A Sleeping Life

Chapter 8

A red-hot evening in Kenbourne Vale, a dusty dying sun.

The reek of cumin came to him from Kemal’s Kebab House, beer and sweat from the Waterlily pub. All the eating and drinking places had their doors wide open, propped back. Children of all ages, all colours, pure races and mixed races, sat on nights of steps or rode two-and three-wheelers on hard pavements and up and down narrow stuffy alleys. An old woman, drunk or just old and sick, squatted in the entrance to a betting shop. There was nothing green and organic to be seen unless you counted the lettuces, stuffed tight into boxes outside a green-grocer’s, and they looked as much like plastic as their wrappings.

One thing to be thankful for was that now he need not come back to Kenbourne Vale ever again if he didn’t want to. The trail had gone cold, about the only thing that had this evening. Sitting in the car on the road back to Kingsmarkham, he thought about it. At first Malina Patel’s behaviour had puzzled him. Why had she come out voluntarily to provide herself or Polly Flinders with an unasked-for alibi? Because she was a tease and a humorist, he now reflected, and in her beauty dwelt with wit. Everything she had said to him had been calculated to amuse – and how she herself had smiled at the time! – all that about telly detectives and bailiffs. Very funny and charming from such a pretty girl.

But no wonder Polly kept the postcard hidden and feared her overhearing their conversation. He could imagine the Indian girl’s comments. But if she hadn’t been listening at the door how the hell had she known what he had come for? Easy. The woman upstairs had told her. One of Baker’s men – that none too reliable Dinehart probably – had been round earlier in the day and let slip not only that the Kingsmarkham police wanted to talk to Polly but why they had wanted to talk to her. Malina would have read the papers, noted the date of Rhoda Comfrey’s death. He remembered how closely and somehow complacently she had looked at his warrant card.

Rather a naughty girl she was, playing detective stories and trying to throw cats among pigeons to perplex him and tease her flatmate. Ah, well, it was over now. Rhoda Comfrey had found that wallet on a bus or in the street, and he was back where he started.

Just before nine he walked into his own house. Dora was out, as he had known she would be, baby-sitting for Burden’s sister-in-law, Sylvia nowhere to be seen or heard. In the middle of the staircase sat Robin in pyjamas.

‘It’s too hot to go to sleep. You aren’t tired, are you, Grandad?’

‘Not really,’ said Wexford who was.

‘Granny said you would be but I know you, don’t I? I said to Granny that you’d want some fresh air.’

‘River air? Put some clothes on, then, and tell Mummy where you’re going.’

Twilight had come to the water meadows. ‘Dusk is a very good time for water rats,’ said Robin. ‘Dusk.’ He seemed to like the word and repeated it over and over as they walked along the river bank. Above the sluggish flow of the Kingsbrook gnats danced in lazy clouds. But the heat was not oppressive, the air was sweet and a refreshment to a London jaded spirit. However, ‘I’m afraid we’ve had it for tonight,’ Wexford said as the darkness began to deepen.

Robin took his hand. ‘Yes, we’d better go back because my daddy’s coming. I thought he was in Sweden but he’s not. I expect we’ll go home tomorrow. Not tonight because Ben’s asleep.’

Wexford didn’t know what answer to make. And when they came into the hall he heard from behind the closed door of the living room the angry but lowered voices of his daughter and son-in-law. Robin made no move towards that door. He looked at it, looked away, and rubbed his fists across his tired eyes.

‘I’ll see you into bed,’ said his grandfather and lifted him more than usually tenderly in his arms.

In the morning they phoned him from Stowerton Royal Infirmary. They thought the police would wish to know that Mr James Comfrey had ‘passed away’ during the night, and since his daughter was dead, whom should they get in touch with?

‘Mrs Lilian Crown,’ he said, and then he thought he might as well go and see her himself. There was little else to do. She was out. In Kingsmarkham the pubs open at ten on market day. To Bella Vista then. Today its name, its veridian roof and its sun-trap windows were justified. Light and heat beat down with equal force from a sky of the same hard dark blue as the late Mr Comfrey’s front door.

‘He’s gone then,’ the old woman said. News travels fast in these quiet backwoods places. During the hour that had passed since Wexford had been told the news, Mrs Crown also had been told and had informed at least some of her neighbours. ‘It’s a terrible thing to die, young man, and have no one shed a tear for you.’

She was stringing beans today, slicing them into long thin strips as few young housewives can be bothered to do. ‘I daresay it’d have been a relief to poor Rhoda. Whatever’d she have done, I used to ask myself, if they’d turned him out of there and she’d had to look after him? Nursed her mother devotedly, she did, used to have to take time off work and all, but there was love there of course, and not a word of appreciation from old Jim.’ The vital, youthful eyes fixed piercingly on him. ‘Who’ll get the money?’

‘The money, Mrs Parker?’

‘Rhoda’s money. It’d have gone to him, being next of kin. I know that. Who’ll get it now? That’s what I’d like to know.’

This aspect hadn’t occurred to him. ‘Maybe there isn’t any money. Few working people these days have much in the way of savings.’

