen when he arrived? What then?’

This was what Wexford wanted to think about once he was alone. He called Burden again to ask if Janet Corbyn-Smith had been questioned in the past few days. Not since Dennison’s disappearance, he was told. What exactly had her relationship with Dennison been?

‘Just landlady and tenant,’ Burden said. ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘You know what I’m suggesting, Mike.’

‘There was nothing like that, any more than there was with Arben Birjar. Barry and Laura have been all over the house. She’s not sheltering him.’

Someone was. Wexford had always been interested in the reasons people have for choosing the names they do; choosing names for their children, for instance, and choosing names for an alias for themselves. These choices were seldom if ever arbitrary. In the case of Christian or given names, it was often that a celebrity was picked on, a television personality or a pop singer. The characters of novels and films provided names, think of ‘Emma’, ‘Shirley’ and ‘Alfie’. But what of surnames as aliases? People used the phone book when phone books were in constant general use. But all those who had no landline might never see a phone book. Where then would you get an assumed name from? The title of a book? The name of an author? Not if you lived an itinerant life and possessed no books anyway. He wrote down the name Dennison on a sheet of paper, then Martin Dennison, followed by Marty Dennison. This told him nothing. Then he began to make a list of all the people he and Burden’s team had spoken to in the course of the investigation, starting with Georgina and Trevor Bray.

A long list followed. He had made notes of each interview he had carried out, most of them made after the meeting was over, and from these he picked out names: the Kilmartins, Duncan Crisp, Daphne Morgan, Linda Green, Clarissa Hussain, Dennis Cuthbert, Nardelie Mukamba, Alan Conroy, the Sams family, Christian Steyner, Timon Arkwright. Watson and Mrs Steyner were dead, the women who had alibied Crisp seemed too long a shot, Janet Corbyn-Smith was no longer in the running. He ran his eye down the list but the names told him nothing. He didn’t even know what he expected them or one of them to tell him. Perhaps he meant, not what he or she would tell him but what he could deduce from what they said. And was that deduction that one of them was hiding Marty Dennison?

How long could you hide someone in an ordinary dwelling house? He thought of all those cases of men who had abducted women and kept them prisoner, often for years. This, of course, would be easier because whoever was sheltering Dennison had his cooperation. Whoever it might be must live in a big house. Hiding someone in a small flat would be impossible. He looked up from the list when Dora came into the room.

‘Just to remind you we’re having supper with Sylvia.’

‘Five minutes and I’ll be with you,’ Wexford said.

Ben was home from university and, rather to his surprise, Robin and Clarissa were both there. Less surprising was Clarissa’s announcement, before they sat down to eat, that she would be going to Cornwall with Christian and Timon for the coming weekend and Robin would be with her. That she had told Wexford only a few hours before that it was too soon, made him smile, but he suppressed his laughter. Perhaps Robin, in his role as adviser, had changed her mind. The list Wexford had made kept appearing word for word before his inner eye. Maybe what he really meant was that he knew it by heart. He resisted thinking about it, talked as his social duty required him, but wasn’t sorry when Dora suggested they leave just before ten. This, of course, was early evening to the three young ones but they were all too polite to comment on it. Once the grandparents had said goodnight they were off upstairs to Clarissa’s room where some new variety of music transmission was awaiting their attention.

At home Wexford looked at his list again, a needless exercise as all the names on it were committed to his memory. He dreamt about it, the dead Watson coming back, a pale and diminished ghost, saying in a horror-film voice that he would have the law on anyone who took his name in vain. In the morning he read through the names once more, stopping halfway at the one name on the list that might have a connection with Martin Dennison. He phoned Burden who took his suggestion grudgingly.

‘But do people find pseudonyms that way?’

‘Why not? It sounds likely to me.’

‘D’you want to go round there?’

‘Can I?’ Wexford didn’t quite want to articulate the correct ‘May I?’ ‘If I may, with Barry, say, or Karen . . . ?’

‘Are you thinking about a search?’

‘I’m thinking about a talk,’ Wexford said.

He met Barry Vine on the police station forecourt. ‘Dennis-son, you see. Is it a long shot?’

‘I reckon the boss thinks so.’

They had never called Wexford the boss but he acknowledged that the title seemed to suit Burden. ‘But he’s letting you go. And he lets
me
go.’

‘Sure, but for now we’re only talking.’

