The Speaker of Mandarin (21 page)

'You mean this Wong was blackmailing Mr Purbank? Unless Mr Purbank agreed to help get him out of China and gave him money, he would make the whole story of your contact with your mother known?'

'Something of that kind, yes. Mr Purbank was very frightened by now, always to be followed everywhere by this Wong, and although it was dreadful thing to happen he wasn't so very distressed when there was accident on the Li River boat and Wong was drowned.' The still features widened into a reflective smile. 'Mr Purbank then thought his troubles at an end till when he got home, a good while after, this Mrs Knighton whom someone has shot sends him photographs of the Li River trip. In them he is talking with Wong and Mr Purbank is very afraid once more . . .'

'Did you see these photographs, Mr Hsia?'

'No, I didn't but I was told of them. Mrs Knighton's husband, you see, is in some way connected with the law and Mr Purbank thinks, suppose this whole story comes out and causes international incident, you see. So he burns the pictures and the negatives and sends the rest back to you and then he becomes nervous again in case you think he shot this Mrs Knighton . . .'

Wexford very nearly laughed. There was something he knew and Hsia very evidently didn't which stopped him laughing.

'It was wise of you to come to me,' he said.

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'I thought it best. And now I shall tell you where Mr Purbank was on the night of October first till after midnight - with me and my wife in our flat.' Getting up to leave, extending his hand, Hsia added, 'I fear he thinks it safer to be suspected of Mrs Knighton's murder than have it known he associates with such politically dangerous people as ourselves.'

From the window Wexford watched him cross the police station forecourt and get into this year's registration dark blue BMW. Strange to reflect that this sleek capitalist was the son of that old woman with the hoof-like mincing feet, that forerunner and instigator of hallucinations.

'Can you believe that?' Burden said. 'Can you believe Purbank was actually afraid of high-level repercussions because photographs existed of himself in conversation with a dissident Chinese?'

'Hsia believes it.'

'Sure he does. He grew to manhood in a country with perhaps the most repressive political system on earth.'

'I'll tell you what I think for what it's worth,' said Wexford. 'I'll never be able to prove it, I've nothing to go on but my own feelings, but it's my belief Purbank pushed Wong overboard. He was harassed by Wong's persecution and when they were on the boat and he came up behind Wong squatting down in the bows, he gave him a shove and pushed him overboard. Not intending to kill, I daresay, intending to frighten, to show Wong in his muddled way that he wasn't going to be used and battened on in the way Wong hoped.

'Back home I expect he soon forgot about it. We all know the old postulation: if by raising your hand you could acquire a million pounds and kill a Chinaman, would you do it? It's generally believed that few would hesitate long. Maybe it seemed a little like that to Purbank. After Wong was drowned I asked Adela Knighton what had happened and she said indifferently that someone had been drowned - "not one of us," she said, "a Chinese". Purbank had

179 - raised his hand and acquired peace if not money and it was all twelve thousand miles off and there are a lot of Chinese anyway . . . until the picture came with his hand reaching towards Wong's back.'

Burden nodded. It was likely enough. Suspects were being cleared, others implicated. Rape had reminded him of Coney Newton and what he had to tell Wexford of the El Video Club. Loring had been there the night before, making inquiries.

'It's managed by a man called Jimmy Moglander- ;Moggy' to his associates. Newton was in there all right. He and three or four other men he was with were there until they closed on the Wednesday morning. The lives these villains lead! Moglander and the barman both remember Newton being there. So that seems to clear each and every old lag that might have had a grudge against Knighton.'

'So how about Knighton?'

'He'll keep till the morning, I should think.'

'You're right.' Wexford thrust back his chair and got up. 'I'm going home, Mike. If I hang about here someone'll be bound to drop in and tell me how he saw an old woman with bound feet climbing in through Knighton's loo window. We'll leave Knighton till tomorrow.'

But for Adam Knighton tomorrow never came. It was like dim vu, Wexford thought in the morning, or the rerun of a tape. It was like going to see a film and sitting through the whole programme to see the beginning again. Only you usually did that because you liked the film. He hadn't lilted this one the first time round, and as for the second. . .

