Authors: Ruth Rendell
Hannah went home to Bal, wondering how long this woman would stay with a man who beat her up and destroyed the poem another man had written for her. Then, holding Bal in her arms, she caught sight of the two of them, young and good-looking, in the mirror and thought that circumstances alter cases.
The hospice that would be Owen Tredown's home until he came to his final resting place was in Pomfret, a purpose-built unit set among trees. In the area between it and Pomfret High Streetwas a fairly large man-made pond on which were mallards and a couple of moorhens. Bulrushes and hostas with succulent bluish leaves fringed its banks. Donaldson drove past it, turned, and parked outside the hospice gates for Wexford to spend five minutes admiring its generous windows, its carefully laid-out garden, and all the various kinds of access provided for disabled visitors.
He liked the theory or idea of a hospice. He had looked the word up in the dictionary before coming out and found the first definition given for it was “a house of rest and entertainment for pilgrims.” Rest was right, but entertainment? Hardly, unless you counted the television sets that he'd heard were provided in every room. He approved, but still he asked himself what it must feel like to go into a place you knew you'd never come out of alive. You knew this was it, the last place in the world to lie down in, this was the antechamber to the crematorium. He told Donaldson to drive on.
The newspapers must already have Tredown's obituaries prepared. One or two of them would discard those prewritten epitaphs in favor of a tribute composed by a personal friend. There would be a photograph of Tredown, probably taken some twenty-five years before, when the author was young and handsome. The last line would be “he is survived by his wife Maeve.”
The rain had gone and it was another fine day, cold as November must be, but bright and sunny as summer without summer's haze. Greg was in the front garden of Mrs. McNeil's house, sweeping leaves from the path. When he saw Wexford arrive he pulled off the jade-green latex gloves he was wearing and ran to open the car door. Like a doorman at a luxury hotel, Wexford thought. Greg's T-shirt was white enough for a washing-powder advertisement, dazzling as fresh fallen snow, his jeans so tight as perhaps to ruin forever his chances of becoming a parent. He ushered the chief inspector into the house with some ceremony, called out, “Reeny, darling, your guest is here,” and asked Wexford what he would like to drink.
She was a different woman. If he had met her outside her expected environment he wouldn't have recognized her. Though bound to await trial on various serious charges, she looked ten years younger and happier than he had ever seen her. She still had her feet up on a footstool but she had sheer stockings on her legs and those feet encased in court shoes. Her hair had just been done—did Greg's talents extend that far?—and she wore a silk blouse and neat black skirt. She gave Wexford one of the first smiles he had ever had from her and extended a hand with freshly painted nails.
“Mrs. McNeil, I want to talk to you again about the—er, intruder in Mr. Grimble's house,” he said when Greg had brought tea for him and what might have been water with ice and lemon but was more likely gin and tonic for Irene McNeil. “We now believe his name was Samuel Miller. I want you to cast your mind back to September eight years ago and tell me something. In the days or weeks following the day you and your husband had removed his body from the bathroom to the cellar, did you talk about it? Did you discuss it? Did anyone else in the neighborhood mention him? Ask about him?”
She picked up a chocolate biscuit off the plate Greg had brought, laid it down again, and selected instead one with a crust of coconut icing. “I didn't talk about it. The less said about it the better, I thought. It was best forgotten.”
He marveled, not so much at her as at the society she had moved in that bred such dismissive indifference to a man's death. “Did your husband talk to you about it?”
“Ronald wanted to bury the body. He said it wasn't safe leaving it there. John Grimble or whatever his name is, he might find it. All I said was he shouldn't try to do that on his own, move it and bury it, I mean. He didn't ask me to help again. It was too much to expect of me.”
“Did he try to bury the body?”
“Of course he didn't,” said Mrs. McNeil. “It was in the cellar, wasn't it, when you found it? Ronald wasn't strong enough. He was nearly eighty, he wasn't well. It hurt his back when we had to move the body down those stairs. I shall always say it was that which damaged his hip. I told you it was the day after that he had a stroke and he wasn't strong enough to have a hip replacement. He wouldn't have stood the anesthetic.”
