The Speaker of Mandarin (16 page)

'You can't take anything out of China that's more than a hundred and twenty years old,' Margery said. 'They put the red seal on an antique piece to show you it's within the limit and therefore all right.'

Redford handed it back. 'Do you happen to know what it was Mr Vinald and Mr Purbank quarrelled about so that they didn't speak to each other after the train left Irkutsk?'

Now it was Margery's turn to laugh. 'I know they didn't but I haven't the faintest idea why. Gordon just said he was a "nasty piece of work" and left it at that.'

He went home to another good, almost elderly, marriage - his own. Dora was watching an old British film on tele- vision, The Snow Moth with Trevor Howard and Milborough Lang.

'I wonder if people will see old films of Sheila's in thirty years time.'

'Considering she's never made any,' said Wexford, 'they

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don't stand much chance. You don't want her going off to Hollywood, do you?'

'I'd like her to make just one or two really good films as well as acting on the stage. There's that old TV series of hers, of course, I don't count that. I'd like to think of her - well, her beauty recorded for posterity. In a lovely setting, in a sensitive film like this one. After all, what do you suppose Milborough Lang looks like now? She must be fifty-five.'

Wexford always did his best to jolly his wife out of these alas-for-my-lost-looks moods of hers. To him, of course, she looked much the same as she had done when he first married her. As the credit titles came up he switched off the set.

'I wish to God you'd been with me in Kweilin. You'd have observed people. You'd have talked to people, you always do, you'd have got to know them. You wouldn't have been distracted like I was by - hallucinations.'

She looked a little worried. 'Reg. I wish we knew what those hallucinations of yours actually were.'

'Lack of sleep; Maotai.'

'Oh, come on. I doubt if you had more than a couple of sips of the stuff.'

Wexford shrugged. 'You might have been able to tell me why a man who sees a pretty girl walk across a roof looks more like he's seen the Virgin Mary.'

The phone rang. It was Burden.

'I'm getting more help than I expected from that chap Brownrigg who's the Clerk to Chambers where Knighton used to be. He's a meticulous old boy and he's got records of all the cases they've handled back for twenty years. But what I'm phoning for is because a fellow by the name of Vinald's been on the blower for you three times since midday. I'll give you his number.'

Wexford dialled it. Vinald himself answered. 'Oh, Chief Inspector, how super of you to phone. I've been trying to

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get in touch ever since my wife said you'd been here.' The voice was hearty, ingratiating. It was also very nervous. 'I really did want to know precisely what you wanted of me.'

'Any little bits of help you or your wife could give me on the background of Mr and the late Mrs Knighton, Mr Vinald, that's all.'

There was a short silence. Vinald cleared his throat. 'There's more to it than that, though, isn't there? I don't think it can be just that, eh?'

Wexford thought quickly. He would play along, though in the dark. 'I expect,' he said, 'you remember that last evening in Kweilin as well as I do.'

'Oh, certainly. And I realize a fuller explanation is actually called for here. I suppose I should begin at the point we all met up in that roof bar place. . .'

'Mr Vinald,' said Wexford heavily, 'I don't want to hear this on the phone. I'll come along and see you tomorrow. I'll see you in your shop at noon sharp.'

'Well, of course. I'll make a point of being there. I can assure you there's a perfectly simple and reasonable explanation for the whole thing. . .'

'Good night, Mr Vinald,' Wexford said firmly. Far better to confront the man in the morning and hear it face to face. He rather enjoyed the feeling of suspense, of revelation deferred. Tomorrow, perhaps, indeed probably, Vinald was going to tell him what had so affected Knighton on the roof.

But that, though not in detail, Wexford thought he already knew. Knighton had seen Pandora Vinald. Of course it wasn't the sight of a pretty girl which had brought that look to his face. The people who had suggested that to him simply hadn't thought what they were saying. It was this particular pretty girl, and Knighton hadn't looked like that because he was seeing her for the first time but because he was seeing her again, perhaps after the passage of years.