‘Speak up, will you?’

Wexford repeated what he had said, and Mrs Parker gave a scornful cackle. 'Course there’s money. She got that lot from her pools win, didn’t she? Wouldn’t have blued that, not Rhoda, she wasn’t one of your spendthrifts. I reckon you lot have been sitting about twiddling your thumbs or you’d have got to the bottom of it by now. A house there’ll be somewhere, filled up with good furniture, and a nice little sum in shares too. D’you want to know what I think? It’ll all go to Lilian Crown.’

Rather unwillingly he considered what she had said. But would it go to Mrs Crown? Possibly, but for that intervening heir, James Comfrey. If she had had anything to leave and if she had died intestate, James Comfrey had for nine days been in possession of his daughter’s property. But a sister in-law wouldn’t automatically inherit from him, though her son, the mongol, if he were still alive… A nephew by marriage? He knew little of the law relating to inheritance, and it hardly seemed relevant now.

‘Mrs Parker,’ he said, pitching his voice loud, ‘you’re quite right when you say we haven’t got very far. But we do know Miss Comfrey was living under an assumed name, a false name. Do you follow me?’ She nodded impatiently. ‘Now when people do that, they often choose a name that’s familiar to them, a mother’s maiden name, for instance, or the name of some relative or childhood friend.’

‘Why ever would she do that?’

‘Perhaps only because her own name had very unpleasant associations for her. Do you know what her mother’s maiden name was?’

Mrs Parker had it ready. ‘Crawford. Agnes and Lilian Crawford, they was. Change the name and not the letter, change for worse and not for better. Poor Agnes changed for worse all right, and the same applies to that Lilian, though it wasn’t a C for her the first time. Crown left her and he’s got another wife somewhere, I daresay, for all she says he’s dead.'

‘So she might have been calling herself Crawford?’ He was speaking his thoughts aloud. ‘Or Parker, since she was so fond of you. Or Rowlands after the editor of the old Gazette.’ This spoken reverie had scarcely been audible to Mrs Parker, and he bawled out his last suggestion. ‘Or Crown?’

‘Not Crown. She hadn’t no time for that Lilian. And no wonder, always mocking her and telling her to get herself a man.’ The old face contorted and Mrs Parker put up her fists as the aged do, recalling that far distant childhood when such a gesture was natural. ‘Why’d she call herself anything but her rightful name? She was a good woman was Rhoda, never did anything wrong nor underhand in her whole life.’

Could you truthfully say that of anyone? Not, certainly, of Rhoda Comfrey who had stolen something she must have known would be precious to its owner, and whose life could be described as a masterpiece of underhandedness.

‘I’ll go out this way, Mrs Parker,’ he said, opening the french window to the garden because he didn’t want to encounter Nicky.

‘Mind you shut it behind you. They can talk about heat all they like, but my hands and feet are always cold like yours’ll be, young man, when you get to my age.’

There was no sign of Mrs Crown. He hadn’t checked her movements on the night in question, but was it within the bounds of possibility that she had killed her niece? The motive was very tenuous, unless she knew of the existence of a will. Certainly there might be a will, deposited with a firm of solicitors who were unaware of the testator’s death, but Rhoda Comfrey would never have left anything to the aunt she so disliked. Besides, that little stick of a woman wouldn’t have had the physical strength. His car, its windows closed and its doors locked for safety’s sake, was oven-hot inside, the steering wheel almost too hot to hold. Driving back, he was glad he was a thin man now so that at least the trickling sweat didn’t make him look like a pork carcase in the preliminary stages of roasting.

Before the sun came round, he closed the windows in his office and pulled down the blinds. Somewhere or other he had read that that was what they did in hot countries rather than let the air in. Up to a point it worked. Apart from a short break for lunch in the canteen, he sat up there for the rest of the day, thinking, thinking. He couldn’t remember any previous case that had come his way in which, after nine days, he had had no possible suspect, could see no glimmer of a motive, or knew less about the victim’s private life. Hours of thinking got him no further than to conclude that the killing had been, wildly incongruous though it seemed, a crime of passion, that it had been unpremeditated, and that Mrs Parker had allowed affection to sway her assessment of Rhoda Comfrey’s character.

‘Where’s your mother?’ said Wexford, finding his daughter alone.

‘Upstairs, reading bedtime stories.’

‘Sylvia,’ he said, ‘I’ve been busy, I’m still very busy, but I hope there’ll never be a time when I’ve got too much on my hands to think about my children. Is there anything I can do to help? When I’m not being a policeman that’s what I’m here for.’

She hung her head. Large and statuesque, she had a face designed, it seemed, to register the noble virtues, courage and fortitude. She was patience on a monument, smiling at grief. Yet she had never known grief, and in her life hardly any courage or fortitude had ever been called for.

‘Wouldn’t you like to talk about it?’ he said.

The strong shoulders lifted. ‘We can’t change the facts. I’m a woman and that’s to be a second-rate citizen.’

‘You didn’t used to feel like this.’

