No More Dying Then

Chapter 5

Burden looked at the sheet of paper Wexford had handed him. Written on it in a bold, large but child like hand were the names of every man, woman and child Gemma Lawrence had known during the past ten years.

“When did she write all that out?”

Wexford eyed him briefly and narrowly. “This morning with Loring’s help. You aren’t her exclusive private eye, you know.”

Burden flushed. What hundreds of people she knew and what extraordinary names they had! Artists and models and theatre folk, he supposed, suddenly bad-tempered. “Have we got to interview all this lot?”

“The Met are going to help us there. I asked Mrs. Lawrence to write down every name because I want to show the list to the Swans.”

“You are connecting the two cases, then?”

Wexford didn’t answer directly. He took the list from Burden, gave him another piece of paper and said, “This came. It’s been gone over for fingerprints, so you needn’t worry about touching it. Of course there weren’t any prints.”

“John Lawrence is safe and, well with me,” Burden read. “He is happy playing with my rabbits on the farm. To show you this is not a hoax, I am enclosing a lock of his hair.” The note, written in block capitals on a sheet of lined paper, was correctly spelt and punctuated. “His mother can have him back on Monday. I will bring him to the southern end of Myfleet Ride in Cheriton Forest at 9 a.m. If anyone tries to collect him before nine-thirty, I will know and I will shoot John dead. This is a serious warning. I will not break my promise if you co-operate.”

Burden dropped it in disgust. Used as he was to such things, he could still not read them without a shudder. “Was there a lock of hair?” he asked.

“Here.”

It had been twisted into a smooth neat circle like a woman’s pin curl. Burden lifted it in tweezers, noting the delicacy of each red-gold strand, the absence of those kinks and ridges which occur in adult hair.

“It’s human,” said Wexford. “I got Crocker on to it at once. He says it’s the child’s hair, but, of course, we shall have to have more expert tests.”

“Has Mrs. Lawrence been told?”

“Thank God he’s safe,” she said when she had read the first lines. She held the letter momentarily to her breast but she didn’t cry. “He’s safe and well on a farm somewhere. Oh my God, and what agonies I’ve been through! Imagine, all that for nothing and he’ll be back with me on Monday.”

Burden was appalled. He had already told her not to bank on the letter at all, that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred such letters are cruel hoaxes. For all the notice she took, he might not have spoken.

“Let me see the hair,” she said.

Reluctantly he took the envelope which contained it from his briefcase. She gasped when she saw the small golden curl. So far it had been handled carefully with tweezers, but she took it, stroked it and pressed it to her mouth. “Come upstairs.”

He followed her into John’s bedroom, noticing that the child’s bed hadn’t been made since his disappearance. It was a nice bedroom, though, full of toys and with a beautiful expensive wallpaper of Dürer animals reproduced in line and wash. However much she might neglect the rest of the house, she had cared for this room and probably done the papering herself. Burden’s opinion of her as a mother rose.

She went over to a small blue-painted chest of drawers and picked up John’s hairbrush. A few fine blond hairs were caught in its bristles and, with an earnest concentrated expression, she compared them with the lock in her hand. Then she turned and smiled radiantly.

Burden had never seen her really smile before. Until then her smiles had been brief and watery, reminding him, he thought suddenly, of a faint sun coming out after rain. Such metaphors were very unusual with him, fanciful and not in his line. But he thought it now as he received the full force of her brilliant happy smile and saw again how beautiful she was.

“It is the same, isn’t it?” she said, the smile fading as she almost pleaded, “isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.” There was certainly a strong similarity, but Burden didn’t know whether he wanted the hairs to be the same or not. If this man really had John and if he had really cut that lock from John’s head, was it likely that he would let the boy go otherwise unharmed? Would he risk the boy’s identifying him? On the other hand, he had demanded no money . . . “You’re his mother,” he murmured. “I wouldn’t like to say.”

“I know he’s safe,” she said. “I feel it. I’ve only got to get through two more days.”

He hadn’t the heart to say any more then. Only a brute, he thought, would destroy such shining happiness. So that she shouldn’t read the last lines he wanted to take the letter from her, but she read it to the end.

“I’ve heard about cases like this,” she said, a little fear returning to her voice as she gazed at him, “and what the police do. You wouldn’t - you wouldn’t do - do what he says you’re not to do? You wouldn’t try to trap him? Because then John . . .”

“I promise you,” he said, “that we shall do nothing which might in any way endanger John’s life.” She had said nothing vindictive about the writer of the letter, he noticed. Other women in her position would have raged and screamed for revenge. She had merely been filled with joy. “We shall go there on Monday morning, at nine-thirty, and if he is there we shall bring him back to you.”

