Some Lie and Some Die (9 page)

‘Imagine so, Mike.’

‘Well, sir, I’ve been wondering if she and this bloke had one of those long close friendships extending over years.’

‘What long close friendships? What are you on about?’

‘You know my sister-in-law Grace?’ Wexford nodded impatiently. Of course he knew Grace, the sister of Burden’s dead wife who had looked after Burden’s children when they had first lost their mother and who he had later hoped would be the second Mrs Burden. That had come to nothing. Grace had married someone else and now had a baby of her own. ‘I mention her,’ said Burden, ‘because it was her experience that gave me the idea. She and Terry knew each other off and on for years before they got married. There was always a sort of bond between them, although they didn’t meet much and each of them had other—well, friends. Terry even got engaged to someone else.’

‘You’re suggesting this was the case with Dawn?’

‘She lived here till she was eighteen. Suppose she knew this bloke when they were both very young and they had an affair and then they both left Kingsmarkham to work elsewhere. Or he stayed here and she went to London. What I’m suggesting is that they kept in touch and whenever she came home or he went to London they had one of these dates, secret dates necessarily because he was married and she was more or less engaged to Wickford. Frankly, I think this covers every aspect of the case and deals with all the difficulties.’

Wexford stirred his coffee, looked longingly towards the sugar bowl and resisted the temptation to take another lump. ‘It doesn’t deal with that bloody red dress,’ he said viciously.

‘It does if they met in this chap’s house. We’d have to admit the possibility of coincidence, that she stained the mauve
outfit and then put on a dress belonging to this man’s wife.’

‘The wife being out presumably. She goes there, he lets her in. What happens to the mauve garment? They had no drinks for her to spill, ate nothing for her to drop, made no love to—er, crush it. (I put it like that, Mike, to save your delicate sensibilities.) Maybe the violence of his welcoming embrace creased it up and she was so dainty about her appearance that she rushed upstairs and slipped into one of her rival’s ancient cast-offs. He was so upset about her thinking more of her clothes than of him that he upped and banged her with the bottle. Is that it?’

‘It must have been something like that,’ said Burden rather stiffly. Wexford was always pouring cold water on his flights of fancy and he never got used to it.

‘Where was this house of assignation, then?’

‘On the outskirts of Stowerton, the Forby side. She went by the fields because he was going to meet her there and take her back to his house. They arranged it that way just in case the wife changed her mind about going away.’ He made a moue of distaste, sordidness temporarily conquering romance. ‘Some people do go on like that, you know.’

‘You seem to know, anyway. So all we have to do now is find a bloke living in a house on the north side of Stowerton who’s known Dawn Stonor since they went to Sunday school together and whose wife was away Monday night. Oh, and find if the wife has missed a red dress.’

‘You don’t sound too enthusiastic, sir.’

‘I’m not,’ Wexford said frankly. ‘The people you know go on like that but the people I know don’t. They act like
people
, not characters in a second feature film that’s been thrown together for the sake of sensation rather than illustrating human nature. But since my mind is otherwise a blank, I reckon we’d better get asking Mrs Stonor who Dawn knew around Stowerton and who had a lifelong sentimental bond with her.’

‘The folks round here,’ said Mrs Stonor, ‘weren’t good enough for Dawn. She was a proper little snob, though what she’d got to be snobbish about I never will know.’

For all her frankly expressed unmaternal sentiments, Mrs Stonor was dressed in deepest black. She and the old woman who was with her, and who had been introduced as ‘My mother, Mrs Peckham’, had been sitting in semi-darkness, for the curtains were drawn. When the two policemen entered the room a light was switched on. Wexford noticed that a wall mirror had been covered by a black cloth.

‘We think it possible,’ he said, ‘that Dawn went to meet an old friend on Monday night. I want you to try and remember the names of any boy friends she had before she left home or any name she may have mentioned to you on her visits here.’

Instead of replying, Mrs Stonor addressed the old woman who was leaning forward avidly, clutching the two sticks that supported her when she walked. ‘You can get off back to bed now, Mother. All this has got nothing to do with you. You’ve been up too long as it is.’

