Wolf to the Slaughter

15

In the morning the rain came back. From the look of the sky it seemed to be one of those mornings when it rains from streaming dawn to dripping, fog-filled dusk. Wexford, dialling Sewingbury, held the receiver gripped under his chin and reached out to lower the Venetian blind. He was listening to the ringing tone when Drayton came in.

'That Mrs Anstey to see you, sir. I passed her as I came in.'

Wexford put the phone down. 'For once the mountain has come to Mahomet.' 'Shall I bring her up?'

'Just a minute, Drayton.' It was a command, rather sharp and with a hint of admonition. The young man stopped and turned obediently. 'Enjoy yourself last night?'

If possible, Drayton's face became more than ever a cipher, secret, cautious, but not innocent. 'Yes, thank you, sir.' The rain drummed against the window. It had grown quite dark in the office as if night was coming at nine-thirty in the morning.

‘I don't suppose you've got to know many young people around here yet?' The question demanded an avuncular heartiness but Wexford made it sound menacing.

'Not many, sir.'

'Pity. God knows, my young daughter seems to know enough. Always having a' — No, not a jam session. Burden had corrected him on that. — A get-together at our place.

Quite a decent bunch if you don't mind noise. I daresay you don't.' Drayton stood, silence incarnate.

'You must join in one of these nights.' He gave the young man a grey cold stare. 'Just you on your own,' he said. 'Yes, sir. I'd like that.'

'Good, I'll get Sheila to give you a tinkle.' Severity had gone and urbanity replaced it. 'Now for Mrs Anstey,' said the Chief Inspector.

The rain gave him a sensation of almost claustrophobic confinement as if he were enclosed by walls of water. He could hear it streaming from the sills and pouring over the naked stone bodies on the frescoes. Pity it never seemed to wash them properly but just left grey trails on shoulders and haunches. He switched on the lights as Burden came in with Mrs Anstey in his wake, each as wet as creatures from the depths of the sea. Mrs Anstey's umbrella hung from her arm and dripped water in a trickle at her heels.

‘I had to come,' she said, ‘I had an impulse. After you'd gone I got to thinking what on earth you could have meant about some girl you mentioned.' Her laughter sounded itself like water, fresh bubbling, yet a little hesitant, ‘I got the first bus.' She shed her grey mackintosh and stripped a hideous plastic hood from her brown hair. There were raindrops on her nose and she wrinkled it as might a little dog. 'Geoff and a girl. I didn't like that. Dog in a manger, aren't I? The fact is, I just have to see him. I've waited long enough. I'm going there now, but I thought I ought to see you first.' Without explanation, she laughed again and this time her laugh held a nervous break. 'Has he got a girl?' she asked and that explained.

The first bringer of unwelcome hews, thought Wexford, has but a losing office. How did it go on? Something about his voice sounding ever after as a sullen warning bell. That didn't matter. Only the present pain mattered. For the first time since he and Burden had discussed Smith's death, his particular duty was brought home to him. He was going to have to tell her. That she was only an ex-wife would, he was sure, make no difference.

'Has he?' she said again and now she was pleading.

‘I wasn't able to see him, Mrs Anstey.'

No lying, no prevaricating. None of that would be possible with this woman. Burden had turned his back.

'What is it? There's something bad ' She got up, the plastic thing from her head stretched taut in her fingers. 'He's ill, he's ...'

'He's dead.' No matter how prepared you were, it was still a shock. You could never be sufficiently prepared. Until the words were said, hope was invincible, ‘I'm sorry,' he said quickly, ‘I'm very very sorry. It was a coronary, bit over a year ago. I'm sure it was quick.'

'He can't be dead!' The words were an echo of Burden's. He could not have been dead for Burden because that made nonsense of a theory; he could not be dead for her because she had a theory too, a theory of re-shaping her life?

‘I'm afraid he is.'

'Not dead!' Wexford heard the thin thread of hysteria, the burning electric shock wire.

'Please sit down. I'll get you something to drink.'

With a kind of horror, he watched her feel blindly behind her for the chair she had satin, find it, kick it away and lurch at the wall. Her fists clenched, she struck her head against the plaster, then the fists themselves came up, pounding and beating on the hard surface.

Wexford took a step towards her. 'Better get one of the W.P.Cs,' he said to Burden. Then she began to scream with a throaty frenzy.

The policewoman took the tea cup from her and replaced the sodden handkerchief with a clean one of her own. 'Bit better now?'

Noreen Anstey nodded. Her face was pink and swollen and her hair, though wet from rain, gave the illusion of being, like her cheeks, soaked with tears. She was all tears, all grief. .

Suddenly she said quite coherently, ‘I can never ask him to forgive me now.' For a moment she had breath enough only for this. Sobs succeeded it. They were like blood pumping from a vein, ‘I won't cry any more.' The sobs were involuntary. Eventually they would subside. ‘I’ll go to my grave,' she said, 'knowing he never knew I was sorry.' Wexford nodded to the policewoman and she went out with the tea cup and the wet handkerchief.