“He’ll be there,” she said. “I trust this man. I’ve got a feeling he’s genuine. Really, I have, Mike.” Her use of his Christian name brought colour into his face. He felt his cheeks burn. “He’s probably dreadfully lonely,” she said gently. “I know what it is to be lonely. If John has given him a few days’ respite from his loneliness I don’t grudge John to him.”

It was incredible and Burden couldn’t understand. If it had been his child, his John, he would have wanted to kill the man, to see him die a lingering death. As it was, his feelings towards the letter-writer were so violent that they frightened him. Let me get at him, he thought, give me five minutes alone in the cell with him and, by God, if I lose my job for it . . . He pulled himself up with a jerk and saw that her eyes were on him, kind, sweet and compassionate.

In his haste to see Gemma, Burden had forgotten the Swans, but now he remembered Wexford saying the note helped to establish a connection between the two cases. The chief inspector was still in his office.

“Swan lives on a farm,” he said. “I phoned but he’s out till three.”

“Does he keep rabbits?”

“Don’t mention rabbits to me. I’ve only just got over an hour with the secretary of the local rabbit club. Rabbits! The place is crawling with them, Old English, Blue Beverens, you name ‘em, we got ‘em. I tell you, Mike, it’s like the Apocrypha says, ‘The coneys are a feeble folk, but they make their houses in the rocks!’”

“And every fancier being checked?” said Burden, unsmiling.

Wexford nodded. “And I know the bloody thing’s a hoax,” he said. “I shall spend the best part of my week end - and so will dozens of other policemen - chasing rabbits and farmers and checking shot-gun licences and being polite to human hair experts, but I know very well it’s a hoax and what I’m doing is an utter waste of time.”

“But it has to be done.”

“Of course it has to be done. Let’s go to lunch.”

At the Carousel Café only ham and salad was left on the menu. Wexford picked without enthusiasm at the salad in which lettuce leaves were economically eked out with shreds of cabbage and carrot. “Can’t get away from rabbits,” he muttered. “Want me to tell you about Swan and his wife?”

“I suppose I ought to have a bit of background.”

“Usually,” Wexford began, “you feel too much sympathy with the parents of a lost child. You find your emotions getting involved.” He shifted his gaze from his plate to Burden’s face and pursed his lips. “Which doesn’t help,” he said. “I didn’t feel particularly sorry for them. You’ll see why not in a minute.” Clearing his throat, he went on, “After Stella disappeared, we did more research into the life and background of Ivor Swan than I can ever remember doing with anyone. I could write his biography.”

“He was born in India, the son of one General Sir Rodney Swan, and he was sent home to school and then to Oxford. Being in possession of what he calls small private means, he never took up any particular career but dabbled at various things. At one time he managed an estate for someone, but he soon got the sack. He wrote a novel which sold three hundred copies, so he never repeated that experiment. Instead he had a spell in P.R. and in three months lost his firm an account worth twenty thousand a year. Utter ingrained laziness is what characterises Ivor Swan. He is indolence incarnate. Oh, and he’s good-looking, staggeringly so, in fact. Wait till you see.”

Burden poured himself a glass of water but said nothing. He was watching Wexford’s expression warm and liven as he pursued his theme. Once he too had been able to involve himself as raptly in the characters of suspects.

“Swan rarely had any settled home,” Wexford said. “Sometimes he lived with his widowed mother at her house in Bedfordshire, sometimes with an uncle who had been some sort of big brass in the Air Force. And now I come to an interesting point about him. Wherever he goes he seems to leave disaster behind him. Not because of what he does but because of what he doesn’t do. There was a bad fire at his mother’s house while he was staying there. Swan had fallen asleep with a cigarette burning in his fingers. Then there was the loss of the P.R. account because of what he didn’t do; the sacking from the estate management job - he left a pretty mess behind him there - on account of his laziness.”

“About two years ago he found himself in Karachi. At that time he was calling himself a free-lance journalist and the purpose of his visit was to enquire into the alleged smuggling of gold by airline staff. Any story he concocted would probably have been libellous, but, as it happened, it was never written or, at any rate, no newspaper printed it.”

“Peter Rivers worked for an airline in Karachi, not as a pilot but among the ground staff, meeting aircraft, weighing baggage, that sort of thing, and he lived with his wife and daughter in a company house. In the course of his snooping Swan made friends with Rivers. It would be mote to the point to say he made friends with Rivers’ wife.”

“You mean he took her away from him?” Burden hazarded.