‘I’m not tired,’ said Mrs Peckham. She was very old, well over eighty. Her body was thin and tiny and her face simian, a maze of wrinkles. What sparse white hair she had was
scragged on to the top of her head into a knot stuck full of pins. ‘I don’t want to go to bed, Phyllis. It’s not often I have a bit of excitement.’

‘Excitement! I like that. A nice way to talk when Dawn’s had her head bashed in by a maniac. Come along now. I’ll take your arm up the stairs.’

A small devil in Wexford’s head spoke for him. ‘Mrs Peckham should stay. She may be able to help.’ He said it more to irritate Mrs Stonor than because he thought her mother would be able to furnish them with information.

Mrs Peckham grinned with pleasure, showing a set of over-large false teeth. Reprieved, she helped herself to a sweet from the bag on a table beside her and began a ferocious crunching. Her daughter turned down the corners of her mouth and folded her hands.

‘Can you think of anyone, Mrs Stonor?’

Still sulky from having her wishes baulked, Mrs Stonor said, ‘Her dad never let her have boy friends. He wanted her to grow up respectable. We had a job with her as it was, always telling lies and staying out late. My husband tried every way we could think of to teach her the meaning of decency.’

‘Tried his strap, mostly,’ said Mrs Peckham. Protected by the presence of the policemen, she gave her daughter a triumphant and unpleasant grin. Wexford could see that she was one of those old pensioners who, dependent for all her needs on a hated child, was subservient, cringing, defiant or malicious as her fancy took her or circumstances demanded. When Mrs Stonor made no reply but only lifted her chin, her mother tried another dig. ‘You and George ought never to have had no kids. Always smacking her and yelling at her. Knock one devil out and two in, that’s what I say.’

Wexford cleared his throat. ‘We don’t seem to be getting very far. I can’t believe Dawn never mentioned any man she was friendly with.’

‘I never said she didn’t. You’ll get your stomach trouble again, Mother, if you don’t leave them acid drops alone. The
fact is, it was all lies with Dawn. I got so I let what she said go in one ear and out the other. I do know she had this man Wickford on account of her bringing him down here for the day last year. They didn’t stop long. Dawn could see what I thought about
him
. A divorced man, running a garage! That was the best she could do for herself.’

‘There was no one else?’ Burden asked coldly.

‘I said I
don’t know
. You’re not going to tell me she got herself done in by some boy she was at school with, are you? That’s all the local boys she knew.’

Mrs Peckham, having incompletely unwrapped her latest sweet, was removing shreds of paper from her mouth. ‘There was Harold Goodbody,’ she said.

‘Don’t be so stupid, Mother. As if Harold’d have anything to do with a girl like Dawn. Harold climbed too high for the likes of her.’

‘Who is this man?’ asked Wexford.

The sweet lodged in a wizened cheek pouch, the noisy sucking abated, Mrs Peckham heaved a heavy but not unhappy sigh. ‘He was a lovely boy, was Harold. Him and his mum and dad used to live round here in the next street. I wasn’t here then, I had my own cottage, but I used to see Harold when I had my job serving dinners at the school. Oh, he was a lad! Always one for a joke was Harold, April Fools all the year round for him. Him and Dawnie was pals from their first day at school. Then I come here to live with Phyllis and George and Dawnie’d bring him back to tea.’

‘I never knew that,’ said Mrs Stonor, bristling. ‘George wouldn’t have had that.’

‘George wasn’t here, was he? And you was working at that shop. I didn’t see no harm in Dawnie bringing her friend home.’ Mrs Peckham turned her back on her daughter and faced Wexford. ‘Harold was a real freak to look at, all bones and his hair nearly as white as mine. I’d have boiled eggs all ready for the three of us, but when Dawnie and me started cracking ours we’d find just the empty shells. Harold’d
brought a couple of empty shells to fool us. Ooh, he was funny! He had a joke ink blot and a rubber spider. Made us scream, that spider did. One day I caught him playing with the phone. He’d rung this number and when the woman answered he said he was the engineers. He said to her there was an emergency. She was to pour boiling water down the receiver, leave it for ten minutes and then cut the lead with scissors. She was going to too, she believed him, but I put a stop to that, though I was laughing fit to die. Harold was a real scream.’