'He forgave you,^’ he said. 'Didn't he give you the flat?'

She hardly seemed to hear him. 'He died and I didn't even know.' Wexford thought of the two women at Smith's funeral, the old neighbour and the girl who did his typing. 'You don't even know what I did to him, do you? We'd been married eight years, the perfect couple, the happy couple. That's what everyone said and it was true.' The sobs made a rattle in her throat. 'He used to buy me presents. Unbirthday presents, he called them. You couldn't have that many birthdays. You'd get old too fast.’ She covered her eyes, shaking her head from side to side. 'We lived in a house with his office in it. There was a garage next door. I could see it from my window. I'd given up work, teaching was my work. No need when I had Geoff to look after me.' The sentences jerked out, short, ragged, staccato. Wexford moved his chair ^lose and sat looking down into his lap. 'Ray Anstey worked at the garage. I used to watch him. You know the way they lie on their backs with their heads thrown back? My God!' She shivered. 'You don't want to hear all this. I'd better go.' Her things were still wet, the raincoat, the umbrella that had dripped and made a puddle on the floor like a blister. She dabbed feebly at the sides of the chair, feeling for her handbags

'We'll take you home, Mrs Anstey,' Wexford said gently. 'But not quite yet. Would you like to have a rest? Two questions only and then you can rest.'

'He's dead. Beyond your reach. Why did you want him?'

‘I think,' Wexford said slowly, 'that it's your second husband we want.'

'Ray?'

'Where is he, Mrs Anstey?'

'I don't know,' she said, tiredly. ‘I haven't seen him for months. He left me at the end of last year.'

'You said he worked in a garage. Is he a mechanic?'

‘I suppose he is. What else could he do?' Her gloves were on the floor at her feet. She picked them up and looked at them as at two wet dead things, dredged up from the bottom of a pond. 'You wanted him all along?' Her face went a sickly white and she struggled up out of the chair. 'It was my husband you wanted, not Geoff?' Wexford nodded. 'What's he done?' she asked hoarsely. 'A girl is missing, probably dead

'The knife,' she said. Her eyes went out of focus. Wexford took a step towards her and caught her in his arms.

'Where did your sister get her car serviced?' Burden said. Margolis looked up from his late breakfast of coffee, orange juice and unappetizing hard-boiled eggs, his expression helplessly apathetic.

'Some garage,' he said, and then, 'It would be Cawthorne's, wouldn't it?'

'Come, Mr Margolis, you must know. Don't you have your own car seen to?'

'Ann looked after that side of things. When it wanted doing, she'd see to it.' The painter turned the eggshells upside down in their cups like a child playing April Fool tricks. 'There was something, though ...' His long fingers splayed through his hair so that it stood up in a spiky halo. 'Some trouble. I have a remote recollection of her saying she was going to someone else.' He put the tray on the sofa arm and got up to shake crumbs from his lap. 'I wish I could remember,' he said.

'She took it to that Ray, Mr M.,' said Mrs Penistan sharply. 'You know she did. Why don't you pull yourself together?' She shrugged at Burden, turning her little eyes heavenwards. 'He's gone to pieces since his sister went. Can't do nothing with him.' She settled herself beside Margolis and gave him a long exasperated stare. Burden was reminded of a mother or a nanny taking a recalcitrant child to a tea party, especially when she bent over him and, with a sharp clucking of her tongue, pulled his dressing gown over to hide his pyjama legs.

'Ray who?'

'Don't ask me, dear. You know what she was like with her Christian names. All I know is she come in here a couple of months back and says, "I've had about as much as I can stand of Russell's prices. I've a good mind to get Ray to do the cars for me." "Who's Ray?" I says, but she just laughed. "Never you mind, Mrs P. Let's say he's a nice boy who thinks the world of me. If I tell you who he is he might lose his job."'

‘Did he come here to service the cars?'

'Oh, no, dear. Well, he wouldn't have the facilities, would he?' Mrs Penistan surveyed the studio and the window as if to. imply that nothing of practical use to a sane human being could be found in cottage or garden. 'She always took them to him. He lived local, you see. Somewhere local. I'd see her go off but I'd always gone when she got back. He'd have been here.' She shoved her elbow into Margolis's thin ribs. 'But he don't listen to what folks tell him.'

Burden left them together, sitting side by side, Mrs Penistan coaxing Margolis to finish his coffee. The heavy rain had made the path slippery and there were wet petals everywhere underfoot. The garage doors were open and for the first time Burden saw Margolis's own car and saw that it was green.

He was beginning to discern a pattern, a way that it could all have been done. Now he thought he could understand why a black car and a green car had been used and where Anita's white car had been until the small hours. A new excitement made him walk jauntily to the cottage gate. He opened it and the hawthorn bush showered him with water as effectively as if someone had put a tilted bucket in its branches.