‘Oh, Dad, what’s the use of talking like that? People change. We don’t hold the same opinions all our lives. If I say I read a lot of books and went to some meetings, you’ll only say what Neil says, that I shouldn’t have read them and I shouldn’t have gone.’

‘Maybe I shall and maybe I’d be right if what you’ve read has turned you from a happy woman into an unhappy one and is breaking up your marriage. Are you less of a second-rate citizen here with your parents than at home with your husband?’

‘I shall be if I get a job, if I start training for something now.'

Her father forbore to tell her that he hardly cared for the idea of her attending some college or course while her mother was left to care for Robin and Ben. Instead he asked her if she didn’t think that to be a woman had certain advantages. ‘If you get a flat tire,’ he said, ‘the chances are in five minutes some chap’ll stop and change the wheel for you for no more reason than that you’ve got a good figure and a nice smile. But if it was me I could stand there flagging them down for twenty-four hours without a hope in hell of even getting the loan of a jack.’

‘Because I’m pretty!’ she said fiercely, and he almost laughed, the adjective was so inept. Her eyes flashed, she looked like a Medea. ‘D’you know what that means? Whistles, yes, but no respect. Stupid compliments but never a sensible remark as from one human being to another.’

‘Come now, you’re exaggerating.’

‘I am not. Dad. Look, I’ll give you an example. A couple of weeks ago Neil backed the car into the gatepost and I took it to the garage to get a new rear bumper and light. When the mechanics had done whistling at me, d’you know what the manager said? “You ladies,” he said, “I bet he had a thing or two to say when he saw what you’d done.” He took it for granted I’d done it because I’m a woman. And when I corrected him he couldn’t talk seriously about it. Just flirtatiousness and silly cracks and I was to explain this and that to Neil. “His motor”, he said, and to tell him this, that and the other. I know as much about cars as Neil, it’s as much my car as his.’ She stopped and flushed. ‘No, it isn’t, though!’ she burst out. ‘It isn’t! And it isn’t as much my house as his. My children aren’t even as much mine as his, he’s their legal guardian. My God, my life isn’t as much mine as his!’

‘I think we’d better have a drink,’ said her father, ‘and you calm down a bit and tell me just what your grievances against Neil are. Who knows? I may be able to be your intermediary.’

Thus he found himself, a couple of hours later, closeted with his son-in-law in the house which he had, in former times, delighted to visit because it was noisy and warm and filled, it had seemed to him, with love. Now it was dusty, chilly and silent. Neil said he had had his dinner but, from the evidence, Wexford thought it had taken a liquid and spirituous form.

‘Of course I want her back, Reg, and my kids. I love her, you know that. But I can’t meet her conditions. I won’t. I’m to have some wretched au pair here which’ll mean the boys moving in together, pay her a salary I can ill afford, just so that Syl can go off and train for some profession that’s already overcrowded. She’s a damn good wife and mother, or she was. I don’t see any reason to employ someone to do the things she does so well while she trains for something she may not do well at all. Have a drink?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Well, I will, and you needn’t tell me I’ve had too much already. I know it. The point is, why can’t she go on doing her job while I do mine? I don’t say hers is less important than mine. I don’t say she’s inferior and when she says others say so I think that’s all in her head. But I’m not paying her a wage for doing what other women have done since time immemorial for love. Right? I’m not going to jeopardize my career by cancelling trips abroad, or exhaust myself cleaning the place and bathing the kids when I get home after a long day. I’ll dry the dishes, OK, I’ll see she gets any laboursaving equipment she wants, but I’d like to know just who needs the liberation if I’m to work all day and all night while she footles around at some college for God knows how many years. I wish I was a woman, I can tell you, no money worries, no real responsibility, no slogging off to an office day in and day out for forty years,’

‘You don’t wish that, you know.’

‘I almost have done this week.’ Neil threw out a despairing hand at the chaos surrounding him. ‘I don’t know how to do housework. I can’t cook, but I can earn a decent living. Why the hell can’t she do the one and I do the other like we used to? I could wring those damned Women’s Libbers’ necks. I love her, Reg. There’s never been anyone else for either of us. We row, of course we do, that’s healthy in a marriage, but we love each other and we’ve got two super kids. Doesn’t it seem crazy that a sort of political thing, an impersonal thing, could split up two people like us?’

‘It’s not impersonal to her,’ said Wexford sadly. ‘Couldn’t you compromise, Neil? Couldn’t you get a woman in just for a year till Ben goes to school?’

‘Couldn’t she wait just for a year till Ben goes to school? OK, so marriage is supposed to be give and take. It seems to me I do all the giving and she does all the taking.’

‘And she says it’s the other way about. I’ll go now, Neil.’ Wexford laid his hand on his son-in-law’s arm. ‘Don’t drink too much. It’s not the answer.’

‘Isn’t it? Sorry, Reg, but I’ve every intention tonight of getting smashed out of my mind.’

Wexford said nothing to his daughter when he got home, and she asked him no questions. She was sitting by the still open trench window, cuddling close to her Ben who had awakened and cried, and reading with mutinous concentration a book called Woman and the Sexist Plot.