It was a grotesque and nightmarish picture she had conjured up, these two aged and no doubt misshapen people, limping and short of breath, struggling and gasping as they humped a dead man down a narrow staircase into a subterranean chamber. “Why do you think Miller was in the house?” Wexford asked.
“Looking for something to steal,” she said promptly. “And then he went to wash himself. That would be stealing too, wouldn't it, stealing Mr. Grimble's water?”
Wexford left her and returned to Flagford. The sun was low in the sky, creating a dazzling glare that the sun visor on the wind-screen did little to remedy. Grimble's Field had become a haven for rabbits, which scattered for the shelter of the trees when Wexford walked up the path. The bungalow had already been searched twice, but he still thought taking a third look might be worth a try. The first thing he did was turn on the cold taps in the bathroom, one over the bath and one on the washbasin. To his surprise—he had never fully believed in the theory that Miller had gone in there to wash himself or have a bath—water came from both. Not a gush or even a steady stream of water but a good deal more than a trickle. It would have been easy to fill the washbasin and not too unpleasant to wash in it in September. The sliver of soap was still there, cracked and blackened now. The shaving brush and the scrap of gray toweling were still there. But the knife . . . ?
Since they must both have known there was a chance of the body being discovered in the cellar, it would have been very much in Ronald McNeil's interest to place the knife near the body. But was there ever a knife? Bridget Cook had told Hannah he carried one “for his own protection,” an excuse Wexford had heard many times before. In spite of all the searching that had been done, could the knife still be in here? Wexford surveyed the bathroom, which must have been a squalid place even while in daily use by old Grimble. Watermarks and rust stains disfigured taps and plug-holes. All the pipework was exposed or wrapped in dirty rags and several tiles had come away from the side of the bath. The floor had been deep in dust but most of that had been swept up by the searchers. He knelt down on the cleanest spot and peered at the floorboards.
Moving his hands through the drifts of powdery yet gritty gray stuff that had accumulated behind the lavatory pan, he pushed his forefinger down a space between the boards. There was nothing to be seen, but his finger encountered some kind of obstruction. What he needed was a knife (a knife!) to slide down into the crack. He went into the kitchen, opened a likely-looking drawer, and found a handful of ancient and rusty cutlery. The knives were far too blunt to stab anyone or be, as far as he could see, of any use at all except perhaps the use he had in mind for one of them. He returned to the bathroom, slid the rusty blade down into the crack, and pushed until it half-lifted the obstruction, something small and cylindrical. Easing it out, he blew the dust from it and saw that what he had found was a cartridge, probably, almost certainly, from a twelve-bore shotgun.
That, at any rate, proved Mrs. McNeil's story. How much now did it matter if the mystery of the knife was never solved? Whether McNeil had killed in self-defense or in malice hardly mattered, either. He was dead and the only offense with which his widow could be charged was that of concealing a death. If Grimble ever got his planning permission, would anyone want to live in a house (or two houses or three) built here, where two murders had happened, where two bodies had been hidden? Wexford was thinking about this, imagining himself as a potential buyer, when he heard a door close softly and a footstep in the kitchen.
He turned around, finding himself in the same position as Miller must have been when he was surprised by McNeil entering the house. This intruder, however, wasn't carrying a shotgun. Claudia Ricardo said, without polite preamble, “I saw your car outside with that driver of yours in it.” Why was “that driver of yours” so much more offensive to Wexford than “your driver”? The words meant the same thing. “It seemed an opportunity to get some facts out of you.”
He said nothing, waited.
“Is it true that was Dusty's body you found in here?”
“Yes, it's true.”
“And he'd been dead for eight years? Murdered? How funny. And it was eight years in September?”
“It would seem so,” said Wexford.
“If only we'd known,” she said, as if to herself. “That's why he never came back. I thought he'd come back, I really did.”
The thought came to him then that this woman, attractive in a bizarre way, had been sexually involved with Miller. Not perhaps in 1998 but three years before that. In jeans and clinging red sweater, she looked younger than when she wore her long skirts and “hippyish” patchwork. She pushed her hands through her hair, the movement lifting her cheeks and giving youth to her face. Silent for a while, apparently speculating, she said, “What happened to the money?”
