Put on by Cunning (18 page)

They stopped for a late lunch not far north of San Luis Obispo. He tried in vain to get through to Sheila again and then Dora said she would try. ‘She came back from the phone with a little smile on her lips. She looked young and tanned and happy, but she hadn’t been able to reach Sheila. Wexford wondered why she should look like that if she hadn’t been talking to anyone. The Newtons would have been back in their home for hours by now. He felt that worst kind of misery, that which afflicts us as the result entirely of our own folly.

The road that returned from inland to the coast wound down through yellow hills. Yuccas pushed their way up through the sun-bleached grass and the rounded mountains were crowned with olives. The hills folded and dipped and rose and parted to reveal more hills, all the same, all ochreish in colour, until through the last dip the blue ocean appeared again. Dora was occupied with her map and guide book.

There was a little seaside town ahead. A sign by the roadside said: Santa Xavierita, height above sea level 50.2 metres, population 482. Dora said:

‘According to the book there’s a motel here called the Mariposa. Shall we try it?’

‘What for?’ said Wexford crossly. ‘Half an hour’s kip? We have to be two hundred miles south of here by eight and it’s five now.’

‘We don’t have to. Our plane doesn’t go till tomorrow night. We could stay at the Mariposa, I think we’re meant to, it was a sign.’

He nearly stopped the car. He chuckled. He had known her thirty-five years but he didn’t know her yet. ‘You phoned Newton back there?’ he said but in a very different tone from the one he would have used if he had asked that question ten minutes before. ‘You phoned Newton and said we couldn’t make it?’

She said demurely, ‘I think Nonie was quite relieved really.’

‘I don’t deserve it,’ said Wexford.

Santa Xavierita had a wide straggly street with a dozen side turnings at right angles to it, as many petrol stations, a monster market, a clutch of restaurants and among a dozen motels, the Mariposa. Wexford found himself being shown, not to a room, but to a little house rather like a bungalow at home in Ramsgate or Worthing. It stood in a garden, one of a score of green oases in this corner of Santa Xavierita, and up against its front door was a pink and with geranium as big as a tree.

He walked back between sprinklers playing on the grass to the hotel reception desk and phoned Sheila on a collect call. In London it was two in the morning, but by now he was unscrupulous. Sheila had got Ilbert’s address. She had had it for two days and couldn’t understand why her father hadn’t phoned. Ilbert was staying at Durrant’s Hotel in George Street by Spanish Place. Wexford wrote down the number. He looked round for someone to inform that he intended to make a call to London.

There was no sign of the little spry man called Sessamy who had checked them in. No doubt he was somewhere about, watering the geraniums and fuchsias and the heliotrope that smelt of cherries. Wexford went back to find Dora and tell her the new, such as it was. She was in the kitchen of their bungalow, arranging in a glass bowl, piling like an Arcimboldo still life, the fruit they had bought.

‘Reg,’ she said, turning round, a nectarine in her hand, ‘Reg, Mrs Sessamy who owns this place, she’s English. And she says we’re the first English people to stay here since – a Mrs Arno in 1976.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Wexford said.

‘I don’t know anything about it., I don’t know any more than I’ve told you. Your Natalie Arno stayed here in 1976. After we’ve eaten we’re to go and have coffee with Mrs Sessamy and she’ll enlighten you.’

‘Will she now? And how did you account for my curiosity? What did you tell her about me?’

‘The truth. The idea of you being a real English policeman almost made her cry. She was a GI bride, I think, she’s about the right age. I honestly think she expects you to turn up in a blue uniform and say ’ere, ’ere, what’s all this about? and she’d love it!’

He laughed. It was rare for him to praise his wife, almost unknown for him to call her by an endearment. That wasn’t his way, she knew it and wouldn’t have wanted it. It would have bracketed her with those he loved on the next level down. He put his hand on her arm.

‘If something comes of all this,’ he said, ‘and one of us gets sent back here at the government’s expense, can I come too?’

There was, of all things, a Lebanese restaurant in the main street of Santa Xavierita. They walked there and ate delicate scented versions of humous and kebab and honey cake. The sun had long gone, sunk almost with a fizzle into that blue sea, and now the moon was rising. The moonlight painted the little town white as with frost. It was no longer very warm. In the gardens, which showed as dark little havens of lushness in aridity, the sprinklers still rotated and sprayed.

