Authors: Ruth Rendell
“Could it be—is it possible—I mean, is it absolutely certain it was a—a violent death? Could it have been a heart attack? Could he have just fallen down dead in that field?”
Wexford sighed. “You don't know how much I would like to let you believe that, Selina, but I can't. His body had been buried. Why would it have been buried if he had died a natural death?”
“No, I see.”
“I know you're upset. You would be a very unnatural daughter if you weren't. If you like I can say that will do for now and I can leave you alone to tell your sister, and I can come back tomorrow or the next day. But I have some questions I need to ask you now that we have identified your father's body. The sooner I ask them the sooner we shall find whoever—how your father came to die.”
“Of course you must ask me. Vivien won't be here till five. We'll have the evening together.”
“Then first, if I may,” said Wexford, “I should like to see the room that was his study.”
They went upstairs. He had been in many houses like this one in the course of his work—semidetached, the two ground-floor rooms usually made into one, two sizable bedrooms and a “box room.” They had sprung up all over England before and just after World War II, comfortable, once affordable, modest houses designed for a couple and two children. The box room here was tinier than usual. It was still as it must have been when Diana Hexham occupied it. Her single bed was there, a long mirror on the wall, a narrow wardrobe barely a foot deep. That was all there was room for apart from a row of books on the windowsill, held in place by wooden bookends, a complete set of Jane Austen in paperback, To Kill a Mockingbird, Madame Bovary in translation, the poems of Wilfred Owen.
“Your father had a desk in here and an electric typewriter?” he asked.
“And the chair he sat in and a lot of books.”
“Yes. What happened to them?”
“His books? We kept them all together when Mum moved in here. They're downstairs.”
He had another look around the tiny room but nothing was to be learned there. Back in the living room where they had sat, she led him to the bookshelves that had been built into the corner on the left of the French windows and that extended along most of the adjacent wall.
“The ones that are in that section are the ones that were in his study,” Selina said. “Oh, except for the Oxford Dictionary and Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. They're with the other dictionaries over there.”
He read the titles. Darwin's Origin of Species, Roget's Thesaurus, Ovid's Metamorphoses, The Greek Myths by Robert Graves, a collection of Icelandic sagas, half a dozen books by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins. It seemed a wild idea now that he might find some link between them to help him find what work Alan Hexham had been doing in that minuscule room.
“Do they help?” Selina asked.
“I don't think so.”
He looked along the other shelves, saw novels by various authors who had been well known a dozen years before and were still well known. Among them were Owen Tredown's The Son of Nun and The Queen of Babylon.
“The half-sheet of A4 paper you mention in your book,” he said, “with a list on it in your father's handwriting, may I see it?”
“Of course,” she said, but as she opened a drawer under the bookshelves and handed him an envelope, he saw there were tears in her eyes.
Hexham had been one of those rare people, growing rarer, whose handwriting was beautiful, a fine calligraphy but plain and without flourishes. He had listed seven authors of science fiction and two of historical novels, several of them, Wexford believed, no longer well known. Alongside the names he had written, in two cases, what were probably phone numbers, and underneath these: “Fact-finding? Proofreading? Editing?”
“Mr. Wexford,” Selina said as they returned to the seats they had had earlier, “I don't really care if you find the—the person who did whatever he did to my father. It doesn't matter now, does it?”
He shook his head. “You're wrong there. It matters. We haven't put it into words yet, but I will now. Someone killed your father and it would be wrong for that person to get away with it, to have profited from his crime. I have to believe that if I am to be in this business I'm in. For one thing, he might do it again, and for another, killing is the worst thing anyone can do and society needs to punish the perpetrator of such a crime for its own—its own well-being.”
“I suppose you're right. What did you want to ask me?”
“First of all, can you think why your father would have gone to Flagford? Did he know anyone there?”
“The only place he ever went to in Sussex—apart from when we all went to Worthing once on holiday—was Lewes. That was because of Maurice Davidson. They'd been friends at university, though Mr. Davidson was a mature student, he was much older than Dad. They didn't see a great deal of each other. I think they met mainly when Mr. Davidson came up to London. We all went there once for lunch. It was summer and I think it was for a picnic. I don't remember much about it. I was only about four.”
