A Sleeping Life

Chapter 20

The dictionaries Clements brought him, staggering under their weight, turned out to be the Shorter Oxford in its old vast single volume and Webster’s International in two volumes.

‘There’s a mighty lot of words in those, sir. I doubt if anyone’s taken a look at them since we had that nasty black magic business in the cemetery a couple of years back and I couldn’t for the life of me remember how to spell mediaeval.’

It was the associative process which had led Rhoda Comfrey to give Dr Lomond her address as 6 Princevale Road, and that same process that had brought Sylvia’s obscure expression back to Wexford’s mind. Now it began to operate again as he was looking through the Addenda and Corrigenda to the Shorter Oxford.

‘Mediaeval?’ he said. ‘You mean you weren’t sure whether there was a diphthong or not?’ The sergeant’s puzzled frown made him say hastily, ‘You weren’t sure whether it was spelt i, a, e – or i, e, was that it?’

‘Exactly, sir.’ Clements’ need to put the world right – or to castigate the world – extended even to criticizing lexicographers. ‘I don’t know why we can’t have simplified spelling, get rid of all these unnecessary letters. They only confuse schoolkids, I know they did me. I well remember when I was about twelve…’ Wexford wasn’t listening to him. Clements went on talking, being the kind of person who would never have interrupted anyone when he was speaking, but didn’t think twice about assaulting a man’s ears while he was reading. ‘… And day after day I got kept in after school for mixing up “there” and “their”, if you know what I mean, and my father said… ’

Diphthongs, thought Wexford. Of course. That ae was just an anglicization of Greek eeta, wasn’t it, or from the Latin which had a lot of ae’s in it? And often these days the diphthong was changed to a single e, as in modern spelling of mediaeval. So his word, Sylvia’s word, might appear among the E’s and not the A’s at all. He heaved the thick wedge of pages back to the E section. ‘Eolienne’ – ‘a fine dress farbric’… ‘Eosin’ – ‘a red dye-stuff… Maybe Sylvia’s word had never had a diphthong, maybe it didn’t come from Greek or Latin at all, but from a name or a place. That wasn’t going to help him, though, if it wasn’t in the dictionaries. Wild ideas came to him of getting hold of Sylvia here and now, of calling a taxi and having it take him down over the river to the National Theatre, finding her before the curtain went up in three-quarters of an hour’s time… But there was still another dictionary.

‘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!