No Man's Nightingale (8 page)

‘Lovely house, isn’t it?’

‘Very nice, yes.’ It was the same vintage as his own, one of a number of houses, detached, four-bedroomed, which had been built soon after the Second World War. ‘Mrs Kilmartin, I have to tell you I have read the letter you wrote to Ms Hussain last July.’

‘She kept it then?’

‘As a bookmark in the book she was reading at the time of her death. I think that shows it meant a lot to her.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Did she reply?’

‘To my letter? Oh, yes, she did. We lived rather too far apart to drop in on each other. I invited her to come and stay in the summer holidays but she said it would be too hard for her to get a locum – or whatever they call them in the Church. She invited me but my husband wasn’t keen. He has an idea of a female clergy person as a formidable woman.’ She laughed and Wexford did too, though Mr Kilmartin’s view wasn’t far from his own. A lot of people had disapproved of poor Sarah Hussain and all of them men. ‘Still, we talked on the phone and made definite plans to meet. I was anxious to see Clarissa. She was a baby when I last saw her.’

Here was his opportunity to ask the awkward or intrusive question but Georgina Bray chose the moment to return with the coffee.

‘Clarissa will be here at any moment,’ she said, ‘so I brought a cup for her. Do go on talking. I promise I won’t listen. I’ll be deep in my book.’

But as she opened
Pride and Prejudice
at a point halfway through, he heard the front door close and Clarissa came in. In the current culture, she was too old for school uniform and wore a knee-length grey skirt, white blouse and grey-and- burgundy blazer. Thora got up, said how glad she was to meet her at last and they shook hands. She looked as if she would have liked to kiss the girl and even leaned a little towards her but there must have been something in Clarissa’s eyes or an almost imperceptible flinching which told her not to touch. The kind of small talk that Wexford could have himself composed word for word ensued.

After a few minutes of this Georgina got up and said, ‘Come along, Clarissa. I’ve got something upstairs I want to show you.’

‘What sort of something?’

Wexford was reminded of a scene from the very book Georgina had been reading where Mrs Bennet takes her daughters away to allow a visitor privacy to propose to the daughter who remains. The daughters react much as Clarissa had done and Mrs Bray much as Mrs Bennet.

‘You’ll soon see. Come along now.’

The girl went with her and Wexford thought it just as well the Bray children were grown up and gone or she would have been shepherding a flock to some non-existent treat. Thora Kilmartin looked as if she shared his amusement but her face with its perpetual half-smile suddenly saddened as he said he wanted to ask her something about Sarah Hussain’s life when they lived together.

‘You know you don’t have to talk to me, Mrs Kilmartin. I’m no longer a police officer.’

She nodded. ‘I know that. But there are things I’d like to tell you about Sarah and I think I can be pretty sure nothing I tell you will be made public.’

‘It will not,’ Wexford said firmly. He felt a little surge of excitement at the prospect of something interesting or out of the ordinary at last. ‘I was going to ask you if I might record this conversation but I’ve changed my mind. Even at my age I’ve got a pretty good memory.’

That made her smile. ‘Thank you.’

‘First, tell me if I’ve got these facts right. Sarah’s husband died in a car crash. They hadn’t been married very long so Sarah and perhaps both of them were very young?’

‘That’s right. Sarah had come down from university with, incidentally, a very good honours degree. Her husband Leo was a couple of years older. I didn’t know her then of course. They lived in Basingstoke and were married in church there. She got herself a qualification teaching English to foreign students and found herself some private pupils. She was bilingual, you know, Urdu was as much her first language as English was. Leo was a landscape architect. It sounds quite grand but she told me he didn’t earn very much though he would have done if he’d lived, apparently. But he didn’t live.’

‘What happened?’

‘He was driving his father’s car on some motorway. His father was sitting beside him. They had been to a football match. It was foggy and there was one of those sudden pile-ups. Leo had been the end of the queue and a lorry came up behind him going much too fast. It crashed into their car, destroying the entire back and forcing them so far into the car in front that they came out the other end. Apparently Leo and his father were killed instantly. Leo was only twenty-eight, Sarah a widow at just twenty-six.’

