Some Lie and Some Die (22 page)

‘We know the way,’ said Wexford.

There was no one in the lounge but the dog. It got up when they came in, stared at them morosely, then collapsed again some two yards from where it had previously been lying.

‘I’m in the dark,’ said Burden, impatiently rejecting the magazines Wexford passed to him. ‘I think you ought to tell me why we’re here.’

‘Why are we ever anywhere?’ Wexford sighed. ‘To ask, to deduce, to conclude and to catch. Only it’s a little different this time.’

‘Oh, riddles, philosophy. What I want to know is …’

‘Wait.’

Godfrey Tate had come very quietly into the room, Godfrey Tate in his usual dapper black that made his torso look as thin as a teenager’s and his limbs spidery.

‘Zeno’s got that guy Silk with him,’ he said, without greeting, without preamble. ‘He says to ask you what you want.’

Wexford said quietly, ‘I want to tell him what I think of him.’

Tate was bemused with drink, not ‘high’ on alcohol, but low, dulled, cut off, almost somnambulistic. ‘Do I tell him that?’

‘Mr Tate, it’s a matter of indifference to me what you tell him. Why is Silk here?’

‘He’d heard Dunsand’s been arrested. He came to tell Nell.’

‘And now you’re celebrating?’

Tate blinked at him. He turned, shuffled towards the door.

‘See you,’ said Wexford, looking at his watch, ‘in ten minutes.’

But before the ten minutes were up—minutes in which Burden had picked up magazine after magazine, discarding them all, and Wexford had sat still, watching the hall—Martin Silk emerged from the lift. Long hair on the elderly makes its wearer look like a nineteenth-century statesman, but in Silk’s case the resemblance ended at his neck. He wore a white tee-shirt with a bunch of grapes appliqued on the chest. As he passed the reception desk he swaggered like a proud adolescent, thrusting his hips forward, but as he neared the lounge door he began to scuttle, an old man getting away from trouble.

‘Mr Silk!’

Silk stopped and forced a broad smile, creasing his face into a thousand wrinkles, enclosing his eyes in cracked parchment skin.

‘I hope we haven’t driven you away,’ said Wexford. ‘You’re welcome to stay as far as we’re concerned.’

Sidling into the lounge, Silk perched himself on the arm of a chair. His knee joint cracked as he swung one leg.

‘Merely a social call,’ he said. ‘I dropped by to tell Zeno there’s quite a crowd waiting in Kingsmarkham to give him a send-off. Of course,’ he added spuriously, ‘I shall be seeing a lot of him now he’s bought this lush pad.’

‘But you’ve always seen a lot of him, haven’t you, Mr Silk?
One might say that you’ve been a sort of …’ Wexford glanced meaningly at the shaggy grey hair, ‘… a sort of
éminence grise
in his life. Or are you another slave?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘But for you he’d still be Harold Goodbody and he never would have met Nell Dunsand.’

Silk stared at him. ‘I acted for the best. We can’t know what tragedies may hang on our small actions. I gave to youth a musical genius. If Dunsand freaked out, if certain people were—well, expendable …’

‘Is that how you see it? Mr Silk, you interfere too much. You organise too much. Be warned, and don’t interfere with Louis Mbowele. You might cause a war this time.’

‘Really, I think you’re twisted, sick. You’re not together. Who is, at your age?’ He sneered. ‘The hung-up generation.’

‘If I belong to it,’ Wexford retorted, ‘so do you. We’re the same age. Only I know it, I accept it. You don’t. I accept that all the sport is stale and all the wheels run down. And when I consider what some people call sport, I’m not all that sorry.’

At Wexford’s words, particularly the reminder of his true age, a look of real pain crossed Silk’s face. Mirrors show us what we want to see, but sometimes we look into living, human mirrors and then, briefly, the fantasising has to stop. Wexford was fat, Silk skinny, the one in a crumpled old suit, the other in tee-shirt and jeans, but they were both sixty. The mirror comparison lay in their shared age, the shared weariness of muscle and bone, and painfully Silk saw it.

He said shrilly, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Talking to you at the moment. Now we’re going upstairs to talk to your genius.’

‘But you’ve got Dunsand. Zeno wasn’t even there. I was with Zeno and the Tates in Kensington. You’ve got Dunsand under lock and key!’

