Wexford 6 - No More Dying Then (17 page)

Holding her in his arms in the dark, Burden said, “I want you to tell me that I’ve made you happier, that things aren’t so bad because I love you.”

   Perhaps she was giving one of her wan smiles. He could see nothing of her face but a pale glow. The room smelt of the scent which she used to use when she was married and had, at any rate, a little money. Her clothes were impregnated with it, a stale musty sweetness. He thought that tomorrow he would buy her a bottle of scent.

   “Gemma, you know I can’t stay the night. I only wish to God I could, but I promised and . . .”

   “Of course you must go,” she said. “If I were going to my - to my children, nothing would keep me, Dear kind Mike, I won’t keep you from your children.”

   “You’ll sleep?”

   “I shall take a couple of those things Dr. Lomax gave me.”

   A little chill touched his warm body. Wasn’t satisfied love the best soporific? How happy it would have made him to know that his love-making alone could send her into sweet sleep, that thoughts of him would drive away every dread. Always the child, he thought, always the boy who had secured for himself all his mother’s care and passion. And he imagined the miracle happening and the lost dead boy, restored to life and to home, running into the darkened bedroom now, bringing his own light with him, throwing himself into his mother’s arms. He saw how she would forget her lover, forget that ho had ever existed, in a little world made just for a woman and a child.

   He got up and dressed. He kissed her in a way that was meant to be tender only but became passionate because he couldn’t help himself. And he was rewarded with a kiss from her as long and desirous as his own. With that he had to be satisfied; with that and with the crumpled chiffon scarf he picked up as he left the room.

   If only he would find his bungalow empty, he mused as be drove towards it. Just for tonight, he told him self guiltily. If only he could go into emptiness and solicitude, free of Grace’s gentle brisk demands and Pat’s castles in the air and John’s mathematics. But if he were going home to an empty house he wouldn’t be going home at all.

   Grace had said she wanted to discuss something with him. The prospect was so dreary and so tedious that he forebore speculating about it. Why endure an agony twice over? He held the scented chiffon against his face for comfort before entering the house but instead of comfort it brought him only longing.

   His son was hunched over the table, ineptly grasping a compass. “Old Mint Face,” he said when he saw his father, “told us that ‘mathema’ means knowledge and ‘pathema’ means suffering, so I said they ought to call it pathematics.”

   Grace laughed a little too shrilly. She was flushed, Burden noticed, as if with excitement or perhaps trepidation. He sat down at the table, neatly drew the diagram for John and sent him off to bed. “May as well have an early night myself,” he said hopefully.

   “Spare me just ten minutes, Mike. I want - there’s something I want to say to you. I’ve had a letter from a friend of mine, a girl - a woman - I trained with.” Grace sounded extremely nervous now, so unlike herself that Burden felt a small disquiet. She was holding the letter and seemed about to show it to him, but she changed her mind and stood clutching it. “She’s come into some money and she wants to start a nursing home and she . . .” The words tumbled out in a rush, “. . . she wants me to come in with her.”

   Burden was beginning on a bored, “Oh, yes, that’s nice,” when suddenly he did a double-take and what she was actually saying came home to him. The shock was too great for thought or politeness or caution. “What about the children?” he said.

   She didn’t answer that directly. She sat down heavily like a tired old woman. “How long did you think I would stay with them?”

   “I don’t know.” He made a helpless gesture with his hands. “Till, they’re able to look after themselves, I suppose.”

   “And when will that be?” She was hot now and angry, her nervousness swamped by indignation. “When Pat’s seventeen, eighteen? I’ll be forty.”

   “Forty’s not old,” said her brother-in-law feebly.

   “Maybe not for a woman with a profession, a career she’s always worked at. If I stay here for another six years I won’t have any career, I’d be lucky to get a job as a staff nurse in a country hospital.”

   “But the children,” he said again

   “Send them to boarding school,” she said in a hard voice. ‘Physically, they’ll be just as well looked after there as here, and as for the other side of their lives - what good do I do them alone? Pat’s coming to an age when she’ll turn against her mother or any mother substitute. John’s never cared much for me. If you don’t like the idea of boarding school, get a transfer and go to Eastbourne. You could all live there with Mother.”

