Some Lie and Some Die (10 page)

‘Did you want to say something to me?’ Wexford asked gently.

‘No, sir.’

‘Back to the station, then. We can’t sit here all day.’

By Wednesday Paul Wickford had been cleared of suspicion. After leaving Joan Miall at the Townsman Club in Hertford Street, he had gone into a pub in Shepherd Market where he had drunk one vodka and tonic before driving back to Earls Court. Waiting for him in his flat was his brother who brought the news of their mother’s serious illness and asked Paul to drive with him immediately to Sheffield. Paul had then asked the tenant of the second floor flat to cancel his milk and papers and, if he happened to see Dawn Stonor, to tell her where he had gone. The two brothers had reached their mother’s house in Sheffield soon after midnight, and by the following morning she was dead.

In spite of there being only thin evidence of Dawn’s killer having lived on the outskirts of Stowerton, a house-to-house investigation had begun on Tuesday afternoon of the whole district. No one had seen Dawn; no one had seen a girl in mauve alone or with a man. Only two wives had been absent
from home on the evening in question, one with her husband and one leaving him behind to mind their four children. No wife had been away for the whole night and no wife had missed a red dress. Wexford’s men searched the fields for the trouser suit and the food. It was dreary work, for the rain fell heavily and there were fears that the river would flood.

Mrs Clarke and Mrs Peveril remained the only people who had seen Dawn after five-twenty, Mrs Peveril the last person—except her killer—to have seen her alive. Wexford concentrated on these two women, questioning them exhaustively, and it wasn’t long before he found something odd in their evidence. It had not previously occurred to him that they might know each other, and it was only when, sitting in Mrs Clarke’s living room, listening to her answer the phone, that the thought occurred to him.

‘I can’t talk now, Margaret. I’ll ring you later. I hope Edward soon feels better.’

She didn’t say who had been at the other end of the line. Why should she? She sat down with a bright, insincere smile. ‘So sorry. You were saying?’

Wexford said sharply, ‘Were you talking to Mrs Peveril?’

‘How
could
you know? I was, as a matter of fact.’

‘Then I imagine you are the one person she claims acquaintance with in this district?’

‘Poor Margaret. She’s so neurotic and she has an awful time with Edward. I suppose I am her only friend. She doesn’t make friends easily.’

‘Mrs Clarke, you were first questioned about Dawn Stonor last Sunday evening, I think? We questioned people on this side of the estate first.’

‘Well, you ought to know that better than me.’

She looked a little offended, bored, but not at all frightened. Wexford considered carefully. Burden and Martin and Gates had begun their questions here at seven, not reaching The Pathway till nine. ‘Did you phone Mrs Peveril on Sunday evening before nine?’ Her glance became wary, defensive. ‘I see you did. You told her you’d been questioned and, moreover,
that you’d been able to help. It was only natural for you to talk to your friend about it. I expect you described the girl to her and told her which way you’d seen her go.’

‘Is there anything wrong in that?’

‘Discretion would have been wiser. Never mind. Describe Dawn Stonor to me again now, please.’

‘But I’ve done it hundreds of times,’ cried Mrs Clarke with exasperated exaggeration. ‘I’ve told you over and over again.’

‘Once more, for the last time.’

‘I was coming along to get the bus into Kingsmarkham. I saw her get off the bus that went the other way. She crossed the road and went into The Pathway.’ Mrs Clarke spoke slowly and deliberately as might a parent explaining for the dozenth time to a not very bright child the point of a simple story. ‘She had fair hair, she was in her twenties, and she wore a lilac-coloured trouser suit and mauve shoes.’

‘That was what you told Mrs Peveril?’

‘Yes, and you and all your other people. I couldn’t say any more because I don’t know any more.’

‘You didn’t, for instance, notice her large mauve bag with a gilt buckle or that there was a darker edging to the suit?’

‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t notice that and you saying it doesn’t bring it back to me or anything. I’m sorry but I’ve told you everything I know.’

