Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life (21 page)

‘She was only telephoning her aunt to say she was going to visit her father in Stowerton Infirmary on the following Monday, but to impress you and Mr West she made it appear as if she were talking to a man. You were uninterested in that aspect of it, but you were intrigued to find out where she would be on the Monday. In the country where you could locate her as you never could on her own in London.’

He paused, deciding to say nothing about the Trieste Hotel and West’s disappearance, guessing that she would be thankful for his name to be omitted.

‘On the evening of Monday, August eighth, you went to Stowerton, having found out when visiting time was. You saw Miss Comfrey get on to a bus with another woman, and you got on to it too, without letting her see you. You left the bus at the stop where she left it and followed her across the footpath - intending what? Not to kill her then. I think you wished only to be alone with her to ask why and to try to dissuade her from interfering between you and Mr West. But she laughed at you, or was patronizing, or something of that sort. She said something hurtful and cruel, and driven beyond endurance, you stabbed her. Am I right, Miss Flinders?’

Loring sat up stiffly, bracing himself, waiting perhaps for more screams. Polly Flinders only nodded. She looked calm and thoughtful as if she had been asked for verbal confirmation of some action, and not even a reprehensible action, she had performed years before. Then she sighed.

‘Yes, that’s right. I killed her. I stabbed her and wiped the knife on the grass and got on another bus and then a train and came home. I threw the knife into Kenbourne Lock on the way back. I did it just like you said.’ She hesitated, added steadily, ‘And why you said.’

Wexford got up. It was all very civilized and easy and casual. He could tell what Loring was thinking. There had been provocation, no real intent, no premeditation. The girl realized all this and that she would get off with three or four years, so better confess it now and put an end to the anxiety that had nearly broken her. Get it over and have peace, with no involvement for Grenville West.

‘Pauline Flinders,’ he said, ‘you are charged with the murder on August eighth of Rhoda Agnes Comfrey. You are not obliged to say anything in answer to the charge, but anything you do say may be taken down and used in evidence.’

‘I don’t want to say anything,’ she said. ‘Do I have to go with you now?’

‘It seems,’ said Burden when Wexford phoned him, ‘a bit of a sell.’

‘You want more melodrama? You want hysterics?’

‘Not exactly that. Oh, I don’t know. There seems to have been so many oddities in this case, and what it boils down to is that it was this girl all along. She killed the woman just because she was coming between her and West.’ Wexford said nothing. ‘I suppose she did kill her? She’s not confessing in an attempt to protect West?’

‘Oh, she killed her all right. No doubt about that. In her statement she’s given us the most precise circumstantial account of times, the geography of the Forest Road area, what Rhoda Comfrey was wearing and even the fact that the London train, the nine-twenty-four Kingsmarkham to Victoria, was ten minutes late that night. Tomorrow Rittifer will have Kenbourne Lock dragged and we’ll find that knife.’

‘And West himself had nothing to do with it?’

‘He had everything to do with it. Without him there’d have been no problem. He was the motive. I’m tired now, Mike, and I’ve got another call to make. I’ll tell you the rest after the special court tomorrow.’

His other call was to Michael Baker. A woman with a soft voice and a slight North Country accent answered. ‘It’s for you, darling,’ she called out, and Baker called back, ‘Coming, darling.’ His voice roughened, crackling down the phone when he heard who it was, and implicit in his tone was the question, ‘Do you know what time it is?’ though he didn’t actually say this. But when Wexford had told him the bare facts he became immediately cocky and rather took the line that he had predicted such an outcome all along.

‘I knew you were wasting your time with all those names and dates and birth certificates, Reg. I told you so.’ Wexford had never heard anyone utter those words in seriousness before, and had he felt less tired and sick he would have laughed. ‘Well, all’s well that ends well, eh?’

‘I daresay. Good night, Michael.’

Maybe it was because he forgot to add something on the lines of his eternal gratitude for all the assistance rendered him by Kenbourne police that Baker dropped the receiver without another word. Or, rather, without more than a fatuous cry of ‘Just coming, sweetheart,’ which he hardly supposed could be addressed to him.

Dora was in bed, sitting up reading the Marie Antoinette book. He sat down beside her and kicked off his shoes.

‘So it’s all over, is it?’ she said.

