No More Dying Then

Chapter 19

In his anxiety to reach the lift, Burden shoved Harry Wild out of the way.

“Manners,” said the reporter, “There’s no need to push. I’ve a right to come in here and ask questions if I . . .”

The sliding door cut off the rest of his remarks which would perhaps have been to the effect that, but for his modesty and fondness for the quiet life, he would have been exercising his rights in loftier portals than those of Kingsmarkham police station. Burden didn’t want to hear. He only wanted Harry’s statement, that they had found the boy, confirmed or denied.

“What’s this about a special court?” he demanded, bursting into Wexford’s office,

The chief inspector looked tired this morning. When he was tired his skin took on a grey matteness and his eyes looked smaller than ever, but still steel-bright, Under the puffy lids.

“Last night,” he said. “I found our letter-writer, a certain Arnold Charles Bishop.”

“But not the boy?” Burden said breathlessly.

“Of course not the boy.” Burden didn’t like it when Wexford sneered like that. His eyes seemed to be drilling two neat holes into the inspector’s already aching head. “He’s never even seen the boy. I found him at his home in Sparta Grove where he was occupied in writing another letter to me. His wife was out at her evening class, his children were in bed. Oh, yes, he has children, two boys. It was from the head of one of them that he cut the hair while the kid was asleep.”

“Oh God,” said Burden.

“He’s a fur fetishist, Want me to read his statement?”

Burden nodded.

“ ‘I have never seen John Lawrence or his mother. I did not take him away from the care of his mother, his legal guardian. On October 16, at about 6 p.m., I overheard my neighbour, Mrs. Foster, tell her husband that John Lawrence was missing and that search parties would probably be arranged. I went to Fontaine Road on my bicycle and joined one of these search parties.' ”

“ 'On three subsequent occasions in October and November I wrote three letters to Chief Inspector Wexford. I did not sign them. I made one telephone call to him. I do not know why I did these things. Something came over me and I had to do them. I am a happily married man with two children of my own. I would never harm a child and I do not own a car. When I wrote about the rabbits I did this because I like fur. I have three fur coats but my wife does not know this. She knows nothing of what I have done. When she goes out and the children are asleep I often put one of my coats on and feel the fur.' ”

“ 'I read in the paper that Mrs. Lawrence had red hair and John Lawrence fair hair. I cut a piece of hair from the head of my son Raymond and sent it to the police. I cannot explain why I did this or any of it except by saying that I had to do it.' ”

Burden said hoarsely, “The maximum he can get is six months for obstructing the police.”

“Well, what would you charge him with? Mental torture? The man’s sick. I was angry too last night, but not anymore. Unless you’re a brute or a moron you can’t be angry with a man who’s going through life with a sickness as grotesque as Bishop’s.”

Burden muttered something about it being all right for those who weren’t personally involved, but Wexford ignored it. “Coming over to the court in about half an hour?”

“To go through all that muck again?”

“A great deal of our work consists of muck, as you call it. Clearing muck, cleaning up, learning what muck is and where it lives.” Wexford rose and leaned heavily on his desk. “If you don’t come, what are you going to do? Sit here mooning all day? Delegating? Passing the buck? Mike, I have to say this. It’s time I said it. I’m tired. I’m trying to solve this case all on my own because I can’t count on you any more. I can’t talk to you. We used to thrash things out together, sift the muck, if you like. Talking to you now - well, it’s like trying to have a rational conversation with a zombie."

Burden looked up at him. For a moment Wexford thought he wasn’t going to answer or defend himself. He just stared, a dead empty stare, as if he had been interrogated for many days and many sleepless nights and could no longer sort out the painful twisted threads that contributed to his unhappiness. But he knew, for all that, that the time for fobbing Wexford off was long gone by, and he brought it all out in a series of clipped sentences.

“Grace is leaving me. I don’t know what to do about the kids. My personal life’s a mess. I can’t do my job.” A cry he hadn’t meant to utter broke out. “Why did she have to die?’ And then, because he couldn’t help himself, because tears which no one must see were burning his eyelids, he sank his head into his hands.

The room was very still. Soon I must lift my head, Burden thought, and take away my hands and see his derision. He didn’t move except to press his fingers harder against his eyes. Then he felt Wexford’s heavy hand on his shoulder.

“Mike, my dear old friend . . .”

An emotional scene between two normally unemotional men usually has its aftermath of deep miserable embarrassment. When Burden had recovered he felt very embarrassed, but Wexford neither blustered heartily nor made one of those maladroit efforts to change the subject.

“You’re due to be off this weekend, aren’t you, Mike?”

“How can I take time off now?”