He shook his head, not in denial of her statement, but at his own bewilderment. At first, briefly, when she put the phone down he had suddenly been certain that Mrs Peveril had never seen Dawn at all, that the news from her friend had sparked off an urge for sensationalism, giving her an opportunity to make herself important. He remembered how, although she said she had taken careful note of the girl’s appearance in order to tell her husband about her, she had never told him. But now he knew she must have seen her. How else could she, and she alone, have known of the bag and the purple border to the tunic?

Three houses that backed on to Sundays, three garden gates opening on to a narrow strip of land beyond which was the quarry.… Each garden separated from its neighbours by high woven chestnut fencing, a strip of land overgrown with dense bushes and quite tall trees. Wexford thought how easy it would have been to carry a body out of one of those houses by night and drop it into the quarry. And yet, if Dawn had gone into one of those houses instead of across the fields, if Mrs Peveril had seen her do so and was a seeker after sensation, wouldn’t these facts have made a far greater sensation?

‘I thought you’d leave me alone after I’d told you the truth,’ said Mrs Peveril fretfully. ‘I shall be ill if you badger me. All right, Mrs Clarke did phone me. That doesn’t mean I didn’t see her too, does it? I saw her and I saw her walk across those fields.’

‘She couldn’t have gone into any of those houses, anyway, sir,’ said Burden. ‘Unless it was into Mrs Peveril’s own house. In which case Mrs P. presumably wouldn’t say she’d seen her at all. Dawn can’t have gone into Dunsand’s or Miss Mowler’s. We’ve checked at Myringham, at the university, and Dunsand didn’t leave there till six. He’d have been lucky to get home by six-thirty, more like twenty to seven. Miss
Mowler was with her friend in Kingsmarkham till a quarter to eight.’

They went back to the police station and were about to enter the lift when a sharp draught of wind told Wexford that the double doors to the entrance foyer had been swept unceremoniously open. He turned round and saw an extraordinary figure. The man was immensely tall—far taller than Wexford who topped six feet—with a bush of jet-black hair. He wore an ankle-length pony-skin coat and carried a canvas bag whose sopping wet contents had soaked the canvas and were dripping on to the floor. Once inside, he paused, looked about him confidently and was making for Sergeant Camb who sat drinking tea behind his counter when Wexford intercepted him.

‘Mr Mbowele, I believe? We’ve met before.’ Wexford put out his hand which was immediately gripped in a huge copper-coloured vice of bone-crushing fingers. ‘What can I do for you?’

The young African was extremely handsome. He had all the glowing virile grace which has led clothes designers and model agencies and photographers to take up the slogan—‘ Black is beautiful’. Beaming at Wexford, his soft, dark eyes alight, he withdrew his hand, dropped the sodden bag on to the floor and undid the collar of his coat. Under it his chest was bare, hung with a chain of small green stones.

‘I don’t altogether dig this rain, man,’ he said, shaking drops of water off his hair. ‘You call this June?’

‘I’m not responsible for the weather.’ Wexford pointed to the bag. ‘And rain wasn’t responsible for that unless the floods have started.’

‘I fished it out of the river,’ said Louis Mbowele. ‘Not here. At Myringham. That’s quite a river now, your little Kingsbrook, man. I go down the river every morning and walk. I can think down there.’ He stretched out his arms. It was easy to imagine him striding by the full flowing river, his mind equally in spate, his body brimming with vibrant energy. ‘I
was thinking,’ he said, ‘about Wittgenstein’s principle of atomicity.…’

‘About
what?
’

‘For an essay. It’s not important. I looked in the river and I saw this purple silk thing …’

‘Is that what’s in the bag?’

‘Didn’t you get that? I knew what it was, man, I’d read the papers. I waded in and fished it out and put it in this bag—it’s my girl friend’s bag—and brought it here.’

‘You shouldn’t have touched it, Mr Mbowele.’

‘Louis, man, Louis. We’re all friends, aren’t we? I’ve no prejudice against the fuzz. The fuzz have their place in a well-organised state. I’m no anarchist.’

Wexford sighed. ‘You’d better come upstairs and bring the bag with you.’

In the office Louis made himself immediately at home by taking off the pony-skin coat and drying his hair on its lining. He sat on a chair like one who is more accustomed to sit on the floor, one long leg stuck out and the other hooked over the chair arm.

