No More Dying Then

Chapter 13

The Piebald Pony is not the kind of pub connoisseurs of rural England normally associate with her country side. Indeed, if you approach it from the direction of Sparta Grove, and if you keep your eyes down so that you cannot see the green surrounding hills, you would not suppose yourself in the country at all. Sparta Grove and Charteris Road which it joins at a right angle - on this corner stands the Piebald Pony - resemble the back streets of an industrial city. A few of the houses have narrow front gardens, but most doors open directly on to the pavement, as do the entrances to the Pony’s public and saloon bars.

One of these rooms fronts Sparta Grove, the other Charteris Road, They are the same shape and size and the saloon bar is distinguished from the public only in that drinks cost more in the former, about a third of its stone floor is covered with a square of brown Axminster and its seating includes a couple of settees, upholstered in battered black, of the kind that used to be seen in railway waiting rooms.

On one of the settees, under a poster recommending the Costa del Sol and displaying a photograph of a girl in a wet-look bikini leering at a bull in its death throes, sat Monkey Matthews with an old man. He looked, Wexford thought, very much by time’s fell hand defaced and in nearly as bad case as the bull. It wasn’t that he was thin or pale - in fact his squarish toad’s face was purple - but there was an air about him of one who has been physically ruined by years of bad feeding, damp dwellings and nasty indulgences whose nature Wexford preferred not to dwell on.

Each man had an almost empty half-pint glass of the cheapest obtainable bitter and Monkey was smoking a minuscule cigarette.

“Evening,” said Wexford.

Monkey didn’t get up but indicated this companion with an airy wave. “This is Mr. Casaubon.”

Wexford gave a tiny sigh, the outward and audible sign of an inward and outrageous scream. “I don’t believe it,” he said thinly. “Just enlighten me to which one of you two intellectuals is acquainted with George Eliot.”

Far from living up to Monkey’s image of a man intimidated by the police, Mr. Casaubon had brightened as soon as Wexford spoke and now rejoined in thick hideous cockney, “I see him once. Strangeways it was, 1929. They done him for a big bullion job.”

“I fear,” Wexford said distantly, “that we cannot be thinking of the same person. Now what are you gentlemen drinking?”

"Port and brandy,” said Mr. Casaubon almost before the words were out, but Monkey, to whom what could be inhaled always took priority over what could merely be imbibed, pushed forward his empty bitter glass and remarked that he would appreciate twenty Dunhill International.

Wexford bought the drinks and tossed the crimson and gold package into Monkey’s lap. “I may as well open the proceedings,” he said; “by telling you two jokers you can forget about. five hundred pounds or anything like it. Is that clear?”

Mr. Casaubon received this in the manner of one used to frequent disappointment. The liveliness which had briefly appeared in his watery eyes died away and, making a low humming sound that might have been a long-drawn murmur of assent or just an attempt at a tune, he reached for his port and brandy. Monkey, said, “When all’s said and done, me and my friend would settle for the reward.”

“That’s very handsome of you,” said Wexford sarcastically. “I suppose you realise that money will be paid only for information leading directly to the arrest of the murderer of Stella Rivers?”

“We wasn’t born yesterday,” said Monkey. This remark was so obviously true, particularly in the case of Mr. Casaubon, who looked as if he had been born in 1890, that the old man broke off from his humming to emit a cackle of laughter, showing Wexford the most hideous, dilapidated and rotting set of teeth he had ever seen in a human mouth, “We can read what’s in the papers as well as you,” Monkey went on. “Now then, cards on the table. If my friend tells you what he knows and what he’s got papers to prove, are you going to do fair by us and see we get what’s our right when Swan’s under lock and key?”

“I can get a witness, if that’s what you want. Mr. Burden perhaps?”

Monkey puffed smoke out through his nostrils. “I can’t stomach that sarcastic devil,” he said. “No, your word’s good enough for me. When folks run down the fuzz I always say, Mr. Wexford’s hounded me, God knows, but he . . .”

“Monkey,” Wexford interrupted, “are you going to tell me or aren’t you?”

“Not here,” said Monkey, shocked. ‘What, give you a load of info that’ll put a man away for life here in what you might call the market place?”

