No Man's Nightingale (5 page)

‘I thought I’d give this place a spring clean. Not that it’s spring, that’s a long way off, but it seemed a good day for it what with someone being in here to talk to. There’s some as can’t get on with their work when they’re talking but I’ve never been one of them.’ Maxine began moving plants in pots along the shelves with her left hand while spraying the panes of glass with her right. A vigorous rubbing with one of her dusters followed. ‘Now the Reverend Hussain, as I was supposed to call her, though it always sounded funny, her being a woman and Hussain being one of them Asian names – talking didn’t suit her, she used to come straight out with it, tell me to my face to be quiet. D’you know what she said to me once? There was this prime minister, she said, or archbishop or some such, and he went to get his hair cut and the hairdresser said to him like they do, “How would you like it done, sir?” and this prime minister said, “In silence.” How about that?’

Snatching an opportunity that wasn’t likely to come again, Wexford laughed but forbore to say he’d heard it before.

‘Well, I said to her, I said it to her face, I’d never heard such rudeness. But there it is. She used to come out with things like that, she called them anec-somethings. Anecdents? Anecments? Never mind. I thought she was sending me up, that’s what it looked like. Not right, is it, in a person who’s supposed to be religious?’ Maxine was moving along the shelves, polishing the glass while she talked. ‘Not that there was much sign of religion in that house. Many a time I’ve seen her sit down to a meal with that Clarissa and no one never said grace. And language too. She lost her mobile one day, ran about the house saying “Where’s my bloody phone?” I was shocked, I can tell you, and the F-word once. I said to her to call the phone number and then she’d know where it was and she did and it was down under the cushions on the settee. Well, that’s where they always are, aren’t they? She didn’t know. “You’re an angel, Maxine,” she said, and I just wondered what my old dad would have thought to that. Taking the name of the Lord in vain, he’d have said.’

The glass brightly polished, Maxine, carrying the glass spray and a clean duster, climbed with surprising agility onto a low shelf and then onto a higher one. Wexford resisted telling her to mind or to be careful as window cleaners know this already or else long ago decided they led charmed lives. ‘She christened my Jason’s Isabella. When he told me she was going to do it – well, it shocked me, it really did. I’d got to know her by then, though she was a decent enough woman in spite of the language, and she was kindness itself, always giving me little presents and once or twice she kissed me, but a woman christening a baby? Now I don’t go to church, never have, except for weddings and funerals and suchlike, but I know what’s right and what’s wrong. And I couldn’t get my head round a woman doing a christening. And I wasn’t alone, I can tell you. There was those in this place who couldn’t stomach her being coloured and there was those who took against her for being a woman. The anominal letters used to come, there was no end to them. I knew they was anonimal on account of her name printed on the envelope. Anyway, I read some of them.

‘You needn’t look like that. People who leave letters lying about are just asking you to read them is what I say. I can see you want to know what was in them. Well, it was mostly bad language, the F-word and the S-word and even the W-word, though that was a funny one to send to her. “Call yourself a woman of God?” was in a lot of them and “Go back to India”. One day she asked me if I’d ever been married. I thought that was a bit of a cheek considering she knew I’d got four kids. I said no, I hadn’t, and had she? I could tell she didn’t like it but if she could ask me why shouldn’t I ask her? “Yes, I was,” she says. “He died.” “When was that then?” I said, thinking that Clarissa was no more than seventeen, and d’you know what she said? “Long ago,” she said. “Long, long ago.” And I don’t know how to put it, but there was like
agony
in her face. Well, she went up to the study to write her sermon. And the opportunism like never arose again.

‘My Jason never liked his mum working in a place where they got anonible letters. He kept on at me about it. Ever since Isabella was born he’s got ever so responsible like he never was before, telling me what I ought to do and telling his sisters things, like not to go with boys before they was sixteen. That don’t go down a treat, I can tell you. The eldest one, that’s Kelli with an i, she went to church one Sunday – never been before or since, needless to say – on purpose to speak to the Reverend Hussain about her brother. Would you credit it? “You tell him he ought to get married to that Nicky,” she says, “and them with a baby. You’re the vicar,” she says, “and you want to teach them what’s right.”’

Unable to resist, Wexford intervened. ‘What did she say?’

‘The Rev? She just laughed, Kelli said, and then she said something about first casting something out of her own eye but Kelli didn’t know where she was at and nor don’t I.’

