No Man's Nightingale (6 page)

‘Suppose you own the house under the right-to-buy provisions?’ Wexford asked.

‘In that case you can let it to whoever you like. Of course you can. It’s a free country.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’ said Dora.

‘Nothing. What can I do? It’s a matter for the council’s housing department.’

‘I suppose,’ said Wexford, ‘that he, whoever he is, could charge any rent he likes if the tenant is prepared to pay. Is it known who he is?’

‘“He”,’ said Burden, ‘is a woman called Diane Stow. She lives on the Costa del Sol with a man who’s made himself rich by dealing in prescription drugs. It’s him I’m interested in. She is quite comfortable enough not to need the rent from a Kingsmarkham council house.’

‘Right,’ said Wexford, ‘but how does she come to be, as I assume she is, the legitimate tenant of this council house?’

‘I don’t know.’ Burden spoke in the indifferent tone of one who no more cares than he knows. ‘She once lived in it, I suppose.’

After that they ate their second course which was Dora’s home-made crème brûlée, and talked about their grandchildren, Burden’s daughter having just become the mother of a baby girl. But Wexford, five times a grandfather and getting rather blasé about it, let his thoughts wander to Sarah Hussain. The answer to the question which was starting to perplex him was probably that Clarissa’s father was a man Sarah had simply had an affair with. What else? Her husband had died, she had met someone she might have considered marrying and as time went on she realised that if she wanted a child there was no time to waste. The engagement or whatever it was didn’t work out, there was no marriage but she had her daughter. It seemed reasonable enough and a lot of women did it but it didn’t quite fit in with Sarah’s apparently fervent commitment to Christianity, to the Church in fact. Yet she was only thirty-one when the child was born, not exactly the last knockings of fertility . . .

‘Reg, you haven’t gone to sleep, have you?’

Wexford came out of his reverie. ‘If I had I wouldn’t be able to answer that.’

‘Well, Mike and Jenny are going.’

‘They’ll forgive me,’ said Wexford, kissing Jenny and rather to the surprise of both of them, shaking hands with Burden. ‘Anyway, I was thinking about the case. About the Reverend Sarah Hussain. I’ll give you the notes I made.’

IF WE CONSIDER
the purity of the Christian religion, the sanctity of its moral precepts, and the innocent as well as austere lives of the greater number of those who during the first ages embraced the faith of the Gospel, we should naturally suppose that so benevolent a doctrine would have been received with due reverence even by the unbelieving world . . .

Wexford briefly set Gibbon aside to marvel at this commentary and to wonder that he had never thought of it before. It struck him that Sarah Hussain had tried to make a benevolent doctrine of Christianity. In her view it was kindly, loving, modern and progressive. What a relief that today wasn’t one of Maxine’s days. He had undisturbed peace and quiet. It
was
odd that so much cruelty and violence was meted out to these ‘innocent disciples’. No doubt Gibbon would provide an explanation in the next few pages and he picked up
The Decline and Fall
once more.

An hour or so had passed when Dora came into the room and asked him if he remembered they were due to have lunch with Sylvia whose day off from work it was. Now that his daughter lived within Kingsmarkham, the Old Rectory at Great Thatto having been sold, they could walk there, Dora said. Wexford agreed. Not that he much wanted to but it was good for him. His love of walking was mainly confined to London. He looked around for a bookmark and in doing so remembered the letter he had taken out of Sarah Hussain’s copy of Newman’s autobiography. That he certainly should not have taken out . . .

It was possibly one of those letters Maxine called ‘anonimable’, foul and at the same time dull and illiterate – but no, Sarah wouldn’t have used such a thing as a bookmark. He put on his raincoat and felt for the letter in the right-hand pocket. It wasn’t any of those things but apparently from a friend. He read it while Dora was upstairs getting ready.

The address at the top was 21 Miramar Close, Reading, with a postcode, the date three months ago in the middle of July.

Dear Sarah [he read]

It is such a long time since we worked here together and shared a home that I wonder if you have forgotten me but I don’t think you can have. I think you have moved several times since you lived here and Clarissa with you. She is my goddaughter and I would have liked to remember her on birthdays but I had lost touch and didn’t know where you were. Then I saw that paragraph in
The Times
that said you were now an ordained priest (you see I remember the correct terminology) with a living in Kingsmarkham. You know, I wasn’t altogether surprised. This, I thought, was what you always ought to have been.

