The Speaker of Mandarin (13 page)

Sewingbury has about four thousand inhabitants, a golf course, a convent and girls' school, a disused mill on the Kingsbrook and a huge market square, usually packed tight with parked cars. The church is halfway down the hill that leads to the river and the new 'weir'. Wexford's driver took the route along Springhill Lane, over the newly built bridge, along the river bank past where the footpath from Thatto Vale comes out and up River Street.

All the Knighton family were assembled, Adam, lean, gaunt, bareheaded, wearing a waisted black overcoat, Roderick in a dark suit with a black tie and Roderick's wife Caroline in a tight black suit and high-heeled black patent shoes. Julian and his wife were in light colours, grey and green respectively, but wore the most doleful expressions, perhaps to compensate. The fair young man with the beaky nose and the thin dark Greek-looking girl Wexford decided must be Colum and his wife. Only Jennifer was absent, though represented by her husband who arrived late and on foot.

Leaving the church when it was all over, after the family had filed out, Wexford, who had been sitting in the very back row, happened to look over his shoulder along the aisle. The small elderly woman he remembered from China as Adela Knighton's friend was walking towards him from where she had been sitting in one of the front pews. He had forgotten all about her until now.

He could tell she was astounded at seeing him. She looked at him as he must have looked when he saw his persecutor with the bound feet. And then her eyes turned sharply away.

Wexford went out and waited for her in the porch.

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'My name is Irene Bell. I don't believe we were ever introduced in China.'

'Chief Inspector Wexford of Kingsmarkham CID. How do you do, Miss Bell?'

'So you're a policeman and living here. How very odd! That must have been quite a shock for poor Adam on top of everything else. He's very cut up, isn't he? Well, we all are. Adela and I were at school together, we'd known each other nearly all our lives. I suppose we'd been friends for something like half a century.'

'It's a long time,' said Wexford. 'Can you and I have a talk, Miss Bell?'

'Now, d'you mean? I suppose so. I wouldn't Be back to the house anyway. I don't care for all this eating and drinking at funerals. People don't mean to be irreverent but somehow they forget what they're there for, someone starts laughing and before you know where you are it's turned into a party. I call that very bad taste.'

Wexford nodded in agreement. She seemed a woman of character. 'I'll see you get to Kingsmarkham station after- wards. You wouldn't think a cup of tea irreverent, would you?'

'I could do with a cup of good hot tea,' said Miss Bell.

She was short and sturdily built, though not fat, with a round sharp-featured face and dark hair that still hadn't much grey in it and was crisply permed. The blue trouser suit would have been unsuitable for today and in any case too light in weigl t, for the previous night had seen the first frost of the winter and a little white frost still lay in shady

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places. She had on a dark grey tweed suit, beige silk blouse and black court shoes that were nevertheless 'sensible' ones. Up until three years before, she told Wexford, she had been the manager of a travel agency at Swiss Cottage near where she lived. In fact it was this agency that had arranged the trans-Asia trip for her and the Knightons. It wasn't the first time the three of them had been away together. She had gone with them to Egypt as well as on various European holidays. It was company for Adela, she said, which Wexford thought an interesting remark.

Back in Kingsmarkham Wexford took her into the Willow Pattern, a cafe in the High Street, and ordered tea for two. Irene Bell refused food, perhaps once again on the grounds of the unsuitability of eating just after one has buried one's best friend. For this was what Mrs Knighton had evidently been, a devoted dear friend, as close as a sister, and when Miss Bell referred to her in this way a look of heavy bitter sadness came into her sharp face. She was, she said, godmother to Jennifer, 'Aunt Irene' to all the young Knightons, as nearly a member of the family as one could be who was not allied by blood. Wexford let her talk for a while about her long friendship with the dead woman, noting that though she referred to all Mrs Knighton's children by name and spoke of their children, Adam Knighton was never mentioned. He interrupted her by reverting to what she had said in the car.

'You said yDU were company for Mrs Knighton. Wasn't her husband company enough for her?'

She lifted her shoulders and gave a half-smile.

'Was it a happy marriage, Miss Bell?'