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A girl who had once meant a great deal to him- whom he had loved? - had walked out on to that roof and by the merest chance he had been there, had looked up and with joy and wonder and fear had seen her.

Part Three

1 ~

Inspector Burden was a conventional conservative man who believed passionately in law and order. The slightest offence against those principles irked him and he loathed crime. That curious understanding of the criminal mind and its workings which some policemen have to such a degree that there is not much to choose between them and their morality and the criminals and theirs, was foreign to Burden, was distasteful to him. That perhaps was why he was a less successful policeman than he might have been. For between them and him a great gulf was fixed which grew wider and deeper as he grew older.

He was insensitive and he lacked sympathy. Supporting a cliche he didn't know to be one, he would often say he reserved his compassion for the mugger's victim, the beleaguered householder or even the Inland Revenue. He was a believer in retribution and was one of that majority of policemen - to which Wexford did not belong- who favoured the reintroduction of capital punishment. And this not solely for the taking of the lives of policemen. That the French, who had been sensible enough to keep the guillotine for so long, were now proposing to get rid of it, was beyond his comprehension.

More even than young rioters and muggers he disliked recidivists. This was a word his wife had taught him, he had always called them old lags himself, but it came to the same thing. It was just his luck, as he remarked to Jenny on leaving the house, that he should have to spend the day, maybe the next few days, hunting them out. And that without even the satisfaction of the housewife hunting cock

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roaches, in that there was nothing he could do to them when he found them.

He had taken an unprofessional dislike to Adam Knighton but he had to see him first. Renie Thompson opened the front door to him. She showed him into the living room where to his mild surprise he saw his chief already there, seated opposite Knighton and in the throes of an enquiry into the topic that was at present obsessing him. Knighton had grown gaunt in the past few days, his feet were in carpet slippers and a grey heavy knit cardigan was wrapped round his shoulders. He had become an old man, all that style and presence gone.

Wexford gave Burden a nod but the other man made a gesture of rising from his chair.

'Don't get up, Mr Knighton,' Wexford said. 'I'd like you to give a little more thought to what I've been asking, if you please.'

Knighton moved his shoulders. He was frowning. 'I told you, I remember very little about it. My memory has been affected by all this,' he said bitterly, as one recalling a tranquil time that can never return. 'It was all very beautiful, wasn't it? The most beautiful view I think I've ever seen. If I looked astonished up on that roof I suppose it was at the beauty of the sight.' A ghastly smile widened across his face and turned it into a death's head.

With a shrug Wexford turned to Burden. He had tried his best. The man was lying, of course, or at least that last sentence of his was highly ambiguous. Burden suggested the possibility that the murder had been committed by someone out to 'get his own back' on the former prosecuting counsel. The smile shrivelled on Knighton's face, he looked almost faint. He took from Burden the lists Brownrigg had compiled.

It took hnn a few moments to collect himself. But he made the effort. He spoke in an almost normal conversational tone.

'I see Hayward's name is here. Gilbert or 'Gib' Hayward.

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He threatened me, actually threatened me it' court. The jury had returned a verdict of guilty and he was awaiting sentence. When the judge asked him if he had anything to say he began shouting threats at me. It was really rather alarming, though of course there was nothing he could actually do.

'I've had anonymous letters too but they won't be much use to you, will they, since they were anonymous?' Knighton was burbling on in this half-crazed way, Burden thought, for the sake of saying something, anything, rather than reveal his true feelings, his deep fears. 'Oh, and there was this other chap here, one Peter Kevin Smith. I was defending him. For some reason he thought I hadn't done a good enough job. He went to prison for five years and the next day his mother came in to see me, made her way into chambers, if you please, burst in threatening he'd shoot me when he came out.'

'When you look at these names, sir, does any one or more of them give you a feeling that, yes, here's someone who might have done more than threaten?'

Knighton gave the lists back as if he didn't like holding them, as if he didn't care for the feel of them on his hands. 'None of them ever did. I can't imagine anyone carrying out such a threat against my - my wife. And do men have such long memories?'

'Some do,' Wexford said rather enigmatically, and he added, 'It depends on how much they want to remember.'

