Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life (14 page)

   ‘The idea is I get a job to fill in the year and start doing my degree next year. I have to “get a grant, you see.’

   ‘My dear, you don’t stand a chance. They’ll assess you on Neil’s salary. At least, I suppose so. He’s your husband.’

   ‘Maybe he won’t be by then. Oh, I’m so sick of you men ruling the world! It’s not fair just taking it for granted my husband pays for me like he’d pay for a child.’

   ‘Just as fair as taking it for granted the taxpayers will. I know you’re not interested in my views or your mother’s, but I’m going to give you mine just the same. The way the world still is, women have to prove they’re as capable as men. Well, you prove it. Do an external degree or a degree by correspondence and in something that’s likely to lead to a good job. It’ll take you five years and by that time the boys’ll be off your hands. Then when you’re thirty-five you and Neil will be two professional people with full-time jobs and a servant you both pay for. Nobody’ll treat you like a chattel or a furniture polisher then. You’ll see.’

   She pondered, looking sullen. Very slowly she began filling in the section of a form headed ‘Qualifications’. The list of them, Wexford noted sadly, was sparse. She scrawled a line through Mr/Mrs/Miss and wrote Ms. Her head came up and the abundant hair flew out.

   ‘I’m glad I’ve got boys. I’d feel sick with despair for them if they were girls. Didn’t you want a son?’

   ‘I suppose I did before Sheila was born. But after she was born I didn’t give it another thought.’

   ‘Didn’t you think what we’d suffer? You’re aware and sensitive. Dad. Didn’t you think how we’d be exploited and humiliated by men and used?’

   It was too much. There she sat, tall and powerful, blooming with health, the youthful hue sitting on her skin like morning dew, a large diamond cluster sparkling on her hand, her hair scented with St Laurent’s Rive Gauche. Her sister, described by critics as one of England’s most promising young actresses, had a big flat of her own in St John’s Wood where, it had often seemed to her father, she sweetly exploited and used all the men who frequented it.

   ‘I couldn’t send you back, could I?’ he snapped. ‘I couldn’t give God back your entrance ticket and ask for a male variety instead. I know exactly what Freud felt when he said there was one question that would always puzzle him. What is it that women want?’

   ‘To be people,’ she said. He snorted and walked out. The Crockers and a couple of neighbours were coming in for drinks. The doctor hustled Wexford upstairs and produced his sphygmomanometer.

   ‘You look rotten, Reg. What’s the matter with you?’

   ‘That’s for you to say. How’s my blood pressure?’

   ‘Not bad. Is it Sylvia?’

   He hated explaining why his daughter and the children were in the house. People categorize others into the limited compartments their imaginations permit. They assumed that either Sylvia or her husband had been unfaithful or that Neil had been cruel. He couldn’t spell it all out, but just had to watch the speculating gleam in their eyes and take their pity.

   ‘Partly,’ he said, ‘and it’s this Comfrey case. I dream about her, Len. I rack my brains, such as they are, about her. And I’ve made a crazy mistake. Griswold half-crucified me this afternoon, called me a foolish man.’

   ‘We all have to fail, Reg,’ said Crocker like a liberal headmaster.

   ‘There was a sort of sardonic gleam in her eyes when we found her. I don’t know if you noticed. I feel as if she’s laughing at me from beyond the grave. Hysterical, eh? That’s what Mike says I am.’

   But Mike didn’t say it again. He knew when to tread warily with the chief inspector, though Wexford had become a little less glum when there was nothing in the papers on Monday or Tuesday about the Farriner fiasco.

   ‘And that business wasn’t all vanity and vexation of spirit,’ he said. ‘We’ve learnt one thing from it. The disappearance of Rhoda Comfrey, alias whatever, may not have been remarked by her neighbours because they expect her to be away on holiday. So we have to wait and hope a while longer that someone from outside will still come to us.’

   ‘Why should they at this stage?’

   ‘Exactly because it is at this stage. How long do the majority of people go on holiday for?’

   ‘A fortnight,’ said Burden promptly.

   Wexford nodded. ‘So those friends and neighbours who knew her under an assumed name would have expected her back last Saturday. Now they wouldn’t have been much concerned if she wasn’t back by Saturday, but by Monday when she doesn’t answer her phone, when she doesn’t turn up for whatever work she does? By today?’