“I’ll drive you back to the station, then.”

“Mr. Casaubon wouldn’t like that.” Monkey stared at the old man, perhaps willing him to show some sign of terror, but Mr. Casaubon, his eyelids drooping, simply continued to hum monotonously. “We’ll go to Rube’s place. She’s out babysitting.”

Wexford shrugged his agreement. Pleased, Monkey gave Mr. Casaubon a poke. “Come on, mate, wakey wakey.”

It took Mr. Casaubon quite a long time to get on to his legs. Wexford walked impatiently to the door, but Monkey, not usually renowned for his considerate manners, hovered with some solicitude at his friend’s side, and then, giving him an arm, helped him tenderly out into the street.

Burden had never phoned her before, His heart palpitated lightly and fast as he listened to the ringing tone and imagined her running to answer, her heart beating quickly too because she would guess who it was.

The steadiness of her voice took the edge off his excitement. He spoke her name softly, on a note of enquiry.

“Yes, speaking,” she said. “Who is it?”

“Mike.” She hadn’t recognised his voice and his disappointment was profound.

But immediately he had identified himself she gasped and said quickly, “You’ve got some news for me? Something’s happened at last?”

He closed his eyes momentarily. She could only think of that child. Even his voice, her lover’s voice, was to her just the voice of someone who might have found her child. “No, Gemma, no, there’s nothing.”

“It was the first time you ever phoned me, you see,” she said quietly.

“Last night was a first time too.”

She said nothing. Burden felt that he had never known so long a silence, aeons of silence, time for twenty cars to drone past the phone box, time for the lights to change to green and back again to red, time for a dozen people to enter the Olive and leave the door swinging, swinging, behind them until it lapsed into stillness. Then at last she said, “Come to me now, Mike. I need you so.”

There was another woman he had to have speech with first.

“I’m just going out on a job, Grace,” said Burden, too straitlaced, too innocent perhaps, to see a double entendre which would have had Wexford in stitches. “I may be hours.”

They were given to pregnant, throbbing silences, his women. Grace broke the one she had created with a sharp ward sister’s snap. “Don’t lie to me, Mike. I just phoned the station and they said you had a free evening.”

“You had no business to do that,” Burden flared. “Even Jean never did that and she had the right, she was my wife.”

“I’m sorry, but the children asked and I thought . . . As a matter of fact, there’s something special I want to discuss with you.”

“Can’t it wait till tomorrow?” Burden thought he knew these discussions of Grace’s. They were always about the children more precisely about the children’s psychological problems or what Grace imagined those problems to be: Pat’s supposedly butterfly mind and John’s mental block over his mathematics. As if all children didn’t have their difficulties which were a part of growing up and which he in his day, and surely Grace in hers, had faced satisfactorily without daily analysis. “I’ll try to be in tomorrow night,” he said weakly.

“That,” said Grace, “is what you always say.”

His conscience troubled him for about five minutes. It had long ceased to do so before he reached the outskirts of Stowerton. Burden had yet to learn that the anticipation of sexual pleasure is the most powerful of all the crushers of conscience. He wondered why he felt so little guilt, why Grace’s reproach had only momentarily stung him. Her words - or what he could recall of them - had become like the meaningless and automatic admonition of some schoolteacher spoken years ago. Grace was no longer anything to him but an impediment, an irritating force which conspired with work, and other useless time-wasters to keep him from Gemma.

Tonight she came to the door to meet him. He was prepared for her to speak of the child and her anxieties and her loneliness, and he was ready with the gentle words and the tenderness which would come so easily to him after an hour in bed with her but which now his excitement must make strained and abrupt. She said nothing. He kissed her experimentally, unable to guess her mood from those large blank eyes.

She took his hands and put them against her waist which was naked when she lifted the shirt she wore. Her skin was hot and dry, quivering against his own trembling hands. Then he knew that the need she had spoken of on the phone was not for words or re assurance or searching of the heart but the same need as his own.