“Don’t be a bloody fool. You’re worse than useless the state you’re in. Make it a long weekend, starting on Thursday.”

“Grace is taking the children down to Eastbourne . . .”

“Go with them. See if you can’t make her change her mind about leaving. There are ways, Mike, aren’t there? And now - my God, look at the time! - I’ll be late for the court if I don’t get cracking.”

Burden opened the window and stood by it, letting the thin morning mist cool his face. It seemed to him that with the arrest of Bishop their last hope - or his last fear? - of finding John Lawrence had gone. He wouldn’t disturb Gemma with it and she had never read the local papers. The mist, floating white and translucent, washed him gently and calmed him. He thought of the mist by the seaside and the long bare beaches, deserted in November. Once there, he would tell the children and Grace and his mother about Gemma, that he was to be married again.

He wondered why the idea of this chilled him more than the cold touch of the autumnal air. Because she was the strangest successor to Jean he could have picked in all his world? In the past he had marvelled at men who, in their selflessness or their temporary infatuation, marry crippled or blind women. Wasn’t he contemplating doing just that, marrying a woman who was crippled in her heart and her personality? And that was the only way he knew her. How would she be if her deformity were healed?

Ludicrously, monstrous, to think of Gemma as deformed. Tenderly and with an ache of longing, he recalled her beauty and their lovemaking. Then, closing the window sharply, he knew he wouldn’t be going down to Eastbourne with Grace.

Bishop was remanded for a medical report. The head shrinkers would get to work on him, Wexford thought. Maybe that would do some good, more likely it wouldn’t. If he had had any faith in psychiatrists he would have recommended Burden to attend one. Still, their recent confrontation had done something to clear the air. Wexford felt the better for it and he hoped Burden did too. Now, at any rate, he was out on his own. Single-handed he must find the children’s killer - or fall back on the Yard.

The events of the past twenty-four hours had distracted his mind from Mr. and Mrs. Rushworth. Now he considered them again. Rushworth was in the habit of wearing a duffel coat, Rushworth was suspected of molesting a child, but surely, if he had been the loiterer in the swings field, Mrs. Mitchell would have recognised him as one of her neighbours? Moreover, at the time of John’s disappearance, every man within a quarter-mile radius of Fontaine Road had been closely investigated, Rushworth included.

Wexford delved once more among the reports. On the afternoon of October 16th Rushworth claimed to have been in Sewingbury where he had a date to show a client over a house. The client, Wexford saw, hadn’t turned up. Back in February Rushworth hadn’t even been questioned. Why should he have been? Nothing pointed to a connection between him and Stella Rivers and no one knew then that he was the owner of the rented cottage in Mill Lane. At the time the ownership of that cottage had seemed irrelevant.

He wouldn’t see Rushworth yet. First he needed enlightenment as to the man’s character and veracity.

“To get away from this house!” Gemma said. “Just to get away for a little while.” She put her arms round Burden’s neck and clung to him. “Where shall we go?”

“You decide.”

“I’d like London. You can lose yourself there, be just one in a lovely enormous crowd. And there are lights all night and things going on and . . .” She paused, biting her lip, perhaps at the look of horror on Burden’s face. “No, you’d hate it. We aren’t much alike, are we, Mike?”

He didn’t answer that. He wasn’t going to admit it aloud. “Why’ not somewhere on the coast?” he said.

“The sea?” She had been an actress, if not a very successful one, and she put all the loneliness and depth and vastness of the sea into those two words. He wondered why she had shivered. Then she said, “I don’t mind if you’d like to. But not to a big resort where you might see - well, families, people with - with children.”

“I thought of Eastover. It’s November, so there won’t be children.”

“All right.” She didn’t point out to him that he had asked her to decide. “We’ll go to Eastover.” Her lips trembled. “It’ll be fun,” she said.

“Everyone will think I’ve gone to Eastbourne with Grace and the children. I’d rather it was that way.”

“So that they can’t get hold of you?” She nodded with a kind of sage innocence. “I see. You remind me of Leonie. She always tells people she’s going to one place when really she’s going somewhere else so that she won’t be badgered with letters and phone calls.”

“It wasn’t that,” Burden said. “It’s just - well, I don’t want anyone . . . Not until we’re married, Gemma.”

She smiled, wide-eyed and uncomprehending. He saw that she really didn’t understand him at all, his need to be respectable, to put a good face on things. They didn’t speak the same language.

It was Wednesday afternoon, and Mrs. Mitchell, that creature of routine, was cleaning her landing window. While she talked she clutched a pink duster in one hand and a bottle of pink cleaning fluid in the other and, because she refused to sit down, Wexford couldn’t either.