Wexford didn’t interrupt. He let her continue, soon realising that Burden’s version of Sarah’s life had got things out of order.

‘Left alone, she went to India – Darjeeling, it was – to live with her grandmother, her father’s mother. There was an uncle and an aunt and several cousins already living there. Grandmother was quite well off and it was a large comfortable compound.’

‘That was before Clarissa was born?’

It was a slightly different story from the one Burden had. ‘Oh, yes.’ Thora’s tone had become weary, almost grim. ‘Sarah had gone to India originally with an aid agency but she couldn’t stand some of the sights she saw, the poverty, the disease. She had some sort of breakdown and took refuge with the grandmother. She stayed there for two years. After that Sarah said she felt she needed to earn her own living, she couldn’t go on taking the grandmother’s charity, though the old lady was perfectly willing to support her, would have done so, I gathered, for the rest of her life.’

Wexford calculated that Sarah Hussain must by this time have been twenty-eight or twenty-nine. ‘She came back here?’

‘She got a job teaching at Bridgwell Comprehensive. I was teaching history there, we got to know each other, became friends and shared a flat. Sarah met a man she liked, the first man in her life since her husband died. I suppose you’ll want to know his name?’

‘He was Clarissa’s father?’

‘Oh, no. Unfortunately, no. Sarah was – well, not prudish or strict, but let’s say she wouldn’t have lived with a man without marriage.’

‘Then, how –’

Thora said almost brutally, ‘She was raped. Clarissa is the result of rape.’

It was at this point that Georgina Bray put her head round the door and said in a curiously coquettish tone, ‘Have you finished with all your secrets? Can Clarissa and I come back now?’

WEXFORD WAS WONDERING
how and where he could prolong this interview when Thora Kilmartin came to his rescue. ‘Oh, Georgina, I think I told you earlier that I haven’t yet looked in at the Olive and Dove hotel where I’m staying tonight. I wonder if Mr Wexford would be kind enough to give me a lift there. I think it may be on his way.’

Wexford said, of course. It would be a pleasure.

‘And since you and Clarissa will be having dinner with me tonight perhaps you’ll meet me there at seven?’

At the wheel, he didn’t speak. He was sure she would if he kept silent for a moment or two and he was right.

‘We were talking about the awful thing that happened to Sarah.’

‘Did she report it to the police?’

‘When she told me I wanted her to but she wouldn’t. She said she couldn’t face the questions and the – well, the doctor examining her. And if it came to court, that would be impossible. I think she thought she could forget it, just put it out of her head. But she couldn’t because she found she was pregnant. I tell you frankly I wanted her to have an abortion. It was the obvious thing to do but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t take a life, she said. The man she was going out with left her. He refused to believe her story, said she’d invented the rape when she found she was pregnant. I think she was well rid of him.

‘Then she said a funny thing. She was crying, she cried a lot at the time, she said the rapist was young and quite good-looking and an
Asian.
I asked her what difference that made, and she said, at least it might be a beautiful baby. And it was.’

‘Poor woman,’ Wexford said, a comment he wouldn’t have made in these circumstances when he was a policeman. He drove on to the forecourt of the Olive and Dove, parked in the last marked space. ‘And that was Clarissa. Why the name?’ Another remark he wouldn’t have made.

‘Oh, because she spent a good deal of the pregnancy reading Richardson’s
Clarissa.
She loved it. In a way it’s about rape, I suppose. It’s the most boring novel I’ve ever read.’

Wexford had enjoyed it but he said nothing. ‘What happened next?’

‘Well, of course, she loved the child. She adored her. They were with me until Clarissa was about four. Sarah supported herself and the child by teaching English to foreign students and translating Urdu and Hindi into English for non-English-speaking immigrants. People from India and Pakistan may be able to talk to their neighbours but can’t read forms and instruction books and so on. You’d be surprised.’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ said Wexford. ‘There can’t be much money in it.’

‘There isn’t. Most of the time, anyway, she wouldn’t let them pay her. She had to go back to teaching and she did once Clarissa was old enough to go to school. By then she had moved away and the last address I had for her was somewhere in Essex. She had a teaching job there.’

Wexford said, ‘I don’t want to keep you but there are a few more details I’d like to have.’

