A Sleeping Life

Chapter 11

He could hardly comfort her as he would have comforted his Sylvia or his Sheila whom he would have taken in his arms. So he picked up the phone and asked for someone to bring up coffee and sandwiches for two, and remarked as much to himself as to her that he wouldn’t be able to get angry when he had his mouth full.

Crying did nothing to spoil her face. She wiped her eyes, sniffed and said, ‘You are nice. And I’ve been such an idiot. I must be absolutely out of my tree.’

‘I doubt it. D’you feel like beginning or d’you want your coffee first?’

‘I’ll get it over.’

Should he tell her he was no longer interested in Grenville West, for it must have been he she had come about, or let it go? Might as well hear what it was.

‘I told you a deliberate lie,’ she said.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘You aren’t the first to do that by a long chalk. I could be in the Guinness Book of Records as the man who’s had more deliberate lies told him than anyone else on earth.’

‘But I told this one. I’m so ashamed.’

The coffee arrived and a plate of ham sandwiches. She took one and held it but didn’t begin to eat. ‘It was about Polly,’ she said. ‘Polly never goes out in the evenings alone, but never. If she goes to Grenville’s he always runs her home or puts her in a taxi. She had a horrible thing happen about a year back. She was walking along in the dark and a man came up behind her and put his arms round her. She screamed and kicked him and he ran off, but after that she was afraid to be out alone in the dark. She says if people were allowed to have guns in this country she’d have one.’

Wexford said gently, ‘Your deliberate lie. Miss Patel? I think you’re stalling.’

‘I know I am. Oh, dear. Well, I told you Polly was at home with me that Monday evening, but she wasn’t. She went out before I got home from work and she came back alone – oh, I don’t know, after I was in bed. Anyway, the next day I asked her where she’d been because I knew Grenville was away, and she said she’d got fed up with Grenville and she’d been out with someone else. Well, I knew she’d been unhappy about him for a long time, Grenville, I mean. She wanted to go and live with him. Actually, she wanted to marry him, but he wouldn’t even kiss her.’ Malina Patel gave a little shudder. ‘Ooh, I wouldn’t have wanted him to kiss me! There’s something really funny about him, something queer – I don’t mean gay-queer, or I don’t think so but something sort of hard to…’

‘On with your story, please, Miss Patel!’

‘I’m sorry. So what I was going to say was that Polly had met this man who was married and that Monday they’d been to some motel and had a room there for the evening. And she said this man of hers was afraid of his wife finding out, she’d put a private detective on him, and if that detective came round, would I say she’d been at home with me?’

‘You thought I was a private detective!'

‘Yes! I told you I was mad. I told Polly I’d do what she said if a detective came, and a detective did come. It didn’t seem so very awful, you see, because it’s not a crime, sleeping with someone else’s husband, is it? It’s not very nice but it’s not a crime. I mean, not against the law.’

Wexford did his best to suppress his laughter and succeeded fairly well. Those remarks of hers, then, which he had thought witty and made at his expense, had in fact come from a genuine innocence. If she wasn’t so pretty and so sweet, he would have been inclined to call her – it seemed sacrilege – downright stupid. She ate a sandwich and took a gulp of coffee.

‘And I was glad Polly had got someone after being so miserable about Grenville. And I thought private detectives are awful people, snooping and prying and getting paid for doing dirty things like that. So I thought it didn’t really matter telling a lie to that sort of person.’

This time Wexford had to let his laughter go. She looked at him dubiously over the top of her coffee cup. ‘Have you ever known any private detectives. Miss Patel?’

‘No but I’ve seen lots of them in films.’

‘Which enabled you to identify me with such ease? Seriously, though…’ He stopped smiling. ‘Miss Flinders knew who I was. Didn’t she tell you afterwards?’

It was the crucial question, and on her answer depended whether he accompanied her at once back to Kenbourne Vale or allowed her to go alone.

