Some Lie and Some Die (21 page)

Wexford went up to the front door and tried Dunsand’s keys. Both worked. The third key, the one Tate had given him, looked different, and by now he was sure it wouldn’t move the lock. It didn’t.

‘It’s a much older key than the others,’ said Burden. ‘What’s Tate playing at?’

‘Let’s go inside.’

The whole house had been searched, but for evidence of a crime, not for clues to a life. Wexford remembered how Dunsand had planned to redecorate the place. He held on to that, certain it must have some significance. In a week’s time perhaps that ugly wallpaper, those wriggling black stems, those golden flowers, would have been removed. Dunsand would have stripped it down, replaced it. But Dunsand had confessed …

Reticently, disliking the job, he went into the living room where the cacti were, where Dunsand had sat, blindly studying his brochures, and opened the desk. He found no letters, only bills; no marriage certificate, no album of photographs. But in a small drawer under the roll-top he discovered Dunsand’s address book, a brown leather-covered book very sparing of entries. A London phone number was recorded under the letter T, just a number followed by a dash and the name Helen. Wexford noted the code and thought it might probably be Vedast’s. He looked under S and under D but found no reference to Dawn Stonor.

It was at this point that it occurred to him how she, the dead, she whose death was the cause of this enquiry, had for some days past seemed to fade from its screen. It was as if
she, as a real person, a personality, had lost her importance, and that he was searching for the answer to some other puzzle in the ramifications of which her death had been almost incidental. And he saw her—vividly but briefly—as a pawn, a used creature, her life blundering across other, brighter lives, falling through folly and vanity into death.

But the vision went, leaving him no wiser, and he thrust his hands once more into the pigeon-holes of the desk. A bunch of photographs came to light at last. They were in an envelope stuffed into a slot at the side of the roll-top interior, and they were mostly snapshots of Dunsand, much younger, with people who were evidently his parents, but underneath them were two much larger shots which Wexford took to the window. The strong fight showed him first a wedding photograph, Dunsand still young, Dunsand smiling down without reserve at his bride in her badly fitting wedding dress, her veil wind-blown, young bony hands clutching a tight posy of rosebuds. Unless he had been twice married, the bride must be Nell. Time and art had changed her so much in the intervening years—eight? Ten?—since the picture was taken as to make her scarcely recognisable as its subject. Her hair was dark, cropped short, her face fresh and childlike. But it was she. The big yearning eyes were unchanged and the short upper lip, showing even in those days its petulant curl.

He brought out the other photograph, the last one, from under it. Nell again, Nell fractionally older, her hair still short and feathery, her skin apparently innocent of make-up. The portrait was coloured, tinted in the shades of old china, rose and sepia and ice-blue and plum red. Nell’s new wedding ring gleamed brassily against the dull red stuff of her dress, and on the simple bodice, just below the round neckline, hung a pearl drop on a gold chain.

Wexford went ponderously out into the hall.

On all-fours Burden was examining the floor and the hideous shiny wallpaper with its pattern of little gold flowers and tiny, regularly recurring crimson leaves, wallpaper which met a floor that curved up to join it without any intervening skirting board.

‘Get up, Mike. It’s useless. We’ve done all that already.’

‘One must do something,’ said Burden irritably. He got up and brushed his hands against each other. ‘What’s the matter? You’ve found something!’

‘This.’

‘It’s the dress! But who’s the girl?’

‘Nell Tate.’

Burden stared incredulously at the portrait. Then he put it beside the wedding picture, nodded, looked up at the chief inspector. ‘I like her better how she was,’ he said quietly.

‘So would most men, but maybe she doesn’t know that.’ Wexford slipped the two photographs back into the envelope. ‘Mike, I’ve a curious feeling I’m losing touch with Dawn Stonor, that she’s fading away from me and I’m coming to grips with something stranger, something almost more terrible than her actual death. There must be many murder victims,’ he said slowly, ‘who meet their deaths without knowing in the least why they are to die.’

‘Most of them, I should think. Victims of poisoners, old shopkeepers who know the till’s empty, all children.’

‘She wasn’t a child,’ said Wexford. ‘Perhaps your list isn’t completely comprehensive. I don’t know, Mike. I’m only dreaming, not really getting anywhere. This is a gloomy place, isn’t it? The windows are huge and yet the light doesn’t seem to get in. Of course, it’s an illusion, it’s something to do with the dulling, deadening influence of the man’s personality.’

They moved back into the living room where the books frowned on the blue birds and the orange lilies that covered the walls.

Burden said, ‘We’re getting too dreamlike for me. I’d be happier if I could understand about the keys, if I could see how Dawn got in here.’

‘Someone let her in. Someone asked her to come and that someone was here to let her in when she arrived at five-thirty. Not Dunsand.’

‘But he cleared up the mess. He was left to dispose of the body he found when he got home.’

‘I suppose so. You talk about mess, Mike. What mess? Where is it? Where are the traces of it? Is this killer the one killer we’ve ever come across who can commit a crime as bloody as this one and leave no blood? I don’t believe it.’

‘This place will have to be taken apart,’ Burden said, crossing the passage and entering the bathroom. ‘If it was done without leaving any apparent trace it must have been done in here.’ He looked at the gleaming taps, the spotless bath and basin. The sunlight showed no film of dust on glass, no fingermarks on mirrors.

Wexford nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the tiles off, the pipes out. And if that yields nothing, the same with the kitchen.’

‘Dunsand may crack. He may tell us what at the moment he’s doing his utmost to conceal.’

‘If he has anything to conceal.’

