Put on by Cunning (15 page)

‘Why did he tell you all this?’ Wexford interrupted.

She gulped, put out a helpless hand. ‘He had to tell someone, he said, and there was no one but me. He overheard her talking to someone on the phone like he was her lover, telling him to come down once we’d gone but to be discreet. Ivan understood then. He’s broken-hearted because she doesn’t want him. He told his own wife that, that he doesn’t know how he can go on living because another woman won’t have him. I couldn’t take it in at first, I couldn’t believe it, than I started screaming. She came into our room and said what was the matter? I told her what he’d said and she said, “I’m sorry, darling, but I didn’t know you then”. She said that to
me
. “I didn’t know you then,” she said, “and it wasn’t anything important anyway. It only happened three or four times, it was just that we were both lonely.” As if that made it better!’

Wexford was silent. She was calmer now, though trembling. Soon she would begin regretting that she had poured out her heart to someone who was almost a stranger. She passed her hands over her face and dropped her shoulders with a long heavy sigh.

‘Oh God. What am I going to do? Where shall Igo? I can’t stay with him, can I? When she said that to me I ran out of the house, I didn’t even take my bag, I just ran and you were there and – oh God, I don’t know what you must think of me talking to you like this. You must think I’m out of my head, crazy, mad. Ivan says I’m mad, “If you’re going to carry on like that,” he said, “a psychiatric ward’s the best place for you.”’ She gave him a sideways look. ‘I’ve been in those places, that’s why he said that. If only I had a friend I could go to but I’ve lost all my friends, in and out of hospital the way I’ve been. People don’t want to know you any more when they think you’ve got something wrong with your mind. In my case it’s only depression, it’s a disease like any other, but they don’t realize.’ She gave a little whimpering cry. ‘Natalie wasn’t like that, she knew about my depression, she was
kind
. I thought she was, but all the time . . . I’ve lost my only friend as well as my husband!’

Her mouth worked unsteadily from crying, her eyes were red. She looked like a hunted gypsy, the greying bushy hair hanging in shaggy bundles against her cheeks. And it was plain from her expression and her fixed imploring eyes that, because of his profession and his manner and his having caught her the way he had, she expected him to do something for her. Wreak vengeance on Natalie Arno, restore an errant husband or at least provide some dignified shelter for the night.

She began to speak rapidly, almost feverishly. ‘I can’t go back there, I can’t face it. Ivan’s going home, he said so, he said he’d go home tonight, but I can’t be with him, I can’t be alone with him, I couldn’t bear it. I’ve got my sister in Wellridge but she won’t want me, she’s like the rest of them . . . There must be somewhere I could go, you must know somewhere, if you could only . . .’

There flashed into Wexford’s mind the idea that he could take her home with him and get Dora to give her a bed for the night. The sheer nuisance this would be stopped him. They were going on holiday tomorrow, their flight went at one p.m, which meant leaving Kingsmarkham for Heathrow at ten. Suppose she refused to leave? Suppose Zoffany arrived? It just wasn’t on.

She was still talking non-stop. ‘So if I could possibly be with you there are lots of things I’d like to tell you. I feel if I could only get them off my chest I’d be that much better and they’d help you, they’re things you’d want to know.’

‘About Mrs Arno?’ he said sharply.

‘Well, not exactly about her, about
me
. I need someone to listen and be sympathetic, that does you more good than all the therapy and pills in the world, I can tell you. I can’t be alone, don’t you understand?’

Later he was to castigate himself for not giving in to that first generous impulse. If he had done he might have known the true facts that night and, more important, a life might have been saved. But as much as the unwillingness to be involved and to create trouble for himself, a feeling of caution prevented him. He was a policeman, the woman was a little mad . . .

‘The best thing will be for me to drive you back up the hill to Sterries, Mrs Zoffany. Let me . . .’

‘No!’

‘You’ll very probably find your husband is ready to leave and waiting for you. You and he would still be in time to catch the last train to Victoria. Mrs Zoffany, you have to realize he’ll get over this, it’s something that will very likely lose its force now he’s brought it into the open. Why not try to . . . ?’

‘No!’

‘Come, let me take you back.’