Wexford marvelled at his wife and, with hindsight, at his own ignorant presumption. Instead of allowing herself to be a passive encumbrance, she had made him absurdly jealous and had hoodwinked him properly. By some sixth sense or some gift of serendipity, she had done in an instant what had eluded him for nearly a fortnight – found Natalie Arno’s hideout. And like Trollope’s Archdeacon of his wife, he wondered at and admired the greatness of that lady’s mind.

The Sessamys lived in a white-painted frame building, half their home and half the offices of the motel. Their living room was old-fashioned in an unfamiliar way, furnished with pieces from a thirties culture more overblown and Hollywood-influenced than that which Wexford himself had known. On a settee, upholstered in snow-white grainy plastic, a settee that rather resembled some monstrous dessert, a cream-coated log perhaps, rolled in coconut, sat the fattest woman Wexford had ever seen. He and Dora had come in by way of the open French windows, as she had been instructed, and Mrs Sessamy struggled to get to her feet. Like a great fish floundering to raise itself over the rim of the keeper net, she went on struggling until her guests were seated. Only then did she allow herself to subside again. She gave a big noisy sigh.

‘It’s such a pleasure to see you! You don’t know how I’ve been looking forward to it ever since Mrs Wexford here said who you was. A real bobby! I turned on the waterworks, didn’t I, Tom?’

Nearly forty years’ domicile in the United States had not robbed her of a particle of her old accent or given her a hint of new. She was a Londoner who still spoke the cockney of Bow or Limehouse.

‘Bethnal Green,’ she said as if Wexford had asked. ‘I’ve never been back. My people all moved out to one of them new towns, Harlow. Been there, of course. Like every other year mostly we go, don’t we, Tom?’

Her husband made no reply. He was a little brown monkey of a man with a face like a nut. He suggested they have a drink and displayed a selection of bottles ranged behind a small bar. There was no sign of the promised coffee. When Dora had apologetically refused bourbon, rye, Chablis, Hawaiian cocktail, Perrier, grape juice and gin, Mrs Sessamy announced that they would have tea. Tom would make it, the way she had taught him.

‘It’s such a pleasure to see you,’ she said again, sinking comfortably back into white plastic. ‘The English who come here, mostly they stop up at the Ramada or the Howard Johnson. But you picked the old Mariposa.’

‘Because of the butterflies,’ said Dora.

‘Come again?’

‘
Mariposa
– well, it means butterfly, doesn’t it?’

‘It does?’ said Tom Sessamy, waiting for the kettle to boil. ‘You hear that, Edie? How about that then?’

It seemed the policy of the Sessamys to question each other frequently but never to answer. Mrs Sessamy folded plump hands in her enormous lap. She was wearing green trousers and a tent-like green and pink flowered smock. In her broad moon face, in the greyish-fair hair, could still be seen traces of the pretty girl who had married an American solider and left Bethnal Green for ever.

‘Mrs Wexford said you wanted to know about that girl who lived here – well, stopped here. Though she must have been here three months. We thought she’d go on renting the chalet for ever, didn’t we, Tom? We thought we’d got a real sinecure.’

‘I’d heard it was up around Big Sur she stayed,’ said Wexford.

‘So it was at first. She couldn’t stick it, not enough life for her, and it was too far to drive to Frisco. You can get up to San Luis in twenty minutes from here by car. She had her own car and he used to come up in a big Lincoln Continental.’

‘Ilbert?’

‘That’s right, that was the name. I will say for her she never pretended, she never called herself Mrs Ilbert. Couldn’t have cared less what people thought.’

Tom Sessamy came in with the tea. Wexford who, while in California, had drunk from a pot made with one teabag, had seen tea made by heating up liquid out of a bottle or by pouring warm water on to a powder, noted that Tom had been well taught by his wife.

‘I never did fancy them bags,’ said Edith Sessamy. ‘You can get tea loose here if you try.’

‘Hafta go to the specialty shop over to San Luis,’ said Tom.

Mrs Sessamy put cream and sugar into her cup. ‘What more d’you want to know about her?’ she said to Wexford.

He showed her the photograph. ‘Is that her?’

She put on glasses with pink frames and rhinestone decoration. Mrs Sessamy had become Californian in all ways but for her tea and her speech. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, I reckon that’s her.’ Her voice was full of doubt.