“The thousand—” he said deliberately, “I mean, the hundred-pound wedding present?”
She wasn't the kind of woman who blushed, but her eyes narrowed.
“I can't tell you that, Miss Ricardo,” he said. “Now it's your turn to tell me something. When Miller came to you eleven years ago, worked for you as a handyman and drove your car, did he bring you the manuscript of a novel for Mr. Tredown to read?”
A strange expression had come into her face, calculating and sly. “Whatever makes you ask?”
“Perhaps you'd just answer the question.”
“Only if we can go and sit down somewhere. Have a little tête-à-tête? This place is a hole and a dump, but it's not as foul as this in the bedroom.”
The stench of old clothes and mothballs was unpleasant. Mice had been eating the old flock mattress. It was strange, Wexford had sometimes thought, how rodents could eat unpalatable, nutrition-free substances and apparently thrive on them. “Now perhaps you'd answer the question,” he said again.
She shrugged in a way that managed to be offhand and involved at the same time. He noticed how long her neck was, a desirable feature in a woman. “Yes, well, people were always sending him manuscripts,” she said, contempt in her voice. “It was him teaching in creative writing schools that did it. They'd go along and sign up or whatever they did, poor deluded creatures, and go to his classes and most of them got crushes on him. He used to be quite good-looking—we were known as a handsome couple—would you believe it?” When she saw Wexford didn't intend to answer her, she shrugged and went on, “Of course he only did it for the money. He had to, since he didn't make much from his books. I've never worked—did you know that? Never. Maeve did. She was someone's secretary. But me, I never fancied working. You have to get up so early in the morning. The people Owen taught, they'd go home and write something, usually some derivative rubbish or so boring you wouldn't believe. They'd send it to him asking for his comments. We got divorced and he married Maeve. She had an income from somewhere, not much, but better than nothing. Those manuscripts, Maeve and I used to read bits of them out loud and have a laugh, it was most amusing. Owen read them all, he was sorry for the people who wrote them, and he'd spend good money on the return postage.”
“And Miller, did he bring a manuscript?”
“You asked me that before,” she said. “He may have. How would I know? If he did Owen didn't say anything to me about it. He didn't like us laughing at them. He's got a soft heart, poor old thing, so maybe he kept it dark. He was well then, of course.”
Wexford wondered which piece of information that he had given her or question he had asked was responsible for the huge improvement in her spirits since she first walked into the house. Then she had been tense, anxious, but now as they left, her step was lighter and she looked young. It was no longer too difficult to believe that eleven years ago she had been the lover of a man of thirty-two.
“I'm off to see Owen,” she said conversationally. “With Maeve, of course. I mean, she'll have to drive me. I'm not prepared to go on the bus. You wouldn't give me a lift, I suppose?”
“I'm afraid not, Miss Ricardo,” he said.
His destination led him in the opposite direction to hers, back into Kingsmarkham. This suburban estate—many like it had sprung up around the town—lay quietly under a mother-of-pearl sky, November's sunset colors. One of the residents daringly mowed his lawn, another was cutting the last roses of the year, the bruised and misshapen flowers of late autumn. Irene McNeil's house had the indefinable look homes have in the daytime when their occupants are asleep. A shuttered silent look, a stillness.
If he hadn't known someone must be at home, Wexford would have given up after the second ring. But he pressed the bell a third time, there was a patter of soft footsteps, and Greg opened the door. Five minutes before, Wexford was sure, he had been asleep, had combed his hair on the way to let him in. His face was like the face of an infant who has been wakened too soon. But he wasn't one to lose his cool, as he might have said himself.
“Hi, Mr. Wexford, how're you?”
When this vacuous greeting started to become commonplace, Wexford resolved not to answer it in any circumstances. “I'd like to see Mrs. McNeil.”
“Oh, dear, she's fast asleep.”
“You'll do,” Wexford said. “In fact, you may do even better.”