No More Dying Then

Chapter 17

Friday’s edition of the Kingsmarkham Courier carried on its front page a double-column spread asking for the three missing men from the search party to come forward. Much good that would do, Wexford thought, as he read it. Hadn’t it occurred to Martin, when he asked Harry Wild for publicity, that an appeal of this kind would fetch forth only the innocents? And where was Burden in all this, Burden who was supposed to rule the place in Wexford’s absence, yet who seemed as much surprised by the newspaper appeal as he was?

When he got back from London he had phoned Burden’s house. He needed to discuss that interview with someone and he thought too that this might be a way of reawakening Burden’s interest. But Grace Woodville had told him her brother-in-law was out, she didn’t know where.

“I think he may just be sitting somewhere in his car, brooding about Jean and - and everything.”

“He’s supposed to leave a number where he can be found.”

“Cheriton Forest doesn’t have a number,” said Grace.

On Saturday afternoon two men walked into Kingsmarkham police station to say that they had read the Courier and believed they were two of the three missing men. They were brothers, Thomas and William Thetford, who lived in adjoining houses in Bury Lane, a half-slum, half-country road on the far side of Stowerton, not far from Sparta Grove. News of John Lawrence’s disappearance had been brought to them by William’s wife who cleaned for Mrs. Dean and who had reached home at five-thirty. The Thetford brothers were on shift work, had both finished for that day. Guessing a search party might be got up - hoping for a bit of excitement to brighten up their day, Wexford thought - they had got into William’s car and driven to Fontaine Road.

Neither man had a squeaky voice or even a voice Wexford could remember hearing before. They denied having passed the news on to anyone and said they had discussed it only with each other. Wexford supposed that routine demanded an interview with Mrs. Thetford. Monday would be time enough for that.

“Golf in the morning?” said Dr. Crocker, bouncing in after the Thetfords had gone.

“Can’t. I’m going to Colchester.”

“Whatever for?” Crocker said crossly, and then, without waiting for an answer, “I wanted to have a little chat with you about Mike.”

“I’d really rather you didn’t. I’d rather you saw him. You’re his doctor.”

“I think he’s found a better doctor than I,” said Crocker slyly. “I saw his car again last night.”

“Don’t tell me. In Cheriton Forest. And he was in it, brooding.”

“It wasn’t and he wasn’t. It was parked at the bottom of Chiltern Avenue at midnight.”

“You’re ubiquitous, you are,” Wexford grumbled. “You’re like the Holy Ghost.”

“It was at the bottom of Chiltern Avenue, next to Fontaine Road at midnight. Come on, Reg. I knew you were thick round the middle but not . . .” The doctor tapped his head “. . . not up here.”

“That’s not possible,” said Wexford sharply. His voice faltered. “I mean . . . Mike wouldn’t . . . I don’t want to talk about it.” And he cast upon the doctor a fierce glare. “If I don’t know about it,” he said with none of his usual logic, “it isn’t happening.”

“I know it would be like a miracle,” said Gemma, “but if - if John is ever found and comes back to me, I shall sell this house, even if I only get what the land’s worth, and go back to London. I could live in one room, I shouldn’t mind. I hate it here. I hate being in here and I hate going out and seeing them all look at me.”

“You talk like a child,” said Burden. “Why talk about what you know can’t happen? I asked you to marry me.”

She got up, still without answering, and began to dress, but not in the clothes she had taken off when she and Burden had come into the bedroom. He watched her hungrily, but puzzled as he always was by nearly every facet of her behaviour. She had pulled over her head a long black dress, very sleek and tight. Burden didn’t know whether it was old, a garment of her aunt’s, or the latest fashion. You couldn’t tell these days. Over her shoulders and around her waist she wrapped a long scarf of orange and blue and green, so stiff and encrusted with embroidery that it crackled as she handled it.

“We used to dress up a lot, John and I,” she said, “dress up and be characters from the Red Fairy Book. He would have grown up to be a great actor.” Now she was hanging jewellery all over herself, long strings of beads draped from her neck and wound about her arms. “That sometimes happens when one of your parents, or both of them, has been a second- rate artist. Mozart’s father was a minor musician.” She swayed in the soft red light, extending her arms. There was a ring on every finger to weigh down her thin hands. She shook down her hair and it fell in a flood of fire, the light catching it as it caught all the stones in the cheap rings and made them flash.

Burden was dazzled and fascinated and appalled. She danced across the room, drawing out the scarf and holding it above her head. The jewels rang like little bells. Then she stopped, gave a short abrupt laugh, and ran to him, kneeling at his feet.

“ 'I will dance for you, Tetrarch,' ” she said. “ 'I am awaiting until my slaves bring perfumes to me and the seven veils and take off my sandals.' ”

Wexford would have recognised the words of Salome. To Burden they were just another instance of her eccentricity. Very distressed and embarrassed, he said, “Oh, Gemma . . .!”

In the same voice she said, “I will marry you if . . . if life is to go on like this with nothing, I’ll marry you.”

“Stop play-acting.”