‘Come on, sir. He must know more than he’s told us. He must know why his wife would kill an unknown girl in his
house, how it happened, the circumstances. He must know that.’

‘I wonder?’ said Wexford. ‘Does he know any more than that his wife—the woman he still thinks of as his wife—may be in danger? I believe he knows very little, Mike, as little of the whole of it as the girl who died.’

Wexford stared up at the ceiling, scanned the smooth glossy walls. The whole place smelt soapy, too clean.

‘Mind you don’t trip,’ said Burden. ‘Your shoelace is undone. It’s no good looking up there. It’s no use looking at all. If she was killed here, someone worked a miracle of butchery.’

Wexford stooped down to re-tie the lace. A bright circle of gold, a little sunbeam refracted through a pane, had lighted on the wall beside his left leg. He stared at the trembling illumination. The gold flowers occurred on the paper in vertical lines about two inches apart, a thin black stripe dividing each line from the next, and the red leaves, pear-shaped, were printed in clusters of three between each flower. Flower, cluster, flower, followed each other immaculately and evenly to meet the bitumastic ridge. There were signs of faint blurring on the pattern, the result perhaps of washing the paper, but nothing had been obliterated. Three leaves, flower, three leaves …

‘Mike,’ he said in a strange voice, ‘your sight’s better than mine. Have a look at this.’

‘I looked before and you stopped me. It’s been washed. So what?’

‘You were looking for signs of washing, maybe for a missing bit of the pattern. Look again.’

Impatiently Burden got to his knees. He concentrated on the puddle of light.

‘Not a missing leaf,’ said Wexford. ‘In the lowest cluster there aren’t three leaves but four.’

They squatted down side by side and examined the paper.

‘You see,’ Wexford said excitedly, ‘in this one and this one, in all of them, there are three little pear-shaped leaves like the
leaves in a fleur-de-lis. But in the one we’re looking at there’s a fourth leaf under the centre one.’

‘And it’s not quite the same colour. It’s darker, it’s browner.’

‘It’s blood,’ said Wexford, and he added wonderingly, ‘One little spot of blood.’

‘Shall I …?’

‘No, don’t touch it. The experts can come here, get their sample themselves. It’s too precious for us to mess about with. Mike, d’you realise that’s the one real piece of evidence we’ve got?’

‘If it’s blood, if it’s hers.’

‘I know it’s hers. It has to be.’

They went outside where the sun blazed on the road, melting tar and creating, where concrete ended and fields began, a mirage like a veil of shimmering water. The car was oven-hot inside, its seats burning to the touch. Burden rolled down his window and drove in his shirt sleeves.

‘Now to check the key,’ said Wexford.

‘Which one, sir? The one that didn’t fit?’

‘Yes. I think we’ll find a door that it will open.’ Sweating profusely, Wexford pulled down the eyeshade across the windscreen. ‘But that’s a simple job, a job for Martin.’

‘I’m not with you,’ said Burden, falling into line behind the bus that, with its load of Sundays estate passengers, made its way along the sunny road to Kingsmarkham. ‘I haven’t a clue what particular door you expect it to unlock.’

Wexford smiled. ‘A lot of doors are beginning to unlock inside my head, Mike, but this one, this actual door, is in Myringham. It’s the door to the house Dunsand lived in before he moved here.’

The afternoon wore on and the heat seemed to mount, reaching the eighties by four o’clock. Wexford shut himself up in his office, the windows open, the blinds down. He sat alone, waiting, thinking, and then, on the principle that it is better to shut away a problem whose answer continually eludes one,
to exclude it and return to it later, he resumed work on that crime-prevention directive which had lain unattended since before the festival.

The reports began to come in. The blood was human and of Dawn Stonor’s group. The key which Tate had given him in the hotel garden opened the door of Leonard Dunsand’s former home in Myringham. But at Sundays, where questioning of housewives had continued all the afternoon, no one had been found to say that she had ever seen Nell Tate, much less observed her call at Dunsand’s house.

The five-twelve bus stopped outside the Baptist church. Wexford watched the passengers get on it. A girl came out of the Luximart, carrying a brown paper bag. She wasn’t wearing mauve, she wasn’t in the least like Dawn, and she was going to her new house at Sundays, not to her death. Wexford phoned the Cheriton Forest Hotel. Yes, Mr Vedast was still there. Mr Vedast planned to leave that evening. The receptionist couldn’t say any more, perhaps, if Wexford was the press, she had said too much already …

He turned the sheets of the crime-prevention directive face downwards. He returned to his problem as the day began to cool and the sun’s rays slanted. At seven he went across the road to the Carousel café where he found Burden and his children eating steak and salad while Emmanuel Ellerman’s hit song ‘High Tide’ brayed at them from wall speakers.

‘Pity you’ve eaten,’ said Wexford. ‘I was going to take you out to dinner at the Cheriton Forest.’ He ordered a sandwich. ‘We shall have to be content to take our coffee with Zeno Vedast instead.’

‘I don’t suppose …’ began John wistfully.

‘I’m afraid you can’t come, John. This is a serious visit, an official visit.’

‘Pat and I were going to hang about in the High Street to see him pass through. He’s going back to London tonight.’

‘I don’t think he’ll be going just yet,’ said Wexford.

The receptionist put a call through to the Elizabethan Suite. ‘Mr Vedast says will you wait, please? Mr Vedast is engaged at present.’ She was young, the right age to be among Vedast’s adorers. ‘If you’d care to go into the Shakespeare Lounge, it’s over there on the …’