Authors: Ruth Rendell
Once in the train he riffled through the main section, just to keep himself up to date with the news, discarded all the rest but the News Review, which he kept, folded small in the pocket of the raincoat he had brought with him. He'd read it at home in the evening. The rest of the journey he spent in blissful enjoyment of Bellini.
“We now know that the remains in Grimble's bungalow aren't Douglas Chadwick,” said Wexford, “but whoever he was the scorpion T-shirt was his. It certainly did belong to the man in the cellar. His hairs were on it, traces of his DNA were on it. It was his all right. The same goes for the anorak, the jeans, and the sneakers. Did he buy it from the Myringham Oxfam shop, or did someone buy it for him? And why has no one else come forward to say they've recognized that T-shirt at a later date? Did he take his clothes off before going into the cellar, or did someone else take them off after he was dead? And why take them off?”
“Maybe he was going to have a bath,” said Burden but whether he was serious or being facetious wasn't clear.
“Then you'd have found him in the bathroom, not the cellar. Grimble said that cellar door was never shut. He'd never seen it shut. Why would he lie about that?”
“He might if he killed the chap in the cellar.”
“I don't see that,” said Wexford. “If he'd killed the chap in the cellar, why mention it at all?”
The phone ringing put an end to this exchange of views. It was a Mrs. Tredown to see him, said the desk sergeant's voice, adding rather awkwardly that what he actually meant was that it was two Mrs. Tredowns.
“Have someone bring them up here, will you?” said Wexford, and to Burden, “You stay, Mike.”
Lyn Fancourt brought them in. Claudia Ricardo wore a long coat of asymmetrical patches in red, yellow, green, and black over a badly creased white linen dress that also came to her ankles. On her feet were sandals with high wedge heels and laces cross-gartered. Her hair in a wild dense bush was in marked contrast to Maeve Tredown's smooth blond “set,” lacquered into helmet shape and glossy as new paintwork. Maeve was in a calf-length check skirt and gray jacket, both rather shabby with a charity-shop look about them. But what struck Wexford about them when they began to speak was not the difference between them but the similarity of their speech and intonation. If you closed your eyes you couldn't have said whose voice it was, Claudia's or Maeve's. Only the content of what they said identified them. Although very unlike to look at, in certain ways they seemed to belong to the same type. Was that why Tredown had married first one and then the other? Or having lost or rid himself of Claudia, he had looked for her counterpart in Maeve?
They had come to tell him something Maeve said they had “neglected” to mention before. “When I spoke to that girl who came to see to Mr. Borodin. The one that brought us up here just now.”
“You mean when you asked if it was true we'd found a body in the cellar of Mr. Grimble's house? I believe you asked if it was a man or a woman.”
“Did you really, Cee? You are so awful.” Maeve's tone was that of a teenager.
“We can't always account for what we say,” Claudia said with a giggle. “Naturally, I wanted to know. Who wouldn't? All those bodies next door. I wondered if they might have partaken in some sexy ritual.”
Burden said in the repressive tone Wexford knew signified his extreme displeasure, “What did you come here to tell us?”
Maeve looked at him as if she had just realized a second man was in the room. “Oh, yes, I remember you now. You came to the house with him, didn't you? Is it all right for you to ask me questions?” She pointed one sharp finger at Wexford. “He's the head one, isn't he?”
These inquiries—they resulted in Claudia dissolving into giggles—neither Wexford nor Burden replied to. “If you have something to tell us, please do so. Our time is limited.”
“Oh, is it?” Claudia put on an expression of disbelief. “Well, if you say so. What was it you asked? Oh, yes, what did we come to tell you. Two things really. One is that Mr. Chadwick—I don't know his first name—he was very friendly with Louise Axall, always at her flat he was when her—well, he's not her husband, is he?—her paramour was away.”
“Let me stop you there, Miss Ricardo,” said Wexford. “Miss Axall has only lived in the district for four years and Douglas Chadwick is no longer a subject of our investigations. He died two years ago.”
Maeve Tredown assumed the look of someone granted a revelation of the magnitude sustained on the road to Damascus. “Douglas! That was his name. I'd entirely forgotten.”
“The second piece of information, Miss Ricardo?”
“Yes, now where was I? Where was I, Em?”