The same credit titles, the same opening. It started with Renie Thompson phoning the police station at nine, with Burden and the fingerprint man and the scene-of-crimes man and Dr Crocker all going up to Thatto Hall Farm. The sun was shining and there was dew on the grass, and if the Michaelmas daisies were a little more mature and frost had shrivelled the leaves of the dahlias, if the sun was

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a little higher because the clocks had gone back an hour, only a purist would have noticed. All things up until this point seemed the same. They found a divergence only when they were inside the house, for this time it was Knighton who lay dead and by his own hand.

'Two times in a month,' said Mrs Thompson. 'It makes you think twice about going into a person's house. I thought he must be having a lay-in but the bedroom door wasn't shut, it was like on the jar, so I just gave a tap and put my head round. . .'

Since Wexford's last visit, Knighton had moved back into the room he had shared with his wife and there, on the evening before, he had undressed, put on blue cotton pyjamas and a brown wool dressing gown, lain on his bed and surrendered himself to death. On the bedside table beside him was an almost empty brandy bottle, an empty wine, not brandy, glass, and a cylindrical plastic container that had once held fifty capsules of tuinal.

'His doctor prescribed that for insomnia, presumably.'

'Not me, thank God,' said Crocker. 'I'd have given him mogadon. The only way you can kill yourself with mogadon is stuff down so many you choke to death.'

He closed Knighton's pale blue staling eyes. On the dressing table were two sealed envelopes, both addressed in Knighton's bold and beautiful hand. One of them was to the coroner.

'Who's Mrs M. Ingram?' said Crocker.

'God knows.' Wexford read the address, Thain Court, Cadogan Avenue, London, SW1, and then he knew. 'It would seem she's the mother-in-law of an antique dealer I happen to know. I see he's provided a stamp but I think I'll deliver this by hand.' Outside, below the window, the gravel crunched. Wexford looked out. 'Angus and Jenni- fer,' he said and he stuffed the letters into his pocket.

Knighton's yellowish-white waxen face looked as long dead as the Marquise of Tai's. It looked as if it were made

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of porcelain but a porcelain they had forgotten to colour before the glaze went on.

'Poor devil,' Wexford said. 'There was no loophole left for him.'

'He did kill her then?'

'I didn't mean that. I've a feeling his predicament was a moral one, that it was his conscience he couldn't escape.' They left the room and closed the door. 'I never thanked you for the book.'

'I'm not sure if it would really happen.'

'Well, yes and no,' said Wexford cryptically.

Jennifer and her husband were in the hall. Her expression was as surly as ever. As he came down the stairs Wexford heard the tail end of what she was saying to Mrs Thompson, something about having no help in the house and a shock like this being enough to send her into premature labour. But Angus Norris looked as shocked and distressed as if Knighton had been his own father.

'This is a bad business, Mr Norris,' Wexford said. It was a phrase he used when he found himself in these or similar circumstances. Non-committal, it nevertheless ex- pressed everything needful.

Norris took it au pied de la lettre. He spoke with a kind of tragic enthusiasm. 'A dreadful business, dreadful.' His face was rather pale and lined in a way some adolescents' faces are, though this ages them not at all. He looked round for his wife, to comfort her perhaps or be comforted, but Jennifer had gone into the living room and was lying in a chair with her feet up.

He said carefully, in a more controlled tone, 'Was there - a suicide note or anything of that sort?'

'Something of that sort,' said Wexford and he followed the doctor out through the front door.

Roderick Knighton's yellow TR7 had just joined the Norrises' worn-out Citroen on the gravel drive. The bar- rister got out of it and rushed into the house, closing the front door behind him with almost a slam.

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The letters burned Wexford's pocket. He would have been justified in opening the envelope addressed to Mrs Ingram and reading the contents. A suicide has forfeited his right to privacy and this suicide was also a prime suspect in a murder case. Who was Mrs Ingram, apart from being Pan- dora Vinald's mother? What had she been to Adam Knighton that he had written her a letter from his deathbed?

He wouldn't open it without phoning her first. He picked up the phone to ask the switchboard to find her number for him, then put it down again. On the hotel roof in Kweilin there had been another woman with Pandora, a much older woman, white-haired. In all the thought he had given to the events of that evening at the rooftop bar, in all his recollections of the people involved, that woman had never figured. The beauty of Pandora had eclipsed her.