   ‘You’ve got a point there.’

   ‘God knows, every newspaper reader in the country must be aware we still don’t know her London identity. The Press has rammed it home hard enough. Wouldn’t it be nice, Mike, if at this very moment some public-spirited citizen were to be walking into a nick somewhere in north or west London to say she’s worried because her boss or the woman next door hasn’t come back from Majorca?’

   Burden always took Wexford’s figurative little flights of fancy literally. ‘She couldn’t have been going there, wouldn’t have had a passport.’

   ‘As Rhoda Comfrey she might have. Besides, there are all sorts of little tricks you can get up to with passports. You’re not going to tell me a woman who’s fooled us like this for two weeks couldn’t have got herself a dozen false passports if she’d wanted them.’

   ‘Anyway, she didn’t go to Majorca. She came here and got herself stabbed.’ Burden went to the window and said wonderingly, ‘There’s a cloud up there.’

   ‘No bigger than a man’s hand, I daresay.’

   ‘Bigger than that,’ said Burden, not recognizing this quotation from the Book of Kings. ‘In fact, there are quite a lot of them.’ And he made a remark seldom uttered by Englishmen in a tone of hope, still less of astonishment. ‘It’s going to rain.’

   The room went very dark and they had to switch the light on. Then a golden tree of forked lightning sprang out of the forest, splitting the purple sky. A great rolling clap of thunder sent them retreating from where they had been watching the beginnings of this storm, and Burden closed the windows. At last the rain came, but sluggishly at first in the way rain always does come when it has held off for weeks, slow intermittent plops of it. Wexford remembered how Sylvia, when she was a tiny child, had believed until corrected that the rain was contained up there in a bag which someone punctured and then finally sliced open. He sat down at his desk and again phoned the Missing Persons Bureau, but no one had been reported missing who could remotely be identified as Rhoda Comfrey.

   It was still only the middle of the afternoon. Plenty of time for the public-spirited citizen’s anxiety and tension to mount until . . . Today was the day, surely, when that would happen if it was going to happen. The bag was sliced open and rain crashed in a cataract against the glass, bringing with it a sudden drop in the temperature. Wexford actually shivered; for the first time in weeks he felt cold, and he put on his jacket. He found himself seeing the storm as an omen, this break in the weather signifying another break. Nonsense, of course, the superstition of a foolish man. He had thought he had had breaks before, hadn’t he? Two of them, and both had come to nothing.

   By six there had come in no phone calls relevant to Rhoda Comfrey, but still he waited, although it was not necessary for him to be there. He waited until seven, until half past, by which time all the exciting pyrotechnics of the storm were over and the rain fell dully and steadily. At a quarter to eight, losing faith in his omen, in the importance of this day above other days - it had been one of the dreariest he had spent for a long time - he drove home through the grey rain.

It was like a winter’s evening. Except at night, the french windows had not been closed since the end of July and now it was August twenty third. Tonight they were not only closed, but the long velvet curtains were drawn across them.

   ‘I thought of lighting a coal fire,’ said Dora who had switched on one bar of the electric heater.

   ‘You’ve got quite enough to do without that.’ Child-minding, Wexford thought, cooking meals for five instead of two. ‘Where’s Sylvia gone?’ he snapped.

   ‘To see Neil, I think. She said something earlier about presenting him with a final ultimatum.’

   Wexford made an impatient gesture. He began to walk about the room, then sat down again because pacing can only provoke irritation in one’s companion. Dora said: ‘What is it, darling? I hate to see you like this.’

   He shrugged. ‘I ought to rise above it. There’s a story told about St Ignatius of Loyola. Someone asked him what he would do if the Pope decided to dissolve the Society of Jesus on the morrow, and he said, “Ten minutes at my orisons and it would be all the same to me.” I wish I could be like that.’

   She smiled. ‘I won’t ask you if you want to talk about it.’

   ‘Wouldn’t do any good. I’ve talked about it to the point of exhaustion - the Comfrey case, that is. As for Sylvia, is there anything we haven’t said? I suppose there’ll be a divorce and she’ll live here with the boys. I told her this was her home and of course I meant it. I read somewhere the other day that one in three marriages now come to grief, and hers is going to be one of them. That’s all. It just doesn’t make me feel very happy.’