Now how to act on the information in the lists?

Those people whom Knighton had successfully defended and those whom he had unsuccessfully prosecuted could be ignored. But this still left so many that Burden realized he was going to have to be ruthless, categorize them according to the circumstances of the case, perhaps decide to disregard all petty crime and go only for killers and perpetrators of manslaughter, robbery with violence and grievous bodily harm. Could he dare assume it wasn't a woman? For a start

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he thought he could. He just couldn't see a woman not personally antagonistic to Adela Knighton getting her out of bed and forcing her downstairs and shooting her in cold blood. A girlfriend of Knighton's who had had reason to hate or resent Adela, that would be a different thing. But Knighton had no girlfriend.

The murderer wasn't going to be in his dotage either. Knighton's own age was just about the oldest at which Burden could imagine anyone climbing up and squeezing through that window, and Knighton was a well-preserved thin sixty-three. The murderer was going to have to be thin, no more than middle-aged. He had started making his list and on it, prominently, were 'Gib' Hayward and Peter Kevin Smith, the former now fifty-two years old, the latter forty-six. They might be fat, though, they might even be dead.

Hayward had killed a man in a fight outside a West London pub and Peter Kevin Smith had hit an old woman in the stomach, rupturing her spleen, prior to breaking into the till in her tobacconist's shop. Narrowing down, rejecting women, people over sixty-five, forgers, con men, straight burglars, bank robbers - though he didn't know if he could afford to do this - he had ended up with a total of sixteen men. In fact there had been more clients in Brownrigg's records with reason to be grateful to Knighton than inimical towards him. Certainly he had been the kind of counsel newspapers and hardened villains adore, spectacular, unscrupulous, witty, savage and subtle.

He went up to London with Wexford where their ways diverged. Though he had set Martin on to 'Gib' Hayward in Brighton, he intended to see Peter Kevin Smith personally.

'He's still living with that loyal and supportive mother of his,' Burden said as they parted. Wexford kept the car and Burden got into the train for Mile End.

The Pensive Selima was sitting in the shop window this time. Not on the lofty vase's side but on the edge of the

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blue plush drapery that covered its plinth. She sat costly folded up into roughly the shape of a fat tawny brown armchair. The woman in the big glasses wasn't there. If he hadn't been seeing him at the appointed time and in his natural habitat, Wexford might not have recognized Vinald. In China he had always worn jeans. He looked quite different in a suit of dark grey fine tweed, pure white shirt and grey tie with a silver zig-zag down it. He looked older, cleverer and much more suave.

'Chief Inspector, do sit down. It's good of you to come.'

Wexford thought this remark strange since it must have been obvious to meaner intelligences that he had come out of duty rather than altruism. He chose a chair which, because he had once apprehended a man who had stolen half a dozen like it, he suspected of being by Hepplewhite. Vinald sat down opposite him on the yellow satin cushion of a love seat. He leant forward in an intimate fashion and, low-voiced, plunged into a - what? The answer to an unasked question? A lecture on iconoclasm? Or just a defence?

'Chief Inspector, China is an extremely long way away and pretty alien to us anyway, I'm sure you'll agree. And who knows how long the present regime will last? What's thirty years? Nothing in historical terms. The next lot to get into power would only do so by bloody revolution. And what's going to happen during any new insurrection? Much the same as happened during the Cultural Revolution. Anarchy. Armies of sixteen-year-old boys told by the highest authority to destroy anything old they could lay their hands on. Did you know that every village in China had its own temple, Taoist, Buddhist or Confucian, and many of them had all three? Where are they now? We know the answer to that. Destroyed. Razed to the ground and the very sites ploughed over as with ancient Carthage. When I hear sentimentalists groaning over our so-called thefts from China in, say, the Boxer Rebellion, I thank God for those - appropriations. Thank God we do have the

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Dowager Empress's throne in the British Museum. What do you suppose the Red Guards would have done with that?'

Wexford was not at all sure what Vinald was driving at but the man was evidently very very guilty over something. 'What indeed?' he said equably.