For answer, she gathered up her skirts and draperies and half jumped, half tumbled out of the car. In some consternation, Wexford too got out to help her, but she had go to her feet and as he put out his arm she threw something at him, a crumpled ball. It was his handkerchief.

She stood for a little while a few yards from him, leaning against the high jasmine-hung wall of one of these sprawling gardens. She hung her head, her hands up to her chin, like a child who has been scolded. It was deep dusk now and growing cool. Suddenly she began to walk back the way she had come. She walked quite briskly up the hill, up over the crown of the hill, to be lost amid the soft, hanging, darkening green branches.

He waited a while, he hardly knew what for. A car passed him just as he started his own, going rather fast down the hill. It was a mustard-coloured Opel, and although it was much too dark to see at all clearly, the woman at the wheel looked very much like Natalie Arno. It was a measure, of course, of how much she occupied his thoughts.

He drove home to Dora who had packed for the last time and was watching Blaise Cory’s programme on the television.

Wexford was driving on the wrong side of the road. Or that was how he put it to himself. It wasn’t as bad as he had expected, the San Diego Freeway had so many lanes and traffic moved at a slower pace than at home. What was alarming and didn’t seem to get any better was that he couldn’t judge the space he had on the right-hand side so that Dora exclaimed, ‘Oh, Reg, you were only about an inch from that car. I was sure you were going to scrape!’

The sky was a smooth hazy blue and it was very hot. Nine hours’ flying had taken its toll on both of them. Stopped at the lights – traffic lights hung somewhere up in the sky here – Wexford glanced at his wife. She looked tired, she was bound to, but excited as well. For him it wasn’t going to be much of a holiday, unless you agreed with those who say that a change is as good as a rest, and he was beginning to feel guilty about the amount of time he would have to spend apart from her. He had tried to explain that if it wasn’t for this quest of his they wouldn’t be coming here at all, and she had taken it with cheerful resignation. But did she understand quite what he meant? It was all very well her saying she was going to look up those long-lost friends of hers, the Newtons. Wexford thought he knew just how much they would do for a visitor, an invitation to dinner was what that would amount to.

He had just got used to the road, was even beginning to enjoy driving the little red automatic Chevette he had rented at the airport, when the palms of Santa Monica were before them and they were on Ocean Drive. He had promised Dora two days here, staying in luxury at the Miramar, before they set off for wherever his investigations might lead them.

Where was he going to begin? He had one meagre piece of information to go on. Ames had given it to him back in February and it was Natalie Arno’s address in Los Angeles. The magnitude of his task was suddenly apparent as, once they had checked in and Dora had lain down in their room to sleep, he stood under the eucalyptus trees, looking at the Pacific. Everything seemed so big, a bigger sea, a bigger beach, a vaster sky than he had ever seen before. And as their plane had come in to land he had looked down and been daunted by the size of the sprawling, glittering, metallic-looking city spread out there below them. The secret of Natalie Arno had appeared enormous in Kingsmarkham; here in Los Angeles it was surely capable of hiding itself and becoming for ever lost in one of a hundred million crannies.

But one of these crannies he would explore in the morning. Tuscarora Avenue, where Natalie had lived for eight years after coming south from San Francisco, Tuscarora Avenue in a suburb called Opuntia. The fancy names suggested to Wexford that he might expect a certain slumminess, for at home Vale Road would be the site of residential elegance and Valhalla Grove of squalor.

The shops were still open. He walked up Wilshire Boulevard and bought himself a larger and more detailed street plan of Los Angeles than the car hire company had provided.

The next morning when he went out Dora was preparing to phone Rex and Nonie Newton. A year or two before she met Wexford Dora had been engaged to Rex Newton; a boy-and-girl affair it had been, they were both in their teens, and Rex had been supplanted by the young policeman. Married for thirty years now, Rex had retired early and emigrated with his American wife to California. Wexford hoped wistfully that they would be welcoming to Dora, that Nonie Newton would live up to the promises she had made in her last letter. But he could only hope for the best. By ten he was on his way to Opuntia.