They walked. Wexford had often noticed that the weather conditions which were said to be the perquisites of certain months, rain in February and April, sunshine in May, heat in June, continuous greyness in November, were seldom accurate. Today, for instance, and for the past week, where were the sharp and icy March winds? It was a mild still day, blue-skied, the sun a gentle harbinger of spring to come. Their walk took them through the old parts of Kingsmarkham, the little streets and alleys that lay between Queen Street and York Street. The tall nineteenth-century house stood alone, too narrow for its height, too ugly for this area of stucco or stone or half-timbered dwellings. Wexford, who had never taken much notice of it before, observed as if for the first time the disproportionate windows, the clashing yellow and purplish-red of the brickwork, the steep tiled roof more suited to a house in a Belgian or northern German street than an English country town.

If he had thought that Dennis Cuthbert suffered from Parkinson’s on the previous occasions they had met, he now saw that he had been mistaken. Cuthbert no longer shook but he smoked as heavily. Allowed to enter grudgingly, they stepped into a grey fog, reminiscent of a pub’s public bar in days gone by. If possible, the clouds of it were even denser in the living room. Repainted not long before by Cuthbert, the pale surfaces (apple white) were already stained yellow by smoke while the skin of Cuthbert’s right forefinger was dark brown.

He made no attempt to deny that Martin Dennison was his son, even saying, ‘I thought you knew.’ Then he said, ‘You expect me to be ashamed of him, don’t you? I’m not. Whatever he’s done, he’s been a good son to me. I don’t suppose you people ever read your Bible.’ He paused, perhaps expecting rebuttal or agreement. When none came, he said, ‘In the parable of the Prodigal Son, Our Lord tells how the father forgave his son for his iniquity and made a feast to welcome him home. He even said to his good son that he mustn’t be envious of his brother because “all that I have is thine”. We’re all forgiven, you know, no matter what we’ve done. No matter how bad it is.’

Neither Wexford nor Vine made a comment on this but after a few seconds of silence Wexford said, ‘Where is your son Martin now, Mr Cuthbert?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He doesn’t live with you, does he?’

‘He does sometimes,’ said Cuthbert. He lit a cigarette from the stub of the last one and this time the inhalation set him coughing. He repeated what he had said. ‘He does sometimes.’

Wexford had the curious impression that he had had before in questioning people who had a deep aversion to lying. They were Jesuitical, in that they would tell a truth they intended to be perceived differently from the usual meaning of the words. For instance Cuthbert’s ‘I don’t know’ might mean, not that he didn’t know where in the country or the world his son might be but that he didn’t know in which room of the house he was at that moment. And Cuthbert now came near to confirming this conjecture by looking up at the ceiling and, realising what he had done, jerked his head down again.

‘Martin Dennison, otherwise known as Martin Cuthbert,’ said Vine heavily, ‘is wanted for murder. I think you know that, don’t you?’

‘Even for murder,’ Cuthbert said, ‘we’re forgiven.’

They crossed the street and stood behind the rear wall of a bus shelter, from where they would be invisible from Cuthbert’s house.

‘I’m going to call someone to take over from me,’ Vine said. ‘Keep the house under surveillance. Rouse, I think. I’ll wait here till he comes.’

‘And I shall go back and talk to the boss,’ said Wexford. ‘If Marty’s not in there but staying with a girlfriend in the Isle of Man I shall look rather foolish but never mind. It wouldn’t be the first time.’

Having rejected Wexford’s theory of alias selection, Burden was now impressed as what he called his friend’s ‘guesswork’ turned out to have been right.

‘You’ll get a warrant?’

‘I’ll have to,’ Burden said. ‘From what you say, Cuthbert’s not likely to welcome us in to search his house without one. The prodigal son, indeed.’

The warrant secured, Burden announced his intention of being present while the search went on. David Rouse, who was already outside the house, Barry Vine, Lynn and Karen were joined by two uniformed officers. Wexford thought he would be expected to go home but Burden said, ‘Stay,’ which Wexford said made him feel like an obedient dog. Both men had looked up to the steep roof which would certainly house a loft. Indoors, they all left the silent and stony-faced Cuthbert to ‘smoke himself to death’ as Burden put it, in the living room, and began the climb up the steep flights of stairs.

Everyone seemed to have decided Martin Dennison’s favoured hiding place would be in the loft. As Burden said, the loft was ‘a gift’ but also too obvious. Still, he sent Rouse down to ask Cuthbert if he had a ladder. At first Cuthbert said no, a refusal which only aroused suspicions once more. Vine came down to join Rouse and to say that if Cuthbert refused the loan of the ladder (which he ‘must possess’) they would send out for one and that would only delay things. Cuthbert produced the ladder and Rouse and Vine carried it up four flights of stairs. Karen climbed up into the loft, saying indignantly that just because she was a woman there was no reason to keep her from this vital area of the search. She was a lot fitter that most of them, she said bluntly. But in the loft all that was to be seen were two water tanks, no piles of old newspapers, no defunct machinery, no crates full of broken crockery and no Marty Dennison. The trapdoor was put back and the ladder taken down.