‘You aren’t keeping me,’ Thora said. ‘I’ve nothing else to do but hang about here waiting for Georgina and Clarissa to come at seven. Why don’t you come in and let me give you tea?’

For all the years he had worked in Kingsmarkham Wexford had been a habitué of the Olive and Dove. He had seen it change from a typical English country hotel where people, driving through on their way to the south coast, could stop without booking ahead and eat in a sunlit dining room a heavy lunch of soup, roast lamb, lemon meringue pie and cheese and biscuits, to what it was today, smart, four-starred, every bedroom with an en suite bathroom, TV, a computer and a basket of exotic fruits. Over the years the public bar had gone, the ‘snug’ had gone and the all-pervading cigarette smoke had gone. Food was available almost round the clock and wine from New Zealand had to a great extent replaced beer and spirits. But as with so many public buildings today, from shops to cathedrals, deconstruction and construction work was going on. The hallway they passed through was apparently about to lose its lift and a new one would replace it. Much of the area was boarded off, but as he passed Wexford caught a glimse of the discarded lift waiting, it seemed, to be taken away to the dump or landfill. The manufacturer’s name on it was one he had recently come across in another context: Cuthbert & Son.

As a waitress was bringing the tea things to one of the tables, Wexford reflected that though he had probably drunk gallons of wine, beer and (once) whisky in this place, he had never before drunk tea here. Regretfully, he declined one of the pink, blue or purple meringues and the chocolate marzipan slices. Thora Kilmartin, overweight though she was, didn’t hesitate but helped herself to a blue meringue.

‘If you’re happy to go on talking about Sarah,’ Wexford began, ‘I’ll ask you if you can remember the name of her boyfriend, the man who left when she found she was pregnant.’

‘It so happens that I can. It was the same as mine. Oh, not Kilmartin, nowhere near as distinguished. My maiden name, Watson. His name was Gerald Watson, known as Gerry.’

‘I know it would be too much to ask if you know what the rapist was called.’

‘It would be,’ said Thora Kilmartin. ‘He wasn’t someone Sarah knew. But she had seen him before and she knew where he lived. It was in a flat in a newish, rather expensive block called Quercum Court quite near where my husband and I live now. But that was all and I think he moved away very soon after the rape. Maybe he suspected that Sarah would go to the police, I don’t know, but he disappeared and of course I was glad for Sarah’s sake. Imagine having him around when she knew he was the father of her child.’

Wexford tried to imagine it but found this too difficult a feat. ‘And Gerald Watson? Do you know his whereabouts?’

‘He was younger than Sarah,’ Thora said ruminatively, as if she were probing her recollections. ‘About five years younger. He lived at home with his parents. A great mistake, I always think, if you’re over twenty. He used to come to the flat to take Sarah out. The evening of the rape they were going out together, they were going to a concert. But he phoned and said he couldn’t come, he had to stay at home with his mother who was upset over the death of a neighbour who had been killed in a road accident. I know. Can you imagine? That’s what comes of staying tied to your mother’s apron strings. Sarah went alone.’

‘And that was when she was raped?’

‘As you say. That was when she was raped.’

‘What did he do for a living?’

‘He was a solicitor.’

‘How close was the relationship? I suppose he stayed in your flat over weekends and he and Sarah went away on holiday together?’

‘Oh, no, you’re wrong there. Sarah wouldn’t have had that. I can see I haven’t made it plain to you how deeply
moral
Sarah was. Absolutely out of date, more like someone living sixty years ago than in the present. She wouldn’t have had – well, sexual relations with a man until she was married to him. I don’t even know if she and Gerry Watson intended to marry.’

Thora helped herself to a chocolate marzipan slice. ‘I wish you’d eat something.’

Wexford shook his head. ‘You said in your letter to her that you weren’t surprised when you heard she’d been ordained. You expected it?’

‘Not exactly that,’ said Thora. ‘It was more that she was always religious and she had high principles. In that way you could say that the rapist, the
handsome Asian
, picked on the most vulnerable and innocent woman he could have. No, perhaps not innocent but very vulnerable. She always saw the best in people but she knew about the worst. I would like to have heard one of her sermons and it’s too late now.’