No Man's Nightingale (7 page)

‘Sure,’ said Burden. ‘You ought to know you don’t have to ask. I’m usually here.’

It was a case, Burden said, of who shall have custody of the custodian. Duncan Crisp, the negative witness, had seemed a valuable custodian, working in the Dragonsdene garden at the time, all the possible time, someone was murdering Sarah Hussain next door. He had been exhaustively interviewed, had now phoned in to say he had a confession to make. When talking to DS Karen Malahyde he had said he had been in the garden for three hours without a break. Now he remembered he had gone into the house called Dragonsdene for a cup of tea at two thirty and stayed there to put a washer on a tap because there was no one else around to do it. Karen had gone back to Dragonsdene to talk to him, Burden told Wexford.

It was a bit strange, wasn’t it, forgetting something that must have taken, if you included the tea drinking, half an hour?

‘It seems he’d been going in there every day he worked there – only a few weeks, though – and he always went there at two thirty.’

‘And Mrs Morgan and Miss Green – is that what they’re called? – do they remember?’

‘No, they don’t. Only that when he started there they’d asked him in for tea. Apparently they did this for their previous gardener and so they carried on the custom with Crisp.’

‘What are you saying? That he missed seeing the perpetrator come or that he’s the perpetrator himself? For what reason? Because he nursed some sort of grudge against her?’

‘You know that finding a motive is never our principal concern. He may not have been in the garden or he may have been there up until three. Mavrikiev is positive now that she died between two and four, nearer to three.’

Wexford liked that ‘our’ but wondered if he would ever hear it again in that context after he had said what he had come to say. ‘Mike,’ he began, ‘I’d like to get it over if you don’t mind.’

‘You what? Oh, yes, this confession of yours.’

‘You may not make so light of it when you know what it is.’ He drew a deep but silent breath and laid the letter on Burden’s desk. ‘You remember we all went into Sarah Hussain’s bedroom, you and I and Lynn, and looked around a bit. There was a book she’d been reading on the bedside table. It was Newman’s
Apologia.
Well, she’d been using this letter as a bookmark. I took it out and put it in my pocket, I just took it without saying anything to you. I didn’t ask, I just took it.’

Burden said, ‘I know. I saw you. What’s the problem?’

‘You
saw
me?’

‘Sure I did. I meant to say something to you about it, like it couldn’t have anything to do with her murder, it was useless to us, but something came up and I forgot. Why, do you think it’s worth following up?’

Wexford was almost stunned by relief. He could hardly speak but he managed to mutter that he did think that and maybe Thora Kilmartin should be contacted.

‘OK, I’ll get Lynn to call her, shall I? Maybe you and she could see the woman. Are you all right, Reg? You’ve gone white.’

‘I’m fine. Now I’ve made my own apologia I’ll go. Thank you.’

‘What for?’ said the puzzled Burden.

Out in the street, going home, he thought not so much about guilt and confessions as about how we magnify a small fault into an enormous transgression with no real basis for doing so. He ought to have known Burden better, he ought to have realised that the worst that could have happened was his old friend, the new detective superintendent, saying, ‘Well, that wasn’t like you,’ or, ‘You must have been having an amnesia moment.’ But even that hadn’t taken place. Burden had
seen
him take it and hadn’t cared. If we weave a tangled web when we practise to deceive, isn’t it equally true that we dig a pit of horror for ourselves when we pay the price of having a conscience?

He felt so happy and serene that for once his heart failed to sink when the voice of Maxine greeted him before he even saw her. ‘You know something, I thought you was reading your travel book in the greenhouse and I’ve been talking to you like a fool for the past ten minutes, well, maybe not as much, but talking I was and then I heard the front door and I saw my mistake or heard I should say. What a fool. My Jason says I talk too much but I don’t know. What do you think?’

Called upon to answer because now she was standing in front of him, Wexford said, remembering how hard it was to find a good cleaner, ‘I wouldn’t like to to say.’

‘You can. I won’t take offence.’ Greatly to his relief, she gave him no chance to reply but charged ahead on one of her tangents. ‘Mind you, them two, Jason and that Nicky, they never talk. To each other, is what I mean. It’s the telly as has done it. Why talk when it talks for you? And the same applies to the Internet. I call it the mini-telly. Jason says Isabella is an early talker and I don’t like to correct him there. Well, you don’t, do you? Not when it’s his kid. But as for early, his sister Kelli with an i, she was talking at ten months and the one we call Barb, though Barbaretta’s her name, she was reading the
Sun
at two.’

