Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life (20 page)

‘Harassment, now,’ the sergeant was saying. ‘There’s a word I’ve never been able to spell, though I always say over to myself, “possesses possesses five s’s”.’

Webster’s International. He didn’t want it to be international, only sufficiently comprehensive. The E section. ‘Eocene’, ‘Eolienne’ - and there it was.

‘Found what you’re looking for, sir?’ said Clements.

Wexford leant back with a sigh and let the heavy volume fall shut. ‘I’ve found, Sergeant, what I’ve been looking for for three weeks.’

Rather warily, Malina Patel admitted them to the flat. Was it for Loring’s benefit that she had dressed up in harem trousers and a jacket of some glossy white stuff, heavily embroidered? Her black hair was looped up in complicated coils and fastened with gold pins.

‘Polly’s in an awful state,’ she said confidingly. ‘I can’t do anything with her. When I told her you were coming I thought she was going to faint, and then she cried so terribly. I didn’t know what to do.’

Perhaps, Wexford thought, you could have been a friend to her and comforted her, not spent surely a full hour making yourself look like something out of a seraglio. There was no time now, though, to dwell on forms of hypocrisy, on those who will seek to present themselves as pillars of virtue and archetypes of beauty even at times of grave crisis.

Making use of those fine eyes - could she even cry at will? - she said sweetly, ‘But I don’t suppose you want to talk to me, do you? I think Polly will be up to seeing you. She’s in there. I said to her that everything would be all right if she just told the truth, and then you wouldn’t frighten her. Please don’t frighten her, will you?’

Already the magic was working on Loring who looked quite limp. It had ceased to work on Wexford.

‘I’d rather frighten you, Miss Patel,’ he said. Her eyelashes fluttered at him. ‘And you’re wrong if you think I don’t want to talk to you. Let us go in here.’

He opened a door at random. On the other side of it was a squalid and filthy kitchen, smelling of strong spices and of decay, as if someone had been currying meat and vegetables that were already rotten. The sink was stacked up to the level of the taps with unwashed dishes. She took up her stand in front of the sink, too small to hide it, a self-righteous but not entirely easy smile on her lips.

‘You’re very free with your advice,’ he said. ‘Do you find in your experience that people take it?’

‘I was only trying to help,’ she said, slipping into her little’ girl role. ‘It was good advice, wasn’t it?’

‘You didn’t take my good advice.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Not to lie to the police. The scope of the truth, Miss Patel, is very adequately covered by the words of the oath one takes in the witness box. I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. After I had warned you, you obeyed - as far as I know - the first injunction and the third but not the second. You left out a vital piece of truth.’

She seized on only one point. ‘I’m not going into any witness box!’

‘Oh, yes you will. One thing you may be sure of is that you will. Yesterday morning you received a phone call, didn’t you? From the manager of the Trieste Hotel.’

She said sullenly, ‘Polly did.’

‘And when Miss Flinders realized that Mr West’s car had been found, you told her that the police would be bound to find out. Did you advise her to tell us? Did you remember my advice to you? No. You suggested that the best thing would be to bring her to us with the old story that your conscience had been troubling you.’

She shifted her position, and the movement sent the dirty plates subsiding over the edge of the bowl.

‘When did you first know the facts, Miss Patel?’

A flood of self-justification came from her. Her voice lost its soft prettiness and took on a near-cockney inflexion. She was shrill. ‘What, that Polly hadn’t been in a motel with a married man? Not till last night. I didn’t, I tell you, I didn’t till last night. She was in an awful state and she’d been crying all day, and she said I can’t tell him that man’s address because there isn’t a man. And that made me laugh because Polly’s never had a real boy-friend all the time I’ve known her, and I said, “You made it up?” And she said she had. And I said, “I bet Grenville never kissed you either, did he?” So she cried some more and . . .’ The faces of the two men told her she had gone too far. She seemed to remember the personality she wished to present and to grab at it in the nick of time. ‘I knew you’d find out because the police always did, you said. I warned her you’d come, and then what was she going to say?’