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Wexford. ‘How old was he when all this fun and games was going on?’

‘About fifteen.’

‘And he still lives round here?’

‘No, of course he don’t. That Mr Silk from Sundays took him up and he left home and went to London when he was seventeen and got famous, didn’t he?’

Wexford blinked. ‘Famous? Harold Goodbody?’

Mrs Peckham wagged her gnarled hands impatiently. ‘He changed his name when he got to be a singer. What did he call himself? Now I’m getting on I seem to forget everything. John Lennon, that was it.’

‘I hardly think …’ Wexford began.

Mrs Stonor, who had remained silent and scornful, opened her mouth and snapped, ‘Zeno Vedast. He calls himself Zeno Vedast.’

‘Dawn was at school with Zeno Vedast?’ Wexford said blankly. So it hadn’t been all boasting, vain name-dropping? Or some of it hadn’t. ‘They were friends?’

‘You don’t want to listen to Mother,’ said Mrs Stonor. ‘I daresay Dawn saw a bit of him when they were at school. She never saw him in London.’

‘Oh, yes, she did, Phyllis. She told me so last Monday when she was home. She’d tell me things she’d never tell you. She knew you’d pour cold water on everything she did.’

‘What did she say, Mrs Peckham?’

‘She come into my room when I was in bed. You remember Hal, don’t you, Gran? she says. We always called him Hal. Well, I went out to dinner with him Friday night, she said.’

‘And you believed her?’ Mrs Stonor gave the brittle laugh that is not a laugh at all. ‘Harold Goodbody was in Manchester Friday night. I saw him myself on telly, I saw him live. She was just making up tales like she always did.’

Mrs Peckham scrunched indignantly. ‘She got the night wrong, that’s all. Poor little Dawnie.’

‘Don’t you be so stupid. He’s a
famous
singer. Though what’s so wonderful about his voice I never shall know. Richard Tauber, now that was a man who
had
a voice.’

Burden asked, ‘Do his parents still live here?’

Mrs Stonor looked for a moment as if she was going to tell him not to be so stupid. She restrained herself and said sourly, ‘When he got rich he bought them a great big detached place up near London. All right for some, isn’t it? I’ve always been decent and brought my daughter up right and what did she ever do for me? I well remember Freda Goodbody going round to her neighbours to borrow a quarter of tea on account of Goodbody spending all his wages on the dogs. Harold never had more than one pair of shoes at a time and they was cast-offs from his cousin. “My darling boy” and “my precious Hal” she used to say but she used to give him baked beans for his Sunday dinner.’

Suddenly Mrs Peckham waxed appropriately biblical. ‘ “Better a dish of herbs where love is”,’ she said, ‘ “than a stalled ox and hatred therewith”.’ She took the last acid drop and sucked it noisily.

‘There you are, sir,’ said Burden when they were in the car. ‘A lifelong friendship, like I said.’

‘Well, not quite like you said, Mike. Zeno Vedast doesn’t live in Stowerton, he has no wife, and I don’t suppose he makes a habit of eating tinned food in fields with waitresses. The odd thing is that she
did
know him. It seems to bear out what Joan Miall said that, in the nature of things, even a chronic liar must tell more truth than lies. We all know the
story of the boy who cried wolf. Dawn Stonor was a lion-hunter. She cried lion and this time the lion was real. But we haven’t a shred of evidence to connect Vedast with her last Monday. Very likely he was still in Manchester. All I can say at the moment is that it’s intriguing, it’s odd.’

‘Surely you think we ought to see him?’

‘Of course we must see him. We must see every man Dawn knew, unless he has a watertight alibi for that Monday night. We still don’t know what Wickford was doing after seven.’ The chief inspector tapped his driver’s shoulder. ‘Back to the station, please, Stevens.’

The man half-turned. He was young, rather shy, recently transferred from Brighton. He blushed when Wexford addressed him, rather as he had coloured under Mrs Peveril’s stare.