“Lewes is quite a long way from Flagford,” Wexford said. “I'm going to say some names to you and ask you to tell me if your father ever mentioned them. If you think you can remember.”
“I'd remember.”
“All right.” He enunciated the names slowly, pausing between each one and watching her face. “McNeil. Hunter. Pickford. Grimble. Tredown.”
“Tredown,” she said. “That's the name of the writer who wrote The First Heaven. ”
“One and the same,” Wexford said. “His name's not on this list. Your father never spoke of him?”
“I don't think The First Heaven had been published by then.”
“I noticed two of his earlier books on your shelves. Were they your father's?”
“I suppose so. Or my mother's.”
“And no bells are rung by McNeil, Grimble, Pickford, or Hunter? Louise Axall? Theodore Borodin?”
“I don't think so. I just can't imagine why my dad would have gone to a village in the middle of Sussex. Is there a train station?”
“Not at Flagford. There's one a few miles away at Kingsmarkham. Anyone heading for Flagford would have to take a taxi unless he was very keen on walking. Was he?”
“It was pouring with rain, Mr. Wexford. I don't think he'd have tried walking.”
Wexford pondered. “Did he take anything with him? I realize a child doesn't take too much notice of that sort of thing.”
“Vivien and I left for school before he left.” Her voice trembled a little and she coughed to clear her throat. “But he already had his raincoat on. He didn't have an umbrella, he never carried one. I know he meant to take his briefcase because he had it open and was looking inside a few minutes before. I never thought much about it at the time, but it was rather odd, wasn't it, taking a brief-case to a funeral?”
“Not so odd perhaps. He was a reading man so he'd have had a book with him to read on the train. A magazine? A newspaper?
Maybe something of Mr. Davidson's to give his widow as a memento, something he'd had since university?”
“You're right. I suppose it could have been any of those things. I wish I could be more help.”
He wondered if what he had said had made her change her mind about wanting her father's murderer brought to justice. Perhaps. He said good-bye, that he would need to see her again, and left for his own walk to the station. Coming along the street he met Vivien Hexham.
“Your sister will tell you about it,” he said, “better than I can.”
Having lunch with Burden in A Passage to India, he was approached rather shyly by Matea, who told him her parents had gone on holiday to Mogadishu, taking Adel and Shamis with them.
“I cannot make them not go,” she said.
Wexford shook his head. “Unfortunately, nor can I.”
Following her with his eyes as she disappeared through the bead curtain, Burden said, “Isn't she stunning? Just so perfect.”
Rage welled up in Wexford. “Let me tell you, sex with her wouldn't give you or her much pleasure.”
Burden recoiled, shocked, not so much by the words as where they came from. “That's a bit near the bone, isn't it?”
“Is it? Well, anger hath a privilege, as someone says in Shakespeare.”
“I take it you're implying she's been circumcised?”
“Genitally mutilated. They all have, all these beautiful women. Ninety-nine percent of them in Somalia. And now let's talk of something else.” Wexford poured still water for both of them. “It looks likely that Hexham took the 2:20 train from Lewes, which reached Kingsmarkham at 2:42. We know he ended up in Grimble's Field, poor chap, and it seems reasonable to guess that he took one of the station taxis to Flagford, a place where he may never have been before.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Selina Hexham says her parents had been to Sussex only to visit the Davidsons in Lewes, and once when they all went on holiday to Worthing. Alan Hexham seems to have been rather a secretive man, so it may be that he came down here sometimes without telling his wife or children, but somehow I don't think so.”
“He was secretive about only one thing—what he did in that study.”
Matea came back with their biryanis, a plate of naan, and a dish of spices and relishes. Her hands were the longest and slenderest Wexford had ever seen on a woman, but he left it to Burden to comment.
“Her wrists have the span of some women's fingers,” said Burden.
“Do shut up,” Wexford said. “Now what you said before uttering that sloppy exaggeration is probably true. He seems to have been quite open in other respects, a good father, a good teacher, and no doubt a good husband. From what I now know of him I'd be very surprised if there was ever another woman in his life or if he ever looked at one.” This with a pointed glance at Burden. “Whatever use he put that room to I'm pretty sure it was nothing—dishonorable, if that isn't too outdated a word these days.”