‘I’ve behaved very badly,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve strung that wretched girl along and told her lies and accepted lies from her just to get a confession. I’ve got a horrible job. She still thinks she’s got away with it.’

‘Darling,’ Dora said gently, ‘you do realize I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about?’

‘Yes, in a way I’m talking to myself. Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one’s other self listening.’

‘That’s one of the nicest things you’ve ever said to me.’

He went into the bathroom and looked at his ugly face in the glass, at the bags under his tired eyes and the wrinkles and the white stubble on his chin that made him look like an old man.

‘I am alone the villain of the earth,’ he said to the face in the glass, ‘and feel I am so most.’

In court on Saturday morning, Pauline Flinders was charged with the murder of Rhoda Comfrey, committed for trial and remanded in custody. After it was over Wexford avoided the Chief Constable, it was supposed to be his day off, wasn’t it? - and gave Burden the slip and pretended not to see Dr Crocker, and got into his own car and drove to Myringham. What he had to do, would spend most of the day doing, could only be done in Myringham.

He drove over the Kingsbrook Bridge and through the old town to the centre. There he parked on the top floor of the multi-storey car park, for Myringham was given over to shoppers’ cars on Saturdays, and went down in the lift to enter the building on the opposite side of the street.

In marble this time, Edward Edwards, a book in his hand, looked vaguely at him. Wexford paused to read what was engraved on the plinth and then went in, the glass doors opening of their own accord to admit him.

For years before it became a hotel - for centuries even - the Olive and Dove had been a coaching inn where the traveller might not get a bedroom or, come to that, a bed to himself, but might be reasonably sure of securing a private parlour. Many of these parlours, oak-panelled, low-ceilinged cubbyholes, still remained, opening out of passages that led away from the bar and the lounge bar, though they were private no longer but available to any first-comer. In the smallest of them where there was only one table, two chairs and a settle,

Burden sat at eight o’clock on Sunday evening, waiting for the chief inspector to come and keep the appointment he had made himself. He waited impatiently, making his half-pint of bitter last, because to leave the room now for another drink would be to invite invasion. Coats thrown over tables imply no reservation in the Olive at weekends. Besides, he had no coat. It was too warm.

Then at ten past, when the bitter was down to its last inch, Wexford walked in with a tankard in each hand.

‘You’re lucky I found you at all, hidden away like this,’ he said. This is for plotters or lovers.’

‘I thought you’d like a bit of privacy.’

‘Maybe you’re right. I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips let no dog bark.’

Burden raised his tankard and said, ‘Cheers! This dog’s going to bark. I want to know where West is, why he stayed in that hotel, who he is, come to that, and why I had to spend Friday afternoon inspecting mental hospitals. That’s for a start. I want to know why, on your admission, you told that girl two entirely false stories and where you spent yesterday.’

‘They weren’t entirely false,’ said Wexford mildly. ‘They had elements of the truth. I knew by then that she had killed Rhoda Comfrey because there was no one else who could have done so. But I also knew that if I presented her with the absolute truth at that point, she would have been unable to answer me and not only should I not have got a confession, but she would very likely have become incoherent and perhaps have collapsed. What was true was that she was in love with Grenville West, that she wanted to marry him, that she overheard a phone conversation and that she stabbed Rhoda Comfrey to death on the evening of August eighth. All the rest, the motive, the lead up to the murder and the characters of the protagonists to a great degree - all that was false. But it was a version acceptable to her and one which she might not have dreamed could be fabricated. The sad thing for her is that the truth must inevitably be revealed and has, in fact, already been revealed in the report I wrote yesterday for Griswold.'

‘I spent yesterday in the new public library in Myringham, in the reference section, reading Havelock Ellis, a biography of the Chevalier d’Eon, and bits of the life histories of Isabelle Eberhardt, James Miranda Barry and Martha Jane Burke if those names mean anything to you.’

‘There’s no need to be patronizing,’ said Burden. ‘They don’t.’

Wexford wasn’t feeling very light-hearted, but he couldn’t, even in these circumstances, resist teasing Burden who was already looking irritable and aggrieved.

