Authors: Ruth Rendell
“It's him, Sarge,” Lyn said excitedly. “Six feet four, the chap in the cellar was.”
“It looks like it,” said the more cautious Barry, “but let's not jump to conclusions yet.”
The tray once more set down on the table, Lily Riley began getting into her stride. “Him and Bridget was talking of getting married. What I do remember was Bridget saying to Michelle as he was too young for her, really, being only forty and her getting on for fifty. A funny thing was she said he wrote poems to her. It was romantic, she said. Anyway, they stopped a couple of days, and then they went off to this Flagford, all three of them.”
Lyn was suspicious. “How come you remember all this, Mrs. Riley?”
Lily Riley spoke huffily. There had been an imputation in Lyn's tone she hadn't liked. “I'll tell you how come. He left Bridget, this Dusty did. They was going to get married, the date was fixed and all. They said to me, you've got to come to our wedding, Lily, and I said okay, I would.
“Well, they'd been picking plums all day at Morella's, Michelle said, and they come home to the van and Dusty said he had to go out, he'd be gone an hour at the most, and off he went but never come back. That's how I remember it. Michelle was so upset. She's got a soft heart, my girl, and she was in tears. He broke poor Bridget's heart, that man.”
Barry came to the crucial question. “Do you know his other name, Mrs. Riley? Could it have been Sam?”
“Dusty, they called him. I don't know what else. I never heard it. I know he come from somewhere in London. Same with Bridget, somewhere in London.”
“That wasn't much help, Sarge,” Lyn said when they were outside.
“You've done a good job finding that Mrs. Riley, Lyn,” said Barry, “but that's where you're wrong. When they call a man Dusty it's usually because his surname's Miller. Like a man called Grey is Smoky and a man called White is Chalky or Snowy but someone called Miller is always Dusty. So now you know.”
“If you say so, Sarge. I thought it might be because he looked dirty like Mrs. Riley said.”
The Family Records Centre showed a large number of Millers but, because this man had been forty, it was possible to narrow it down to those born in the late fifties and early sixties.
“I suppose I can put each one of these into the Web,” Lyn said, “and get a search engine to track him down. But if he's who we think he is, our man's dead. He's been dead eight years and he won't be on an electoral register anymore. Maybe it would be better to find dead Millers.”
“Are we looking for a connection between these two men?” Burden asked. “I mean, are we working on the premise that the chap in the cellar wasn't the only one Ronald McNeil killed? That he also shot Alan Hexham?”
“That's why I'm going to see Irene McNeil again now that she's home,” said Wexford. “But I don't think so, do you? There's no question of Hexham trespassing anywhere.”
“Adam's talked to all the taxi firms who were here eleven years ago, he's been very thorough, I must say. But it was always a hopeless task. What kind of a miraculous memory would someone have to have to remember that far back?”
“I don't know. I don't see how there can be a connection, yet if there's not it's too much of a coincidence. But I'm sure Hexham came here and came to see Tredown. I think he came to do research for Tredown's book The First Heaven. I've left a message on Selina Hexham's voice mail”—Wexford was proud of himself for knowing the term and bringing it out with such ease—“but she hasn't called me back yet.”
Irene McNeil had spent two days in a private nursing home since what she called her “ordeal” at Kingsmarkham police station. Since her return home, showing she wasn't always the helpless creature she seemed to be, she had engaged a full-time carer. This was a young man of daunting efficiency who had transformed the soulless cupboard-lined house with bowls of flowers and jardinières of houseplants. The place smelled of lemon air freshener. A boy in jeans and T-shirt was the last kind of person Wexford supposed Mrs. McNeil would find to tend on her, but he began to see that his analysis of her character had been wide of the mark. She might be old-fashioned and prudish, a stickler for manners and a snob, but she was very much an upper-middle-class woman of her generation too, one who had always had a man about the house—first her father, then her husband—and who bitterly missed the masculine presence. No doubt, also, whatever she said, she would have liked a son. Greg the carer answered a deeply felt need. Wexford suspected it was he who had painted her fingernails a silvery rose-pink, and it amazed him that Mrs. McNeil let him call her “Reeny.”