“I'm wondering,” Burden said thoughtfully, “if it could have been something he was doing or was trying to do that he didn't want his family to know about until he had—well, succeeded.”
“Interesting. Go on.”
“Some business he was setting up. Maybe something he'd invented, some small thing, a gadget—he was a scientist, after all.”
“Yes, but a biologist, not some sort of engineer. This, whatever it was, has to have been something that needed very little equipment and presumably entailed very little expense.”
“Was he doing it to make money, d'you think?”
“I don't know,” said Wexford. “No doubt, they needed money. They could have done with a bigger house, but it doesn't seem to me a need for more money loomed very large in his existence. I think doing whatever it was had some particular importance in his life irrespective of what financial gain was involved.”
Fixed on his idea of Hexham as inventor, Burden said, “You pointed out that he was a biologist, not an engineer. Douglas Chadwick was an engineer and he'd been living in Flagford. More than that, he'd been living in Grimble's house.”
“But he was gone before the summer of 1995, Mike. Still, I like your idea. Hexham might not have known he no longer lived there or that old Grimble was dead. We know Chadwick died two years ago, but we don't know where he went when he left Grimble's. He and Hexham may have corresponded. He may have come back to Flagford for the purpose of meeting Hexham there. But it's all speculation, isn't it? And I haven't the faintest idea how we could prove it or what would come out of it if we did.”
“As you say, Hexham must have got to Flagford in a taxi. It was pouring with rain, so there's no way he'd have walked. It's much too far.”
“You're saying we can start on the taxi firms or those which were operating eleven years ago?” Wexford almost groaned, remembering past investigations, questioning cab drivers, checking times. “I suppose Damon could do it or the new chap. But is it likely, is it even possible, any driver would remember that far back? Would you remember the face of a driver who picked you up in a taxi at Kingsmarkham station in 1995?”
“Probably not, but that's rather different. How many people look at taxi drivers' faces? But they look at ours. I think we should try it.”
Flagford was on the edge of the fruit-growing area, and for some reason it was particularly suited to apples, pears, plums, and soft fruit, in the midst of dairy farming. Of the two fruit farms, Morella's was the bigger, with a thriving farmer's market and a juice-production plant as well as acres of orchards and strawberry fields. In recent years, these last had been covered in glittering polytunnels, which in midsummer looked like sheets of ice melting in the sun but which now were fallow fields where nothing grew. In the orchards all the apples and pears had been picked weeks before. The rows of trees were in the process of being pruned. Damon drove himself and Barry along a lane that led between rows of alders to a building that housed the offices of the chief executive and the administrative staff.
It appeared that Morella's had come a long way since the day Bill Runge had come here with his wife and daughter. The chief executive, a man called Graham Bailey, said they now employed people from Eastern Europe, mostly Romanians and Bulgarians, from June till October, housing them in what he called “hostels,” and pointed out of the window. Six trim buildings now stood on the field where fruit-pickers had once camped, concrete paths linking each one to its neighbor and to the forecourt and shop. Bailey said proudly that every building was equipped with “bathroom facilities,” showers, and a self-service laundry.
“Did you ever employ itinerant workers?”
“Gyppos?” said Graham Bailey. “Not in my time. I've only been here three years. There were some who used to come here and camp over there. That was before we put up the hostels.” He took Barry and Damon into the farmer's market store and called over an assistant who, he said, had worked there for fifteen years, first on the land and later when the store originally opened.
The shop sold cakes and pies and frozen food, ice cream and elaborate desserts, as well as fruit and vegetables. Everything was pristine and neatly kept. Damon, always hungry, asked if he could buy a black-currant pie, a request that earned a frown from Barry and a sharp suggestion that they should move on. They were taken into an administrative office, Bailey telling them with excusable pride that the names of everyone who had ever worked for them were kept on record, names and home addresses even if their homes were (as was the case recently) in Sofia or Krakow or on the Black Sea coast.