   The phone rang, and with a sigh Dora got up to answer it. ‘I’ll get it,’ Wexford said, almost pouncing oh the receiver.

   The voice of Dora’s sister calling from Wales as she mostly did on a mid-week evening. He said, yes, there had been a storm and, yes, it was still raining, and then he handed the phone to Dora, deflated. Two weeks before, just a bit earlier than this, he had received the call that told him of the discovery of Rhoda Comfrey’s body. He had been confident then, full of hope, it had seemed simple. Through layers of irrelevant facts, information about people he would never see again and whom he need not have troubled to question, through a mind-clogging jumble of trivia, a gaunt harsh face looked up at him out of his memory, the eyes still holding that indefinable expression.

   She had been fifty and ugly and shapeless and ill-dressed, but someone had killed her from passion and in revenge. Some man who loved her had believed her to be coming here to meet another man. It was inconceivable but it must be so. Stabbing in those circumstances is always a crime of passion, the culmination of a jealousy or a rage or an anguish that suddenly explodes. No one kills in that way because he expects to inherit by his victim’s death, or thereby to achieve some other practical advantage . . .

   ‘They had the storm in Pembroke this morning,’ said Dora, coming back.

   ‘Fantastic,’ said her husband, and then quickly, ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t snipe at you. Is there anything on the television?’

   She consulted the paper. ‘I think I know your tastes by now. If I suggested any of this lot I might get that vase chucked at me. Why don’t you read something?’

   ‘What is there?’

   ‘Library books. Sylvia’s and mine. They’re all down there by your chair.’

   He humped the stack of them on to his lap. It was easy to sort out which were Sylvia’s. Apart from Woman and the Sexist Plot, there was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Dora’s were a detective story, a biography of Marie Antoinette and Grenville West’s Apes in Hell. His reaction was to repudiate this last, for it reminded him too forcibly of his first mistake. Women’s Lib as seen through the eyes of Shelley’s mother-in-law would almost have been preferable. But that sort of behaviour was what Burden called hysterical.

   ‘What’s this like?’

   ‘Not bad,’ said Dora. ‘I’m sure it’s very well researched. As far as I’m concerned, the title’s way-out, quite meaningless.’

   ‘It probably refers to an idea the Elizabethans had about unmarried women. According to them, they were destined to lead apes in hell.’

   ‘How very odd. You’d better read it. It’s based on some play called The Maid’s Tragedy.’

   But Wexford, having looked at the portrait of its author, pipe in mouth, on the back of the jacket, turned to Marie Antoinette. For the next hour he tried to concentrate on the childhood and youth of the doomed Queen of France, but it was too real for him, too factual. These events had taken place, they were history. What he needed tonight was total escape. A detective story, however bizarre, however removed from the actualities of detection, was the last thing to give it to him. By the time Dora had brought in the tray with the coffee things, he had again picked up Apes in Hell.

   Grenville West’s biography was no longer of interest to him, but he was one of those people who, before reading a novel, like to acquaint themselves with that short summary of the plot publishers generally display on the front flap of the jacket and sometimes in the preliminary pages. After all, if this precis presents too awful an augury one need read no further. But in this instance the jacket flap had been obscured by the library’s own covering of the book, so he turned the first few pages.

   Apparently, it was West’s third novel, having been preceded by Her Grace of Amalfi and Arden’s Wife. The plot summary informed him that the author’s source had been Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, a Jacobean drama set in classical Rhodes. West, however, had shifted the setting to the England of his favourite half-timbering and knot gardens, and with an author’s omnipotent conjuring trick - his publisher’s panegyric, this - had transformed kings and princes into a seventeenth-century aristocracy. Not a bad idea, Wexford thought, and one which Beaumont and Fletcher might themselves have latched on to if writing about one’s contemporaries and fellow nationals had been more in favour at the time. Might as well see what it was like. He turned the page, and his fingers rested on the open pages, his breath held. Then he gave a gasp.

   ‘What on earth is it?’ said Dora.

   He made her no answer. He was looking at two lines of type in italics on an otherwise blank sheet. The dedication. For Rhoda Comfrey, without whom this book could never have been written.