She still had her feet up, but now she was reclining on a sofa, her legs discreetly covered with a blanket. Rather to his surprise she made no reference to their previous meetings but instead was fervent on the subject of Greg, his excellences and his charm.
“Of course, having him here wouldn't have done at all when I was young,” she said. “I may be older than he”—as if there was any doubt about it—“but that would have made no difference. If one was a woman alone, one simply could not have a man staying overnight and that was all there was to it. It would have caused talk. Oh, thank you so much, Greg.”
The carer had brought not tea but a glass of what looked like iced coffee and a plate of the kind of biscuits you can only buy in delicatessens. “And what can I get you, sir?”
Wexford thought it might have been the first time in his life—at any rate for a long time—that anyone but the members of his team had called him “sir,” and even they now mostly called him “guv,” thanks to Hannah. “A cup of tea would be good,” he said, thinking Greg would be more likely to understand “good” than “nice.”
“Isn't he perfect?” Like a woman in love, Mrs. McNeil watched Greg depart for the kitchen, closing the door quietly behind him. In more mundane accents she asked Wexford what she could do for him. “Can I update you?” wasn't the kind of question she would have asked before the advent of Greg.
“The man your husband shot—” he began but Irene McNeil interrupted him.
“In self-defense!”
“Yes, well—you must have got a good look at him.”
“After he was dead. I didn't look too closely, I can tell you. He wasn't a pretty sight.”
“Mrs. McNeil, what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean he was dirty or injured in some other way?”
“I don't know. He wasn't old, I can tell you that. Not much older than Greg, probably, only Greg's always so spotlessly clean and neat.”
“If I told you this man's age was forty, would that be about right?”
Before she could reply, Greg came back with Wexford's tea. The biscuits provided were of a slightly lower standard than those on Mrs. McNeil's plate. Greg flashed his employer so dazzling a smile that Wexford found himself wondering in exactly what way he was on the make.
“About forty, Mrs. McNeil?”
“No, no, Greg is just forty—oh, you meant that creature who was trespassing in Mr. Grimble's house? I don't know. Possibly. I suppose he was about that.”
Next he asked her about the knife her husband had said was about to be used to attack him. This prompted Irene McNeil into an angry diatribe against Helen Parker, the young solicitor. He steered her back to the knife.
“There was no knife in the house, Mrs. McNeil, that's the difficulty.”
“John Grimble took things away, you know. You shouldn't believe him when he says he didn't take a thing, just left everything there.”
Wexford gently reminded her that whatever John Grimble had removed from his father's house, he had taken eleven years before, not eight. “Could your husband have brought the knife back home with him?”
A flash of alarm showed in her eyes. “Why would he do that?”
It was hardly for Wexford to find explanations for the behavior of a man like Ronald McNeil. “Your husband might have told you if he disposed of the knife.”
“Or I might have.” She spoke carefully. “I might have given it away. He might have brought it back home. I mean, when we lived at the Hall.”
“Is that what happened, Mrs. McNeil?”
“Will I get into trouble?” She spoke like a little girl who has been disobedient. “It wouldn't be very wrong, would it, to get rid of a knife? It wasn't mine, you see. Would it be stealing? It wasn't mine, it was that man's.”
Wexford was almost at a loss. He seemed to have strayed into the country of the mad. He was seeing what happens to people—women, mostly—who have been sheltered and protected all their lives and suddenly find themselves alone.
“Did you get rid of it, Mrs. McNeil?”
“It was stolen,” she said. “The cleaner I had stole it.” She stared at him. “I'm telling you the absolute truth.”
It was very nearly too much for him. He changed the subject.
“Had you ever seen this man before, Mrs. McNeil? Think carefully before you answer.”
“I know I'd never seen him before.”
“His name may have been Miller. He was called Dusty.”
This time she did ponder on the name. “The Tredowns once had a—well, a handyman they called Dusty. He used to drive their car sometimes too. I never saw him. That Ricardo woman told me.”
“When was this?”
“Oh, my goodness, how you expect me to remember things like this I really don't know.”
“You're doing very well,” he said eagerly.