‘I guess that’s her,’ said Tom. ‘It’s kinda hard to say. She kinda wore her hair loose. She got this terrific tan and wore her hair loose. She got this terrific tan and wore her hair loose. Right, Edie?’

Edith Sessamy didn’t seem too pleased by her husband’s enthusiastic description of Natalie Arno. She said rather sharply, ‘One man wasn’t enough for her. She was two-timing that Ilbert the minute he was off to L.A. For instance, there used to be a young fell a hung about here, kipped down on the beach, I reckon you’d have called him a beachcomber in olden times.’

‘Kinda hippie,’ said Tom.

‘She carried on with him. I say he slept on the beach, that summer I reckoned he slept most nights in Natalie’s chalet. Then there was an English chap, but it wasn’t long before she left she met him, was it, Tom?’

‘Played the guitar at the Maison Suisse over to San Luis.’

‘Why did she leave?’ Wexford asked.

‘Now that I can’t tell you. We weren’t here when she left. We were at home, we were in England.’

‘Visiting with her sister over to Harlow,’ said Tom.

‘She was living here like she’d stay for the rest of her life when we left. That’d have been the end of July, I reckon. Tom’s cousin from Ventura, she come up to run the place like she always does when we’re off on our holidays. She kept in touch, I reckon we got a letter once a week. I remember her writing us about that woman who got drowned here, don’t you, Tom? But she never mentioned that girl leaving. Why should she? There was guests coming and going all the time.’

‘You weren’t curious yourselves?’

Edith Sessamy heaved up her huge shoulders and dropped them again. ‘So if we were? There wasn’t much we could do about it, six thousand miles away. She wasn’t going to tell Tom’s cousin why she upped and went, was she? When we come back we heard that’s what she’d done, a moonlight flit like. Ilbert come up the next day but the bird was flown. She went off in her car, Tom’s cousin said, and she’d got a young chap with her, and she left that poor mug Ilbert to pay the bill.’

Wexford woke up very early the next morning. The sun was perhaps the brightest and the clearest he had ever seen and the little town looked as if it had been washed clean in the night. Yet Edith Sessamy had told him that apart from a few showers the previous December they had had no rain for a year. He bathed and dressed and went out. Dora was still fast asleep. He walked down the narrow straight road bordered with fan palms, feather dusters on long tapering handles, that led to Santa Xavierita state beach.

The sky was an inverted pan of speckless blue enamel, the sea rippling blue silk. Along the silver sand a young man in yellow tee-shirt and red shorts was jogging. Another, in swimming trunks, was doing gymnastic exercises, sit-ups, press-ups, toe-touching. There was no one in the water. In the middle of the beach was a chair raised up high on stilts for the use of the lifeguard who would sit on it and halloo through his trumpet at over-venturesome swimmers.

Wexford’s thoughts reverted to the night before. There was a question he ought to have asked, that he had simply overlooked at the time, because of the crushing disappointment he had felt at the paucity of Edith Sessamy’s information. Disappointment had made him fail to select from that mass of useless matter the one significant sentence. He recalled it now, picking it out as the expert might pick out the uncut diamond from a handful of gravel.

Two hours later, as early as he decently could, he was waiting in the motel’s reception area by the counter. Ringing the bell summoned Tom Sessamy in shortie dressing gown which left exposed hairless white legs and long white feet in sandals of plaited straw.

‘Hi, Reg, you wanna check out?’

‘I wanted to ask you and your wife a few more questions first if you’ll bear with me.’

‘Edie, are ya decent? Reg’s here ta pick your brains.’

Mrs Sessamy was rather more decent than her husband in an all-enveloping pink kimono printed with birds of paradise. She sat on the white sofa drinking more strong black tea, and on her lap on a tray were fried eggs and fried bacon and hash browns and English muffins and grape jelly.

‘It’s been such a pleasure meeting you and Dora, I can’t tell you.’ She had told him at least six times already, but the repetition was somehow warming and pleasant to hear. Wexford returned the compliment with a few words about how muchthey had enjoyed themselves.

‘You wanna cup of Edie’s tea?’ said Tom.

Wexford accepted. ‘You said last night a woman was drowned here. While you were away. D’you know any more than that? Who she was? How it happened?’