Wexford 6 - No More Dying Then (26 page)

   Her dress was soaked. Oddly, Burden thought of a picture he had once seen, an artist’s impression of the sea giving up its dead. With a soft, tender glance at the boy, she dropped his hand and lifted Leonie West’s instead. Speechless, the other woman looked at her, and then Gemma, hesitating only for a moment, took her into her arms.

“It would never have worked, Mike. You know that as well as I do. I’m not conventional enough for you, not respectable, not good enough if you like.”

   “I think you are too good for me,” said Burden.

   “I did say once that John - if John was ever found I wouldn’t marry you. I don’t think you quite understood. It will be better for both of us if I do what we’re planning and go and live with Leonie. She’s so lonely, Mike, and I’m so dreadfully sorry for her. That way I can have London and my friends and she can have a share in John.”

   They were sitting in the lounge of the hotel where they had stayed together. Burden thought she had never been so beautiful, her white skin glowing from her inner joy, her hair mantling her shoulders. And never so alien in the golden dress Leonie West had lent her because her own was ruined by salt water. Her face was sweeter and gentler than ever.

   “But I love you,” he said.

   “Dear Mike, are you sure you don’t just love going to bed with me? Does that shock you?”

   It did, but not so much, not nearly so much, as once it would have. She had taught him a multitude of things. She had given him his sentimental education.

   “We can still be loving friends,” she said. “You can come to me at Leonie’s. You can meet all my friends. We can sometimes go away together and I’ll be so different now I am happy. You’ll see.”

   He did see. He almost shuddered. Go to her with her child there? Explain somehow to his own children that he had a - a mistress?

   “It would never work,” he said clearly and firmly. “I can see it wouldn’t.”

   She looked at him very tenderly. “ ‘You’ll court more women,’ ” she said, half-singing, “ ‘and I’ll couch with more men . . .’ ”

   He knew his Shakespeare no better than he knew his Proust. They went out on to the sea front where Leonie West was waiting with John in her red car.

   “Come and say hello to him,” said Gemma.

   But Burden shook his head. No doubt it was better this way, no doubt he would one day be grateful to the child who had robbed him of his happiness and his love. But not now, not yet. One does not say hello to an enemy and a thief.

   She lingered under the esplanade lights, turning towards him and then back again to where John was. Torn two ways, they called it, he thought, but there was little doubt who had won this tug of war. That light in her eyes had never been there when they looked at him, was not there now, died as soon as she ceased to face the car. She was parting from him not with regret, not with pain, but with politeness.

   Always considerate, always ready to respect another person’s conventions - for they were in a public place and people were passing - she held out her hand to him. He took it, and then, no longer caring for those passers-by, forgetting his cherished respectability, he pulled her to him there in the open street and kissed her for the last time.

   When the red car had gone he leant on the rail and looked at the sea and knew that it was better this way, knew too, because he had been through something like it before, that he would not go on wanting to die.

Wexford was genial and sly and almost godlike. “What a fortunate coincidence that you happened to be in Eastbourne with Miss Woodville and happened to go to Eastover and happened - Good God, what a lot of happenings! - to meet Mrs. Lawrence.” He added more gravely, “On the whole, you have done well, Mike.”

   Burden said nothing. He didn’t think it necessary to point out that it was Gemma who had found the lost boy and not he.

   Quietly, Wexford closed the door of his office and for a few moments regarded Burden in silence. Then he said, “But I don’t much care for coincidences or for melodrama, come to that. I don’t think they’re in your line, do you?”

   “Perhaps not, sir.”

   “Are you going to go on doing well, Mike? I have to ask, I have to know. I have to know where to find you when you’re needed and, when I find you, that you’ll be your old self. Are you going to come back and work with me and - well, to put it bluntly - pull yourself together?”

   Burden said slowly, remembering what he had once said to Gemma, “Work is the best thing, isn’t it?”

   “I think it is.”

   “But it has to be real work, heart and soul in it, not just coming in every day more or less automatically and hoping everyone will admire you for being such a martyr to duty. I’ve thought about it a lot, sir, I’ve decided to count my blessings and . . .”

   “That’s fine,” Wexford cut off his words. “Don’t be too sanctimonious about it, though, will you? That’s hard to live with. I can see you’ve changed and I’m not going to enquire too closely into who or what has brought that change about. One good thing, I’m pretty sure I’m going to find that the quality of your mercy is a lot less strained than it used to be. And now let’s go home.”