   “You’ve sprung this on me, all right, haven’t you, Grace?”

   She was almost in tears. “I only had Mary’s letter yesterday. I wanted to talk to you yesterday, I begged you to come home.”

   “My God,” he said, “what a thing to happen. I thought you liked it here, I thought you loved the kids."

   “No, you didn’t,” she said fiercely, and her face was suddenly Jean’s, passionate and indignant, during one of their rare quarrels. “You never thought about me at all. You - you asked me to come and help you and when I came you turned me into a sort of house mother and you were the lofty superintendent who condescended to visit the poor orphans a couple of times a week.”

   He wasn’t going to answer that, He knew it was true. “You must do as you please, of course,” he said.

   “It isn’t what I please, it’s what you’ve driven me to. Oh, Mike, it could have been so different! Don’t you see? If you’d been with us and pulled your weight and made me feel we were doing something worth while together. Even now if you . . . I’m trying to say . . . Mike, this is very hard for me. If I thought you might come in time to . . . Mike, won’t you help me?”

   She had turned to him and put out her hands, not impulsively and yearningly as Gemma did, but with a kind of modest diffidence, as if she were ashamed. He remembered what Wexford had said to him that morning in the lift and he recoiled away from her. That it was almost Jean’s face looking at him, Jean’s voice pleading with him, about to say things which to his old-fashioned mind no woman should ever say to a man, only made things worse.

   “No, no, no!” he said, not shouting but whispering the words with a kind of hiss.

   He had never seen a woman blush so fierily. Her face was crimson, and then the colour receded, leaving it chalk white. She got up and walked away, scuttling rather, for on a sudden she had lost all her precise controlled gracefulness. She left him and closed the door without another word.

   That night he slept very badly. Three hundred nights had been insufficient to teach him how to sleep without a woman and, after them, two of bliss had brought back with savagery all the loneliness of a single bed. Like a green adolescent he held, pressed against his face so that he could smell it, the scarf of the woman he loved. He lay like that for hours, listening through the wall to the muffled crying of the woman he had rejected.

The look of hair did not belong to Stella Rivers either. Enough of her own blond curls remained on what remained of her for them to make comparison. “A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,” Wexford thought, shuddering.

   That proved nothing, of course. It was only to be expected, it was known, that the fur man - Wexford thought of his correspondent and his caller as the “fur man” now - was a liar. There was nothing for him to do but wait for news from the Lakes, and his temper grew sour. Burden had been unbearable for the last couple of days, hardly answering when you spoke to him and not to be found when most he was wanted. The rain fell unceasingly too. Everyone in the police station was irritable and the men, depressed by the weather, snapped at each other like wet, ill-tempered dogs. The black-and-white foyer floor was blotched all day by muddy footmarks and trickles from sodden rain-capes.

   Marching briskly past the desk to avoid an encounter with Harry Wild, Wexford almost crashed into a red-faced Sergeant Martin who was waiting for the lift.

   “I don’t know what the world’s coming to, sir, I really don’t. That young Peach, usually won’t say boo to a goose, flares up at me because I tell him he should be wearing a stouter pair of boots. Mind your own business, be has the nerve to say to me. What’s up, sir? What have I said?”

   “You’ve solved something for me,” Wexford said, and then more soberly, because this was only the beginning of an investigation, not a solution: “Sergeant, the night we were searching for John Lawrence you told a man in the search party to put on thicker shoes - you must have a thing about it - and he too told you to mind your own business, Remember?”

   “I can’t say I do, sir.”

   “I spoke to him too,” Wexford said wonderingly. “He tried to stroke the dogs.” Fur, he thought, fur and rabbits. He had tried to stroke the alsatian, his hand seemingly impelled towards that soft thick coat. “God, I can’t remember what he looked like! But I remember that voice. That voice! Sergeant, the man you spoke to, the man who tried to stroke the dogs, is the writer of those letters.”

   “I just don’t recall him, sir.”

   “Never mind. It should be easy to find him now.”

   But it wasn’t.

