Authors: Ruth Rendell
“I never laid a finger on him,” Claudia Ricardo said again. “Funny, that phrase, isn't it? As if touching someone would kill him. The touch of death.” She laughed musical peals. “Be useful, wouldn't it? Like a ray shooting out of one's forehead you get in those films about aliens. Noli me tangere would have some real meaning.”
Priscilla Daventry, her solicitor, was looking grim. One's clients were not supposed to behave like this. One's clients should be rude or truculent or abusive or frightened, in need of reassurance or comfort, preferably silent, though that was rare, but not lighthearted and speculative as this woman was.
“Who drove Mr. Hexham to Kingsmarkham station?” Wexford asked her.
“Maeve couldn't drive then. She's a terrible driver now,” Claudia giggled. “I mean, I can't drive at all, but I'd still be better at it than she is, if you get my meaning. And of course you get my meaning! I was forgetting. She did that to your arm, didn't she? Poor Maeve, she shouldn't be allowed out at the wheel of a car.”
“Just answer the question, will you, Miss Ricardo?”
“I wasn't there. I went up to Owen.”
“Answer the question, please.”
“My client has answered the question,” said Priscilla Daventry. “She said she wasn't there.”
“Tell me about your relationship with Samuel Miller.”
“I suppose you mean ‘love affair.’ That's such a terrible expression, ‘relationship.’ I mean I have a relationship of sorts with you, though I'd rather not. I have a relationship with Miss Daventry, and I certainly have one with Maeve. But I don't fuck them, which is what you mean by the word, isn't it?”
Wexford just stopped himself shaking his head. He glanced at Burden, who said, “Did you have sexual relations with Samuel Miller?”
“Well, I did in 1995. When he was doing our garden. Sometimes in the garden. That shocks you, I can see. Policemen are such prudes.”
One of the most irritating things someone can say to you is to tell you you're shocked when you're not. Burden reflected on this without rising to the bait. “And when he came back three years later?”
“Not then,” she said. “He'd taken up with that Bridget woman and I'd—well, I'd moved on. That's the contemporary expression, isn't it? Moved on?” She looked at Wexford and smiled, turned the smile on to Burden, and then, broadening it, onto Priscilla Daventry. “I'm not going to say any more. Silence is about to reign. It's no good asking me because I'm going to keep silent.”
And she did. He tried to move her to answer, but she remained speechless. She sat smiling and contemplated her long, clawlike, unpainted fingernails. She crossed her legs, right over left, then left over right. She said nothing. Burden took over the questioning. She smiled at him. When he asked her if she had killed Alan Hexham, she smiled more broadly, and when he asked her if Maeve Tredown had, she closed her eyes. Staying there was useless, and after half an hour the interview was terminated, Claudia Ricardo returning to one of Kingsmarkham police station's two cells, and the two policemen going back to Wexford's office. Hannah and Barry had left but returned when sent for, and Karen Malahyde came with them. Claudia Ricardo had been given refreshments, but there had been none for Wexford and Burden, so Hannah sent down for tea.
“As I said, Hexham came to Athelstan House and saw Tredown alone,” Wexford resumed. “I don't really know how Tredown could have been so confident this story of his could become a best-seller. Of course this may be because I couldn't see much in it myself, but the fact remains that Tredown fell in love with it. He more or less told me so. And, as we know, he was right. He had to get his hands on it and make it his own. Maeve and Claudia appear to have been as enthusiastic as he was. But whereas Tredown left to himself wouldn't, I'm sure, have contemplated anything criminal to get hold of it, they would and did. Tredown may have thought of buying it from Hexham or simply persuading Hexham that whereas he could easily get it published because of the name he already had, Hexham himself would have had great difficulties.
“Did Hexham waver? Up in that room at Athelstan House did he listen to some proposition Tredown made to him but decided against it and to have a go at getting it published on his own? If he did so he condemned himself to death.”
“Signed his own death warrant, guv,” said Barry brightly, using the cliché Wexford had avoided.
