Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life (10 page)

   Baker seemed to have forgotten his cause for offence and greeted Wexford cordially. ‘Michael Baker, meet Mike Burden, and this, Mike, is Sergeant Clements.’

   Once, though not for more than a few hours, Wexford had suspected the rubicund baby-faced sergeant of murder to be certain of the undisputed guardianship of his adopted son. It always made him feel a little guilty to remember that, even though that suspicion had never been spoken aloud. But the memory - how could he have entertained such ideas about this pillar of integrity? - had made him careful, in every subsequent conversation, to show kindness to Clements and not fail to ask after young James and the small sister chosen for him. However, the sergeant was too conscious of his subordinate rank to raise domestic matters now, and Wexford was glad of it for other reasons. He, in turn, would have been asked for an account of his grandsons, at present a sore and embarrassing subject.

   'Trincevale Road?’ said Baker. ‘Very pleasant district. Unless I’m much mistaken, number six is one of a block of what they call town houses, modern sort of places with a lot of glass and weatherboarding.’

   ‘Excuse me, sir,’ Clements said eagerly, ‘but unless I’m much mistaken we were called to break-in down there a few months back. I’ll nip downstairs and do a bit of checking.’

   Baker seemed pleased to have guests and something to relieve the tedium of August in Kenbourne Vale. ‘How about a spot of lunch at the Grand Duke, Reg? And then we could all get along there, if you’ve no objection?’

   Anxious to do nothing which might upset the prickly Baker, who was a man of whom it might be said that one should not touch his ears, Wexford said that he and Burden would be most gratified, adding to Baker’s evident satisfaction, that he didn’t know how they would get on without his help. The sergeant came back, puffed up with news.

   ‘The occupant is a Mrs Farriner,’ he said. ‘She’s away on holiday. It wasn’t her place that was broken into, it was next door but one, but apparently she’s got a lot of valuable stuff and she came in here before she went away last Saturday week to ask us to keep an eye on the house for her.’

   ‘Should put it on safe deposit,’ Baker began to grumble. ‘What’s the use of getting us to . . .’

   Wexford interrupted him. He couldn’t help himself. ‘How old is she, Sergeant? What does she look like?’

   ‘I’ve not seen her myself, sir. Middle-aged, I believe, and a widow or maybe divorced. Dinehart knows her.’

   ‘Then get Dinehart to look at that photo, will you?’

   ‘You don’t mean you think Mrs Farriner could be that Comfrey woman, sir?’

   ‘Why not?’ said Wexford.

   But Dinehart was unable to say one way or another. Certainly Mrs Farriner was a big tall woman with dark hair who lived alone. As to her looking like that girl in the picture - well, people change a lot in twenty years. He wouldn’t like to commit himself. Wexford was tense with excitement. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? All the time he was frustrated or crossed by people being away on holiday, and yet he had never considered that Rhoda Comfrey might not have been missed by friends and neighbours because they expected her to be absent from her home. They supposed a Mrs Farriner to be at some resort, going under the name by which they knew her, so why connect her with a Miss Comfrey who had been found murdered in a Sussex town?

   In the Grand Duke, an old-fashioned pub that had surely once been a country inn, they served themselves from the cold table. Wexford felt too keyed-up to eat much. Dealing diplomatically with people like Baker might be a social obligation, but it involved wasting a great deal of time. The others seemed to be taking what he saw as a major breakthrough far more placidly than he could. Even Burden showed a marked lack of enthusiasm.

   ‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd,’ he said, ‘that a woman like this Mrs Farriner, well-off enough to live where she lives and have all that valuable stuff, should keep a wallet she presumably found on a bus?’

   ‘There’s nowt so strange as folk,’ said Wexford.

   ‘Maybe, but it was you told me that any departure from the norm is important. I can imagine the Rhoda Comfrey we know doing it, but not this Mrs Farriner from what we know of her. Therefore it seems unlikely to me that they’re one and the same.’

   ‘Well, we’re not going to find out by sitting here feeding our faces,’ said Wexford crossly.

   To his astonishment, Baker agreed with him. ‘You’re quite right. Drink up, then, and we’ll get going.’

   Ascending Montfort Hill on the bus, Wexford hadn’t noticed the little row of five or six shops on the left-hand side. This time, in the car, his attention was only drawn to them by the fact of Burden giving them such an intense scrutiny. But he said nothing. At the moment he felt rather riled with Burden. The name of the street which turned off immediately beyond these shops was lettered in black on a white board, Princevale Road, W19, and Burden eyed this with similar interest, craning his neck to look back when they had passed it. At the very end of the street - or perhaps, from the numbering, the very beginning - stood a row of six terraced houses. They looked less than ten years old and differed completely in style from the detached mock-Tudor, each with a generous front garden, that characterized Princevale Road.