   Wexford went first to Mr. Crantock, the husband of Gemma Lawrence’s neighbour, who was head cashier at the Kingsmarkham branch of Lloyd’s Bank. Certain that this man would know every member of the search parties by sight if not by name, Wexford was disappointed to learn that not every searcher had been drawn from the three streets, Fontaine Road, Wincanton Road and Chiltern Avenue.

   “There were a lot of chaps I’d never seen before,” said Crantock. “Heaven knows where they came from or how they got to know the kid was missing that early. But we were glad of anyone we could get, weren’t we? I remember there was one character came on a bike.”

   “News of that kind travels fast,” Wexford said. “It’s a mystery how it does, but people get to know of things before there’s time for them to be on television or radio or in the papers.”

   “You could try Dr. Lomax. He led one of the parties until he had to go back on a call. Doctors always know everybody, don’t they?”

   The supplier of Gemma Lawrence’s sleeping pills practised from his own home, a Victorian Gothic house of considerable dimensions that was superior to its neighbours in Chiltern Avenue. Wexford arrived in time to catch the doctor at the end of his afternoon surgery,

   Lomax was a busy harassed little man who spoke with a shrill voice, but it wasn’t the shrillness Wexford was listening for and, besides, the doctor had a faint Scottish accent. It seemed that he too was unlikely to be of much help.

   “Mr. Crantock, Mr. Rushworth, Mr. Dean . . .” He enumerated a long list of men, counting them on his fingers, though of what use this was Wexford didn’t know, as the search parties had never been counted. Lomax, however, seemed certain when he reached the end of his list that there had been three strangers, one the cyclist.

   “How they even knew about it beats me,” he said, echoing Crantock. “I only knew myself because my wife came in and told me while I was holding surgery. She acts as my nurse, you see, and she’d overheard someone talking in the street while she was helping an elderly patient out of a car. She came straight in here and told me and when my last patient had gone I went outside to see what I could do and saw all your cars.

   “What time would that have been?”

   “When my wife told me or when I went outside? It would have been something after six when I went out, but my wife told me at twenty past five. I can be sure of that because the old lady she helped from the car always comes at five twenty on the dot on Thursdays. Why?”

   “Were you alone when your wife told you?”

   “No, of course not. I had a patient with me.”

   Wexford’s interest quickened. “Did your wife come up to you and whisper the news? Or did she say it aloud so that the patient could have heard?”

   “She said it aloud,” said Lomax rather stiffly. “Why not? I told you she acts as my nurse.”

   “You will remember who the patient was, naturally, Doctor?”

   “I don’t know about naturally. I have a great many patients.” Lomax reflected in silence for a moment. “It wasn’t Mrs. Ross, the old lady. She was still in the waiting room. It must have been either Mrs. Foster or Miss Garrett. My wife will know, she has a better memory than I”

   Mrs. Lomax was called in.

   “It was Mrs. Foster. She’s got four children of her own and I remember she was very upset.”

   “But her husband didn’t come in the search party,” said Lomax, who seemed now to be following Wexford’s own line of reasoning. “I don’t know him, he’s not my patient, but he couldn’t have. Mrs. Foster had just been telling me he’d broken one of his big toes.”

Except to say in an embarrassed low tone, “Of course, I’ll stay till you’ve made other arrangements,” Grace had scarcely spoken to Burden since telling him of her plans. At table - the only time they were together - they kept up a thin polite pretence of conversation for the sake of the children. Burden spent his evenings and his nights with Gemma.

   He had told her, but no one else, that Grace was deserting him, and wondered, not understanding at all, when her great wistful eyes widened and she said how lucky he was to have his children all to himself with no one to come between or try to share their love. Then she fell into one of her terrible storms of weeping, beating with her hands on the dusty old furniture, sobbing until her eyes were swollen and half-closed.

   Afterwards she let him make love to her, but let was the wrong word. In bed with him she seemed briefly to forget that she was a mother and bereaved and became a young sensual girl. He knew that sex was a forgetting for her, a therapy - she had said as much - but he told himself that no woman could show so much passion if her involvement was solely physical. Women, he had always believed, were not made that way. And when she told him sweetly and almost shyly that she loved him, when she hadn’t mentioned John for two hours, his happiness was boundless, all his load of cares nothing.