“Yes, thank you, Barry. Hexham took his second manuscript away with him, no doubt very much encouraged by what Tredown had said to him and confident he could handle the rest himself,” Wexford resumed. “There was a 5:30 train to London and probably he aimed to catch it. It seems possible that Maeve told him someone would drive him as she couldn't drive at that time. Did those two try dissuading Hexham from trying to publish his own work? I don't think so. After he was dead Maeve must have told Tredown not to worry about him again because he had said before he left that he was making them a present of his book. And here was the second manuscript to prove it.”
“Would he have believed that?”
“We tend to believe what we want to believe, Barry, and Tredown passionately wanted to believe it.”
“So who did drive Hexham, guv?”
“No one,” Wexford said. “He was taken to their car all right. Or taken in the direction of the car, which was in the garage. Claudia is maintaining a useless silence down there. She might as well not bother. Maeve admitted everything to Inspector Burden, isn't that so, Mike?”
“Not everything,” said Burden, “but a lot.”
“Hexham was taken to the garage and his briefcase containing the second manuscript was taken from him and put into the boot of the car. There, as he bent down to get into the passenger seat, he was stabbed in the back with a knife, probably repeatedly stabbed.”
“You mean by Maeve or Claudia?” Barry asked.
“I mean by Samuel Miller. I mean by the lover of Claudia Ricardo and later on of Bridget Cook. Sam Miller, the so-called poet.”
“Miller may have stabbed him in a frenzy—God knows why—because one blow of the knife seemed to have cracked a rib. That broken rib is the only sign Carina could find that Hexham met his death by violence.”
“But we knew he must have,” Karen said, “because someone buried him.” Picking up Hannah's usage, she added, “Who was that, guv?”
Wexford sighed a little. “That was Miller. Grimble's trench had been dug and partially filled in by Bill Runge. Miller didn't really have to bury him. The grave had already been prepared. All he had to do was wrap the body in a sheet—Claudia's purple sheet, there was of course no bed linen burglary—carry the body to the trench after dark, take out a few spadefuls of earth, lay poor Hexham in there and cover him up again with, say, six inches of soil. Next day, June seventeenth, Runge finished filling in the trench. Someone must have helped Miller carry the body and I daresay that was Claudia. She'd be stronger than Maeve.”
“They must have paid Miller,” said Burden.
“Indeed they must. I doubt if sex with Claudia would have been sufficient inducement. But how much? Unless they tell us we'll never know and we'll never know even then because lying seems to come naturally to them. We do know that Miller took the ring off Hexham's finger and kept it. Maybe Claudia told him to. She wouldn't have dared keep it herself.
“He took it and three years later he gave it to Bridget Cook and went back to Athelstan House to blackmail those two women. For all I know at present, he may have been back several times in those three years to blackmail them. Over the plagiarism, of course, not the murder. He was too deeply involved in that himself. I don't suppose he threatened them with the police—it's more likely that he'd tell his story to a tabloid. They paid up and this time we do know the sum Miller extracted from them—a thousand pounds.”
“What happened to Miller after he'd buried Hexham?” Hannah asked.
“We must assume he went back to his fruit-picking poetry-writing career with possibly occasional forays into Sussex to demand money with menaces from the Tredown women. By this time of course The First Heaven was starting to be the success Tredown had predicted for it and, when Miller came back three years after Hexham's murder, they could pay up without too much pain. By this time too Miller had engaged himself to Bridget Cook. He may have genuinely meant to marry her. She had a caravan and a car. She wasn't a bad option for someone like him.
“With the thousand pounds in his jeans pocket he went into Grimble's bungalow. Who knows how often he'd been in there before when he was camped in Grimble's Field? Bridget's shower was broken and he stripped off his clothes in the kitchen, left them on the counter, and went into the bathroom to wash himself in the trickle of water that came out of the tap. He had no intention of putting those clothes on again—with the exception of the T-shirt, he'd have worn that again to please Bridget—though he didn't intend to leave them behind, either. The thousand pounds was in the pocket of his jeans and that too he intended to take with him. After he had washed, he meant to help himself to whatever he fancied from Arthur Grimble's wardrobe. In fact, he had already been into the bedroom and put the contents of his anorak pockets—keys and a watch and his wallet—into the pocket of a sports jacket. It was in the bathroom that Ronald McNeil encountered him.
