No More Dying Then

Chapter 14

Nervous bliss, Wexford decided, best described Inspector Burden’s current state of mind. He was preoccupied, often to be found idle and staring distantly into space, jumping out of his skin over nothing, but at least it was a change from that bleak irritable misery everyone had come to associate with him. Very likely the cause of the change was a woman, and Wexford, encountering his friend and assistant in the lift on the following morning, remembered Dr. Crocker’s words.

“How’s Miss Woodville these days?”

He was rewarded, and somewhat gratified, by the uneven burning blush that spread across Burden’s face. It confirmed his suspicion that recently there had been something going on between those two and something a good deal more exciting than discussions about whether young Pat ought to have a new blazer for the autumn term.

“My wife,” he went on, pressing his point home, “was only saying yesterday what a tower of strength Miss Woodville has been to you.” When this evoked no response, he added, “All the better when the tower of strength has an uncommonly pretty face, eh

Burden looked through him so intensely that Wexford suddenly felt quite transparent. The lift halted.

“I’ll be in my office if you want me.”

Wexford shrugged. Two can play at that game, he thought. You won’t get any more friendly overtures from me, my lad. Stiff-necked prude. What did he care about Burden’s dreary love life, anyway? He had other things on his mind and because of them he hadn’t slept much. Most of the night he had lain awake thinking about that letter and Monkey Matthews and the old villain who was Monkey’s guest, and he had pondered on what it all meant.

Elsie was as sharp as a needle but bone ignorant. To a woman like her any J.P. was a judge and she wouldn’t know the difference between assizes and a magistrates’ court. Was it possible that all those years ago the young Swan had appeared before a magistrate, charged with murder or manslaughter, and the case been dismissed? And if that was so had the facts of that hearing somehow escaped being included in Wexford’s dossier of Swan?

Night is a time for conjecture, dreams, mad conclusions; morning a time for action. The hotel had been somewhere in the Lake District and as soon as he was inside his office Wexford put through calls to the Cumberland and Westmorland police. Next he did a little research into the antecedents of Mr. Casaubon, working on the assumption that he had been in Walton at the same time as Monkey, and this conclusion and the investigations it led to proved fruitful.

His name was Charles Albert Catch and he had been born in Limehouse in 1897. Pleased to discover that all his guesswork had been correct, He learned that Catch had served three terms of imprisonment for demanding money with menaces but since reaching the age of sixty-five had fallen on evil days. His last conviction was for throwing a brick through the window of a police station, a ploy to secure - as it had done - a bed and shelter for the blackmailer who had be come an impoverished vagrant.

Wexford wasted no sympathy on Charley Catch but he did wonder why Elsie’s information had led her uncle to take no steps against Swan at the time. Because there really was no evidence? Because Swan had been innocent with nothing to hide or be ashamed of? Time would show. There was no point in further conjecture, no point in taking any steps in the matter until something came in from the Lakes.

With Martin and Bryant to keep watch from a discreet distance, he sent Polly Davis, red-wigged, off to her assignation at Saltram House. It was raining again and Polly got soaked to the skin, but nobody brought John Lawrence to the park of Saltram House or to the Italian garden. Determined not to speculate any further on the subject of Swan, Wexford racked his brains instead about the caller with the shrill voice but still he was unable to identify that voice or to re member any more about it but that he had heard it somewhere before,

Holding her in his arms in the dark, Burden said, “I want you to tell me that I’ve made you happier, that things aren’t so bad because I love you.”

Perhaps she was giving one of her wan smiles. He could see nothing of her face but a pale glow. The room smelt of the scent which she used to use when she was married and had, at any rate, a little money. Her clothes were impregnated with it, a stale musty sweetness. He thought that tomorrow he would buy her a bottle of scent.

“Gemma, you know I can’t stay the night. I only wish to God I could, but I promised and . . .”

“Of course you must go,” she said. “If I were going to my - to my children, nothing would keep me, Dear kind Mike, I won’t keep you from your children.”

“You’ll sleep?”

“I shall take a couple of those things Dr. Lomax gave me.”

A little chill touched his warm body. Wasn’t satisfied love the best soporific? How happy it would have made him to know that his love-making alone could send her into sweet sleep, that thoughts of him would drive away every dread. Always the child, he thought, always the boy who had secured for himself all his mother’s care and passion. And he imagined the miracle happening and the lost dead boy, restored to life and to home, running into the darkened bedroom now, bringing his own light with him, throwing himself into his mother’s arms. He saw how she would forget her lover, forget that ho had ever existed, in a little world made just for a woman and a child.

He got up and dressed. He kissed her in a way that was meant to be tender only but became passionate because he couldn’t help himself. And he was rewarded with a kiss from her as long and desirous as his own. With that he had to be satisfied; with that and with the crumpled chiffon scarf he picked up as he left the room.