The names had misled him. Everything here had an exotic name, the grand and tawdry alike. Opuntia wasn’t shabby but paintbox bright with houses like Swiss chalets or miniature French chateaux set in garden plots as lush as jungles. He had previously only seen such flowers in florist’s shops or the hothouses of public gardens, oleanders, bougainvilleas, the orange-and-blue bird-of-paradise flower, emblem of the City of the Angels. No wind stirred the fronds of the fan palms. The sky was blue, but white with smog at the horizon.

Tuscarora Avenue was packed so tightly with cars that two drivers could hardly pass each other. Wexfrod despaired of finding a niche for the Chevette up there, so he left it at the foot of the hill and walked. Though there were side streets called Mar Vista and Oceania Way, the sea wasn’t visible, being blocked from view by huge apartment buildings which raised their penthouse tops out of a forest of palm and eucalyptus, 1121 Tuscarora, where Natalie Arno had lived, was a small squat house of pink stucco. It and its neighbours, a chocolate-coloured mini-castle and a baby hacienda painted lemon, reminded Wexford of the confections on the sweets trolley at the Miramar the previous night. He hesitated for a moment, imagining Natalie there, the light and the primary colours suiting her better than the pallor and chill of Kingsmarkham, and then he went upto the door of the nearest neighbour, the chocolate-fudge-iced 1123.

A man in shorts and a tee-shirt answered his ring. Wexford, who had no official standing in California, who had no right to be asking questions, had already decided to represent himself as on a quest for a lost relative. Though he had never before been to America, he knew enough of Americans to be pretty sure that this kind of thing, which might at home be received with suspicion, embarrassment and taciturnity, would here be greeted with warmth.

The householder, whose shirt campaigned in red printed letters for the Equal Rights Amendment, said he was called Leo Dobrowski and seemed to justify Wexford’s belief. He asked him in, explained that his wife and children had gone to church, and within a few minutes Wexford found himself drinking coffee with Mr Dobrowski on a patio hung with the prussian-blue trumpets of morning glory.

But in pretending to a family connection with Tina Zoffany he had made a mistake. Leo Dobrowski knew all about Tina Zoffany and scarcely anything about Natalie Arno or any other occupants of 1112 Tuscarora. Hadn’t Tina, in the two years she had lived next door, become Mrs Dobrowski’s closest friend? It was a pleasure, though a melancholy one, for Mr Dobrowski at last to be able to talk about Tina to someone who
cared
. Her brother, he thought, had never cared, though he hoped he wasn’t speaking out of turn in saying so. If Wexford was Tina’s uncle, he would know what a sweet lovely person she had been and what a tragedy her early death was. Mrs Dobrowski herself had been made sick by the shock of it. If Wexford would care to wait until she came back from church he knew his wife had some lovely snapshots of Tina and could probably let him have some small keepsake of Tina’s. Her brother had brought all her little odds and ends to them, wouldn’t want the expense of sending them, home, you could understand that.

‘You sure picked the right place when you came to us,’ said Mr Dobrowski. ‘I guess there’s not another family on Tuscarora knew Tina like we did. You have ESP or something?’

After that Wexford could scarcely refuse to meet the church-going wife. He promised to come back an hour later. Mr Dobrowski beamed his pleasure and the words on his tee-shirt – ‘Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex’ – expanded with his well-exercised muscles.

The occupants of 1125 – this time Wexford was a cousin of Natalie’s and no nonsense about it – were new to the district and so were those who lived further down the hill in a redwood-and-stucco version of Anne Hathaway’s cottage. He went to1121 itself and picked up from the man he spoke to his first piece of real information, that the house had not been bought but was rented from Mrs Arno. Who was there in the neighbourhood, Wexford asked him, who might have known Mrs Arno when she lived here? Try 1122 on the opposite side, he was advised. In an ever-changing population, the people at 1122, the Romeros, had been in residence longest.

Natalie’s cousin once more, he tried at 1122.

‘You English?’ said Mrs Donna Romero, a woman who looked even more Spanish than Natalie and whose jet-black hair was wound on to pink plastic rollers.

Wexford nodded.

‘Natalie’s English. She went home to her folks in London. That’s all I know. Right now she’s somewhere in London, England.’