‘I meant,’ Wexford tried, ‘when did you know where Miss Flinders had truly been that night?’

Anxiety gone - he wasn’t really cross, men would never really be cross with her - she smiled the amazed smile of someone on whom a great revelatory light has shone. ‘What a weird thing! I never thought about that.’

No, she had never thought about that. About her own attractions and her winning charm she had thought, about establishing her own ascendancy and placing her friend in a foolish light, about what she called her conscience she had thought, but never about the aim of all these inquiries. What a curiously inept and deceiving term Freud had coined, Wexford reflected, when he named the conscience the super-ego!

‘It never occurred to you then that a girl who never went out alone after dark must have had some very good reason for being out alone all that evening and half the night? You didn’t think of that aspect? You had forgotten perhaps that that was the evening of Rhoda Comfrey’s murder?’

She shook her head guilelessly 'No, I didn’t think about it. It couldn’t have had anything to do with me or Polly.’

Wexford looked at her steadily. She looked back at him, her fingers beginning to pick at the gold embroideries on the tunic whose whiteness set off her orchid skin. At last the seriousness of his gaze affected her, forcing her to use whatever powers of reasoning she had. The whole pretty sweet silly facade broke, and she let out a shattering scream.

‘Christ,’ said Loring.

She began to scream hysterically, throwing back her head. The heroine, Wexford thought unsympathetically, going mad in white satin. ‘Oh, slap her face or something,’ he said and walked out into the hall. Apart from the screeches, and now the choking sounds and sobs from the kitchen, the flat was quite silent. It struck him that Pauline Flinders must be in the grip of some overpowering emotion, or stunned into a fugue, not to have reacted to those screams and come out to inquire. He looked forward with dread and with distaste to the task ahead of him.

All the other doors were closed. He tapped on the one that led to the living room where he had interviewed her before. She didn’t speak, but opened the door and looked at him with great sorrow and hopelessness. Everything she wore and everything about her seemed to drag her down, the flopping hair, the stooping shoulders, the loose overblouse and the long skirt, compelling the eye of the beholder also to droop and fall. Today there was no script on the table, no paper in the typewriter. No book or magazine lay open. She had been sitting there waiting - for how many hours? - paralysed, capable of no action.

‘Sit down. Miss Flinders,’ he said. It was horrible to have to torture her, but if he was to get what he wanted he had no choice. ‘Don’t try to find excuses for not telling me the name of the man you spent the evening of August eighth with. I know there was no man.’

She tensed at that and darted him a look of terror, and he knew why. But he let it pass. Out of pity for her, his mind was working quickly, examining this which was so fresh to him, so recently realized, trying to get enough grasp on it to decide whether the whole truth need come out. But even at this stage, with half the facts still to be understood, he knew he couldn’t comfort her with that one. She hunched in a chair, the pale hair curtaining her face.

‘You were afraid to go out alone at night,’ he said, ‘and for good reason. You were once attacked in the dark by a man, weren’t you, and very badly frightened?’

The hair shivered, her bent body nodded.

‘You wished it were legal in this country for people to carry guns for protection. It’s illegal too to carry knives but knives are easier to come by. How long is it. Miss Flinders, since you have been carrying a knife in your handbag?’

She murmured, ‘Nearly a year.’

‘A flick knife, I suppose. The kind with a concealed blade that appears when you press a projection on the hilt. Where is that knife now?’

‘I threw it into the canal at Kenbourne Lock.’

Never before had he so much wished he could leave someone in her position alone. He opened the door and called to Loring to come in. The girl bunched her lips over her teeth, straightened her shoulders, her face very white.

‘Let us at least try to be comfortable,’ said Wexford, and he motioned her to sit beside him on the sofa while Loring took the chair she had vacated. ‘I’m going to tell you a story.’ He chose his words carefully. ‘I’m going to tell you how this case appears.’