‘What an old-fashioned expression!’ Wexford mocked. ‘Can’t you find a more trendy way of putting it? Come on, Mike, we’ve wasted enough time.’

They walked up. Silk stood at the foot of the staircase watching them, hesitating, torn perhaps between a fear of his protégé coming to harm and an even greater fear of more cruel jibes levelled at him concerning his age.

Wexford said, ‘He knows nothing about it. He knows less even than Dunsand.’ He smiled obscurely, tapped on the door of the Elizabethan Suite.

They were packing. At last they were going home. His face an even duskier red than usual, Tate was on his knees, trying to fasten an overfull suitcase, while Vedast sat cross-legged on top of a lacquer cabinet watching him. Wordlessly, Nell led them through the labyrinth of piled luggage and mountains of frippery, magazines and records.

Dead flowers, smelling foetid, were heaped on the balcony. Fresh flowers had arrived that day, perhaps that afternoon, roses, lilies, carnations, and they were dying too. No one had bothered to put them in water.

Nell was as carefully dressed and made-up as usual, but her exertions in the heat had given her an air of dishevelment, for it was still hot, the evening air windless, the sun a smouldering crimson knot over the forest. She scowled at the policemen, met Vedast’s cool gaze, and turned immediately to look at herself in one of the mirrors. Vedast gave a light laugh.

‘Fasten that case, Goffo. Get a move on, dears. Why don’t you go and order some coffee, Nello?’ He swayed his body towards Wexford. ‘That will give her a chance to repair her poor face,’ he said as if she wasn’t there.

Burden, who had followed the chief inspector’s example and cleared a seat for himself, said gruffly, ‘No coffee for us.’

‘Just as you like.’ Vedast flicked his fingers at Nell, who, still in front of the mirror, was apathetically fidgeting with her hair while watching the policemen in the glass. She sprang round as if those snapping fingers had actually touched her, fetched his orange juice and handed it to him with a pleading look. He removed a lump of ice and licked it. ‘How glum
you all look!’ he said, surveying the four faces. ‘You’re frightening my little ones, Chief Inspector. Why don’t we take it as read. I know what happened and so, presumably, do you—now. It
did
take you a long time. But you can’t prove it. So why don’t we just congratulate each other like clever cats and mice and you pop off home?’

Wexford quoted softly, ‘ “What need we fear who knows it when none can call our power to account?” ’

The Tates looked at him uncomprehendingly, Nell edging closer to Vedast, who said, ‘Macbeth. I sometimes think of changing over to the legitimate theatre. I’ve had no end of offers.’ He swallowed what remained of his ice cube. ‘But I don’t want to start now, thank you so much. We’re none of us feeling quite strong enough for drama.’

‘You mean you’ve had enough of it? You’ve made your tragedy and now you’re exhausted? The function of tragedy, as I’m sure you know, Mr Vedast, is to purge with pity and terror, and that’s what I’m going to try to do to you—or some of you. So sit down, Mr Tate, and you too, Mrs Tate, and listen to me.’

Both Nell and her husband looked doubtfully at Vedast for instructions. He nodded lightly.

‘Do what the man says, dears.’

Nell flounced on to the sofa, tipping off a heap of dirty clothes and what seemed to be a stack of fan letters. A full glass in his hand, a hand which trembled, Tate crept towards her.

She made a slight movement of rejection, turning her shoulder and at the same time spreading out her thick, stiffly embroidered skirts so that there was no room for her husband to sit beside her. He gave her a bitter look, a look of dark reproach, from under swollen veined eyelids. Clasping his drink as if it were a protective talisman, he perched himself on the sofa arm.

The singer watched them, amused that they had obeyed so easily. A law unto himself, he got down from the cabinet and
lounged against the open french window. With the setting of the sun, a light breeze had begun to blow. It fanned his hair, lifting it into a golden aureole. Outside the blue of the sky was deepening to violet, feathered with flamingo red. The frosty orange glass glowed in his hand like a lamp. He stood as if he were about to sing, his chin lifted, his hips thrust forward, quite still, utterly relaxed.

‘A tragedy,’ said Wexford, ‘in two parts.’

