Wexford 6 - No More Dying Then (8 page)

   Wexford read the messages which had been left on his desk, but most were negative and some needed immediate attention. He scanned the anonymous note again, then put it back in its envelope with a sigh.

   "We had enough letters in the Stella Rivers case to paper the walls of this office,” he said, “and we followed them all up. We had five hundred and twenty-three phone calls. The fantasies that go on in people’s minds, Mike, the power of their imaginations! They were nearly all well intentioned. Ninety per cent of them really thought they had seen Stella and . . .”

   Burden interrupted him. “I want to hear about Swan’s alibi.”

   “Swan drove Stella to Equita at two-thirty. Silly sort of name, isn’t it? Whether it’s supposed to mean all the pupils are equal or the only thing they teach is horse-riding, I wouldn’t know.”

   Burden was always impatient with these digressions. “What kind of a car does he drive?”

   “Not a red Jag. An oldish Ford shooting brake. He left Stella at the gates, believing, he said, that friends would bring her home, and went back home himself. At three-thirty he also got on a horse, that Sherry thing, and rode to Myfleet to see, believe it or not, a man about a dog.”

   “You’re joking.”

   “Would I, about a thing like this? There’s a fellow in Myfleet called Blain who breeds pointers. Swan went to look at some .puppies with an eye to buying one for Stella. Of course, he didn’t buy one, any more than he ever got her the pony he promised or got her name changed. Swan’s always ‘just going to do something.’ One of the Four Just Men, he is.”

   “But he did call on this man?”

   “Blain told us Swan was with him from ten to four until four-fifteen, but he didn’t get back to Hall Farm until five-thirty.”

   “Where did he say he had been in that hour and a quarter?”

   “Just riding round. The horse, he said, needed exercise. Maybe it also needed a wash, for both rider and mount must have been wet through when Swan got home. But odd though this sounds, it is the kind of thing Swan would do. He would moon about on horse back in the rain. His ride, he said, took him through Cheriton Forest, but be couldn’t produce a single person to corroborate this. On the other hand, he could have got to Mill Lane in the time and killed Stella. But if he did, why did he? And what did he do with her body? His wife hasn’t an alibi either. She says she was at Hall Farm and she can’t drive. At any rate, she hasn’t a driving licence.”

   Burden digested all this carefully. Then, he decided, he wanted to know more about Stella’s departure from Equita. He wanted the details Wexford hadn’t had time to give him when they had sat together in the car in Fontaine Road.

   “The children,” said Wexford, “had an hour’s riding lesson and a further hour they spent messing about with the horses. Miss Williams, the owner of Equita, who lives in that house adjoining the stables, saw Stella that afternoon but says she didn’t speak to her and we have no reason to doubt her word. It was Mrs. Margaret Fenn who took the children out for their ride. She’s a widow of about forty and she lives in what used to be the lodge to Saltram House. Know it?”

   Burden knew it. Ruined Saltram House and its grounds, now turned to wilderness, had been a favourite resort of his and Jean’s. For them it had been a place of romance, a lost domain, where they had gone for evening walks in the early days of their marriage and where they had later returned many times to bring their children on picnics.

   All that day he had hardly thought about Jean and his happy past with her. His misery had been suspended by the present tumultuous events. But now again he saw her face before him and heard her call his name as they explored the gardens that time had laid waste and, hand in hand, entered the dark cold shell of the house. He shivered.

   “You all right, Mike?” Wexford gave him a brief anxious glance and then he went on. “Stella said good bye to Mrs. Fenn and said that as her step-father - incidentally, she always referred to him as her father - hadn’t yet arrived, she would walk along Mill Lane to meet him. Mrs. Fenn didn’t much like letting the girl go alone, but it was still light and she couldn’t go with her as she still had another hour and a half at Equita in which to clear up. She watched Stella go through the gates of Equita, thus becoming the last person but one to see her before she disappeared.”

   “The last but one?”