I am married now but still living in Reading not far from where we had our flat nineteen years ago. My husband preferred me not to work and to tell you the truth I was glad to give up. I have taken my husband’s name but I am still the old Thora Watson who was, I think, your best friend. You and I were so close like the sisters we neither of us ever had. Do let me hear from you.

With love,

Thora (Kilmartin)

So this was the Reading woman Georgina Bray had mentioned when she corrected her claim to have been herself Sarah’s only friend. This woman was a lapsed friend but might be the one to tell them something about Sarah Hussain that others wouldn’t or couldn’t. Had Sarah replied to the letter? You don’t keep a letter as a bookmark, Wexford decided as he and Dora walked along York Street, unless you’ve answered it or intend to answer it. It would be a permanent reminder to you and make you feel guilty. Talking of which, though he wasn’t . . .

‘You’re very silent,’ Dora said. ‘Gibbon on your mind?’

‘I was thinking of Sarah Hussain. You went to church most Sundays. What kind of sermons did she preach?’

‘The controversial kind. There was one about her idea that royal family members shouldn’t wear military uniforms. I told you about it.’

‘Dennis Cuthbert told me about one in support of single parents and wasn’t there one advocating gay marriage?’

‘That’s right,’ said Dora. ‘Her idea was that – well, in everything, not only gay marriage – the important thing was love. That was a central tenet of Christianity, she said. “Little children, love one another”, which of course comes from the New Testament and there’s nothing about only heterosexuals loving one another. If the Church held on to that, she said, the Church and clerics, there wouldn’t be any banning of men marrying men and women women provided they loved each other.’

‘I don’t suppose her bishop was overjoyed at that.’

‘No, I gather she got a dressing-down.’

Sylvia had cooked one of her father’s favourite dishes for lunch, a fish pie, and her elder son was at home to help him eat it. Always interested in the way families behave, the patterns they follow, Wexford had often noticed that a grown-up child, in his or her early twenties, say, will make a point of being present when grandparents come, make conversation with them and eat with them, but depart pretty fast after the meal is over, leaving Mother to explain the pressing business that has taken him away. So it was in Robin’s case, though he explained the business himself while Wexford listened politely. When his grandson had left and Dora gone upstairs to be shown a dress Sylvia had bought for someone’s wedding, he reflected that while Robin was obviously totally bored by his pursuits, so was he by Robin’s. Gibbon held no more interest for the grandson than recording the latest production of a local rock group did for the grandfather. It must always be so. ‘Crabbed age and youth cannot live together,’ only he didn’t think he was crabbed – but what elderly person did think that of himself?

But he did wonder if the rock group was the same one that Sarah Hussain had hoped would perform in St Peter’s Church and then his thoughts went back to Thora Kilmartin’s letter. Not so much to the letter as to his abstracting it without a word to Burden or any police officer, abstracting it moreover from a crime scene. Guilt wasn’t a feeling with which he was very familiar but he recognised it when he had it. It wasn’t just the guilt that troubled him but the necessity of confessing his offence to Burden. It was necessary, he had to do it, but he could hardly think of anything he wanted to do less. In the past Burden had confessed his mistakes and lapses to
him
, he was the appropriate person, the superior officer. Now their roles were reversed or almost. There was no way out. To ignore it, to forget the letter, was unthinkable. Not only should Burden and his team meet Thora Kilmartin and talk to her,
want
to meet her and talk to her, but to withhold that letter and pretend it didn’t exist was the kind of act that made him feel – in a phrase he had always despised when others used it – unable to live with himself.

Dora and Sylvia came downstairs, announced that tea would soon be coming and looked at him as if they had expected him to be asleep.