This seemed to please her. She was susceptible to flattery and she smiled, though this may have been due to the reappearance of Greg with a tray on which was a rolled-up hot towel of the kind they give you in Chinese restaurants, a bottle of violet-scented toilet water, and a tube of hand cream.
“He's so thoughtful,” she said when she had anointed her hands. “I can't imagine now how I got on without him. When was it this Dusty was with them? Oh, at least ten years ago, maybe more like twelve.” She became almost chatty. “Mr. Tredown can drive, but he doesn't. Apparently he once caused an awful accident—someone was killed—and he's never driven since. The Ricardo woman can't and Mrs. Tredown can now, but she hadn't passed her test then. She passed it a year or two before we moved. Ronald said she'd no business being on the road when he heard she'd passed.”
All this was interesting enough, but it seemed of little use to him. The vital contribution Mrs. McNeil had made, perhaps the only contribution of any worth, was that a man called Dusty had worked for the Tredowns. Only they could tell him more now.
“I shall ask you about the knife again,” he said.
She shrugged, made an unusual movement with her hand, an impatient flutter. He was on his way out and Donaldson was waiting when his phone rang. It was Selina Hexham.
He took the call in the car. The answer he expected was a negative one, because now he had less faith in the idea that had come to him in the small hours. Things you think of when you wake in the night often look bizarre or stupid in the morning.
Instead she said, “That would mean the piece of paper with his writing on it makes sense. But I don't know. One small thing, though. It's so small I didn't think it worth putting in my book. I remember a magazine—well, a journal, I suppose you'd call it—lying on a table in our house. It was called The Author. Where it came from I don't know but there were some ads in it from people offering to do research for authors. I don't remember any more except Mum saying that would be a nice job for someone.”
He thanked her and unexpectedly she began to talk about how she'd changed her mind about finding her father's killer. Now she agreed with him. This man should be found, but still she was glad capital punishment had gone forever. Later he wondered how much credence he should put on her remembering The Author and her mother's comment. Would anyone's memory be that good? It was more likely, he thought, that Selina had, perhaps unconsciously, invented it in an effort to help him find the perpetrator of a crime.
They followed her car along the short drive and under the dripping trees. Maeve Tredown wasn't a good driver, uncertain and apparently nervous at the wheel. She came close to scraping the side of the old Volvo against the trunk of a towering conifer and pulled up too sharply outside the front door, setting the car juddering. The curious colors of the house, the jarring yellows and reds, looked brighter when washed by teeming rain. She opened the driver's door and leaned out to see who had come to visit.
“Good morning, Mrs. Tredown,” Wexford said. “Perhaps it would be best if we went straight inside.” He expected some irrational argument, but she got quickly out of the car, slamming the door violently, and let them into the house. “How is your husband?” he asked when they were inside.
“They are taking him into a hospice tomorrow,” she said. “There isn't any hope.” She said it in the kind of cheerful tone she might have used to say there wasn't anything to fear. “I thought a hospice was a place monks lived in with Saint Bernard dogs. But apparently not anymore.”
Wexford could smell the vanilla scent she wore as she led them along the dark passage past the haphazardly hung coats and flung footwear, throwing her raincoat onto a peg as she passed. This time they weren't to be received in the gloomy living room. Instead they went into a kind of farmhouse kitchen where, in front of an open fire, Tredown lay in an armchair with his legs up on the seat of another, pipe in mouth. Blankets covered him, though it was insufferably hot. At the other end of the room, the part where cooking was done, Claudia Ricardo stood in front of an Aga, apparently making lemon curd. The whole place smelled of a mixture of lemons and burning sage.
“I believe it's very hot in here,” Tredown said, removing the pipe without lifting his head. “I'm afraid I always feel cold these days. Perhaps you should take these gentlemen into the drawing room, Em.”
“Please don't worry about the heat, Mr. Tredown,” Wexford said. “We'd like to talk to you as well.”
“You'd better sit down, then.” Maeve Tredown was as offhand as her husband was courteous.
“Would you make us some coffee or tea, Cee?” Tredown apparently thought it safer to make this request of his ex-wife than his present one, or perhaps he only did so because Claudia was already engaged in cooking. She waved a wooden spoon in a gesture of acquiescence. “What did you want to ask me, Mr. Wexford?”