“You were going to tell them about seeing that old bat Irene McNeil going into the house after old Grimble died.”
“That's it. She and that retarded boy and Grimble's pals, they were always in and out. Irene must be the nosiest old woman in the United Kingdom. As soon as they'd had the funeral she was in there. She lived across the road then, of course. We used to see her go in there time after time, didn't we, Em?”
“Absolutely, Cee, and bring stuff out with her. Her husband too. That man decimated the wildlife around here. If it moved he shot it. Shame, really.”
In absolute calm, Wexford said, “Thank you very much, Mrs. Tredown, Miss Ricardo.” He picked up the phone, said into it, “Have DC Fancourt come up, will you?”
The two “wives-in-law” began chatting to each other in low voices, punctuated by the occasional burst of laughter and little high-pitched screams. From what Wexford could hear of their conversation, he gathered Claudia was telling Maeve a joke involving fellatio and a banana. He sighed, said, “We should like to talk to Mr. Tredown. Will tomorrow morning be convenient? Nine o'clock?”
“It's very early,” said Claudia, giggling as if he had made an improper suggestion. “Very early. I may still be in bed.”
“Oh, we'd better say yes, Cee. He'll only keep on at us if we don't.”
“Thank you,” Wexford said as Lyn Fancourt came in. “See Mrs. Tredown and Miss Ricardo out, will you?” he said.
Both giggling now, they went. Burden said they were like two schoolgirls who have enjoyed themselves but not quite succeeded in goading their teacher into losing his cool.
“I don't know. It's a bit more sinister than that. They're more like a couple of thoroughly nasty participants in a witches' sabbath.”
“Most of it was done to annoy. No doubt, they don't have enough to do. Maybe Tredown sends them out of the house so that he can work in peace. But was it done to distract?”
“Distract from what, Mike?”
“Well, obviously something they don't want us to know about. One thing they did tell us, though. I know you noticed, I could tell by the way you suddenly looked disgusted.”
Wexford nodded. “You mean her reference to ‘that retarded boy,’ as Claudia so charmingly called him? That's obviously Charlie Cummings. Mike, I think that should have occurred to us. Is the body in the cellar Charlie Cummings?”
“He disappeared three years before the man in the cellar died.”
“Even so it's possible,” said Wexford.
Doris Lomax, who had lived next door to Charlie Cummings and his mother, was a very old woman by this time. In the eleven years and more which had passed she had gradually lost her sight and was now registered as blind. Hannah Goldsmith, who could be tough and unrelenting with men and particularly with the young vigorous sort, was understanding with her own sex, reserving a particular tenderness and sympathy for old women whom she judged victims of a hard life and male oppression. She spoke with extreme gentleness to Doris Lomax in a voice Wexford would barely have recognized.
The little stuffy room in which they sat was insufferably hot, for, though the day was mild for the time of year, Mrs. Lomax had her gas fire full on. The windows looked as if they had never been opened and now had seized up through disuse. Hannah gave no sign of discomfort, in spite of the sweat starting in her armpits, a physical manifestation she most disliked.
“Not cold, are you, dear?” were almost the first words Mrs. Lomax uttered.
“Not a bit, Mrs. Lomax, thank you. Now I quite understand you're unable to read the newspaper. Let me say I really don't think you miss much. But it did mean you weren't able to see the picture of the clothes Charlie was wearing, didn't it?”
“I do have a carer comes in a lot, dear, and she's ever so kind. She reads bits of the local paper to me, but she never read that bit. What did you say he was wearing?”
“A T-shirt, Mrs. Lomax.” Hannah could tell she didn't know what this was. “A thing—a garment—something like a sweater, only cotton. It's white and it's got a scorpion printed on it.”
“A what, dear?”
Describing a scorpion is surprisingly difficult. “A black thing,” Hannah began. Was it a reptile? An insect? An arachnid? “A bit like a sort of spider with a long tail—”
Doris Lomax cut her short. “Oh, no dear. I knitted a sweater for him but it was plain blue. Maybe he had a thing like that, but I don't know.” An unwelcome possibility occurred to her. “You don't mean, oh, you can't mean you've found—”
“We're not sure yet, Mrs. Lomax. We really can't tell but it's possible.” She had to say that.
