No More Dying Then

Chapter 20

He hadn’t been able to bring himself to book a double room for Mr. and Mrs. Burden. One day Gemma would be Mrs. Burden and then it would be different. In the meantime the name was Jean’s. Jean held the title like a champion whose honours cannot be taken from her by death.

Their hotel was Eastover village pub which had been extended since the war to accommodate half a dozen guests, and they had been given rooms side by side, both overlooking the wide grey sea. It was too cold for bathing, but there are always children on beaches. While Gemma unpacked, Burden watched the children, five of them, brought down there to play by their parents. The tide was far out and the beach a silvery ochre, the sand packed too tight and flattened too firmly by the sea to show footprints from this distance. The man and the woman walked far apart from each other, seeming entirely detached. Married for many years, Burden supposed - the eldest girl looked at least twelve - they had no need of contact or of reassurance. The children, running from one to the other, then wheeling towards the sea, were evidence enough of love. He saw the parents, separated now by a wide drift of shells and pebbles, glance casually at each other and in that glance he read a secret language of mutual trust and hope and profound understanding.

One day it would be like that for him and Gemma. They would bring their children, his and theirs, to such a beach as this and walk with them between the water and the sky and remember their nights and days and look forward to the night. He turned quickly to tell her what he was thinking but suddenly it came to him that he mustn’t tell her, he couldn’t because to do so would be to draw her attention to the children.

“What is it, Mike?”

“Nothing, I only wanted to say that I love you.”

He closed the window and drew the curtains, but in the half-dark he could still see the children. He took her in his arms and closed his eyes and still he could see them. Then he made love to her violently and passionately to exorcise the children and, in particular, the little fair-haired boy whom he had never seen but who was more real to him than those he had watched on the seashore.

The weekenders’ cottage was very ancient, built before the Civil War, before the departure of the Mayflower, perhaps even before the last of the Tudors. Rushworth’s was newer, though still old, belonging, Wexford decided, to the same period as that of Saltram House and its lodge, about 1750. In Burden’s absence he was spending much of his time in Mill Lane, viewing the three little houses, sometimes entering their gardens and walking thoughtfully around them.

Once he walked from Rushworth’s cottage to the fountains at Saltram House and back again, timing himself. It took him half an hour. Then he did it again, pausing this time to play-act the lifting of the cistern slab and the insertion of a body. Forty minutes.

He drove to Sewingbury and saw the woman who had a date to meet Rushworth on that October afternoon and heard from her that she had been unable to keep the appointment. What of that other afternoon in Feburary?

One evening he made his way to Fontaine Road in search of the Crantocks and on an impulse knocked first at number 61. He had nothing to say to Mrs. Lawrence, no good news, but he was curious to see this forlorn woman people said was beautiful and he knew from past experience that his very presence, stolid and fatherly, could sometimes be a comfort. No one answered his knock and this time he sensed quite a different atmosphere from that he had felt outside Bishop’s door. Nobody answered because there was nobody there to hear.

For some moments he stood thoughtfully in the quiet street, and then, discomfited now for personal reasons, he went next door to the Crantocks.

“If you wanted Gemma,” said Mrs. Crantock, “she’s away, gone down to the South Coast for the weekend.”

“I really want to talk to you and your husband. About a man called Rushworth and your daughter.”

“Oh, that? Your inspector kindly saw her home. We were grateful. Mind you, there was nothing in it. I know they say Mr. Rushworth chases the girls, but I expect that’s just gossip, and they don’t mean little girls. My daughter’s only fourteen.”

Crantock came into the hall to see who had called. He recognised Wexford immediately and shook hands. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “Rushworth came round the next day to apologise. He said he’d only called out to Janet because he’d heard we’d got a piano we wanted to get rid of.” Crantock grinned and turned up his eyes. “I told him sell, not get rid of, so, of course, he wasn’t interested.”

“Silly of Janet, really,” said his wife, “to have got so worked up.”

