Some Lie and Some Die (6 page)

With the rain came a kind of false night, a streaming, early twilight. It drove everyone indoors, everyone, that is, but the departing young people who trudged through the downpour into Kingsmarkham. Soaked and shivering, the long processions came on towards the buses, towards the station. Some stayed behind on the Forby road, hoping to hitch, doggedly resigned when cars passed without stopping, when motorists, put off by their draggled clothes and their long wet hair, rejected them.

They invaded the centre of the town, queueing for any bus that might come, forming dispirited lines that stretched the length of the High Street. A conglomeration of youth filled the centre, but the outskirts, the back streets, were deserted. In Lower Road where all the doors and windows were shut, every curtain drawn, rain drumming on rows of pavement-parked cars, it might have been the depths of winter. Only the roses in the front gardens of these squat red-brick council houses, the drooping foliage on cherry trees, showed that there should have been sunshine, that it was a June evening.

Number fifteen was a house just like its neighbours, a similar Dorothy Perkins trailing over the front door, its acid pink flowers clashing with ochreish red brick, similar white net
curtains, draped crosswise like the bodice of a négligé, across its windows. A scaffolding of television aerials sprouted from its single chimney and juddered in the gale.

Wexford went slowly up the path. The rain was falling so heavily that he had to put up his umbrella even for this short distance from the car to the front door. He hated having to question the bereaved, hated himself for intruding on their grief and for feeling, if not showing, impatience when memories overcame them and tears silenced them. He knew now that Dawn Stonor had had no father. It was a woman in the barren country of deep middle age, alone and perhaps utterly broken, he had to interview. He tapped softly on the door.

Detective Polly Davies let him in.

‘How is she, Polly?’

‘She’s O.K., sir. There wasn’t much love lost between mother and daughter, as far as I can see. Dawn hadn’t lived at home for ten years.’

Dreadful to feel relief at a lack of love … ‘I’ll talk to her now.’

Mrs Stonor had been driven to the mortuary and home again in a police car. Still wearing her coat, her red straw hat on the arm of her chair, she sat in the living room, drinking tea. She was a big, florid-faced woman of fifty-five with bad varicose veins, her swollen feet crushed into court shoes.

‘Do you feel up to giving me some information, Mrs Stonor? I’m afraid this has been a bad shock for you.’

‘What d’you want to know?’ She spoke abruptly in a shrill, harsh voice. ‘I can’t tell you why she was in that quarry. Made a proper mess of her, didn’t he?’

Wexford wasn’t shocked. He knew that in most people there is something sado-masochistic, and even the newly-bereaved have an apparently ghoulish need to dwell with pleasurable horror on the injuries inflicted on dead relatives. Whether or not they express these feelings depends on their degree of cultivated repression rather than on grief.

‘Who was “he”, Mrs Stonor?’

She shrugged. ‘Some man. There was always some man.’

‘What did she do for a living?’

‘Waitress in a club. Place called the Townsman up in London, up West somewhere. I never went there.’ Mrs Stonor gave him a lowering, aggressive look. ‘It’s for men. The girls get themselves up in daft costumes like bathing suits with skirts, showing off all they’ve got. “Disgusting!” I said to her. “Don’t you tell me about it, I don’t want to know.” Her dad would have turned in his grave if he’d known what she did.’

‘She came here on Monday?’

‘That’s right.’ She took off her coat. He saw that she was heavily built, rigidly corseted. Her face was set in grim, peevish lines, and it was hard to tell whether it was more grim and peevish than usual. ‘You wouldn’t find a decent girl going to that quarry with a man,’ she said. ‘Had he done anything to her?’

The question was grotesque between people who had seen for themselves, but he knew what she meant. ‘There was no sexual assault and intercourse hadn’t taken place.’

She flushed darkly. He thought she was going to protest at his fairly blunt way of speaking but instead she rushed into an account of what he wanted to know. ‘She came down by train, the one that gets in at half past eleven. I’d got her dinner for her, a bit of steak. She liked that.’ The harsh voice wavered a little. ‘She liked her bit of steak, did Dawn. Then we chatted a bit. We hadn’t really got nothing in common any more.’