   Half-way down the lift, he went on, “You say Mrs. Lawrence doesn’t want this woman charged? That’s all very well, but what about all our work, all the expenditure? Griswold will do his nut. He may insist on charging her. But if she’s really a bit cuckoo . . . My God, one culprit dead and the other crazy!”

   The lift opened, and there, inevitably, was Harry Wild.

   “I have nothing for you,” Wexford said coldly.

   “Nothing for me!” Wild said wrathfully to Camb. “I know for a fact that . . .”

   “There was quite a to-do in Pump Lane,” said Camb, opening his book. “One police van and two fire engines arrived at five p.m. yesterday - Sunday, that was - to remove a cat from an elm tree . . .” Wild’s infuriated glance cut him short. He cleared his throat and said soothingly, “Let’s see if there’s any tea going”

   On the station forecourt Wexford said, “I nearly for got to tell you. Swan’s uncle’s going to pay out the reward.”

   Burden stared. “But it was offered for information leading to an arrest.”

   “No, it wasn’t. That’s what I thought till I checked. It was offered for information leading to a discovery. The Group Captain’s a just man, and not the sort of just man I mean when I talk about his nephew. That’s two thousand smackers for Charley Catch, or would be if he wasn’t a very sick old man.” Absently, Wexford felt in his pocket for his blood-pressure tablets. “When Crocker arrived in Charteris Road last night there was a solicitor at his bedside and Monkey keeping well in the background because a beneficiary can’t also be a witness. I must work out sometime,” said the chief inspector, “just how many king-size fags you could buy with all that boodle.”

“Are you all right, Mike?” said Grace. “I mean, are you feeling all right? You’ve been home every night this week on the dot of six.”

   Burden smiled. “Let’s say I’ve come to my senses. I find it a bit hard to put my feelings into words, but I suppose I’ve Just realised how lucky I am to have my kids and what hell it would be to lose them.”

   She didn’t answer but went to the window and drew the curtains to shut out the night. With her back to him she said abruptly, “I’m not going in for that nursing-home thing.”

   “Now, look here . . .” He got up, went over to her and took her almost roughly by the arm. “You’re not to sacrifice yourself on my account. I won’t have it.”

   “My dear Mike!” Suddenly he saw that she was not troubled or conscience-stricken but happy. “I’m not sacrificing myself. I . . .” She hesitated, remembering perhaps how in the past he would never talk to her, never speak of anything but the most mundane household arrangements.

   “Tell me,” he said with a new fierce intensity.

   She looked astonished. “Well . . . Well, I met a man while we were in Eastbourne, a man I used to know years ago. I - I was in love with him. We quarrelled . . . Oh, it was so silly! And now - now he wants to begin again and come here and take me out and - and I think, Mike, I think . . .” She stopped and then said with the cold defiance he had taught her, “You wouldn’t be interested.”

   “Oh, Grace,” he said, “if only you knew!”

   She was staring at him now as if he were a stranger, but a stranger she had begun to like and would want to know better. “Knew what?” she said.

   For a moment he didn’t answer. He was thinking that if only he had the sense to realise it now, he had found his listener, his one friend who would understand, because of her experience of many sides of life, the simple daily joy his marriage had been to him and understand too the blaze of glory, the little summer, he had found with Gemma.

   “I want to talk too,” he said. “I’ve got to tell some one. If I listen to you, will you listen to me?”

   She nodded wonderingly. He thought how pretty she was, how like Jean, and that, because she was like Jean, she would make a wonderful wife for this man who loved her. And because there could now be no misunderstanding between them he hugged her briefly and rested his cheek against hers.

   He felt her happiness in the warmth with which she returned the hug and it infected him, almost making him happy too. Would it last? Was he finally finding a sense of proportion? He couldn’t tell, not yet. But his own boy and girl were safe, sleeping behind those closed doors, he could work again, and be had a friend who was waiting now, still tightly clasping his hands, to hear what he had to tell.

   Grace led him back to the fire, sat down beside him and said, as if already she half understood, “It’ll be all right, Mike.” She leaned towards him, her face serious and intent. “Let’s talk,” she said.