A Sleeping Life

Chapter 13

There was no point in delaying. He went straight to Hightrees Farm. Griswold listened to him with an expression of lip-curling disgust. In the middle of Wexford’s account he helped himself to a brandy and soda, but he offered nothing to his subordinate. When it was ended he said, ‘Do you ever read the newspapers?’

‘Yes, sir. Of course.’

‘Have you ever noticed how gradually over the past ten years or so the Press have been ramming it home to people that their basic freedoms are constantly under threat? And who comes in for most of the shit-throwing? The police. You’ve just given them a big helping of it on a plate, haven’t you? All ready for throwing tomorrow morning.’

‘I don’t believe Mrs Farriner will tell the Press, sir.’

‘She’ll tell her friends, won’t she? Some busy-body do-gooder will get hold of it.’ The Chief Constable, who referred to Mid-Sussex as the General had been in the habit of referring to la belle France, with jealousy and with reverence, said, ‘Understand, I will not have the hitherto unspotted record of the Mid-Sussex Constabulary smeared all over by the gutter Press. I will not have it endangered by one foolish man who acts on psychology and not on circumstantial evidence.’

Wexford smarted under that one. ‘Foolish man’ was hard to take. And he smarted more when Griswold went on, even though he now called him Reg which meant there would be no immediate retribution.

‘This woman’s been dead for two weeks, Reg, and as far as you’ve got, she might as well have dropped from Mars. She might as well have popped off in a space ship every time she left Kingsmarkham.’ I’m beginning to think she did, Wexford thought, though he said nothing aloud. ‘You know I don’t care to call the Yard in unless I must. By the end of this coming week I’ll have to if my own men can’t do better than this. It seems to me…’ and he gave Wexford a ponderous bull-like glare ‘… that all you can do is get your picture in the papers like some poove of a film actor.’

Sylvia sat in the dining room, the table covered with application forms for jobs and courses.

‘You’ve picked the wrong time of year,’ her father said, picking up a form that applied for entry to the University of London. ‘Their term starts next month.’

‘The idea is I get a job to fill in the year and start doing my degree next year. I have to “get a grant, you see.’

‘My dear, you don’t stand a chance. They’ll assess you on Neil’s salary. At least, I suppose so. He’s your husband.’

‘Maybe he won’t be by then. Oh, I’m so sick of you men ruling the world! It’s not fair just taking it for granted my husband pays for me like he’d pay for a child.’

‘Just as fair as taking it for granted the taxpayers will. I know you’re not interested in my views or your mother’s, but I’m going to give you mine just the same. The way the world still is, women have to prove they’re as capable as men. Well, you prove it. Do an external degree or a degree by correspondence and in something that’s likely to lead to a good job. It’ll take you five years and by that time the boys’ll be off your hands. Then when you’re thirty-five you and Neil will be two professional people with full-time jobs and a servant you both pay for. Nobody’ll treat you like a chattel or a furniture polisher then. You’ll see.’

She pondered, looking sullen. Very slowly she began filling in the section of a form headed ‘Qualifications’. The list of them, Wexford noted sadly, was sparse. She scrawled a line through Mr/Mrs/Miss and wrote Ms. Her head came up and the abundant hair flew out.

‘I’m glad I’ve got boys. I’d feel sick with despair for them if they were girls. Didn’t you want a son?’

‘I suppose I did before Sheila was born. But after she was born I didn’t give it another thought.’

‘Didn’t you think what we’d suffer? You’re aware and sensitive. Dad. Didn’t you think how we’d be exploited and humiliated by men and used?’

It was too much. There she sat, tall and powerful, blooming with health, the youthful hue sitting on her skin like morning dew, a large diamond cluster sparkling on her hand, her hair scented with St Laurent’s Rive Gauche. Her sister, described by critics as one of England’s most promising young actresses, had a big flat of her own in St John’s Wood where, it had often seemed to her father, she sweetly exploited and used all the men who frequented it.

‘I couldn’t send you back, could I?’ he snapped. ‘I couldn’t give God back your entrance ticket and ask for a male variety instead. I know exactly what Freud felt when he said there was one question that would always puzzle him. What is it that women want?’

‘To be people,’ she said. He snorted and walked out. The Crockers and a couple of neighbours were coming in for drinks. The doctor hustled Wexford upstairs and produced his sphygmomanometer.

‘You look rotten, Reg. What’s the matter with you?’

‘That’s for you to say. How’s my blood pressure?’