If Mr. Casaubon had been capable of inspiring the slightest sentimentality, Wexford reflected, it would have been impossible to witness Monkey’s extravagant care of him without disgust. But the old man - his real name would have to be ferreted out from some file or other - was so obviously a villain and a parasite who took every advantage of his age and an infirmity that was probably assumed that Wexford could only chuckle sardonically to himself as he watched Monkey settle him into one of Ruby Branch’s armchairs and place a cushion behind his head. No doubt it was obvious to the receiver of these attentions as it was to the chief inspector that Monkey was merely cosseting the goose that would lay a golden egg. Presumably Mr. Casaubon had already come to some financial agreement with his partner of impresario and knew there was no question of affection or reverence for old age in all this fussing with cushions. Humming with contentment in the fashion of an aged purring cat, he allowed Monkey to pour him a treble whisky, but when the water jug appeared the hum rose a semitone and a gnarled purple hand was placed over the glass.

Monkey drew the curtains and placed a table lamp on the end of the mantelpiece so that its radiance fell like a spotlight on the bunchy rag-bag figure of Mr. Casaubon, and Wexford was aware of the dramatic effect It was almost as if Monkey’s protégé was one of those character actors who delight to appear solo on the London stage and for two hours or more entertain an audience to a monologue or to readings from some great novelist or diarist. And Mr. Casaubon’s repetitive nodding and humming rather enhanced this impression. Wexford felt that at any moment the play would begin, a witticism would issue from those claret-coloured lips or the humming would give place to a speech from Our Mutual Friend. But because he knew that this was all fantasy, deliberately achieved by that crafty little con-man Monkey Matthews, he said sharply: “Get on with it, can’t you?”

Mr. Casaubon broke the silence he had maintained since leaving the Piebald Pony. “Monk can do the talking,” he said. “He’s got more the gift of the gab than me.”

Monkey smiled appreciatively at this flattery and lit a cigarette. “Me and Mr. Casaubon,” he began, “made each other’s acquaintance up north about twelve months back.” In Walton jail, Wexford thought, but he didn’t say it aloud. “So when Mr. Casaubon was glancing through his morning paper the other day and saw about Mr. Ivor Swan and him living in Kingsmarkham and all that, his thoughts naturally flew to me.”

“Yes, yes, I get all that. In plain English he saw the chance to make a little packet and thought you could help him to it. God knows why he didn’t come straight to us instead of getting involved with a shark like you. Your gift of the gab, I suppose.” A thought struck Wexford. “Knowing you, I wonder you didn’t try putting the black on Swan first.”

“If you’re going to insult me,” said Monkey, snorting out smoke indignantly, “we may as well have done, and me and my friend’ll go to Mr. Griswold. I’m doing this as a favour to you, like to advance you in your profession.”

Mr. Casaubon nodded sagely and made a noise like a bluebottle drowsing over a joint of beef. But Monkey was seriously put out. Temporarily forgetting the respect due to age and golden geese, he snapped in the tone usually reserved for Mrs. Branch, “Give over that buzzing, will you? You’re getting senile. Now you can see,” he said to Wexford, “why the silly old git needs me to prop him up.”

“Go on, Monkey. I won’t interrupt again.”

“To get to the guts of the business,” said Monkey, “Mr. Casaubon told me - and showed me his paper to prove it - that fourteen years back your Ivor Bloody Swan - listening, are you? Ready for a shock? - your Ivor Swan killed a kid. Or, to put it more accurate, caused her death by drowning her in a lake. There, I thought that’d make you sit up.”

Rather than sitting up, Wexford had slumped into his chair. “Sorry, Monkey,” he said, “but that’s not possible. Mr. Swan hasn’t a stain on his character.”

“Hasn’t paid the penalty, you mean. I’m telling you, this is fact, it’s gospel. Mr. Casaubon’s own niece, his sister’s girl, was a witness. Swan drowned the kid and he was up in court, but the judge acquitted him for lack of evidence.”

“He can’t have been more than nineteen or twenty,” Wexford said ruminatively. “Look here, I’ll have to know more than that. What’s this paper you keep on about?”

“Give it here, mate,” said Monkey.