“Now Irene McNeil says he menaced her husband with a knife, and the knife we took off Darrel Fincher may certainly have been his. But would a man who believed himself alone in a house, a man who was in his underwear, in a bathroom, carry a knife with him? I don't think so. I think what happened was that after McNeil had shot Miller, he found a knife among the clothes in the kitchen and put it in the bathroom to give credence to his story. The thousand pounds remained where it was, in Miller's jeans pocket. Pity it never found its way to Bridget Cook.”
“She had a lucky escape,” Hannah said.
“And maybe even she will think so,” said Wexford, “when all this gets to be public knowledge.”
In A Passage to India Wexford said to Burden, “We come in here because it's more or less next door—well, you come to feast your eyes on beauty and I must come because you do. I can't think of any other reason. I'm getting sick of Indian food.”
“There's a new restaurant opened on the corner of Queen Street. It's Uzbek. We could give it a go.”
The bead curtain was pushed aside and Matea came out, followed by Rao in a tight suit and a bow tie. Matea stopped when she saw them and whispered something to her employer. He seemed to be arguing with her, but after a moment or two, he spread his hands out, shrugged, and let her go back the way she had come. Two menus in his hand, he came over to Wexford and Burden, all smiles, bowing to them.
“What was that about?” Burden said when Rao had taken their order.
“God knows. Before we say any more, I have to tell you that Tredown is dead. Barry told me as we were coming out.”
Burden was silent. “I think this is a case where you could truly talk about a merciful release.”
“Yes. Poor wretch. Stealing Hexham's work didn't bring him much pleasure, did it? It brought him money. Money for those two hellcats. But when you come to think of it, they didn't know what to do with it when they had it, did they? Flagford is a pretty village, but they lived in the ugliest house in it. As far as I could gather, they never had a holiday. They hadn't got a decent piece of furniture. Their car was fifteen years old. When Tredown wanted to change his consciousness he didn't use an expensive opiate but a herb you could grow in your garden.”
Always interested in sartorial matters, Burden said, “And one of his wives dressed like a bag lady and the other one from Asda.”
Two more couples had come into the restaurant, followed by a man on his own. Matea emerged from the kitchen area, setting the bead curtain ringing. She moved so fast, her normal grace was lost. Her face seemed deliberately turned away from their table as she went to hand menus to the newcomers.
Without commenting on her behavior, Wexford said, “It's an image I shan't soon get out of my head, that poor devil sitting up there in a room—which, by the way, we never got to see—with someone else's manuscript in front of him, retyping the whole thing, making a little change here, a different word there, altering Hexham's no doubt superior style to something more like his own writing in those Bible epics. Maybe making those changes made him feel what he was doing wasn't all that wrong. He must have told himself that the finished work—think of it, Mike, over five hundred pages when it was a hardcover book, how many manuscript sheets must it have been?—but think of it, think of him laboring away, turning someone else's work into his own, so that he could tell himself in the long watches of the night that what he was doing wasn't so bad, wasn't real plagiarism, because its author had said he could have it—hadn't he?”
No wonder he saw ghosts, he thought, but didn't say aloud. Their chicken tikka and lamb korma arrived, brought by the proprietor. He seemed nervous. It was as if, Wexford said when the man had gone, he feared being questioned about Matea's conduct. An explanation for it awaited them next door in the police station but first they had their lunch.
“Poor Charlie Cummings was never found,” said Wexford.
“A great many missing people never are found. Darracott was never found.”
“I know. But all through this case I've had a sort of absurd hope that one of us would come across Cummings somewhere, alive and well. I suppose I should be glad we didn't find him dead. Yet somewhere he's dead. In some pond or lake or cave or deep ditch his bones are lying and it seems wrong, though I'm not sure I could say why, for anyone's body to lie unburied.”
Burden always felt uncomfortable when Wexford talked in this vein.
“What do they eat in Uzbekistan?”
“Camel,” said Wexford who didn't know. “Yak. Abominable Snowmen. Noodles. I wish I knew what was wrong with that girl. It worries me.”
They walked across the police station forecourt. “D'you think they'll still make the film?”