“If you can imagine Swan doing anything as active as taking anyone or anything away from anyone else. I should rather say that the fair Rosalind – ‘From the East to Western Ind no jewel is like Rosalind’ - fastened herself to Swan and held on tight. The upshot was that Swan returned to England plus Rosalind and Stella and about a year later Rivers got his decree.”

“The three of them all lived in a poky flat Swan took in Maida Vale, but after they were married Swan, or more likely Rosalind, decided the place wasn’t big enough and they came out here to Hall Farm.”

“Where did he get the money to buy a farm?”

“Well, in the first place it isn’t a farm any more but a chichi tarted-up farmhouse with all the land let off. Secondly, he didn’t buy it. It was part of the property held under a family trust. Swan put out feelers to his uncle and he let him have Hall Farm at a nominal rent.”

“Life’s very easy for some people, isn’t it?” said Burden, thinking of mortgages and hire purchase and grudgingly granted bank loans. “No money worries, no housing problems.”

“They came here last October, a year ago; Stella was sent to the convent at Sewingbury - uncle paid the fees - and Swan let her have these riding lessons. He rides himself and hunts a bit. Nothing in a big way, but then he doesn’t do anything in a big way.”

“As to Rivers, he’d been having it off on the quiet with some air hostess and he also has married again. Swan, Rosalind and Stella plus an au pair girl settled down quite comfortably at Hall Farm, and then, bang in the middle of all this bliss, Stella disappears. Beyond a doubt, Stella is dead, murdered.”

“It seems clear,” said Burden, “that Swan can have had nothing to do with it.”

Wexford said obstinately, “He had no alibi. And there was something else, something less tangible, something in the personality of the man himself.”

“He sounds too lazy ever to commit an aggressive act.”

“I know, I know.” Wexford almost groaned the words. “And he had led, in the eyes of the law, a blameless life. No history of violence, mental disturbance or even bad temper. He hadn’t even the reputation of a philanderer, Casual girl friends, yes, but until he met Rosalind he had never been married or engaged to be married or even lived with a woman. But he had a history of a sort, a history of disaster. There’s a line in rather a sinister sonnet – ‘They that have power to hurt and yet do none.’ I don’t think that means they don’t do any hurt but that they do nothing. That’s Swan. If he didn’t do this killing it happened because of him or through him or because he is what he is. D’you think that’s all airy-fairy moonshine?’

“Yes,” said Burden firmly.

St. Luke’s Little Summer maintained its glory, at least by day. The hedges were a delicate green-gold and frost had not yet bitten into blackness the chrysanthemums and michaelmas daisies in cottage gardens. The year was growing old gracefully.

The farm was approached by a narrow lane scattered with fallen leaves and overhung by hedges of Old Man’s Beard, the vapourish, thistledown seed heads of the wild clematis, and here and there, behind the fluffy masses, rose Scotch pines, their trunks a rich coral pink where the sun caught them. A long low building of stone and slate stood at the end of this lane, but most of its stonework was obscured by the flame and scarlet virginia creeper which covered it.

“Du coté de chez Swan,” said Wexford softly.

Proustian references were lost on Burden. He was looking at the man who had come round from the back of the house, leading a big chestnut gelding.

Wexford left the car and went up to him. “We’re a little early, Mr. Swan. I hope we’re not putting you out?”

“No,” said Swan. “We got back sooner than we expected. I was going to exercise Sherry but that can wait.

“This is Inspector Burden.”

“How do you do?” said Swan, extending a hand. “Very pleasant, all this sunshine, isn’t it? D’you mind coming round the back way?”

He was certainly an extremely handsome man. Burden decided this without being able to say in what his handsomeness lay, for Ivor Swan was neither tall nor short, dark nor fair, and his eyes were of that indeterminate colour men call grey for want of more accurate term. His features had no special regularity, his figure, though lean, no sign of athletic muscular development. But he moved with an entirely masculine grace, exuded a vague lazy charm and had about him an air of attractiveness, of making himself immediately noticed.

His voice was soft and beautiful, the words he used slowly enunciated. He seemed to have all the time in the world, a procrastinator who would always put off till tomorrow what he couldn’t bring himself to do today. About thirty-three or thirty-four, Burden thought, but he could easily pass fox twenty-five to a less discerning observer.

The two policemen followed him into a kind of lobby or back kitchen where a couple of guns and an assortment of fishing tackle hung above neat rows of riding boots and wellingtons.

“Don’t keep rabbits, do you, Mr. Swan?” Wexford asked.

Swan shook his head. “I shoot them, or try to, if they come on my land.”