If only he would find his bungalow empty, he mused as be drove towards it. Just for tonight, he told him self guiltily. If only he could go into emptiness and solicitude, free of Grace’s gentle brisk demands and Pat’s castles in the air and John’s mathematics. But if he were going home to an empty house he wouldn’t be going home at all.

Grace had said she wanted to discuss something with him. The prospect was so dreary and so tedious that he forebore speculating about it. Why endure an agony twice over? He held the scented chiffon against his face for comfort before entering the house but instead of comfort it brought him only longing.

His son was hunched over the table, ineptly grasping a compass. “Old Mint Face,” he said when he saw his father, “told us that ‘mathema’ means knowledge and ‘pathema’ means suffering, so I said they ought to call it pathematics.”

Grace laughed a little too shrilly. She was flushed, Burden noticed, as if with excitement or perhaps trepidation. He sat down at the table, neatly drew the diagram for John and sent him off to bed. “May as well have an early night myself,” he said hopefully.

“Spare me just ten minutes, Mike. I want - there’s something I want to say to you. I’ve had a letter from a friend of mine, a girl - a woman - I trained with.” Grace sounded extremely nervous now, so unlike herself that Burden felt a small disquiet. She was holding the letter and seemed about to show it to him, but she changed her mind and stood clutching it. “She’s come into some money and she wants to start a nursing home and she . . .” The words tumbled out in a rush, “. . . she wants me to come in with her.”

Burden was beginning on a bored, “Oh, yes, that’s nice,” when suddenly he did a double-take and what she was actually saying came home to him. The shock was too great for thought or politeness or caution. “What about the children?” he said.

She didn’t answer that directly. She sat down heavily like a tired old woman. “How long did you think I would stay with them?”

“I don’t know.” He made a helpless gesture with his hands. “Till, they’re able to look after themselves, I suppose.”

“And when will that be?” She was hot now and angry, her nervousness swamped by indignation. “When Pat’s seventeen, eighteen? I’ll be forty.”

“Forty’s not old,” said her brother-in-law feebly.

“Maybe not for a woman with a profession, a career she’s always worked at. If I stay here for another six years I won’t have any career, I’d be lucky to get a job as a staff nurse in a country hospital.”

“But the children,” he said again

“Send them to boarding school,” she said in a hard voice. ‘Physically, they’ll be just as well looked after there as here, and as for the other side of their lives - what good do I do them alone? Pat’s coming to an age when she’ll turn against her mother or any mother substitute. John’s never cared much for me. If you don’t like the idea of boarding school, get a transfer and go to Eastbourne. You could all live there with Mother.”

“You’ve sprung this on me, all right, haven’t you, Grace?”

She was almost in tears. “I only had Mary’s letter yesterday. I wanted to talk to you yesterday, I begged you to come home.”

“My God,” he said, “what a thing to happen. I thought you liked it here, I thought you loved the kids."

“No, you didn’t,” she said fiercely, and her face was suddenly Jean’s, passionate and indignant, during one of their rare quarrels. “You never thought about me at all. You - you asked me to come and help you and when I came you turned me into a sort of house mother and you were the lofty superintendent who condescended to visit the poor orphans a couple of times a week.”

He wasn’t going to answer that, He knew it was true. “You must do as you please, of course,” he said.

“It isn’t what I please, it’s what you’ve driven me to. Oh, Mike, it could have been so different! Don’t you see? If you’d been with us and pulled your weight and made me feel we were doing something worth while together. Even now if you . . . I’m trying to say . . . Mike, this is very hard for me. If I thought you might come in time to . . . Mike, won’t you help me?”

She had turned to him and put out her hands, not impulsively and yearningly as Gemma did, but with a kind of modest diffidence, as if she were ashamed. He remembered what Wexford had said to him that morning in the lift and he recoiled away from her. That it was almost Jean’s face looking at him, Jean’s voice pleading with him, about to say things which to his old-fashioned mind no woman should ever say to a man, only made things worse.

“No, no, no!” he said, not shouting but whispering the words with a kind of hiss.

He had never seen a woman blush so fierily. Her face was crimson, and then the colour receded, leaving it chalk white. She got up and walked away, scuttling rather, for on a sudden she had lost all her precise controlled gracefulness. She left him and closed the door without another word.

That night he slept very badly. Three hundred nights had been insufficient to teach him how to sleep without a woman and, after them, two of bliss had brought back with savagery all the loneliness of a single bed. Like a green adolescent he held, pressed against his face so that he could smell it, the scarf of the woman he loved. He lay like that for hours, listening through the wall to the muffled crying of the woman he had rejected.