‘Oh, and Edward Edwards,’ he said. ‘Know who Edward Edwards was? The Father of Public Libraries, it said underneath his statue. Apparently, he was instrumental in getting some bill through Parliament in 1850 and . . .’

‘For God’s sake,’ Burden exploded, ‘can’t you get on to West? What’s this Edwards got to do with West?’

‘Not much. He stands outside libraries and West’s book are inside.’

‘Then where is West? Or are you saying he’s going to turn up now he’s read in the paper that one of his girl-friends has murdered the other one?’

‘He won’t turn up.’

‘Why won’t he?’ Burden said slowly. ‘Look, d’you mean there were two people involved in murdering Rhoda Comfrey? West as well as the girl?’

‘No. West is dead. He never went back to the Trieste Hotel because he was dead.’

‘I need another drink,’ said Burden. In the doorway he turned round and said scathingly, ‘I suppose Polly Flinders bumped him off too?’

‘Yes,’ said Wexford. ‘Of course.’

The Olive was getting crowded and Burden was more than five minutes fetching their beer. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘who d’you think’s out there? Griswold. He didn’t see me. At least, I don’t think so.’

‘Then you’d better make that one last. I’m not running the risk of bumping into him.’

Burden sat down again, his eye on the doorway which held no door. He leant across the table, his elbows on it. ‘She can’t have. What became of the body?’

Wexford didn’t answer him directly. ‘Does the word eonism mean anything to you?’

‘No more than all those names you flung at me just now. Wait a minute, though. An aeon means a long time, an age. An aeonist is - let’s see - is someone who studies changes over long periods of time.’

‘No. I thought something like that too. It has nothing to do with aeons, there’s no a in it. Havelock Ellis coined the word in a book published in 1928 called Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Eonism and other Studies. He took the name from that of the Chevalier d’Eon, Charles Eon de Beaumont, who died in this country in the early part of the nineteenth century . . .’ Wexford paused and said,  'Having masqueraded for thirty-three years as a woman Rhoda Comfrey masqueraded for twenty years as a man. When I agreed that Pauline Flinders had murdered Grenville West, I meant that she had murdered him in the body of Rhoda Comfrey. Rhoda Comfrey and Grenville West were one and the same.’

'That’s not possible,’ said Burden. ‘People would have known or at least suspected.’ Intently staring at Wexford’s face, he was oblivious of the long bulky shadow that had been cast across the table and his own face.

Wexford turned round, said, ‘Good evening, sir,’ and smiled pleasantly. It was Burden who, realizing, got to his feet.

‘Sit down, Mike, sit down,’ said the Chief Constable, casting upon Wexford a look that implied he would have liked the opportunity to tell him to sit down also. ‘May I join you? Or is the chief inspector here indulging his well-known habit of telling a tale with the minimum of celerity and the maximum of suspense? I should hate to interrupt before the climax was reached.’

In a stifled voice, Burden said, ‘The climax was reached just as you came in, sir. Can I get you a drink?’

‘Thank you, but I have one.’ Griswold produced, from where he had been holding it, for some reason, against his trouser leg, a very small glass of dry sherry. ‘And now I too would like to hear this wonderful exposition, though I have the advantage over you, Mike, of having read a condensed version. I heard your last words. Perhaps you’ll repeat them.’

‘I said she couldn’t have got away with it. Anyone she knew well would have known.’

‘Well, Reg?’ Griswold sat down on the settle next to Burden. ‘I hope my presence won’t embarrass you. Will you go on?’

‘Certainly I will, sir.’ Wexford considered saying he wasn’t easily embarrassed but thought better of it. ‘I think the answer to that question is that she took care, as we have seen, only to know well not very sensitive or intelligent people. But even so, Malina Patel had noticed there was something odd about Grenville West, and she said she wouldn’t have liked him to kiss her. Even Victor Vivian spoke of a “funny high voice” while, incidentally, Mrs Crown said that Rhoda’s voice was deep. I think it probable that such people as Oliver Hampton and Mrs Nunn did know, or rather, if they didn’t know she was a woman, they suspected Grenville West of being of ambivalent sex, of being physically a hermaphrodite, or maybe an effeminate homosexual. But would they have told me? When I questioned them I suspected West of nothing more than being acquainted with Rhoda Comfrey. They are discreet people, who were connected with West in a professional capacity.'