In the kitchen proper two women were engaged on feminine tasks. The younger, an ungainly dark girl, was preparing - if the heaps of vegetables, tins of dried herbs, eggs and mincemeat spread on the counter in front of her were anything to go by - what Burden chauvinistically thought of as a continental mess. Well away from the chopping and splashing, a minute doll-like blonde was ironing shirts. Five or six had already been ironed. There were at least that number remaining. Burden noticed that she was taking extreme care not to cause a horizontal crease to appear under the yoke of the shirt she was at present attending to, an error into which hasty or careless women often fall and which makes the removal of a jacket by its wearer an embarrassment.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Swan. I wonder if I may trouble you for a few minutes?”

Rosalind Swan had a girlish air, a featherlight “bovver” haircut and nothing in her face or manner to show that eight months before she had been deprived of her only child. She wore white tights and pink buckled shoes, but Burden thought she was as old as he.

“I like to see personally to all my husband’s laundry,” she declared in a manner Burden could only describe as merry, “and Gudrun can’t be expected to give his shirts that little extra wifely touch, can she?”

From long experience Burden had learnt that if a man is having an affair with another woman and, in that woman’s presence, his wife makes a more than usually coquettish and absurd remark, he will instinctively exchange a glance of disgust with his mistress. He had no reason to suppose Gudrun was anything more than an employee to Swan - she was no beauty, that was certain - but, as Mrs. Swan spoke, he watched the other two. Gudrun didn’t look up and Swan’s eyes were on his wife. It was an appreciative, affectionate glance he gave her and he seemed to find nothing ridiculous in what she had said.

“You can leave my shirts till later, Rozzy.”

Burden felt that Swan often made remarks of this nature. Everything could be put off till another day, another time. Idleness or chat took precedence over activity always with him. He nearly jumped out of his skin when Mrs. Swan said gaily:

“Shall we go into the lounge, my love?”

Wexford just looked at him, his face impassive.

The “lounge” was furnished with chintzy chairs, doubtful antiques, and, hanging here and there, brass utensils of no apparent use to a modern or, come to that, ancient household. It reflected no particular taste, had no individuality, and Burden remembered that Hall Farm, doubtless with all its contents, had been supplied to Swan by an uncle because he had nowhere else to live.

Linking her arm into her husband’s, Mrs. Swan led him to a sofa where she perched beside him, disengaged arms and took his hand. Swan allowed himself to be thus manipulated in a passive fashion and seemed to admire his wife.

“None of these names mean anything to me, Chief Inspector,” he said when he had looked at the list. “What about you, Roz?”

“I don’t think so, my love.”

Her love said, “I saw in the paper about the missing boy. You think the cases have some connection?”

“Very possibly, Mr. Swan. You say you don’t know any of the people on this list. Do you know Mrs. Gemma Lawrence?”

“We hardly know anyone around here,” said Rosalind Swan. “You might say we’ll still on our honeymoon, really.

Burden thought this a tasteless remark. The woman was all of thirty-eight and married a year. He waited for her to say something about the child who had never been found, to show some feeling for her, but Mrs. Swan was looking with voracious pride at her husband. He thought it time to put his own spoke in and he said flatly:

“Can you account for your movements on Thursday afternoon, sir?”

The man wasn’t very tall, had small hands, and any one could fake a limp. Besides, Wexford had said he hadn’t had an alibi for that other Thursday afternoon . . .

“You’ve quite cast me for the role of kidnapper, haven’t you?’ Swan said to Wexford.

“It was Mr. Burden who asked you,” Wexford said imperturbably.

“I shall never forget the way you hounded me when we lost poor little Stella.”

“Poor little Stella,” Mrs. Swan echoed comfortably.

“Don’t get upset, Rozzy. You know I don’t like it when you’re upset. All right, what was I doing on Thursday afternoon? Every time you add anyone to your missing persons list I suppose I must expect this sort of inquisition. I was here last Thursday. My wife was in London and Gudrun had the afternoon off. I was here all alone. I read for a bit and had a nap.” A flicker of temper crossed his face. “Oh, and at about four I rode over to Stowerton and murdered a couple of tots that were making the streets look untidy.”

“Oh, Ivor, darling!”

“That sort of thing isn’t amusing, Mr. Swan.”

“No, and it’s not amusing for me to be suspected of making away with two children, one of them my own wife’s.”

No more could be got out of him. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Burden as they drove back, “did she go on calling herself Rivers after her mother remarried?”

“Sometimes she was one, sometimes the other, as far as I could gather. When she became a missing person she was Stella Rivers to us because that was her real name. Swan said he intended to have the name changed by deed poll, but he hadn’t taken any steps towards it. Typical of him.”

“Tell me about this non-existent alibi,” said Burden.