‘Of course she did! But I was too stupid to see. She said you hadn’t come about the man and the motel at all, but it was something to do with Grenville and that wallet he’d lost and she was going to tell me a whole lot more, but I wouldn’t listen. I was going out, you see, I was late already, and I was sick of hearing her on and on about Grenville. And she tried again to tell me the next day, only I said not to go on about Grenville, please, I’d rather hear about her new man, and she hasn’t mentioned him – Grenville, I mean – since.’

He seized on one point. ‘You knew before that the wallet had been lost, then?’

‘Oh, yes! She’d been full of it. Long before she told me about the motel and the man and the private detective. Poor Grenville had lost his wallet on a bus and he’d asked her to tell the police but she hadn’t because she thought they wouldn’t be able to do anything. That was days before she went to the motel.’

He believed her. His case for indentifying Rhoda Comfrey as Rose Farriner was strengthened. What further questions he asked Malina Patel would be for his amusement only.

‘May I asked what made you come and tell me the awful truth?’

‘Your picture in the paper. I saw it this morning and I recognized you.’ From that picture? Frivolous inquiries may lead to humiliation as well as amusement.

'Polly had already gone out. I wished I’d listened to her before. I suddenly realized it had all been to do with that murdered woman, and I realized who you were and everything. I felt awful. I didn’t go to work. I phoned and said I’d got gastro-enteritis which was another lie, I’m afraid, and I left a note for Polly saying I was going to see my mother who was ill, and then I got the train and came here. I’ve told so many lies now I’ve almost forgotten who I’ve told what.’

Wexford said, ‘When you’ve had more practice you’ll learn how to avoid that. Make sure to tell the same lie.’

‘You don’t mean it!’

‘No, Miss Patel, I don’t. And don’t tell lies to the police, will you? We usually find out. I expect we should have found this one out, only we’re no longer very interested in that line of inquiry. Another cup of coffee?’

She shook her head. ‘You’ve been awfully nice to me.’

‘You don’t go to prison till next time,’ said Wexford. ‘What they call a suspended sentence. Come on, I’ll take you downstairs and we’ll see if we can fix you up with a lift to the station. I have an idea Constable Loring has to go that way.’

Large innocent eyes of a doe or calf met his. ‘I’m afraid I’m being an awful lot of trouble.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ Wexford said breezily. ‘He’ll bear it with the utmost fortitude, believe me.’

Once again he got home early with a free evening ahead.

Such a thing rarely happened to him in the middle of a murder case. There was nothing to do but wait and wonder. Though not to select or discard from a list of suspects, for he had none, nor attempt to read hidden meanings and calculated falsehoods between the lines of witnesses’ statements. He had no witnesses. All he had were four keys and a missing car; a wallet that beyond all doubt now had been lost on a bus; and a tale of a phone call overheard by a man who, against all reasonable probability, loved withered middle-aged gawky Rhoda Comfrey so intensely that he had killed her from jealousy, not a very promising collection of objects and negativities and conjectures.

The river was golden in the evening light, having on its shallow rippling surface a patina like that on beaten bronze. There were dragonflies in pale blue or speckled armour, and the willow trailed his hoar leaves in the grassy stream.

‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ said Robin 'if the river went through your garden?’

‘My garden would have to be half a mile longer,’ said Wexford.

Water rats having failed to appear, the little boys had taken off sandals and socks and were paddling. It was fortunate that Wexford, rather against his will, had consented to remove his own shoes, roll up his trousers and join them. For Ben, playing boats with a log of willow wood, leant over too far and toppled in up to his neck. His grandfather had him out before he had time to utter a wail.

‘Good thing it’s so warm. You’ll dry off on the way back.’

‘Grandad carry.’

Robin looked anything but displeased. ‘There’ll be an awful row.’

‘Not when you tell them how brave grandad jumped in and saved your brother’s life.’

‘Come on. It’s only about six inches deep. He’ll get in a row and so will you. You know what women are.’

But there was no row, or rather, no fresh row to succeed that already taking place. How it had begun Wexford didn’t know, but as he and the boys came up to the french windows he heard his wife say with, for her, uncommon tartness, ‘Personally, I think you’ve got far more than you deserved, Sylvia. A good husband, a lovely home and two fine healthy sons. D’you think you’ve ever done anything to merit more than that?’