This is how it must feel to be a psychiatrist, Wexford thought. Noreen Anstey lay on the couch in the rest room, staring at the ceiling, and he sat beside her, letting her talk.

'He always had a knife,' she said, ‘I saw it that first day, the first time he came up from the garage. Geoff was working downstairs. I used to take coffee down to him and then I started taking it to Ray as well. One day he came up instead.' For a while she was silent, moving her head from side to side. 'God, he was beautiful. Not handsome, beautiful, perfect. Like people ought to be, like I never was. Not very tall, black-haired, red mouth like a flower ...' He didn't want to interrupt, but he had to. He wasn't a real psychiatrist.

'How old is he?'

'Ten years younger than me,' she said and he knew it hurt her to say it. 'He came up that day. We were quite alone and he had this knife, a little flick knife. He took it out of his pocket and put it on the table. I'd never seen one before and I didn't know what it was. We didn't talk much. What was there for us to talk about? We didn't have anything in common. He sat there smiling, making little sort of sly innuendoes.' She almost laughed but it was a gasp Wexford heard, ‘I was sick with wanting him.' Her face turned to the wall, she went on, ‘I'd had that lighter a few months arid I remember lighting a cigarette for Ray. He said, "No, light it in your mouth''. He looked at the lighter and he said, "He give you this? Does he give you toys because he can't give you anything else?" That wasn't true, but it must have been the way it looked, the way I looked. I've got a toy too, he said, and he picked up the knife and held it against my throat. The blade came out. I kept still or it would have cut me. My God, I was a teacher of French in a girls' school. I'd never been anywhere or done anything. You'd have thought I'd have screamed. D'you know, I'd have let him kill me, then? Afterwards, after he'd gone, there was blood on my neck from a little scratch and I knew he'd been looking at it all the time he was making love to me.'

'Smith divorced you?' Wexford said to fill up the great silence.

'He found out. That wasn't difficult. I've never been much good at hiding my feelings. Geoff would have forgiven me and started afresh. He couldn't believe I'd want to marry a man ten years younger than myself, a garage hand ... I was mad to have him. I knew he was a sadist and a. moron. He'd cut me, really cut me since then.' She pulled open her dress. On the left breast, where the flesh swelled under the collarbone, was a small white cicatrice. For all his years of experience, Wexford felt sickness catch at the back of his throat like a fingernail plucking.

'You were always unhappy?'

‘I was never happy with him.' She said it almost reproachfully, ‘I don't think there was a moment when I could say I was happy. He loathed Geoff. D'you know what he used to do? He'd give Geoff's name, pretend he was Geoff.' Wexford nodded, guessing this was to come. 'When the phone rang he'd pick it up and say — well, sort of absent-mindedly, "Geoff Smith speaking". Then he'd correct himself and say he'd made a mistake. Once he took some clothes to the cleaners, filthy overalls, and when I went to collect them they couldn't find the ticket. It was made out to Smith, you see. Anything a bit nasty or disreputable he was involved in and he'd always give Geoff's name. A girl came round once — she couldn't have been more than seventeen - and asked if this was where Geoff Smith lived. He'd dropped her and she wanted him back, even though he'd used the knife on her too. She showed me a scar on her neck. I told him he'd go too far one day. He'd kill one of them or she'd go to the police.'

'He's gone too far,' Wexford said.

'He had to see their blood, you see.' She spoke very calmly, without horror. Not for the first time Wexford pondered on the dulling effect of custom, how habit dulled the edge of shock. All pity choked with custom of fell deeds ... 'I used to think,' she said, 'that one day there'd be a girl who wasn't mesmerized by him but just plain frightened and that maybe she'd turn the knife on him. He wasn't big and strong, you see, not powerful physically. His power was the other sort. I used to take the knives away but he always got new ones. Then he left me.'

'This must have been about the time you lost your lighter.'

Noreen Anstey raised herself on one elbow, then turned and swung her legs on to the floor. 'I've been thinking about that,' she said. 'Ray must have taken it. He took things from Geoff and me when we were still married. I couldn't prove it, but I thought he had, jewellery, things like that.' She sighed, covered her face and then brought her hands down again. 'I suppose Geoff guessed too. There were so many things,' she said, 'we both knew and never put into words. Oh, I'm sorry!' she cried, clenching her fists and pressing them into her lap. 'I'm so bitterly sorry. I want to find where he's buried and lie on his grave and cry into the earth that I'm sorry!'

So many women who were sorry, Wexford thought, Noreen Anstey because she had thrown away love for love's ugly shadow, Ruby Branch because she had betrayed an old crook, and Anita Margolis? The dead have no regrets. She could not be sorry that she had played her dangerous game once too often, played it with a man and a knife.