Wexford 6 - No More Dying Then (12 page)

   If Burden had realised how haggard his own face was, how it mirrored all his pain and his turbulent feelings, he wouldn’t have lifted it numbly to stare at the chief inspector. Thoughtfully, Wexford returned his gaze, but for a moment neither man spoke. Why don’t you get yourself a woman? Wexford was thinking. D’you want to drive yourself into a nervous collapse? He couldn’t say those things aloud, not to Mike Burden.

   "I’m going out,” Burden muttered. “See if they need any help searching the forest.”

   Wexford let him go. He shook his head gloomily. Burden knew as well as he did that they had completed their search of Cheriton Forest on Monday afternoon.

The inquest on Stella Rivers was opened and adjourned until further evidence should come to light. Swan and his wife were there and Swan stumbled brokenly through his evidence, impressing the coroner as a shattered parent. This was the first sign Wexford had seen of any real grief in Stella’s stepfather and he wondered why it had taken the inquest to bring it out. Swan had heard the news of Burden’s discovery stoically and had identified Stella’s body with no more physical nausea. Why break down now? For he had broken down. Leaving the court, Wexford saw that Swan was weeping, a lost soul, clinging to his wife’s arm.

   Now, if ever, was the time to verify Rosalind Swan’s statement that she couldn’t drive. Wexford watched eagerly as they got into the shooting brake. And it was she, he saw, who got into the driving seat. But after a while, when they had whispered together and Rosalind had briefly laid her cheek against her husband’s, they changed places. Odd that, Wexford thought.

   Swan took the wheel wearily and they drove off in the direction of the Myfleet road.

   She would get him home and comfort him with her drinks and her kisses and her love, Wexford thought. “Come, come, come, come, give me your hand,” he said to himself. “What’s done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed.” But Rosalind Swan was no Lady Macbeth to counsel murder or even connive at it. As far as he knew. Certainly she would cover up any crime Swan might commit, even the killing of her own child, for the sake of keeping him with her.

   The fine weather had broken. It was raining now, a fine drizzle dispersing the fog which had settled on Kingsmarkham since early morning. Pulling up his raincoat collar, Wexford walked the few yards that separated the court from the police station. No one at the inquest had mentioned John Lawrence, but the knowledge that a second child was missing had underlain, he felt, everything that was said. There was not a soul in Kingsmarkham or Stowerton who didn’t connect the two cases, not a parent who doubted that a child killer stalked their countryside. Even the policemen who stood about the entrances to the court wore the grave aspect of men who believed a madman, a pathological criminal who killed children simply because they were children, went free and might attack again. He couldn’t recall any inquest at which these hardened men had looked so dour and so downcast.

   He stopped in his tracks and viewed the length of the High Street. The primary school’s half-term was over and all the younger children back at work. The big ones hadn’t yet broken up. But was it imagination or fact that he could hardly see a single four-year-old out with its mother this morning, scarcely a toddler or a baby in its pram? Then he spotted a pram which its owner was parking outside the supermarket. He watched her lift out the baby and its older sister, take the one in her arms and propel the other, who could only just walk, ahead of her into the shop. That such care should have to be exercised in the town whose guardian he was brought him a deep depression.

   Why not Ivor Swan? Why not? It meant nothing that the man had no record. He had no record perhaps because no one had ever found him out. Wexford decided that he would again review Swan’s life with particular reference to the districts he had lived in since he left Oxford. He would find out if any children had disappeared while Swan was in their vicinity. If Swan had done this, he swore to himself, he would get Swan.

   But before making further investigations into the antecedents of her stepfather he had to see Stella’s father. Their appointment was for twelve and when Wexford reached his office Peter Rivers had already been shown in.

   A woman is often attracted by the same type of man and Rivers was not unlike his supplanter. Here was the same dapper quality, the same groomed look, neat small bead, finely cut, almost polished, features and womanish tapering hands. But Rivers lacked Ivor Swan’s indolent air, the impression he gave that sexually he would be far from indolent. There was something bustling about him, a fussy restiveness combined with a nervous manner, that might not endear itself to a silly romantic woman like Rosalind Swan.