   “Don’t forget the man who offered her a lift. Now for the houses in Mill Lane. There are only three between Equita and Stowerton, all widely separated, Saltram Lodge and two cottages. Before Hill offered her the lift she had passed one of these cottages, the one that is occupied only at weekends, and, this being a Thursday, it was empty. We know no more of what happened to her after she was seen by Hill, but if she walked on unmolested she would next have come to the second cottage which has a tenant, not an owner occupier. This tenant, a single man, was out at work and didn’t return until six. Again this was carefully checked because both this cottage and Saltram Lodge have telephones and one of the possibilities which occurred to me was that Stella might have called at a house and asked to phone Hall Farm. The third and last house, Saltram Lodge, was also empty until Mrs. Fenn got home at six. She had had some relatives staying with her, but they had left for London by the three-forty-five train from Stowerton. A taxi-driver confirmed that he had picked them up at the lodge at twenty past three.”

   “And was that all?” Burden said. “No more leads?” Wexford shook his head. “Not what you’d call leads. The usual flock of people came forward with unhelpful evidence. A woman had picked up a child’s glove outside one of the cottages but it wasn’t Stella’s. There was another of those free-lift merchants who said he had picked up an elderly man near Saltram Lodge at five-thirty and driven him into Stowerton, but this driver was a shifty sort of fellow and he impressed me as a sensation-monger rather than someone whose word you could rely on.”

   “A van-driver claimed to have seen a boy come out of the back door of the rented cottage and perhaps he did. They all leave their back doors unlocked in this part of the world. They think there’s no crime in the country. But the van-driver also said he heard screams coming from behind the hedge just outside Equita, and we know Stella was alive and unharmed until she had refused Hill’s offer. I doubt if we shall ever find out any more.”

   Wexford looked tired, his jowly face heavier, and more drooping than usual. “I shall take a couple of hours off tomorrow morning, Mike, and I advise you to do the same. We’re both dead-beat. Have a lie-in.”

   Burden nodded abstractedly. He didn’t say that there is no point in lying-in when there is no one to lie in with, but he thought it. Wearily he found himself recalling as he went out to his car those rare but delightful Sunday mornings when Jean, usually an early riser, consented to remain in bed with him until nine. Lying in each other’s arms, they had listened to the sound of Pat making tea for them in the kitchen, and had sat bolt upright, jerking away from each other when she came in with the tray. Those had been the days, but he hadn’t known it at the time, hadn’t appreciated and treasured each moment as he should have done. And now he would have given ten years of his life for one of those mornings back again.

   His memories brought him a dull misery, his only consolation that soon he would be in the company of someone as wretched as himself, but when he walked up to the always open door he heard her call out to him gaily and as intimately as if they were old friends, “I’m on the phone, Mike. Go in and sit down. Make yourself at home.”

   The telephone must be in the dining room, he thought. He sat down in the other room, feeling uncomfortable because untidiness always made him ill-at-ease. He wondered how anyone as beautiful and as charming as she could bear to live in such disorder and wondered more when she came in, for she was a changed woman, brilliantly smiling, almost elegant.

   “You needn’t have run off on my account,” he said, trying not to stare too hard at the short kingfisher-blue dress she wore, the long silver chains, the silver comb in her high-piled hair.

   “That was Matthew,” she said. “They brought him a phone and he phoned me from his bed. He’s terribly worried about John, but I told him it was all right. I told him everything would be all right on Monday. He has so many worries, poor boy. He’s ill and his wife’s expecting a baby and he’s out of work and now this.”

   “Out of work? What sort of work does he do?”

   She sat down opposite him and crossed the best pair of legs Burden thought he had ever seen. He stared at a patch of floor some inches from her feet.

   “He’s a television actor, or he is when he can get work. He so terribly wants to be a household word. The trouble is his face is wrong. Oh, I don’t mean he isn’t good-looking. He was born too late. He looks just like Valentino and that won’t do these days. John’s going to be just like him. He’s very like him now.”

   Matthew Lawrence . . . it rang some sort of bell. “I think I may have seen his picture in the papers,” said Burden.

   She nodded earnestly. “Escorting Leonie West about, I expect. She used to be photographed wherever she went.”

   “I know her. She’s a ballet dancer. My daughter’s crazy about ballet. As a matter of fact, I think that’s where I’ve seen your ex-husband, in pictures with Leonie West.”