   Wexford supposed that they had been built on ground left vacant after the demolition of some isolated old house. They were a sign of the times, of scarcity of land and builders’ greed. But they were handsome enough for all that, three floors high, boarded in red cedar between the wide plateglass windows. Each had its own garage, integrated and occupying part of the ground floor, each having a different coloured front door, orange, olive, blue, chocolate, yellow and lime. Number six, at this end of the block, had the typical invitation-to-burglars look a house takes on when its affluent and prideful owner is away. All the windows were shut, all the curtains drawn back with perfect symmetry. An empty milk bottle rack stood on the doorstep, and there were no bottles, full or empty, beside it. Stuck through the letterbox and protruding from it were a fistful of letters and circulars in brown envelopes. So much for police surveillance, Wexford thought to himself.

   It was rather unwillingly that he now relinquished a share of the investigating to Baker and Clements, though he knew Baker’s efficiency. The hard-faced inspector and his sergeant went off to ring at the door of number one. With Burden beside him, Wexford approached the house next door to the empty one. Mrs Cohen at number five was a handsome Jewess in her early forties. Her house was stuffed with ornaments, the wallpaper flocked crimson on gold, gold on cream. There were photographs about of nearly grown-up children, a buxom daughter in a bridesmaid’s dress, a son at his bar mitzvah.

   ‘Mrs Farriner’s a very charming nice person. What I call a brave woman, self-supporting, you know. Yes, she’s divorced. Some no-good husband in the background, I believe, though she’s never told me the details and I wouldn’t ask. She’s got a lovely little boutique down at Montfort Circus. I’ve had some really exquisite things from her and she’s let me have them at cost. That’s what I call neighbourly. Oh, no, it couldn’t be’ - looking at the photograph ‘ - not murdered. Not a false name, that’s not Rose’s nature. Rose Farriner, that’s her name. I mean, it’s laughable what you’re saying. Of course I know where she is. First she went off to see her mother who’s in a very nice nursing home somewhere in the country, and then she was going on to the Lake District. No, I haven’t had a card from her, I wouldn’t expect it.’

   The next house was the one which had been burgled, and Mrs Elliott, when they had explained who they were, promptly assumed that there had been another break-in. She was at least sixty, a jumpy nervous woman who had never been in Rose Farriner’s house or entertained her in her own. But she knew of the existence of the dress shop, knew that Mrs Farriner was away and had remarked that she sometimes went away for weekends, in her view a dangerous proceeding with so many thieves about. The photograph was shown to her and she became intensely frightened. No, she couldn’t say if Mrs Farriner had looked like that when young. It was evident that the idea of even hazarding an identification terrified her, and it seemed as if by so doing she feared to put her own life in jeopardy.

   ‘Rhoda,’ said Wexford to Burden, ‘means a rose. It’s Greek for rose. She tells people she’s going to visit her mother in nursing home. What are the chances she’s shifted the facts, and mother is father and the nursing home’s a hospital?’

   Baker and Clements met them outside the gate of number three. They too had been told of mother and the nursing home, of the dress shop, and they too had met only with doubt and bewilderment over the photograph. Together the four of them approached the last, the chocolate coloured, front door.

   Mrs Delano was very young, a fragile pallid blonde with a pale blond baby, at present asleep in its pram in the porch. ‘Rose Farriner’s somewhere around forty or fifty,’ she said as if one of those ages was much the same as the other and all the same to her. She looked closely at the photograph, turned even paler. ‘I saw the papers, it never crossed my mind. It could be her. I can’t imagine now why I didn’t see it before.’

   In the display window on the left side of the shop door was the trendy gear for the very young: denim jeans and waistcoats, T-shirts, long striped socks. The other window interested Wexford more, for the clothes on show in it belonged in much the same category as those worn by Rhoda Comfrey when she met her death. Red, white and navy were the predominating colours. The dresses and coats were aimed at a comfortably-off middle-aged market. They were ‘smart’ - a word he knew would never be used by his daughters or by anyone under forty-five. And among them, trailing from an open sleeve to a scent bottle, suspended from a vase to the neck of a crimson sweater, were strings of glass beads.