Mr. Casaubon fumbled among his layers of clothing, finally bringing out from some deep recess beneath mackintosh, coat and matted wool a very dirty envelope inside which was a single sheet of paper. He held it lovingly for a moment and then handed it to his go-between who passed it on to Wexford.

The paper was a letter with neither address nor date.

“Before you read it,” said Monkey, “you’d best know that this young lady as wrote it was chambermaid in this hotel in the Lake District. She had a very good position, lot of girls under her. I don’t know exactly what she was but she was the head one.”

“You make her sound like the madame in a brothel,” said Wexford nastily, and cut short Monkey’s expostulation with a quick, “Shut up and let me read.”

The letter had been written by a semi-literate person. It was ill-spelt, almost totally lacking in punctuation. While Mr. Casaubon hummed with the complacency of a man showing off to an acquaintance the prize-winning essay of some young relative, Wexford read the following.

“Dear Uncle Charley.

“We have had a fine old fuss up hear that you will want to know of there is a young Colledge feller staying in the Hotel and what do you think he as done he as drowned a little girl swimmin in the Lake in the morning befor her Mum and Dad was up and they have had him up in Court for it Lily that you have herd me speak of had to go to the Court and tell what she new and she tell me the Judge give it to him hot and strong but could not put him away on account of Nobody saw him do the deed the young fellers name is IVOR LIONEL FAIRFAX SWAN i got it down on paper when Lily said it gettin it from the Judge on account i new you would wish to know it in ful.

“Well Uncle that it all for now i will keep in touch as ever hoping the news may be of use and that your Leg is better Your Affect Niece

“Elsie”

The pair of them were staring eagerly at him now. Wexford read the letter again - the lack of commas and stops made it difficult to follow - and then he said to Mr. Casaubon, “What made you keep this for fourteen years? You didn’t know Swan, did you? Why keep this letter in particular?”

Mr. Casaubon made no reply. He smiled vaguely as people do when addressed in a foreign language and then he held out his glass to Monkey, who promptly refilled it and, once more taking on the task of interpreter, said, “He kept all her letters. Very devoted to Elsie is Mr. Casaubon, being as he never had no kiddies of his own,”

“I see,” said Wexford, and suddenly he did. He felt his features mould themselves into a scowl of rage as the whole racket worked by Mr. Casaubon and his niece grew clear to him. Without looking again at the letter he recalled certain significant phrases. “A fine old fuss that you will want to know or and “hoping the news may be of use” sprang to mind. A chambermaid, be thought, a chiel among us taking notes . . . How many adulterous wives had Elsie spotted? Into how many bedrooms had she blundered by the merest chance? How many homosexual intrigues had she discovered when homosexual practice was still a crime? Not to mention the other secrets to which she would have had access, the papers and letters left in drawers, the whispered confidences between women, freely given at night after one gin too many. The information about Swan, Wexford was sure, was just one of many such pieces of news retailed to Uncle Charley in the knowledge that he would use them for the extortion of money of which Elsie, in due course, would claim her share. A clever racket, though one which, to look at him now, had not finally worked to Mr. Casaubon’s advantage.

“Where was this Elsie working at the timer he snapped.

“He don’t remember that,” said Monkey. “Some where up in the Lakes. She had a lot of jobs one way and another.”

“Oh, no. It was all one way and a dirty way at that. Where is she now?”

“South Africa,” mumbled Mr. Casaubon, showing his first sign of nervousness. “Married a rich yid and went out to the Cape.”

“You can hang on to the letter.” Monkey smiled ingratiatingly. “You’ll want to do a bit of checking up. I mean, when all’s said and done, we’re only a couple of ignorant fellers, let’s face it, and we wouldn’t know how to go about getting hold of this judge and all that.” He edged his chair towards Wexford’s. “All we want is our rightful dues for setting you on the track. We don’t ask for no more than the reward, we don’t want no thanks ‘nor nothing . . .” His voice faltered and Wexford’s baleful face finally silenced him. He drew in a deep lungful of smoke and appeared to decide that at last it was time to offer hospitality to his other guest. ‘Have a drop of Scotch before you go?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Wexford said pleasantly. He eyed Mr. Casaubon. “When I drink I’m choosey about my company.”