“I don’t know.” Crantock had stopped smiling. “We’re all on edge, especially kids who are old enough to understand.” He looked deep into Wexford’s eyes. “And people with kids,” he added.

Wexford walked into Chiltern Avenue by way of the shrub-shadowed alley. There he had to use his torch and as he went he thought, not by any means for the first time, on his great good fortune in having been born a man, and a big man at that, instead of a woman. Only in daylight and fine weather could a woman have walked there without fear, without turning her head and feeling her heart-beats quicken. No wonder Janet Crantock had been frightened. And then he thought of John Lawrence whose youth had given him a woman’s vulnerability and who would never grow up to be a man.

In the evenings when the tide was far out they walked along the sands in the dark or sat on the rocks at the entrance to a cave they had found. The rain held off, but it was November and cold at night. The first time they went there they wore thick coats but the heavy clothing separated and isolated them, so after that Burden brought the car rug. They cocooned themselves in it, their bodies pressed together, their hands tightly clasped, the thick woollen folds enclosing them and keeping out the salty sea wind. When he was alone with her in the darkness on the seashore he was very happy.

Even at this time of the year Eastbourne would be crowded and she was afraid of people. So they avoided the big resort and even the next village, Chine Warren. Gemma had visited the place before and wanted to walk there, but Burden prevented her. It was from there, he believed, that the children came. He tried all the time to keep children out of her sight. Sometimes, pitying her for her sorrow yet jealous of the cause of it, he found himself wishing a modern Pied Piper would come and whistle away all the little children of Sussex so that they might not be there to laugh and play and torment her and deprive him of joy.

“Would it be a quick death, the sea?” she said.

He shivered, watching the running tide. “I don’t know. Nobody who has died in it has ever been able to tell us.”

“I think it would be quick.” Her voice was a child’s, gravely considering. “Cold and clean and quick?’

In the afternoons Burden made love to her - he had never been more conscious of and more satisfied with his manhood than when he saw how his love comforted her - and afterwards, while she slept, be walked down to the shore or over the cliff to Chine Warren. There was still a little warmth left in the sunshine and the children came to build sandcastles. He had discovered that they were not a family, the couple not husband and wife, but that four of the children belonged to the man and the other one to the woman. How teasing and deceptive were first impressions! He looked back now with self-disgust on his romancing, his sentimental notion that this pair, known to each other perhaps only by sight, had an idyllic marriage. Illusion and disillusion, he reflected, what life is and what we think it is. Why, from this distance he couldn’t even tell if the solitary child were a boy or a girl, for it was capped and trousered and booted like all the children.

The woman kept stooping down to collect shells and once she stumbled. When she stood up again he noticed that she dragged her leg and he wondered if he should go down the seaweedy steps and cross the sands to offer her his help. But perhaps that would mean bringing her back to the hotel while he fetched his car, and the sound of the ‘child’s voice would awaken Gemma . . .

They rounded the foot of the cliff, going towards Chine Warren. Receding fast, the tide seemed to be drawing the sea back into the heart of the red sunset, a November sunset which is the most lovely of the whole year.

Now the great wide sweep of, beach was deserted, but its young visitors had left evidence behind them. As sure as he could be that he was unobserved, Burden walked down the steps, pretending to stroll casually. The two sandcastles stood proudly erect, as if confident of their endurance until the sea conquered them, rushing them away when it returned at midnight. He hesitated, the rational sensible man momentarily intervening, and then he kicked over their turrets and stamped on their battlements until the sand they were made of was as flat as the surrounding shore.

Once more the beach belonged to him and Gemma. John or his deputies, his representatives, should not take her away from him. He was a man and any day a match for a lost dead child.

Rushworth came to the door in his duffel coat.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “I was just going to take the dog out.”

“Postpone it for half an hour, will you?”