“Of course I should have known if it was Mr. Rushworth,” she said. “Why, his own little boy, his Andrew, was playing there with the others. Besides, Mr. Rushworth’s quite a big man and the man I saw was little, very small-made. I told, the other officer what little hands he had. Mr. Rushworth wouldn’t pick leaves.”

“How many children has he?”

"Four. There’s Paul - he’s fifteen - and two little girls and Andrew. I’m not saying they’re my idea of good parents, mind. Those children are allowed to do just what they please, and Mrs. Rushworth didn’t take a blind bit of notice when I warned her about that man, but do a thing like that . . .! No, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick there.”

Perhaps he had. Wexford left Mrs. Mitchell to her window-cleaning and crossed the swings field. The year was far too advanced now for any children to play there and there would be no more freak summers. The roundabout looked as if it had never spun on its scarlet axis and mould had begun to grow on the seesaw. Hardly a leaf remained on the trees, oak and ash and sycamore, which grew between the field and Mill Lane. He touched the lower branches and fancied that here and there he could see where a twig had been snapped off. Then, in a more ungainly fashion, he was sure, than the leaf-picker and his young companion, he scrambled down the bank.

Briskly he walked the length of the lane, telling himself it was as much for his health’s sake as for duty. He hadn’t expected to find anyone at home in the rented cottage but Harry Wild’s friend was off work with a cold. Leaving again after a quarter of an hour, Wexford was afraid his visit had only served to raise the man’s temperature, so heated had he been on the subject of Rushworth, a far from ideal landlord. Unless the tenant’s account was exaggerated, it appeared that the whole Rushworth family was in the habit of entering the cottage, helping themselves to garden produce and occasionally removing small pieces of furniture for which they substituted pencilled notes of explanation. They had retained a key of their own and the tenant paid so low a rent that he was afraid to expostulate. At any rate, Wexford now knew the identity of the boy who had been seen leaving the cottage that February afternoon. Beyond a doubt, it had been Paul Rushworth.

The day had been dull and overcast and now evening was closing in, although it was scarcely five, Wexford felt a first few drops of rain. On just such a day and at much this time Stella had followed the road he was taking, quickening her steps perhaps, wishing she had more to protect her than a thin riding jacket. Or had she even come so far back towards Stowerton? Had her journey - and her life - taken her no further than the cottage he had just left?

He had immersed himself so much in Stella, mentally transmuting his own elderly, male and stout body into the slight form of a twelve-year-old girl, that when he heard the sounds ahead of him he stepped back on to the grass verge and listened with a kind of hope.

The sounds were of horse’s hooves. A horse was coming round the bend in the lane.

He was Stella, not old Reg Wexford. He was alone and a bit frightened and it was beginning to rain, but Swan was coming . . . On a horse? One horse for two people? Why not in a car?

The horse and its rider came into sight. Wexford shook himself back into himself and called out. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Fenn.”

The riding instructress reined in the big grey. “Isn’t he lovely?” she said. “I wish he was mine, but I’ve got to take him back to Miss Williams at Equita. We’ve had such a nice afternoon out, haven’t we, Silver?” She patted the animal’s neck. “You haven’t – er - caught anyone yet? The man who killed poor Stella Swan?”

Wexford shook his head.

“Stella Rivers, I should say. I don’t know why I find it so confusing. After all, I’ve got two names myself and half my friends call me Margaret and half by my second name. I ought not to get mixed up. Must be getting old.”

Wexford felt no inclination for gallantry and simply asked if she had ever seen Rushworth in the grounds of Saltram House.

“Bob Rushworth? Now you come to mention it, he and his wife were up here a lot last winter and she actually asked me if I thought it would be all right for them to take one of the statues away with them. The one that was lying down in the grass, you know.”

“You said nothing about this before.”

“Well, of course not,” said Mrs. Fenn, bending over to coo into the horse’s ear. “I know the Rushworths, I’ve known them for years. Paul calls me auntie. I suppose they wanted the statue for their garden. It’s not my place to say whether you can have it or you can’t, I said, and they didn’t take it, did they?” She edged herself more comfortably into the saddle. “If you’ll excuse me I must be on my way. Silver’s very highly bred and he gets nervous when it’s dark.” The horse lifted its head and emitted a loud whinny of agreement. “Never mind, darling,” said Mrs. Fenn. “Soon be home with Mother,”

Wexford went on. The rain was falling thinly but steadily. He passed Saltram Lodge and entered that part of the lane which was most thickly overshadowed by trees. They thinned out after two or three hundred yards to disclose the celebrated view of the great house.

The parkland looked grey and the house itself, looming through mist, a black skeleton with empty eye-sockets. Wexford was glad he had never known the place or been in the habit of visiting it. To him it had become a graveyard.