'Someone said the state of marriage is unhappy only insofar as life itself is unhappy.'

'Samuel Johnson said it. What do you say?'

'In general, Mr Wexford, I don't think much of it. It goes on too long. If it could be for five years, say, I think it would be an excellent institution. Who can stand the same person morning, noon and night for forty years?

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People think a single woman of my age hasn't married because she hasn't had the chance. That's not so of course.' Irene Bell chuckled. It was a grim chuckle that hadn't much to do with amusement or pleasure. 'I'm not much to look at and never have been but neither are most of the married women you see around you. If folks only got married because they were pretty or charming it'd be a world of singles. No, I never fancied marriage myself. I don't much like sharing. I don't like cooking or housework or babies or sex. Oh, yes, I've tried sex. I tried it three times forty years ago and those three times were enough for a lifetime in my opinion.

'But those are my views. That's marriage in general. In particular, which is what you're asking, I daresay the Knightons were as happy as most people. She was very fond of him, poor Adela. She made her choice and she stuck to it and she was a good wife, no one could have had a better wife.'

You don't like him, Wexford thought to himself. Or is it more complex than that? Is it that once you liked him too much?

'They never had much to say to each other. That's partly what I mean when I say I don't think much of marriage. How else do we communicate but in words when all's said and done? You hear a lot of nonsense about the language of the eyes, the language of love, silent communion, all that kind of thing. There wasn't anything of that sort with Adela and Adam, I can tell you. Adela wasn't that sort of woman anyway. Adam - well, it always seems a funny thing to me, a man who reads poetry.'

'Most of it was written by men.

'That's different,' said Miss Bell. 'Don't confuse me. I mean it's not very robust, it's affected, if you ask me, a man reading- what d'you call 'em?- sonnets.'

Wexford said abruptly, 'Was he unfaithful to her? Did he have love affairs with other women?'

She was taken aback. She had been raising her teacup to

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her lips. The motion was arrested in mid-air then slowly she restored the cup to the saucer. 'Good God, no. What an extraordinary idea! He was sixty-three.'

'He wasn't always sixty-three. In any case he's a very handsome man, with what I'd call an attractive presence.' Wexford paused. How intimate they had become, how frank, in ten minutes over the teacups! It seemed at that moment as if there were nothing they couldn't have said to each other. It was a pity she hadn't more to say. 'There's many a man of sixty-three,' he said, 'would be horrified at a suggestion his emotional life was over.'

She gave a short, rather harsh, cackle. 'See the day looming yourself, can you? No, there was nothing like that with Adam, you can forget that. Who would he carry on with? Never saw a woman but the vicar's wife. If you're thinking he shot poor Adela to take up with someone else, you're cold like they say in "hunt the thimble", you're stone cold. Adam wouldn't point a gun at anyone, let alone fire it. He gave up shooting pigeons because he said it wasn't ethical. I once saw him get stung by a wasp trying to put it out of the window because he wouldn't kill it.' She laughed again, then set down her cup with a rattle. 'I knew it!' she said. 'This is turning into a party, a beanfeast, and I'm not having it. I call it very bad taste. It was good of you to give me tea but now you'll take me to the station, please.'

Wexford pleaded, 'Five more minutes, Miss Bell, and I promise I will. I want to ask you something about China. Do you remember when we were all sitting in that bar on the hotel roof in Kweilin?'

She was putting on her gloves. 'The temperature was ninety and they were playing "White Christmas". Of course I remember.'

'Mr Knighton had a shock. He went white. He saw something or someone and he was absolutely astounded by what he saw. Did you notice that?'

'I can't say I did.'

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'A minute or two later Mrs Knighton said she thought she would go to bed and you and she got up to leave.'

'Maybe, but I don't remember.'

'And the next day he didn't mention it to you? Or to Mrs Knighton in your presence? I mean, he didn't say "Something I saw on the roof last night amazed me"?'

'No, he didn't. Why don't you ask him?'

'I will. You took a lot of photographs. So did Mrs Knighton. Did she show you the ones she took?'

'Weeks ago,' said Irene Bell. 'She came up to town. She always had lunch with me when she did that. We had lunch and we looked at each other's snaps.'