Not very willingly, Rushworth took off his coat, hung up the lead and led Wexford into a living room amid the cries of the disappointed terrier. Two teenage children were watching television, a girl of about eight sat at the table doing a jigsaw puzzle, and on the floor, lying on his stomach, was the most junior member of the family, Andrew, who had been John Lawrence’s friend.

“I’d like to talk to you alone,” said Wexford.

It was a biggish house with what Rushworth, in one of his house agent’s blurbs, would perhaps have described as three reception rooms. That evening none was fit for the reception of anyone except possibly a second-hand-furniture dealer. The Rushworths were apparently acquisitive creatures, snappers up of anything they could get for nothing, and Wexford, seating himself in this morning room-cum-study-cum-library, observed a set of Dickens he had surely last seen in Pomfret Grange before the Rogerses sold out and two stone urns whose design seemed very much in keeping with the other garden ornaments of Saltram House.

“I’ve racked my brains and I can’t tell you another thing about the fellows in that search party.”

“I’ve not come about that,” said Wexford. “Did you pinch those urns from Saltram House?”

“Pinch’ is a bit strong,” said Rushworth, taming red. “They were lying about and no one wanted them.”

“You had your eye on one of the statues too, didn’t you?”

“What’s this got to do with John Lawrence?”

Wexford shrugged. “I don’t know. It might have something to do with Stella Rivers. To put it in a nutshell, I’m here to know where you were and what you were doing on February 25th.”

“How can I remember that far back? I know what it is, it’s Margaret Fenn putting you up to all this. Just because I complained my girl wasn’t doing as well as she should at her riding lessons.” Rushworth opened the door and shouted, “Eileen!”

When she wasn’t at work, typing specifications for her husband, Mrs. Rushworth managed this sprawling household single-handed and it showed. She looked dowdy and harassed and her skirt hem was coming down at the back. Perhaps there was some foundation in the gossip that her husband chased the girls.

“Where were you that Thursday?” she enquired of him. “In the office, I suppose. I know where I was. I got it all sorted out in my mind when there was all that fuss about Stella Rivers being missing. It was half-term and I’d taken Andrew to work with me. He came with me in the car to pick Linda up from. Equita and - oh, yes – Paul - that’s my eldest - he came too and dropped off at the cottage. There was a little table there we thought we might as well have here. But we didn’t see Stella. I didn’t even know her by sight.”

“Your husband was in the office when you got back?”

“Oh, yes. He waited for me to get back before he went out in the car.”

“What kind of a car, Mr. Rushworth?”

“Jaguar. Maroon colour. Your people have already been all over my car on account of its being a Jaguar and a kind of red colour. Look, we didn’t know Stella Rivers. As far as we know, we’d never even seen her. Until she disappeared I’d only heard of her through Margaret always going on about how marvellous she was on a horse.”

Wexford favoured them with a hard, unsympathetic stare. He was thinking deeply, fitting in puzzle pieces, casting aside irrelevancies.

“You,” he said to Rushworth, “were at work when Stella disappeared. When John disappeared you were in Sewingbury waiting for a client who never turned up.” He turned to Mrs. Rushworth. “You were at work when John disappeared. When Stella vanished you were driving back from Equita along Mill Lane. Did you pass anyone?”

“Nobody,” said Mrs. Bushworth firmly. ‘Paul was still in the cottage. I know that - he’d put a light on - and, well, I’d better be quite frank with you. He’d actually been in Margaret Fenn’s place too. I’m sure he had because the front door was open, just a little bit ajar. I know he shouldn’t, though she does always leave her back door unlocked and when he was little she used to say he could let himself in and see her whenever he liked. Of course, it’s different now he’s so old, and I’ve told him again and again . . .”

“Never mind,” Wexford said suddenly. “It doesn’t matter.”

“If you wanted to talk to Paul . . . I mean, if it would clear the air . . .?”

“I don’t want to see him.” Wexford got up abruptly. He didn’t want to see anyone at all. He knew the answer. It had begun to come to him when Rushworth called out to his wife and now nothing remained but to sit down somewhere in utter silence and work it all out.