“Oh, poor Charlie, poor Charlie. He wasn't quite right in his head, you know, but such a nice boy. A good boy.” Another unhappy idea occurred to her. “You don't want me to come and look at him, do you? I can see a bit—well, sort of shapes, but I wouldn't—I couldn't . . .”
“No, of course not,” Hannah said. “Of course not.” She didn't add that there was nothing to see but the basic structure of a man, common to all men. “One more thing—can you tell me what color Charlie's hair was?”
“His mother had fair hair, dear, but all the Cummingses was dark. Charlie was quite dark.” She looked gravely at Hannah. “Not quite as dark as you, dear, but getting on that way.”
Hannah was finding she desperately didn't want the body in Grimble's cellar to be Charlie Cummings. It was very unlike her, she thought, but she didn't want this old woman to suffer further hurt. Inspiration came to her. “How tall was Charlie, Mrs. Lomax?”
“Not very tall for a man, dear. Maybe five feet five or six.”
Hannah's relieved expression wouldn't have been visible, but the little sigh she gave reached Mrs. Lomax. “Thank you, Mrs. Lomax. You've been very helpful. I think you can be sure this isn't Charlie Cummings.”
“Can I, dear? But he's still dead somewhere, isn't he?”
A Passage to India was darkish and cool. A ceiling fan, not too aggressive, blew the air about and faintly agitated the colored streamers, figured in red and blue and gold, which hung against the walls. It was hard to tell if these were Indian decor or early Christmas decorations. Wexford and Burden were shown to what Rao the proprietor was starting to call “their” table.
Burden wore his silk suit. It was very discreet, charcoal gray with knife-edge creases to the trousers and long lapels to the jacket. But still it was silk and Wexford thought it a bit much, though he kept this to himself. Burden's shirt was plain white and his tie light gray with a single slightly off-center vertical stripe in black, as if he was trying to play down the effect of the suit, which he too perhaps knew was over the top. Matea, the beautiful Somali girl, brought menus and asked them in her heavily accented soft voice what they would like to drink. Water, of course, it would have to be water. She seemed to sense their reluctance and she smiled. Wexford asked her if they could have the fan off and she said she'd tell Rao.
When she had disappeared behind the bead curtain, he said to Burden, “If I didn't know you for an uxorious man, I'd suspect all this sartorial elegance being designed to impress or better still attract Matea.”
“Utter nonsense.” Burden never blushed. His face retained its even biscuit color through all embarrassments. “When I got dressed this morning I didn't even know we'd come here. It was your idea, if you remember. Since we're in the long-words department, my attitude to Matea is paternal or maybe avuncular.”
“Really? I hope you don't go telling people that old one about her being your niece. With your coloring no one would ever believe you.”
Burden laughed. “You were wrong about the body in the cellar being Charlie Cummings. He was far too tall.”
“Yes.” Wexford hesitated. “God knows who it is. We know the remains are those of a man and he was between forty and fifty when he died. Carina's now saying he's been dead eight years. We've run out of possible people he might be.”
“Could we try the National DNA Database?”
“Try it with what, Mike? The man in the cellar's DNA won't be on it. He died too long ago.”
Matea came back with a large jug of iced water and took their order. The long black hair that had hung loose when Wexford saw her at the inaugural meeting of KAAM had been wound up onto the top of her head and secured there with long jewel-headed pins. It struck him that she didn't wear the hijab. It would have been a shame if she had, he thought, the scarf covering her crowning glory. Perhaps she was one of those modern progressive Moslems who had broken with the old traditions, or maybe she wasn't a Moslem at all. Some Somalis were Christians, he had heard, some animists. Her hairstyle gave Matea a regal look. With her head held high and her back plumb-line straight, she walked, as Burden remarked, like some African queen.
“Seen many, have you?” Wexford made a face. “All we really know is that the clothes in the kitchen belonged to the man in the cellar. We don't know why he took them off or why, wearing only a vest and pants, he went down into that filthy cellar. Or was he killed elsewhere? There were no keys, no identification. Did his killer take those things?”
Wexford broke off as sweet-scented spicy dishes were brought, a large bowl of fragrant rice, little stone pots of green and scarlet pickles, a basket of naan. Matea asked if everything was all right.
“Excellent, thank you,” said Burden. “Delicious.”