Sylvia jumped up. Wexford thought she was going to shout some retort at her mother, but at that moment, seeing her mudstained child, she seized him in her arms and rushed away upstairs with him. Robin, staring in silence, at last followed her, his thumb in his mouth, a habit Wexford thought he had got out of years before.

‘And you tell me not to be harsh with her!’

‘It’s not very pleasant,’ said Dora, not looking at him 'To have your own daughter tell you a woman without a career is a useless encumbrance when she gets past fifty. When her looks have gone. Her husband only stays with her out of duty and because someone’s got to support her,’

He was aghast. She had turned away because her eyes had filled with tears. He wondered when he had last seen her cry. Not since her own father died, not for fifteen years. The second woman to cry over him that day. Coffee and sandwiches were hardly the answer here, though a hug might have been. Instead he said laconically, ‘I often think if I were a bachelor now at my age, and you were single – which, of course, you wouldn’t be – I’d ask you to marry me.’

She managed a smile. ‘Oh, Mr Wexford, this is so sudden. Will you give me time to think it over?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Sorry. We’re going out to celebrate our engagement.’ He touched her shoulder. ‘Come on. Now. We’ll go and have a nice dinner somewhere and then we’ll go to the pictures. You needn’t tell Sylvia. We’ll just sneak out.’

‘We can’t!’

‘We’re going to.’

So they dined at the Olive and Dove, she in an old cotton dress and he in his water-rat-watching clothes. And then they saw a film in which no one got murdered or even got married, still less had children or grandchildren, but in which all the characters lived in Paris and drank heavily and made love all day long. It was half past eleven when they got back, and Wexford had the curious feeling, as Sylvia came out into the hall to meet them, that they were young lovers again and she the parent. As if she would say: Where had they been and what sort of a time was this to come home? Of course she didn’t.

‘The Chief Constable’s been on the phone for you, Dad.’

‘What time was that?’ said Wexford.

‘About eight and then again at ten.’

‘I can’t phone him now. It’ll have to wait till the morning.’

Sharing the initials and, to some extent, the appearance of the late General de Gaulle, Charles Griswold lived in a converted farmhouse in the village of Millerton – Millerton Les-Deux eglises, Wexford called it privately. Wexford was far from being his favourite officer. He regarded him as an eccentric and one who used methods of the kind Burden had denounced on Parish Oak station platform.

‘I hoped to get hold of you last night,’ he said coldly when Wexford presented himself at Hightrees Farm at nine-thirty on Saturday morning.

‘I took my wife out, sir.’

Griswold did not exactly think that policemen shouldn’t have wives. He had one himself, she was about the place now, though some said he had more or less mislaid her decades ago. But that females of any kind should so intrude as to have to be taken out displeased him exceedingly. He made no comment. His big forehead rucked up into a frown.

‘I sent for you to tell you that this warrant has been sworn. The matter is in the hands of the Kenbourne police. Superintendent Rittifer foresees entering the house tomorrow morning, and it is entirely by his courtesy that you and another officer may accompany him.’

It’s my case, Wexford thought resentfully. She was killed in my manor. Oh, Howard, why the hell do you have to be in Tenerife now? Aloud he said, not very politely: ‘Why not today?’

‘Because it’s my belief the damned woman’ll turn up today, the way she’s supposed to.’

‘She won’t, sir. She’s Rhoda Comfrey.’

‘Rittifer thinks so too. I may as well tell you that if it rested on your notions alone the obtaining of this warrant wouldn’t have my support. I know you. Half the time you’re basing your inquiries on a lot of damn-fool intuitions and feelings.’

‘Not this time, sir. One woman has positively identified Rhoda Comfrey as Rose Farriner from the photograph. She is the right age, she disappeared at the right time. She complained of appendicitis symptoms only a few months after we know Rhoda Comfrey went to a doctor with such symptoms. She…’

‘All right, Reg.’ The Chief Constable delivered the kind of dismissive shot of which only he was capable. ‘I won’t say you know your own business best because I don’t think you do.’