‘It concerns,’ he began, ‘two people who by their looks and the power of their personalities were able to command obsessive love. You, Mr Vedast, and you, Mrs Tate. I’m not flattering you. Anyone may become the object of such love and, in my experience, those who do are usually shallow, narcissistic and self-centred.’

Nell said shrilly, ‘Are you going to let him talk to me like that, Godfrey?’

Hunched up, nursing his glass, Tate gave her a black look. He said nothing. The breeze chilled him, making the dark hairs on his wrists stand erect.

‘The need to love like this lies in the characters of the lovers who fasten generally on the first desirable person who comes in their way, fasten and, if they can, hold on. Unfortunately, the beloved objects trade on this and use it for their own ends, for cruelty and victimisation. Just in case Mrs Tate is under any misapprehension as to whom I mean when I speak of the man who loves her obsessively, in case she should be so obtuse as to suppose I mean Mr Vedast, I’ll tell her now that I refer to her first husband, Leonard Dunsand. A foolish, clever, learned, dull and conventional little man who has loved her since she was eighteen when he married her.’

One of those people who will bear any insult provided it carries with it a hint of flattery, Nell apparently couldn’t resist preening herself at this. She crossed her long and very shapely legs and gave a sidelong glance in Vedast’s direction.
Vedast stroked the string of beads he wore, running them through his fingers.

Wexford went on: ‘Who is probably the only man sufficiently capable of self-delusion to love her sincerely, the only man who ever will.’ He waited for some reaction from Nell’s present husband. Tate reacted characteristically, behaving as he always did in crises or threatened crises. Without getting up, he reached for the brandy bottle. ‘If you are in a position to be thankful for anything, Mr Tate, be thankful that you are more sophisticated and have eyes to see. Pity you’ve clouded them so much with that stuff.’

‘I can look after myself,’ said Tate in a low voice.

‘I never saw a man less capable of doing so, unless it is Mr Dunsand.’

‘I’ll look after Goffo.’ Vedast turned idly, smiling, cooling his hands on the glass, caressing it. ‘Do tell us who’s in love with me. I’m dying to know.’

‘Thousands, I imagine. The one in particular I speak of is dead. She was dying for you too often and at last she really died. You were her first lover. That’s supposed to have some profound effect on a woman and, whether it’s true or not, it had a profound effect on Dawn Stonor. I wonder how much of that story Mr and Mrs Tate know?’ While Vedast resumed his scanning of the sky in which a few pale stars had appeared, Wexford leant towards the Tates. ‘They were at school together, Dawn and a boy called Harold Goodbody, a boy who went to tea with his girl friend’s grandmother because he only had baked beans at home; Harold Goodbody who wore his cousin’s cast-off shoes and whose father spent the housekeeping money on dog racing; Harold Goodbody who played April Fool tricks to amuse his friends, who doubtless carried young Dawn’s satchel for her. A rustic idyll, wasn’t it? Dawn Stonor and her first love, Harold Goodbody.’

‘I would prefer you not to call me that,’ said Vedast, and for the first time Wexford heard an edge of temper to his voice.

‘You’d prefer me to go away, but I shan’t do that,’ Wexford flashed back. ‘You said you were dying to hear and you shall hear.’ He leaned back, pleased at the unease his words had provoked in Nell, pleased by Tate’s cringing. ‘You left your friend,’ he said to Vedast, ‘and went to London. For you the idyll was over. Soon afterwards she went to London too, but by then you were beyond her reach. And yet she never forgot you. She told her friends and she pretended, perhaps to herself as well as to her friends, that you had always remained lovers and between you was some enduring bond.’ Wexford glanced at Burden and inclined his head, giving the inspector honour for this idea which at first he had ridiculed. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘nearly a decade passed by before you saw each other again. In that time you had become very famous, many exciting things had happened to you. Very little had happened to her. She was a waitress in a club and she remained a waitress.

‘It was a pity you ever went into that club. If you hadn’t, Dawn might at this moment be making wedding plans with her fiancé. Why did you go?’

Vedast shrugged. ‘This bloke asked us. We hadn’t anything better to do.’

‘You could hardly have done worse.’

‘I didn’t kill her. I never touched her.’

Wexford turned towards the Tates, to Godfrey Tate whose bloodshot eyes were wide open and staring.