   He jumped up when Wexford came into the room and embarked on a long explanation of why he hadn’t attended the inquest followed by an account of the tiresomeness of his journey from America. Wexford cut him short.

   “Will you be seeing your former wife while you are here?”

   “I guess so.” Sponge-like, Rivers, although domiciled for less than a year in America, had already picked up a transatlantic phraseology. “I guess I’ll have to. Needless to say, I can’t stand that Swan. I should never have let Stell go to him.”

   “Surely you had no choice, Mr. Rivers?”

   “Where did you get that idea? I never opposed her mother’s application for custody, that’s all, on account of Lois - that’s the present Mrs. Rivers - not wanting to be lumbered with a big kid like that. Rosie wasn’t keen on getting custody either, come to that. Swan egged her on. I can tell you why, if you want to know.”

   Sickened by all this, Wexford merely looked his assent.

   “Swan knew he wouldn’t have a bean after he’d paid the costs, nowhere to live, nothing. The three of them were pigging it in a crummy furnished place in Paddington. His uncle told him he’d let him have that Hall Farm place if Rosie kept Stell. I know it for a fact. Rosie told me.”

   “But why? Why should his uncle care?”

   “He wanted Swan to settle down, raise a family and do a bit of good for himself. Some hopes! Swan was supposed to take an agricultural course at the college here so that he could farm the land. As soon as he got here he let the whole lot off to a farmer who had his eye on it. I don’t know why the uncle doesn’t kick them both out. He’s got pots of money and no one to leave it to but Swan.”

   “You seem to know a lot about it, Mr. Rivers.” 

   “I made it my business to. Yes, sir! Rosie and me have corresponded regularly since Stell went missing. I’ll tell you another thing. Before he came out to Karachi and messed up my married life Mr. Ivor Swan was living with his uncle and the aunt. Only she died while he was there. You’ll know what I mean when I say she died very suddenly.”

   “Will I?”

   “You’re a detective. I’d have thought that’d make you sit up. Swan thought he was coming in for some money, but it all went to uncle,”

   “I don’t think I need detain you any longer, Mr. Rivers,” said Wexford, who was beginning to think Rosalind Swan had decidedly bad taste in men. The dislike he felt for Swan was nothing to the loathing this man aroused in him. He watched Rivers buttoning his raincoat and waited for him to say something to the effect that he mourned the child whom nobody seemed to have wanted. The words came at last and in curious form.

   “It was a bit of a shock hearing she was dead,” Rivers said briskly, “but she’d been dead to me for a couple of years, anyway, in a manner of speaking. I guess I’d never have seen her again.” He made for the door, not at all abashed by Wexford’s scowl. “A newspaper’s offered me two thousand for my exclusive story.”

   “Oh, I should take it,” said Wexford in a level voice. “It will be some recompense for your tragic loss.”

   He went to the window. It was still raining. The children who went home to lunch were issuing from Queen Street where the primary school was. Usually on wet days they managed the journey as best they could. Today, the first day of the second half of term, not one went unaccompanied, not one lacked the shelter of an umbrella, which seemed to Wexford to have a deeper significance than that of protecting small heads from the drizzle.

Routine checking occupied Burden’s afternoon. It was only just after six when he got home. For almost the first time since Jean’s death be was anxious to be at home and with his children, particularly with his daughter. All day long he had been thinking of her, her image driving away Gemma’s, and as he made himself more and more familiar with the circumstances of Stella’s life and death, he kept seeing Pat alone and frightened and cruelly overpowered and - dead.

   It was she who rushed to let him in almost before his key was in the lock. And Burden, thinking he saw in her eyes some special alarm, some unusual need for comfort, bent swiftly and put his arms round her. Had he only known it, Pat had quarrelled with her aunt and natural ally and was turning for support to the only other available grown up. 

   “What is it, darling?” He saw a car stopping, a hand beckoning, a figure stepping out into the wet dusk. “Tell me what’s happened?”

   “You’ve got to tell Auntie Grace she’s not to meet me from school. I’m at the high school, I’m not an infant. I was humiliated.”