If Wexford had a pretty good idea what Sarah Hussain had been getting at, he gave no explanation to Maxine. He had an appointment to talk to Dennis Cuthbert and he was very nearly late. The vicar’s warden lived in a four-storey Victorian villa, tall and narrow, red and yellow brick, incongruously steep-roofed and without quite enough windows.

A widower, Dennis Cuthbert lived in darkness or near enough. There were, of course, overhead lights, both in the hall and the living room Cuthbert took Wexford into, but no table lamps, no standard lamp, and the bulbs were of low wattage. Opposite the fireplace, half covering the wall, hung a greyish-pinkish folkweave bedspread, intended perhaps to look like a tapestry. The impression in this almost bookless room where there were no plants and where the ornaments were of the kind you could pick up in seaside resorts half a century ago, was of almost total indifference on the part of its occupant to his surroundings. One book there was, the Book of Common Prayer, a worn black leather and gilt copy, lying face down on the low piecrust table. Wexford was ushered to an armchair covered in brown corduroy in front of an old-fashioned heater, the kind once called an electric fire, in a black marble fireplace in which lay a few ashes and numerous cigarette stubs that had evidently been there a long time.

But Dennis Cuthbert himself wasn’t old. He might have seemed so to Clarissa but not to Wexford. Not much more than fifty perhaps. Sitting down himself, Cuthbert rather ostentatiously picked up the prayer book, marked his place with a ribbon bookmark attached to its spine and laid it on the table in a position where Wexford could hardly fail to see what it was. He then switched on the heater, lighting up one bar of the three, and a very faint breath of warmth came into the icy room. If Wexford hadn’t been able to see him but only to hear his high voice and old-fashioned accent, a perfection of what was once called ‘BBC English’, he would have supposed him a small thin elderly man but Dennis Cuthbert was quite unlike the impression these things conveyed, being at least as tall as Wexford with heavy shoulders and thick neck, a muscular body and big hands. His hair, still thick and dark, was untouched by grey. He was also, again unexpectedly, a smoker. Wexford had thought the smell of cigarettes and the stubs in the grate must have been left behind by some other visitor, but that illusion was soon dispelled by his lighting up as soon as they sat down. His yellow-stained hand shook a little.

‘You don’t object if I smoke, do you?’ he asked.

Wexford smiled and shook his head. ‘It’s your home,’ he said, and then, ‘I’ve got some questions for you but I have to tell you that you don’t have to answer them. I was once a policeman but I’m one no longer. It’s entirely up to you.’

Unexpectedly nasty, Cuthbert said, ‘Maybe, but we both know what you and your
real
policemen colleagues would think if I didn’t answer, don’t we?’

Best to act as if he hadn’t spoken. Making what turned out to be an inspired guess, he said, ‘You’ve a copy of the Book of Common Prayer on the table here and I think you’d been reading it when I came.’

‘I often read it,’ said Cuthbert.

‘And like it, I imagine. What did you think of the Reverend Ms Hussain using the Alternative Service Book?’

‘I hate it. But I’m used to it. It’s been in use for forty years. Her predecessor used it and his predecessor. She
loved
it. She said now people could understand what God meant. I’d hoped things might change when we had a change of incumbent, revert to what they used to be, I mean.’ He drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘I may as well tell you that I nearly gave up this job when I was told we were to have a woman. In the Church of England! I didn’t believe it at first.’

‘Women have been priests for quite a long time now. There are a good many of them and they’ve been around since you were young. Like the Alternative Service Book, come to that. You can’t have been much more than a child.’

‘I’m sixty-three. I know I don’t look it.’ The shaking was no longer confined to one hand. His whole body was trembling. ‘Age makes no difference. There are some things you never accept. You never get used to them. I’ve no objection to women doctors or lawyers or bankers, don’t mind any of that. Women priests are a blasphemy.’

He was on his third cigarette since Wexford’s arrival. ‘She had no morals, had a boyfriend who used to wait outside in a car. She used bad language and in the daughter’s hearing. One of her sermons – if you could call them sermons – was about what a good idea it was to give unmarried mothers a flat to live in with their babies. And she contrasted it with the old ways when such a woman would have been ostracised. The congregation didn’t like that, I can tell you, especially the ones that are on the council’s housing list.’