Seated in the nearest armchair, Wexford had fallen asleep.

THOUGH BURDEN CLUNG
to his theory that whoever had killed Sarah Hussain had figured significantly in her past life, he still felt that Duncan Crisp might join his sparse list of suspects. After all, the man had lied or had suffered a lapse of memory so great as to make all his behaviour suspicious. Either he was guilty himself or he had seen someone else come across the Vicarage garden during the course of the afternoon and enter the house by the back door.

When questioned by DI Barry Vine in his own home, a flat on the Deepvale Estate, Crisp had begun by being truculent, then aggressive. By a rather unfortunate chance he turned out to have attended the same primary school as Vine’s father, some half-century before, when Crisp had been a form captain or monitor.

‘I was your superior then,’ he said to the inspector, ‘and as far as I’m concerned I am still. Your DI letters don’t cut no ice with me. I’m not saying no more.’

So Vine took him in, Crisp’s feeble resisting arrest doing him no good.

‘I want a lawyer,’ said Crisp to Burden in the interview room.

‘Later,’ said Burden. ‘Now Mrs Morgan of Dragonsdene House says you spent half an hour in her kitchen having tea with her housekeeper and herself on Thursday afternoon from approximately two thirty to just before three. You also replaced a washer on a tap. And the housekeeper, Linda Green, confirms this. Your story is that you were outside in the garden all that time. You weren’t though, were you?’

‘I forgot. I can’t remember every time I have a cup of tea – more like dishwater it was – with a couple of old hens. I went in there and had tea like I do every bloody day I work there. What time it was I don’t know and I don’t care. I want a lawyer.’

‘Later,’ said Burden. ‘How well did you know the Reverend Hussain?’ Wexford would have winced or cringed at this usage but he wasn’t there to hear it. ‘Speak to her, did you? Pass the time of day?’

‘I never did. My old mum what passed away last year, Lord rest her, didn’t hold with females in pulpits, that’s what she called them, females in pulpits and no more do I. I wouldn’t have spoke to her if she’d spoke to me but she never did.’

‘Have you ever been in the Vicarage?’

‘No, I never. What would I go in there for? Two women living there, two Asiatics? Asians they call them now, but Asiatics is what they are. Coloured and got black hair, dressed up like in fancy dress. Now can I have a lawyer? How many times do I have to ask?’

‘Not any more,’ said Burden. ‘What do you want one for? I’m not going to arrest you. You can go. But,’ he added in a magisterial tone, ‘we shall talk again in the not too far distant future.’

Meanwhile, Lynn had spoken to Thora Kilmartin on the phone and been told that she was coming to Kingsmarkham in two days’ time to meet Clarissa at Georgina Bray’s. She had met Georgina in the past and it was Georgina who had been in touch with her. Reading between the lines or between the sentences, Lynn got the impression that Georgina was anxious that Clarissa should continue to stay with her.

‘Clarissa’s still at school. She’s at school now. And with her A levels next summer it would be very wrong for her to miss classes.’

Lynn had just terminated the call when another came in. This time it was from Wexford. Did Lynn know about the Congolese community living in Stowerton, members of which had apparently attended St Peter’s church services? Lynn did. She had heard from another source.

‘Wouldn’t you to have expected them to go to the Catholic church?’

Lynn said in a very apologetic tone that she didn’t know much about religion. ‘I don’t know anything about religion in Congo,’ Wexford said, ‘or the Democratic Republic of Congo, as I suppose I should say. A misnomer if ever there was one. But since it was once – notoriously – a Belgian colony I thought they’d be Catholic and French-speaking.’

‘There’s a woman in Oval Road I interviewed a few months back. Her name is Nardelie Mukamba – not the kind of name you’d forget, is it? She witnessed a burglary. I could talk to her. Would you like to come with me?’

‘I would,’ said Wexford.

The area had always been a poor one, the little houses, ranged in terraces, originally built in the late nineteenth century, to accommodate workers in the chalk quarries and their families. Now it was run-down, the small front gardens repositories of bicycles, a couple of worn-out motorbikes, no longer habitable rabbit hutches and birdcages and the local authority issue bins for recyclable paper and cardboard, glass and metal and a larger one for general rubbish. A woman in a tall turban and elaborately pleated red-and-pink dress was in the act of dropping a couple of lager cans into the appropriate bin.