   “Oh, is that all?” With relief came gratitude. He laughed at Pat’s rebelliously pouting lower lip, tugged at her ponytail, and went out to the kitchen to thank Grace for her forethought. What a fool he had been to worry when he had such a guardian!

   But he felt a need to stay close by his daughter that evening. All through their meal and afterwards, while he was helping John with his geometry - Pythagoras’ theorem which ‘old Mintf ace” insisted on the third form knowing by the next day - his thoughts and his eyes wandered to Pat. He had failed in his duty to her, failed, through the indulgence of selfish grief, to watch over her and interest himself in her activities as he should have done. Suppose she were taken from him as Stella Rivers, her contemporary, had been taken?

   “In a right-angled triangle,” he said mechanically, “the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.”

   Grace hadn’t failed. He watched her covertly while John drew his diagram. She was sitting in a dark corner of the room, a table lamp throwing a small pool of light on to the letter she was writing. Suddenly it occurred to him that she must thousands of times have sat in just that attitude, at a lamplit desk in a long quiet hospital ward, writing the night’s report and, while all the time aware that she was surrounded by people who depended on her, yet at the same time detached from them and contained. She wrote - indeed she did everything - with a beautiful economy of movement, an absence of fuss or flutter. Her training had taught her this efficiency, this almost awe-inspiring reliability, but instead of spoiling her delicate feminine quality, had somehow enhanced it. They had had wisdom and prevision, he thought, those parents-in-law of his, when they named her Grace.

   And now his gaze encompassed both his daughter and his sister-in-law, the child moving up to her aunt and standing beside her within the same circle of light. They were very alike, he saw, with the same strong gentle face and the same light gauzy hair. They were both like Jean. The image of Gemma Lawrence coarsened beside them, became harsh-coloured, red and white and strained. Then it dwindled away, leaving a vacant space for his daughter and her aunt to fill with the wholesome beauty he understood.

   Grace, he realised, was just the type of woman he most admired. There was the delicate prettiness he loved combined with the competence he needed. Couldn’t she, he asked himself, be Jean all over again? Why not? Couldn’t she be his Rosalind Swan, as loving, as devoted, as all-in-all to him, without the other woman’s silly affectations? Usually, when they parted for the night, Grace simply got up out of her chair, picked up her book and said, “Well, good night, Mike. Sleep well,” and he said, “Good night, Grace I’ll see that everything’s locked up.” That was all. They never even touched hands, never stood close be side each other or let their eyes meet.

   But tonight, when the time came for them to separate, why shouldn’t he take her hand and, saying something of what her goodness had meant to him, take her gently in his arms and kiss her? He glanced at her again and this time both Grace and Pat turned to him and smiled. His heart seemed to swell with an easy warm happiness, very different from the storm of feelings Gemma Lawrence aroused in him. That had been a kind of madness, nothing more than lust brought about by frustration. How unimportant it seemed now!

   Pat loved her aunt. If he married Grace she would return to him entirely. He put out his hand to his daughter and she, her earlier annoyance with him forgotten, skipped over to the sofa where he was sitting and snuggled close against him, her arms hard around his neck.

   “Shall I show you my scrapbook?”

   “What have you got in it?” said John, his eyes on the proof of his theorem. “Pictures of caterpillars?”

   “Caterpillars are my summer hobby.” Pat spoke with great dignity. “You’re so ignorant you wouldn’t know, but in the winter they go into their chrysalises.”

   “And even you couldn’t collect pictures of chrysalises. Here, let’s see.”

   “You shan’t! You’re not to! It’s mine!”

   “Leave her alone, John. Put that book down.”

   John said in disgust, “It’s only dancers, old ballet dancers.

   “Come and show me, love.”

   Pat resumed her semi-suffocation of her father. “Can I have ballet lessons, Daddy? I do want to. It’s the great ambition of my life.”

   “I don’t see why not.”

   Grace was smiling at him, her letter completed. They smiled at each other like fond parents, happy in conspiracy, in contemplation of what they would do for their children.

   “You see,” said Pat, “it’ll be too late if I don’t start now. I know I should have to work and work, but I don’t mind that because it’s my great ambition, and perhaps I could get a scholarship and be in the Bolshoi and be a prima ballerina assoluta like Leonie West.”