‘Can you tell me what you talked about?’

‘Nothing about
men
, if that’s what you mean. She was fed-up on account of some little kid in the train had wiped his sticky fingers down her dress. It was a new dress, one of them minis, and it showed all her legs. I said she’d have to change it and she did.’

‘She put on the dark red dress she was found in?’

‘No, she never. That wasn’t hers. I don’t know where that
come from. There was a mauve thing she had here as I’d fetched from the cleaners for her—they call them trouser suits—and she put that on. She was wearing mauve shoes so it looked all right. Well, like I said, we chatted a bit and she went up to see her gran—that’s my mother as lives with me—and then Dawn went off to catch the four-fifteen train. Left here just before four.’

Wexford looked thoughtful. ‘You thought she was going straight back to London?’

‘Of course I did. She said so. She said, “I’ve got to be in the club by seven.” She took the blue dress with her in a bag and she said she’d have to run not to miss her train.’

‘Two more things, Mrs Stonor, and then I’ll leave you in peace. I’d like you to describe the trouser suit, if you would.’

‘Very showy, it was. More like pyjamas than something you’d wear in the street. There was slacks, sort of flared, and a kind of tunic. It was mauve nylon stuff with a bit of darker mauve round the sleeves and the bottom of the tunic. Dawn liked to dress flashy.’

‘Have you a photograph of her?’

Mrs Stonor gave him a suspicious glare. ‘What, got up in them clothes?’

‘No. Any photograph.’

‘There was a photo she sent me for Christmas. Funny idea giving your mum a photo of yourself for Christmas, I thought. You can have that if you like.’

The photograph, a studio portrait, was brought. It had never been framed and, from its pristine condition, Wexford supposed that it had never been shown with pride to Mrs Stonor’s friends but kept since its arrival in a drawer. Dawn had been a heavy-featured, rather coarse-looking girl, who wore thick make-up. The blonde hair was piled into puffs and ringlets, a massy structure reminding him of the head-dresses of eighteenth-century belles or perhaps of actresses playing such parts. She wore a blue silk evening gown, very low-cut and showing a great deal of fleshy bosom and shoulder.

Mrs Stonor eyed it irritably, peevishly, and Wexford could see that it would have been a disappointing gift for a mother of her type. Dawn had been twenty-eight. To have met with maternal favour, the picture should have shown not only a daughter but grandchildren, a wedding ring on those stiffly posed fingers, and behind the group the outline of a semidetached house, well kept-up and bought on a mortgage.

He felt a stirring of pity for this mother who was a mother no longer, a flash of sympathy which was dissipated at once when she said as he was leaving:

‘About that trouser suit …’

‘Yes?’

‘It was more or less new. She only bought it back in the winter. I mean, I know a lady who’d give me five pounds for that.’

Wexford gave her a narrow glance. He tried not to show his distaste.

‘We don’t know what’s become of it, Mrs Stonor. Perhaps the lady would like the shoes and the bag. You can have them in due course.’

The exodus continued. By now it was dark, a windswept, starless night, the rain falling relentlessly. Wexford drove back to the Sundays estate where, on both sides of the Forby road, police cars cruised along the streets or stood parked in lakes of trembling black water. Presently Burden found him and got into the car beside him.

‘Well? Anything startling?’

‘Nothing much, sir. Nobody remembers seeing a girl in a red dress down here during the week. But last Monday afternoon one woman from Sundays Grove, a Mrs Lorna Clarke, says she saw a blonde girl, answering Dawn’s description, but wearing a …’

‘Mauve trouser suit?’

‘That’s right! So it was her? I thought it must be from Mrs
Clarke talking about mauve shoes and a mauve bag. Where did the red dress come from then?’

Wexford shook his head. ‘It’s beginning to look as if she died on Monday. She left her mother’s house just before four that afternoon. When and where did your Mrs Clarke see her?’

‘She got off the five-twenty-five bus from Kingsmarkham. Mrs Clarke saw her get off the bus and cross the road towards The Pathway. A few minutes later someone else saw her in The Pathway.’

‘Which backs on to the quarry. Go on.’