‘There was a woman of thirty called Rhoda Comfrey who came from Kingsmarkham in Sussex to London where she lived for some time on the income from a football pools win, a sum which I think must have been in the region of ten thousand pounds. When the money began to run out she supplemented it with an income derived from blackmail, and she called herself West, Mrs West, because the name Comfrey and her single status were distasteful to her. After some time she netted a young man, a foreigner, who had no right to be in this country but who, like Joseph Conrad before him, wanted to live here and write his books in English. Rhoda Comfrey offered him an identity and a history, a mother and father, a family and a birth certificate. He was to take the name of someone who would never need national insurance or a passport because he had been and always would be in an institution for the mentally handicapped - her cousin, John Grenville West. This the young man did.'

‘The secret bound them together in a long uneasy friendship. He dedicated his third novel to her, for it was certain that without her that book would never have been written. He would not have been here to write it. Was he Russian perhaps? Or some other kind of Slav? Whatever he was, seeking asylum, she gave him the identity of a real person who would never need to use his reality and who was himself in an asylum of a different kind. And what did she get from him? A young and personal man to be her escort and her companion. He was homosexual, of course, she knew that. All the better. She was not a highly sexed woman. It was not love and satisfaction she wanted, but a man to show off to observers. How disconcerting for her, therefore, when he took on a young girl to type his manuscripts for him, and that young girl fell in love with him . . .’

Polly Flinders made a sound of pain, a single soft ‘Ah’  perhaps irrepressible. Wexford paused, then went on.

‘He wasn’t in love with her. But he was growing older, he was nearly middle-aged. What sort of dignified future had a homosexual who follows the kind of life-style he had been following into his forties? He decided to marry, to settle down - at least superficially - to add another line to that biography of his on the back of his books.Perhaps he hadn’t considered what this would mean to the woman who had created him and received his confidences, it was not she, twelve years his senior, he intended marrying but a girl half her age. To stop him, she threatened to expose his true nationality, his illegalities and his homosexual conduct. He had no choice but to kill her.’

Wexford looked at Polly Flinders who was looking hard at him.

‘But it wasn’t quite like that, was it?’ he said.

While he was speaking a change had gradually come over her. She was suffering still but she was no longer tortured with fear. She had settled into a kind of resigned repose until, at his last sentence, apprehensiveness came back. But she said nothing, only nodding her head and then shaking it, as if she wished to please him, to agree with him, but was doubtful whether he wanted a yes or a no.

‘Of course he had a choice,’ Wexford went on. ‘He could have married and left her to go ahead. His readers would have felt nothing but sympathy with a man who wanted asylum in this country, even though he had used illegal means to get it. And there was not the slightest chance of his being deported after so long. As for his homosexuality, who but the most old-fashioned would care? Besides, the fact of his marriage would have put paid to any such aspersions. And where and how would Rhoda Comfrey have published it? In some semi-underground magazine most of his readers would never see? In a gossip column where it would have to be written with many circumlocutions to avoid libel? Even if he didn’t feel that any publicity is good publicity, he still had a choice. He could have agreed to her demands. Marriage for him was only an expedient, not a matter of passion.’

The girl showed no sign that these words had hurt her. She listened calmly, and now her hands lay folded in her lap. It was as if she were hearing what she wanted to hear but had hardly dared hope she would. Her pallor, though, was more than usually marked. Wexford was reminded of how he had once read in some legend or fairy story of a girl so fair and with skin so transparent, that when she drank the course the red wine followed could be seen as it ran down her throat. But Polly Flinders was in no legend or fairy story - or even nursery rhyme - and her dry bunched lips looked parched for wine or love.

‘It was for this reason,’ he said, ‘that someone else was alarmed - the girl he could so easily be prevented from marrying. She loved him and wanted to marry him, but she knew that this older woman had far more influence over him than she did. August fifth was Rhoda Comfrey’s birthday. Grenville West showed her - and showed the girl too - how little malice or resentment he felt towards her by giving her an expensive wallet for a birthday present. Indicating, surely, that he meant to let her rule him? That evening they were all together, the three of them, in Grenville West’s flat, and Rhoda Comfrey asked if she might make a phone call. Now when a guest does that, a polite host leaves the room so that the person making the call may be private. You and Mr West left the room, didn’t you, Miss Flinders? But perhaps the door was left open.'