   A woman of about thirty came up to attend to them. She said her name was Mrs Moss and she was in charge while Rose Farriner was away. Her manner astonished, suspicious, cautious - all to be expected in the circumstances. Again the photograph was studied and again doubt was expressed. She had worked for Mrs Farriner for only six months and knew her only in her business capacity.

   ‘Do you know what part of the country Mrs Farriner originally came from?’ Burden asked her.

   ‘Mrs Farriner’s never discussed private things with me.’

   ‘Would you say she’s a secretive person?’

   Mrs Moss tossed her head. ‘I really don’t know. We aren’t always gossiping to each other, if that’s what you mean. She doesn’t know any more about me than I know about her.’

   Wexford said suddenly, ‘Has she ever had appendicitis?’

   ‘Has she what?'

   ‘Has she had her appendix out? It’s the kind of thing one often does know about people.’

   Mrs Moss looked as if she were about to retort that she really couldn’t say, but something in Wexford’s serious and ponderous gaze seemed to inhibit her. ‘I oughtn’t to tell you things like that. It’s a breach of confidence.’

   ‘You’re aware as to whom we think Mrs Farriner really is or was. I think you’re being obstructive.’

   ‘But she can’t be that woman! She’s in the Lake District. She’ll be back in the shop on Monday.’

   ‘Will she? Have you had a card from her? A phone call?’

   ‘Of course I haven’t. Why should I? I know she’s coming home on Saturday.’

   ‘I’ll be as frank with you,’ Wexford said, ‘as I hope you’ll be with me. If Mrs Rose Farriner has had her appendix removed she cannot be Miss Rhoda Comfrey. There was no scar from an appendicectomy on Miss Comfrey’s body. On the other hand, if she has not, the chances of her having been Miss Comfrey are very strong. We have to know.’

   ‘All right,’ said Mrs Moss, ‘I’ll tell you. It must have been about six months ago, about February or March. Mrs Farriner took a few days off work. It was food poisoning, but when she came back she did say she’d thought at first it was a grumbling appendix because - well, because she’d had trouble like that before.’

The heat danced in waving mirages on the white roadway.

   Traffic kept up a ceaseless swirl round Montfort Circus, and there was headache-provoking noise, a blinding glare from sunlight flashing off chrome and glass. Wexford and Baker took refuge in the car which Clements had imperiously parked on a double yellow band.

   ‘We’ll have to get into that house, Michael.’

   Baker said thoughtfully, ‘Of course we do have a key . . .’ His eye caught Wexford’s. He looked away. ‘No, that’s out of the question. It’ll have to be done on a warrant. Leave it to me, Reg, I’ll see what can be done.’

   Burden and Clements stood out on the pavement, deep in conversation. Well aware of Burden’s prudishness and also of Clements’ deep-rooted disapproval of pretty well all persons under twenty-five - which augured ill for James and Angela in the future - Wexford had nevertheless supposed that they would have little in common. He had been wrong. They were discussing, like old duennas, the indecent appearance of the young housewife who had opened the door of number two Princevale Road dressed only in a bikini. Wexford gave the inspector a discourteous and peremptory tap on the shoulder.

   ‘Come on, John Knox. I want to catch the four-thirty-five back to Sussex, home and beauty.’

   Burden looked injured, and when they had said goodbye and were crossing the Circus to Parish Oak station, remarked that Clements was a very nice chap. ‘Very true,’ sneered Wexford 'with Miss Austen and this is a very nice day and we are taking a very nice walk.’

   Having no notion of what he meant but suspecting he was being got at, Burden ignored this and said they would never get a warrant on that evidence.

   ‘What d’you mean, on that evidence? To my mind, its conclusive. You didn’t expect one of those women to come out with the whole story, did you? Oh, yes, Rose told me in confidence her real name’s Comfrey. Look at the facts. A woman of fifty goes to a doctor with what she thinks may be appendicitis. She gives the name of Comfrey and her address as 6 Princevale Road, Parish Oak. The only occupant of that house is a woman of around fifty called Rose Farriner. Six months later Rose Farriner is again talking of a possible appendicitis. Rhoda Comfrey is dead, Rose Farriner has disappeared. Rhoda Comfrey was comfortably-off, probably had her own business. According to Mrs Parker, she was interested in dress. Rose Farriner is well-off, has her own dress shop. Rose Farriner has a sick old mother living in a nursing home in the country. Rhoda Comfrey had a sick old father in a hospital in the country. Isn’t that conclusive?’