Most of the time Jeremy Legg watched television. Fiona would put up with it in the morning for the news and weather forecast but always turned it off when she left for work in her Aztec gold Prius. Jeremy switched it on again, playing about with various channels but mostly just sitting and gazing in a relaxed sort of way at ITV1 or, as the morning wore away to lunchtime, Sky Movies Premiere. He was a house husband but he performed few tasks. Seldom bored, he preferred his own company to anyone else’s, and if he wanted a change of scene he got in his car, a battered-about Nissan, for Jeremy wasn’t a careful driver, and went for what he called (and his grandfather had called) ‘a spin’. This took him up Ladysmith Road to have a look at the house which had been his mother’s and was now rented to Mr and Mrs Patel.

He liked to sit outside in his car and build up his ego thinking that he was a landlord and this just one of his lucrative properties. A house further up the road similar to this one was for sale. It was going for two hundred thousand, cheap in an area considered within commuting distance to London. If he could get Fiona interested she might pay the deposit and he could pay the mortgage out of his rents. She might help there as well. He moved off towards the Muriel Campden Estate and Peck Road, parking opposite but a few yards away from his house. Strictly speaking Diane was the tenant but so long as the rent got paid the council didn’t pay much attention to where it came from.

After a little while, the time it took to smoke a cigarette – Fiona didn’t know he smoked or so he fondly believed – Jason Sams’s woman came out with the baby in one of those enormous buggies, as big as an adult’s wheelchair and much more lushly upholstered. A child would never learn to walk if it could ride in one of those. Jeremy almost envied that baby girl, all dressed up in a fleecy jumpsuit and enthroned in sheepskin cushions. When Fiona had a baby they would have one of those and he would push it round the Stringfield lanes. He wondered how he would get on. Would he
like
it?

Would they ever have a baby? ‘Make a baby’, as Fiona put it. He supposed he knew how that was done: have sex without using or swallowing anything, he supposed, and a baby would come. Only they did and it didn’t. Was he doing it right? He’d never had a baby with Diane and they’d been together years and years. Thinking about it, he felt himself lapse into one of those dream states of his when a stillness took hold of him and his mind emptied. He called it a fugue because somewhere he had read that’s what it was. He remained sufficiently aware to know not to drive while in this condition. It would pass, he would come back to life and be as he was before.

After about a quarter of an hour he returned to full consciousness, waking, so to speak, to where he had broken off: making a baby, Fiona looking after a baby, looking after the baby himself. Maybe he could go to a class where they taught you baby-caring. Jeremy had been to many classes and joined many courses in his adult life, exercise, elocution, t’ai chi, Spanish, country dancing, woodwork, even origami, but had completed none of them. Of the t’ai chi and the Spanish he had attended only a single session. But would Fiona have a baby? They didn’t have a lot of sex. He had never been very keen on it, believing Fiona was keen enough for both of them. Making an effort was called for if he was to get her pregnant and persuade her to buy that house. But maybe she was pregnant already, and being still in doubt, hadn’t said.

He sat in Peck Road for a long time and then he drove home to Stringfield, at so slow a pace as to arouse the ire of other motorists who hooted at him and shouted abuse.

Considering Wexford had no intention – not for a moment – of failing to confess to Burden, wouldn’t have dreamt of it, it was strange that this was exactly what he did, he dreamt of it. He wasn’t at home in Kingsmarkham but in the kitchen in the Hampstead coach house, quite alone, holding Thora Kilmartin’s letter in his hand. The letter was still folded up as it had been when it served as a bookmark. He opened it and tried to read it again but the handwriting was unreadable and all that he could see was a grey blur. Nevertheless, he interpreted it as horribly condemnatory of himself, as a denunciation of his whole life, exposing his career as dishonourable, his marriage as a fake, his efforts at parenthood as ludicrous and his preference for classical music and such literature as Gibbon as a pretentious sham. Out of a drawer in the cabinet he took that object so seldom used these days, a box of matches, dropped the letter into a saucer and, intending to burn it, struck a match. The sound, the flash, the sudden brightness, woke him and he sat up to ask Dora why she had put the light on.

‘You were thrashing about and moaning. Are you all right?’

‘I am now,’ he said.

It had been one of those dreams whose absolute horror is exorcised by the relief of knowing it’s not true. Its content never happened. In the morning, as soon as he felt he decently could, he phoned Burden and asked if he could come and see him. It was important – well, it was to him.