   “Matthew and Leonie were lovers for years. Then he met me. I was a drama student and I had a small part in a television series he was in. When we got married he said he wouldn’t see Leonie any more, but he really only married me because he wanted a child. Leonie couldn’t have children, otherwise he’d have married her.”

   She had been speaking in a very cool practical voice, but now she sighed and fell silent. Burden waited, no longer tired, even more interested than usual in other people’s life stories, although this one perturbed him strangely.

   After a while she went on. “I tried to keep our marriage going and when John was born I thought we had a chance. Then I found out Matthew was still seeing Leonie. At last he asked me to divorce him and I did. The judge expedited the decree because there was a child on the way.”

   “But you said Leonie West couldn’t . . .”

   “Oh, not Leonie. He didn’t marry her. She was years older than he was. She must be well into her forties by now. He married a girl of nineteen he met at a party.”

   “Good God,” said Burden.

   “She had the baby, but it only lived two days. That’s why I’m keeping my fingers crossed for them now. This one just must be all right.”

   Burden couldn’t keep his feelings to himself any longer. “Don’t you bear any malice?” he said. “I should have thought you’d hate him and his wife and that West woman.”

   She shrugged. “Poor Leonie. She’s too pathetic now to hate, Besides, I always rather liked her. I don’t hate Matthew or his wife. They couldn’t help themselves. They did what they had to do. You couldn’t expect them all to spoil their lives for me.”

   “I’m afraid I’m rather old-fashioned in these things,” said Burden. “I believe in self-discipline. They spoiled your life, didn’t they?”

   “Oh, no! I’ve got John and he makes me very very happy.”

   “Mrs. Lawrence . . .”

   “Gemma!”

   “Gemma,” he said awkwardly. “I must warn you not to bank too much on Monday. I don’t think you should bank on it at all. My chief - Chief Inspector Wexford - has absolutely no faith in the veracity of this letter. He’s sure it’s a hoax.”

   She paled a little and clasped her hands. “No one would write a letter like that,” she said innocently, “if it wasn’t true. Nobody could be so cruel.”

   “But people are cruel. Surely you must know that?”

   “I won’t believe it. I know John is going to be there on Monday. Please - please don’t spoil it for me. Fm holding on to it, it’s made me so happy.”

   He shook his head helplessly. Her eyes were beseeching, imploring him to give her one word of encouragement. And then, to his horror, she fell on her knees in front of him, seizing both his hands in hers.

   "Please, Mike, tell me you think it’ll be all right. Just say there’s a chance, There could be, couldn’t there? Please, Mike!”

   Her nails dug into his wrists. “There’s always a chance . . .”

   “More than that, more than that! Smile at me, show me there’s a chance.” He smiled, almost desperately. She sprang up. “Stay there. I’m going to make coffee.”

   The evening was dying away. Soon it would be quite dark. He knew that he should go away now, follow her outside and say briskly, “Well, if you’re all right, I must be on my way.” Staying here was wrong, entirely overstepping the bounds of his duty. If she needed company it ought to be Mrs. Crantock or one of those strange friends of hers.

   He couldn’t go. It was impossible. What a hypocrite he was with his talk of self-discipline. Jean? he said, savouring her name experimentally. If Jean had been at home there would have been no staying, no need for control.

   She came back with the coffee and they drank it in the dusk. Soon he could hardly see her and yet some how he felt her presence more forcefully. In one way he wanted her to turn on the light, but at the same time he prayed that she wouldn’t and thus destroy the atmosphere, warm, dark and scented with her scent, a tension and yet a peace.

   She poured him more coffee and their hands touched. “Tell me about your wife,” she said.

   He had never told anyone. He wasn’t the kind of man to open his heart and relieve his soul. Grace had tried to draw him out. That idiot Camb had tried and, in a more subtle and tactful way, Wexford himself. And yet he would have liked to tell someone, if only the right listener could be found. This beautiful kind woman wasn’t the right listener. What would she with her strange past, her peculiar permissiveness, understand of his notions of monogamy, his one-woman life? How could he talk to her of his simple gentle Jean, her quiet existence and her abominable death?

   “It’s all over now,” he said shortly. “Best forgotten.” Too late he realised the impression his words had made.