‘There are only five houses in The Pathway, two bungalows and three proper houses. If you remember, they didn’t do any more building down there. People made a fuss about it and the ministry reversed the decision to grant planning permission. She was next seen by a woman who lives in the last house.’

‘Not the wife of that bloke who came out making a to-do on Saturday night?’

Burden nodded. ‘A Mrs Peveril, sir. They’re both at home all day. He’s a graphic designer, works at home. His wife says she saw a blonde girl in mauve go down the road at five-thirty and enter the public footpath that goes across the fields to Stowerton. She gave a very detailed description of the trouser suit, the shoes and the bag. But, of course, I couldn’t be sure it was Dawn. I couldn’t understand her being dressed in mauve. Mrs Peveril says the girl was holding a brown carrier bag.’

‘Mm-hm. It certainly was Dawn. She changed out of a blue dress into the mauve thing and it was obviously the blue one she was carrying in the bag. She seems to have gone in for a lot of clothes changing, doesn’t she? I wonder why. No other help from The Pathway?’

‘No one else saw her. Each of the bungalows has only one occupant and they were both out at the relevant time. Miss Mowler’s a retired district nurse and she was out on Monday
till eight. Dunsand—he’s a lecturer at the University of the South, philosophy or something—didn’t get home from work till after half past six. I can’t find anyone else who saw her on Monday or at any other time. My guess is she picked up some bloke and made a date to meet him between Sundays and Stowerton that evening.’

‘Ye-es. I expect that’s it. She left her mother at four and she must have caught the five-twelve bus. There are only two buses going to Forby in the afternoon, as you know. What did she do in that spare hour and ten minutes? We’ll have to find out if anyone saw her in the High Street. There’s the London angle too, but I’ve already got wheels moving there.’

‘D’you want to see Mrs Peveril?’

‘Not now, Mike. I doubt if we can make much progress tonight. I’ll let them finish the house-to-house. They may get something more. She may have been seen later. I don’t want to speculate at this stage.’

Burden left the car and, throwing his raincoat over his head, plunged off through the rain. Wexford turned the car, moving off in low gear through the torrents, the steady downpour, glancing once at Sundays where the last dispirited stragglers were leaving the park.

By the morning it had been established that Mrs Margaret Peveril of number five, The Pathway, was very probably the last person to have seen Dawn Stonor alive. On Monday, June sixth, Dawn had entered the pathfields at five-thirty and disappeared. By nine Wexford and Burden were back in The Pathway. By nine also an emergency interview room had been set up in the Baptist church hall where Sergeant Martin and a team of detectives waited to talk to anyone who might have seen Dawn on the previous Monday afternoon. The photograph had been blown up to poster size ready to jog memories, and another photograph prepared, this time of Polly Davies wearing a blonde wig and dressed in clothes resembling as nearly as possible Mrs Stonor’s description of the mauve suit.

The rain had stopped during the night and the town and its environs looked washed, battered, wrung out to dry. All the summer warmth had gone with the storm, leaving a cloud-splashed sourly blue sky, a high sharp wind and mid-winter temperatures.

At Sundays Martin Silk was burning litter, the accumulated detritus of eighty thousand people’s weekend. A row of fires blazed just behind the wall and the wind blew acrid white
smoke in clouds over the Sundays estate, the Forby road and the barren brown plain of the park. Silk’s little herd of Friesians had returned to their pasture. They stood in a huddle under the cedars, bewildered by the smoke.

The Pathway was shaped like an arm with bent elbow, its shoulder the junction with the Forby road, its wrist and hand—or perhaps its one pointing finger—a footpath which ran through hilly meadows and copses to Stowerton. Three houses and two bungalows had been built along this arm, but in its crook there were only open fields. The bungalows were identical, rather large pink plastered bungalows with red tiled roofs and detached garages. They stood ‘in their gardens’, as estate agents put it, meaning that there are sections of garden at the sides as well as at front and back. Some twenty feet separated one from the other, and a further twenty feet down stood a two-storey house. Similar building materials had been used for this house and the two dwellings on the upper arm, red brick, white stone, cedarwood, but they varied in size and in design. All had sparse lawns and flower-beds planted with unhappy-looking annuals.