'What did she do with hers?'

'Took them away, of course. She was going to put them in an album she'd got.'

Up in his office on the second floor of the police station he found Burden and Dr Crocker talking about guns. Burden even had a replica of a Walther PPK 9 mm, one which they had taken off a young tearaway who had threatened a visiting pop star with it and which, after the case was over, had unaccountably got into Wexford's desk drawer and remained there ever since.

'I feel more at home with a scalpel,' said the doctor. 'Had a nice funeral, Reg? It beats me why people who aren't religious have funerals. Boring, embarrassing, awk- ward affairs with no grace or beauty to them now the old prayer book's more or less gone.'

'You have to have a funeral, don't you?' said Burden.

'If you mean by law, certainly not. People have them because they think they've got to but they haven't. You can just get your undertaker to do a quiet little disposal when the crematorium's not busy. Nothing to it. Mind you, it'll cost you much the same. Five hundred quid give or take a little, that's what a funeral comes to these days.'

Wexford, who had been silent, sat down at his desk and, taking the replica gun, turned it slowly over and over in

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his hands, saying, 'He was sitting on that roof, drinking cassia wine, and suddenly he saw something that utterly astounded him. Not something unpleasant, mark you, rather the reverse. I could almost hazard a guess he saw something wonderful. But what did he see?'

'A pretty girl,' said the doctor.

'Oh, come on. You'd only look like that when you saw a pretty girl if you'd been shut up in solitary confinement for the past twenty years.'

'An old friend?' said Burden. 'Someone maybe he'd defended in court years ago and thought he'd never see again?'

'In that case why didn't he immediately get up and go and speak to him? Why did he go and lean over the parapet and start muttering Chinese poetry?'

'You'd better ask him.'

'I will, but I'm sure he'll lie about it. One of the things we have to do is find out just who knew he was going to be away last Tuesday night. We haven't done much about that but it's on the cards a good many people did know. Everyone at that Golden Jubilee party at the Palimpsest Club for a start. Probably most of Mrs Knighton's acquaintances in Sewingbury. Friends or relations she may have written to or talked to on the phone.'

'You mean,' said the doctor, 'it's a bit fishy it happened that night. I mean here's a chap stays away from his home once a year and on the very night he's away his wife gets murdered.'

'At any rate it teaches us that it was planned. It may have been planned by one of those people who knew he'd be away or it may have been planned by Knighton himself in collusion with someone else or Knighton may have done it alone.'

'Everyone in Hyde Park Gardens,' said Burden, 'is being questioned as to the possibility of their having seen Knighton that night.' He hesitated, said in a rather embarrassed way, 'You may think this very far-fetched . . .'

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Wexford countered, 'I'm the one that gets accused of that.'

'Maybe it's infectious. Maybe it's because I - well, I sort of read more than I used.' It was well-known that Burden's cultured wife was in the habit of recommending books to him, was one of those rare people who like being read to and had discovered in her husband an unexpected histrionic talent for reading aloud. Burden's face had become a little pink. 'Fiction, you know. I must admit to having read only novels lately.'

Wexford exploded into a quotation from Jane Austen.

'Only novels! Only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delin- eation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language!'

'OK, let him tell us his idea,' said Crocker.

'It's just that - well, it sounds like something out of Conan Doyle really. On the other hand, you do read in the papers sometimes . . .' Seeing Wexford's eyes sharpening with rage, Burden went on hurriedly, 'You hear of old lags, or any villains really, getting sent down by a judge and swearing to get back at him later. Right? And I'm pretty sure I've come across actual cases - attempts anyway. It did strike me it might be something like that which had happened here.'

'Knighton wasn't a judge.'

'No, but someone accused of a crime in a case where he was prosecuting might feel much the same towards him as towards the judge. He might easily feel that Knighton's presentation of the evidence against him had more effect on the jury than the judge's summing up. Say that because of what Knighton said for the prosecution some guy either got convicted when he expected to be acquitted or got sent down for twice as long as he anticipated, mightn't he then resolve to get back at Knighton when he came out? And I