She got up. “I wasn’t acting.”

“I wish you’d take those things off;’ he said.

“You take them off.”

Her huge staring eyes made him shiver. He reached out both hands and lifted the bunch of chains from her neck, not speaking, hardly breathing. She lifted her right arm, curving it in a slow sweep and then holding it poised. Very slowly he slid the bracelets down over her wrist and let them fall, pulled the rings from her fingers one by one. All the time they stared into each other’s eyes. He thought that be had never in his life done anything as exciting, as overpoweringly erotic, as this stripping a woman of cheap glittering jewellery, although in doing so he had not once touched her skin.

Never . . . He hadn’t even dreamed that such a thing might be possible for him. She stretched out her left arm and .he made no other move towards her until her last ring had joined the others in a heap on the floor.

It wasn’t until he awoke in the night that he realised fully what had happened, that he had proposed and been accepted. He told himself that he ought to be elated, in a seventh heaven of happiness, for he had got what he wanted and there would be no more agony or struggling or loneliness or dying small daily deaths.

The room was too dark for him to see anything at all, but he knew exactly what the first light would show him here and downstairs. Yesterday it hadn’t mattered much, the mess and the chaos, but it mattered now. He tried to see her installed in his own house as its mistress, caring for his children and cooking meals, tending on them all as Grace did, but it was impossible to conjure up such a picture, he hadn’t enough imagination. What if Wexford were to call one night for a chat and a drink as he sometimes did and Gemma appear in her strange dress and her shawl and her long beads? And would she expect him to have her friends there, those itinerant subactors with their drugs? And his children, his Pat . . . !

But all that would change, he told himself, once they were married. She would settle down and be a housewife. Perhaps he could persuade her to have that mane of hair cut, that hair which, at one and the same time, was so beautiful and so evocative of desire and yet so unbecoming in a policeman’s wife. They would have a child of their own, she would make new suitable friends, she would change . . .

He did not allow himself to dwell on the notion that such changes as he envisaged would destroy her personality and dull all the strangeness that had first attracted him, but it touched the edges of his mind. He pushed it away almost angrily. Why make difficulties where none existed? Why seek always to find flaws in perfect happiness?

Gemma and he would have love, a nightly orgy for two, an endless honeymoon. He turned towards her, pressing his lips against the mass of hair of which he planned to deprive her. Within minutes he was asleep and dreaming that he had found her child, restoring him to her and seeing her, by that gift, transformed into everything he wanted her to be.

“Kingsmarkham?” said Mrs. Scott, smiling comfortably at Wexford. “Oh, yes, we know Kingsmarkham, don’t we, dear?” Expressionless, her husband gave a tiny nod. “We’ve got a niece lives in ever such a nice little house near Kingsmarkham, built back in the seventeen hundreds, it was, and we used to go there regularly for our holidays right up till this year. But now . . .”

Wexford, who while she was speaking had been taking stock of the room and looking particularly at the framed photographs of those older Scott children who had survived, middle-aged now and with teenage children of their own, followed her gaze towards their progenitor.

No need to ask why they wouldn’t go back to Kingsmarkham or to question the implication that they would take no more holidays. Scott was a little old man, nearing eighty, whose face was badly twisted, especially about the mouth. Two sticks hung from the wings of his chair. Wexford supposed that he was unable to walk without their aid and, from his silence, was beginning to suppose that Ralph Scott had also lost the power of speech. It was something of a shock when the distorted mouth opened and a harsh voice said:

“What about a cup of tea Ena?”

“I’ll have it ready in a jiffy, dear.”

Mrs. Scott jumped up and mouthed something to Wexford, indicating that he should join her in the kitchen. This was a sterile-looking place full of gad gets, and it was modern enough to gladden the heart of any house-proud woman, but Mrs. Scott seemed to think it needed apology.

“Mr. Scott had a stroke back in the winter,” she said as she plugged in an electric kettle, “and it’s really aged him. He’s not at all the man he was. That’s why we moved out here from Colchester. But if he was himself I’d have had everything automatic here, he’d have done the lot himself, not left it to those builders. I wish you could have seen my house in Colchester. The central heating was too hot. You had, to have the windows open night and day. Mr. Scott did all that himself. Of course, him being in the trade all his life, there’s nothing he doesn’t how about heating and pipes and all that.” She stopped, stared at the kettle which was making whining noises, and said in a voice that seemed to be suppressing something explosive, “We saw in the papers about that man Swan and you digging all that up again about his little girl. It made Mr. Scott ill, just seeing his name,”

“The child died back in the winter.”

"Mr. Scott never saw the papers then. He was too ill. We never knew Swan lived near our niece. We wouldn’t have gone if we had. Well, he was living there the last time we went but we didn’t know.” She sat down on a plastic-upholstered contemporary version of a settle and sighed. “It’s preyed on Mr. Scott’s mind all these years, poor little Bridget. I reckon it would have killed him to have come face to face with that Swan.”

“Mrs. Scott, I’m sorry to have to ask you, but in your opinion, is it possible he let your daughter drown? I mean, is it possible he knew she was drowning and let it happen?”