For him perhaps, for almost everyone who saw them together, but not for Knighton. Knighton, sitting at that table with his wife, had seen her as Dante saw Beatrice and in a moment his life and his hopes had been transformed. But unlike Dante he wasn't seeing her for the first time. Wexford was sure of that. There was a romantic side to his nature that had a weakness for the phenomena of passion, yet he couldn't admit of the possibility of a man of Knighton's age falling in love at first sight with a woman of Mrs Ingram's.

He must have known her before, perhaps years ago. When they had interrogated him he had said that his career would have been damaged if he had 'deserted my wife and children for a young actress'. Mrs Ingram would have been young then, when the Knightons lived in Hampstead during the week and Sussex at the weekends, when Jennifer and Colum were babies, when Knighton by his eloquence was saving at least one murderer from execution.

The interesting thing was that the first time he saw her in London Pandora had reminded him of some famous beauty of thirty years back. He had thought of Hedy La

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marror Lupe Velez. Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee calls back the lovely April of her prime. . . Mrs Ingram had friends in the film world. She had brought a film cameraman to meet her daughter and son-in-law.

'What do you suppose Milborough Lang looks like now?' Dora had said, watching The Snow Moth. 'She must be f~fty-five.'

The letter to the coroner, Dr Neville Parkinson, Wexford delivered in person. Then he went off to meet Burden for lunch at the Many-Splendoured Dragon.

'It's unlike you not to be hungry,' said Burden.

Wexford was picking rather listlessly at his food. 'It's Setzuan here too,' he said. 'Nicer than the Hunan we mostly got sewed with.'

Burden looked impressed. 'Have you ever heard of a play called The Good Wo~nan of Setzaan by a chap called Brecht? The drama society here is doing it at the end of the month. You ought to go.'

'I suppose your wife's playing the lead?' Wexford could tell from Burden's sheepish look that he had guessed right. He dipped in his chopsticks to catch a curl of okra while Burden, resigned to a spoon, watched him warily. Wexford dismissed the versatile Jenny Burden with a wry smile. 'Fishing for bouts in a peculiar river,' he said. 'Knighton was too old for that kind of thing. He was too old to have a mistress and too old to murder his wife.'

'what did Parkinson's letter say?'

'It was very short. I can probably quote it from memory. "This is to inform you that on the morning of 2 October I killed my wife, Adela Knighton, by shooting her with a Walther PPK automatic pistol. As a consequence of that act I shall, by the time you read this, have taken my own life." And he signed it. That was all.'

Burden poured himself a glass of mineral water. 'I wonder where he got the gun and, come to that, what he did with it afterwards.'

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,. _

'I wonder about a lot of things. Frankly, Mike, I think it's all these doubts I have that are making me- well, I won't say upset. Uneasy.'

'You don't mean you think it's a false confession?'

Wexford didn't answer him directly. 'He was devoured by guilt, wasn't he? You could tell that.' He pushed away his plate. For a moment he hesitated, then he asked the waiter to bring a pot of green tea. 'And certainly he wanted her dead. He left Dobson-Flint's and came back here that night. He must have killed her. Why say so if he hadn't? It's not your run-of-the-mill false confession. The man killed himself. The whole point of a false confession is to attract attention and the kind of hysteric who does that doesn't defeat his own object by committing suicide immediately afterwards.'

'Certainly not,' said Burden firmly.

'Let's go. I have to phone Mrs Ingram and then I have to see her.'

16

Fashion had come full circle and the clothes she wore were not unlike those she had been dressed in for her films, a little grey flannel suit with a straight skirt, a pearl-coloured silk blouse with a high pleated neckline, stockings with seams, high-heeled shoes. Her figure seemed unchanged. But that kind of black silk hair is perhaps of all shades the most vulnerable to time. It was whiter than her skin now and that skin itself webbed with lines.

She hadn't sounded surprised by his phone call. Why should she have been? For weeks now she must have been waiting for the police to come to her. Why he had come, that was something else again. She greeted him with a gentle, ever so slightly ironical, friendliness.