Leaving Wexford in the car, Lynn went up to her. ‘Mrs Mukamba, do you remember me? I talked to you about a break-in at number 30.’

Nardelie Mukamba looked in her mid-twenties. Wexford saw that she was beautiful, her skin a deep smooth bronze, her eyes obsidian black. He got out of the car. Lynn didn’t introduce him but included him in her explanation. ‘We are inquiring about the murder of the vicar, Ms Hussain. Did you ever go to her church? Did you ever go to St Peter’s, Kingsmarkham?’

Her reply came in fluent English with that accent which most British people recognise as African as distinct from Caribbean.

‘Me and my children went there most Sundays.’

‘Did you ever speak to the Reverend Hussain?’

‘I shook hands with her. Everyone did. When you’d been two, three times she kissed you. She said, Welcome to God’s house. She made you feel you were a guest in the home of the Lord and that was nice. My boy Jean-Jacques and my boy Aristide, they loved her. She let them run around the church during the service and there was a woman who complained. Sarah – she asked us to call her that – she said, We must all love the little children because Our Lord told us to.’ Nardelie looked at Wexford and smiled, a divine smile, he thought it was, warm, wide and showing those glorious teeth it had become an unwelcome cliché to remark on.

For a few minutes he and Lynn sat in the car outside Nardelie’s house, waiting for what he didn’t know, if they were waiting. A couple who looked as if they were Congolese came along and went into the house next door and then a tall white man, quite young but who reminded Wexford of someone much older. He went up to the front door of Nardelie’s and stood there, apparently searching for his key. He was wearing gloves but took the right one off in order to feel in his pocket, exposing a dark blue and red tattoo covering the back of his hand. Wexford could just make out a female figure in a robe but he saw the man hastily put the glove back on once he had got the door open.

‘Yes, I saw him here before,’ Lynn said. ‘He lives in Nardelie’s place.’

‘Her husband? Partner? Boyfriend?’

‘I don’t know, but somehow I think he’s just a tenant of the top floor. What do you think of tattoos, sir?’

Wexford laughed. ‘I don’t like them. But you could have guessed that, Lynn, without asking.’

He had to refuse her invitation to come back with her that afternoon, reminding her that one of them was due to meet Thora Kilmartin.

‘Would you do that, Reg?’ she asked, making a real effort.

It was the first time she had obeyed him and called him by what Sarah Hussain would no doubt have called his Christian name.

‘Of course. And I’ll record our conversation – if she’ll let me.’

Two women of comparable age and education, both middle class and belonging to the same ethnic group, could scarcely have looked more disparate. Haggard and strained, with the kind of thinness that is due to stress, Georgina Bray looked no older than her mid-forties but an unhealthy mid-forties, strained and tired. But she had made a sartorial effort for these guests with what Wexford would once have known as an afternoon dress, burgundy-coloured and too short, and high-heeled court shoes her fidgeting feet told Wexford she would like to shed. Thora Kilmarton, on the other hand, was fat. No two ways about it. She wasn’t overweight or plump or any of the other euphemisms. She was uncompromisingly fat and apparently happy to be so. He had seldom seen a woman who looked so pleasantly contented. She was appropriately dressed in a tweed skirt, beige jumper and dark brown cardigan, no jewellery but her wedding ring, brown lace-up brogues, her sole frivolity lacy but thick brown tights.

It was Clarissa’s half-term break and she was out with a friend. She would soon be back but they wouldn’t wait for her. Now Wexford was here she would make coffee.

‘Or would you prefer tea?’

He had noticed lately that, with the advance of age, people often assumed that tea would be his drink, the pensioner’s beverage of choice. ‘Coffee will be fine,’ he said.

Much as he had hoped to get Thora Kilmartin alone, he realised that the time Mrs Bray took to bring in the coffee, even if she had to grind the beans before brewing the drink, would be inadequate for his purposes. In his position, as the rather absurdly named Crime Solutions Adviser (unpaid), he could hardly banish Georgina from her own living room. The question he most of all wanted to ask, but not in front of Clarissa or, come to that, Mrs Bray, might have to be put on hold until another time. Thora was waiting, smiling as she looked round the room, evidently admiring her surroundings.