She was silent. Wexford saw an old grief cross her face, travel into her eyes and pass away. The kettle boiled with a blast and switched itself off.

Mrs. Scott got up and began making the tea. She was quite collected, sorrowful but with an old dry sadness. The fingers on the kettle handle, the hand on the teapot, were quite steady. A great grief had come to her, the only grief, Aristotle says, which is insupportable, but she had borne it, had gone on making tea, gone on exulting in central heating. So would it be one day for Mrs. Lawrence, Wexford mused. Aristotle didn’t know everything, didn’t know perhaps that time heals all pain, grinds all things to dust and leaves only a little occasional melancholy.

“Mr Scott loved her best,” Bridget’s mother said at last. “It’s been different for me. I had my sons. You know how it is for a man and his little girl, his youngest.”

Wexford nodded, thinking of his Sheila, his ewe lamb, the apple of his eye.

"I never took on about it like he did. Women are stronger, I always say. They get to accept things. But I was in a bad way at the time. She was my only girl, you see, and I had her late in life. In fact, we never would have had another one, only Mr. Scott was mad on getting a girl.” She looked as if she were trying to remember, not the facts, but the emotions, of the time, trying and failing. “It was a mistake going to that hotel,” she said. “Boarding houses were more in our line. But Mr. Scott was doing so well and it wasn’t for me to argue when he said he was as good as the next man and why not a hotel when we could afford it? It made me feel uncomfortable, I can tell you, when I saw the class of people we had to mix with, Oxford boys and a barrister and a Sir. Of course, Bridget didn’t know any different, they were just people to her and she took a fancy to that Swan. If I’ve wished it once I’ve wished it a thousand times that she’d never set eyes on him.”

“Once we were in the lounge and she was hanging about him - I couldn’t stop her. I did try - and he gave her such a push, not saying anything, you know, not talking to her, that she fell over and hurt her arm. Mr. Scott went right over and had a go at him, told him he was a snob and Bridget was as good as him any day. I’ll never forget what he said. ‘I don’t care whose daughter she is,’ he said. ‘I don’t care if her father’s a duke or a dustman. I don’t want her around. She gets in my way.’ But that didn’t stop Bridget. She wouldn’t leave him alone. I’ve often thought since then that Bridget swam out to that boat so as she could be alone with him and no one else there.”

Mrs. Scott picked up her tray, but made no other move to return to the sitting room. She seemed to be listening and then she said:

“She couldn’t swim very far. We’d told her over and over again not to go out too far. Swan knew, he’d heard us. He let her drown because he just didn’t care, and if that’s killing, he killed her. She was only a child. Of course he killed her.”

“A strong accusation to make, Mrs. Scott.”

“It’s no more than the coroner said. When I saw in the paper about his own little girl I didn’t feel sorry for him, I didn’t think he’d got his desserts. He’s done the same to her, I thought.”

“The circumstances were hardly the same,” said Wexford. “Stella Rivers died from suffocation.”

“I know. I read about it. I’m not saying he did it deliberately any more than I’m saying he actually pushed Bridget under the water. It’s my belief she got in his way too - stands to reason she would, a step daughter and him newly married - and maybe she said something he didn’t like or got too fond of him like Bridget, so he got hold of her, squeezed her neck or something and - and she died. We’d better to go back to Mr. Scott now.”

He was sitting as they had left him, his almost sightless eyes still staring. His wife put a teacup into his hands and stirred the tea for him.

“There you are, dear. Sorry I was so long. Would you like a bit of cake if I cut it up small?”

Mr. Scott made no reply. He was concentrating on Wexford and the chief inspector realised that no explanation of his visit had been given to the old man. True, there had been a passing reference to Kingsmarkham and a cousin, but Wexford had not been identified by name or rank.

Perhaps it was the look in his wife’s eyes or perhaps something that he had overheard while they were in the kitchen that made him say suddenly in his harsh monotone:

“You a policeman?”

Wexford hesitated: Scott was a very sick man. It was possible that the only real contact he had ever had with the police was when his beloved daughter died. Would it be wise or kind or even necessary to bring memories back to that exhausted, fuddled brain?

Before he could make up his mind, Mrs Scott said brightly. “Oh, no dear. Whatever gave you that idea? This gentleman’s just a friend of Eileen’s from over Kingsmarkham way.”

“That’s right,” said Wexford heartily.

The old man’s hand trembled and the cup rattled in its saucer. “Shan’t go there any more, not in my state. Shan’t last much longer.”

“What a way to talk!” Mrs Scott’s brisk manner did little to cover her distress. “Why, you’re almost your old self again.” She mouthed incomprehensible things to Wexford and followed them up with a louder, “You should have seen him last March, a couple of weeks after he had that stroke. More dead than alive he was, worse than a new-born baby. And look at him now.”

But Wexford could hardly bear to look. As he left them, he reflected that the interview hadn’t been entirely fruitless. At least it would spur him on to take Crocker’s tablets with renewed zeal.