‘Not bad. Is it Sylvia?’

He hated explaining why his daughter and the children were in the house. People categorize others into the limited compartments their imaginations permit. They assumed that either Sylvia or her husband had been unfaithful or that Neil had been cruel. He couldn’t spell it all out, but just had to watch the speculating gleam in their eyes and take their pity.

‘Partly,’ he said, ‘and it’s this Comfrey case. I dream about her, Len. I rack my brains, such as they are, about her. And I’ve made a crazy mistake. Griswold half-crucified me this afternoon, called me a foolish man.’

‘We all have to fail, Reg,’ said Crocker like a liberal headmaster.

‘There was a sort of sardonic gleam in her eyes when we found her. I don’t know if you noticed. I feel as if she’s laughing at me from beyond the grave. Hysterical, eh? That’s what Mike says I am.’

But Mike didn’t say it again. He knew when to tread warily with the chief inspector, though Wexford had become a little less glum when there was nothing in the papers on Monday or Tuesday about the Farriner fiasco.

‘And that business wasn’t all vanity and vexation of spirit,’ he said. ‘We’ve learnt one thing from it. The disappearance of Rhoda Comfrey, alias whatever, may not have been remarked by her neighbours because they expect her to be away on holiday. So we have to wait and hope a while longer that someone from outside will still come to us.’

‘Why should they at this stage?’

‘Exactly because it is at this stage. How long do the majority of people go on holiday for?’

‘A fortnight,’ said Burden promptly.

Wexford nodded. ‘So those friends and neighbours who knew her under an assumed name would have expected her back last Saturday. Now they wouldn’t have been much concerned if she wasn’t back by Saturday, but by Monday when she doesn’t answer her phone, when she doesn’t turn up for whatever work she does? By today?’

‘You’ve got a point there.’

‘God knows, every newspaper reader in the country must be aware we still don’t know her London identity. The Press has rammed it home hard enough. Wouldn’t it be nice, Mike, if at this very moment some public-spirited citizen were to be walking into a nick somewhere in north or west London to say she’s worried because her boss or the woman next door hasn’t come back from Majorca?’

Burden always took Wexford’s figurative little flights of fancy literally. ‘She couldn’t have been going there, wouldn’t have had a passport.’

‘As Rhoda Comfrey she might have. Besides, there are all sorts of little tricks you can get up to with passports. You’re not going to tell me a woman who’s fooled us like this for two weeks couldn’t have got herself a dozen false passports if she’d wanted them.’

‘Anyway, she didn’t go to Majorca. She came here and got herself stabbed.’ Burden went to the window and said wonderingly, ‘There’s a cloud up there.’

‘No bigger than a man’s hand, I daresay.’

‘Bigger than that,’ said Burden, not recognizing this quotation from the Book of Kings. ‘In fact, there are quite a lot of them.’ And he made a remark seldom uttered by Englishmen in a tone of hope, still less of astonishment. ‘It’s going to rain.’

The room went very dark and they had to switch the light on. Then a golden tree of forked lightning sprang out of the forest, splitting the purple sky. A great rolling clap of thunder sent them retreating from where they had been watching the beginnings of this storm, and Burden closed the windows. At last the rain came, but sluggishly at first in the way rain always does come when it has held off for weeks, slow intermittent plops of it. Wexford remembered how Sylvia, when she was a tiny child, had believed until corrected that the rain was contained up there in a bag which someone punctured and then finally sliced open. He sat down at his desk and again phoned the Missing Persons Bureau, but no one had been reported missing who could remotely be identified as Rhoda Comfrey.

It was still only the middle of the afternoon. Plenty of time for the public-spirited citizen’s anxiety and tension to mount until… Today was the day, surely, when that would happen if it was going to happen. The bag was sliced open and rain crashed in a cataract against the glass, bringing with it a sudden drop in the temperature. Wexford actually shivered; for the first time in weeks he felt cold, and he put on his jacket. He found himself seeing the storm as an omen, this break in the weather signifying another break. Nonsense, of course, the superstition of a foolish man. He had thought he had had breaks before, hadn’t he? Two of them, and both had come to nothing.

By six there had come in no phone calls relevant to Rhoda Comfrey, but still he waited, although it was not necessary for him to be there. He waited until seven, until half past, by which time all the exciting pyrotechnics of the storm were over and the rain fell dully and steadily. At a quarter to eight, losing faith in his omen, in the importance of this day above other days – it had been one of the dreariest he had spent for a long time – he drove home through the grey rain.