‘Are you pleased the Reverend Ms Hussain is gone now and can’t come back, Mr Cuthbert?’

‘I’m not answering that,’ said Cuthbert. ‘I’ll tell you something, though. I went into the Vicarage one day to talk to her, I wanted to ask if the rumour I’d heard was true, that she was going to get a rock band playing at matins instead of the organist. D’you know what she said, what she did? “Don’t worry, Dennis,” she said. “It’ll be fine. They’re very good musicians and they worship Our Lord with every note.” I hadn’t told her she could address me by my Christian name and I didn’t much care for it. Then, just as I was leaving, she came up to me and
kissed
me.’

He got up and blew storm clouds of smoke almost into Wexford’s face. Wexford retreated a little. ‘Did the rock band come?’

‘It would have,’ said Cuthbert. ‘She died.’ He inhaled on his cigarette, strangely seeming to Wexford not so much like a smoker as a heavy drinker who may need a strong draught of whatever his poison may be. ‘She’d already got rid of a lot of the old hymns. “O God, our help in ages past” was the latest to go. She brought in a hymn written by a schoolgirl. A schoolgirl, I ask you! “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun” was going to be next. D’you know why? D’you know what she said? That everyone has known for hundreds of years that the earth goes round the sun, so the words are nonsense. What do you think of that?’

Instead of replying Wexford commented on the one framed photograph in the bleak room. It was of a teenage boy in school uniform.

‘Your son?’ Wexford guessed.

The boy didn’t look in the least like Cuthbert apart from being large and dark. Having controlled his shaking by what was perhaps a gargantuan effort, Cuthbert nodded, said strangely, ‘Are you acquainted with the parable of the Prodigal Son?’

‘I am, yes.’

‘I haven’t yet killed the fatted calf for him but I hope to one day.’

And what was the point of that? Wexford wondered as he walked home.

In describing Maxine to people who didn’t know her, describing that is her voice, her speech and her malapropisms, as he was doing now to Burden’s wife Jenny, he had noticed they always assumed she was a fat, blowsy lumbering woman with brassy, home-dyed blonde hair who wore low-cut tops and high-heeled boots. The truth was that Maxine was tall and slender, her hair its natural light brown and worn in a chignon, and her clothes invariably jeans that were well fitting but not tight with a black or blue sweater in the winter and in summer a plain T-shirt.

‘I never assumed that,’ Jenny said. ‘Her Jason was in primary school with Mark and I used to see her picking him up at the school gates. It’s not a thing one ought to say but you could usually pick out the middle-class mums from the working-class ones simply by the latter’s appearance, their size, their hair and those ubiquitous boots. Maxine Sams was the exception. You’d have taken her for a doctor’s wife. There, isn’t that an outrageous thing to say?’

‘Until she opened her mouth,’ said Burden. ‘What’s she been regaling you two with today?’

They were round at the Wexfords’ partaking or due to partake of an Indian meal about to be brought to the door by a man on a bike from a takeaway purveyor called the Bombay Bicycle Club.

‘Not me,’ said Dora. ‘I wisely got out before she arrived.’

‘Well, you’ve heard about Dennis Cuthbert who told me nothing useful but a lot about his character. Maxine gave me a lot of useful stuff about Sarah Hussain. They may not be new to you, Mike, but I made notes of them after she’d gone in case they help.’

Dora was making a face and on the point of banning shop when the doorbell rang, announcing the arrival of their food.

‘I don’t think it’s shop,’ Burden said, ‘but since we were on the subject of Jason Sams, once well known to the Mid-Sussex Constabulary but now a reformed character, I don’t suppose either of you have picked up anything about the rent he pays in these sessions you have with his mum.’

‘He lives in a council house, doesn’t he?’

‘Well, yes, Dora, he does. But it’s not his council house – that is, it was never allocated to him or to his grandfather or grandmother or to anyone who could legitimately have passed it on to him.’

‘What are you saying, Mike? That his landlord or landlady is a council tenant and letting his rented house off to Jason Sams? That’s illegal, isn’t it?’

‘It’s against the council’s rules. If you get found out doing it you can get evicted and of course your tenant too. And then the only roof over your head is a B & B. No doubt there are some who run an extra scam and are tenants of a council house that the council pays for as housing benefit and still rent it out while living elsewhere.’