‘Exactly where did you find this, Louis?’

‘In the river between Mill Street and the college grounds. It’d been swept down from round here somewhere. Look, why freak out about it? If I’d left it there it’d be down by the sea somewhere now. Keep your cool, man.’

‘I am not losing my cool,’ said Wexford who couldn’t help smiling. ‘Was there anything else in the river?’

‘Fish,’ said Louis, grinning, ‘and sticks and stones and a hell of a lot of water.’

It was pointless, anyway, to ask about the paper carrier of food. What carrier bag, what cardboard cartons, would survive ten days and fifteen miles of pounding in that swollen stream? The can and the jar would survive, of course. But only a miracle would have brought them to precisely the same spot in the river as the trouser suit when Louis Mbowele had found it. Maybe the Wittgenstein principle provided for that
sort of coincidence, but Wexford decided not to pursue it. The bag and, to a lesser extent the coat, were soaking his carpet.

‘Well, I’m very grateful to you. You’ve been most public-spirited.’ Wexford risked his hand again and managed not to wince when the vice enclosed it. ‘There’s a bus goes to Myringham at ten past which you ought to be in time for.’

‘I ought if I’m going to get to Len’s tutorial.’ He glanced at the window. It was pouring. ‘Have you ever been to Marumi?’

‘Marumi?’

‘My country. Sometimes you get no rain there for three years. Man, is that country dry! You like the sun?’

‘It makes a change,’ said Wexford.

‘You said I was to remember you when I came into my kingdom. It won’t be a kingdom but I’ll need fuzz and I could get along great with you if you got rid of your hang-ups. How does it grab you?’

‘I’ll be too old by that time, Louis.’

‘Age,’ said the philosopher, ‘is just a state of mind.’ He looked, Wexford thought, about twenty. ‘It won’t be that long, man, not long at all. Get yourself together. Think it over.’

From the window Wexford watched him cross the street, swinging the wet, empty bag. He chuckled. When Burden came into the room, he looked up from the mauve rags he was examining.

‘Just been offered a job, Mike.’

‘Doing what?’

‘My own thing, man, my own thing. When the rain and boredom here freak me out I can go boss the fuzz in a sort of black Ruritania. Can you see me in epaulettes with a Mauser on each hip?’

‘My God,’ said Burden. He fingered the torn material fastidiously. ‘Is that the missing suit?’

Wexford nodded. ‘Down to the purple edging, as described by our accurate Mrs Peveril. Louis Mbowele found it in the river at Myringham. It had obviously been washed down there by the heavy rains.’

‘From those fields?’

‘From up there somewhere. She was killed up there. I’m as sure of that as I’m sure I’ll never be the Maigret of Marumi.’

Wexford remembered Miss Mowler from when she had been a district nurse in Kingsmarkham. His wife had broken her ankle and Miss Mowler had called three times a week to bath her and keep an eye on the plaster cast. She greeted him like an old friend.

‘Mrs Wexford not been climbing any more ladders, I hope? And how are your lovely girls? I saw Sheila on television last week. She’s getting quite well known, isn’t she? And amazingly good-looking.’

‘You mean it’s amazing with me for her dad?’

‘Oh, Mr Wexford, you know I didn’t mean that!’ Miss Mowler blushed and looked very confused. She tried to cover her gaffe with a string of explanations, but Wexford laughed and cut her short.

‘I’ve come to talk to you about this murder, Miss Mowler.’

‘But I can’t help you. I wasn’t here.’

‘No, but you were here later in the evening. If there was anything you noticed, any little oddity …’

‘I really can’t help you,’ she said earnestly. ‘I’ve only been here three months and I hardly even know my neighbours.’

‘Tell me what you do know of them, of the Peverils especially.’

The hall of the bungalow was rather garishly decorated, black and gilt predominating. The black bitumastic flooring curved upwards at the edges to meet an astonishingly hideous wallpaper. Wexford was rather surprised that sprays of lipstick-red flowers, each petal a pear-shaped scarlet blot, with spiralling black stems and glossy golden leaves, should be to Miss Mowler’s taste. He did not tell her so as she led him into the living room, but he must have looked it, for she plunged into characteristic excuses.