‘I do see,’ said Wexford. ‘You didn’t move anything else?’
Parker shook his head. ‘I told Nicky the lady was ill and we’d go home and phone the doctor. I said she’d be all right. I don’t think he realized. I hope not. I got him home and phoned your people. Honestly, I wouldn’t have touched her if I’d been on my own.’
‘This was an exception, Mr Parker.’ Wexford smiled at him. ‘I’d have done the same in your place.’
‘He won’t have to…? I mean, there’ll be an inquest, won’t there? I mean, I’ll have to go, I know that, but…’
‘No, no. Good God, no. Get off home now and we’ll see you again later. Thanks for your help.’
Parker got up off the seat, glanced at the photographers, the huddle round the body, then turned round. ‘It’s not for me to… Well, I mean, I do know who she is. Perhaps you don’t…’
‘No, we don’t yet. Who is she?’
‘Well, a Miss Comfrey. She didn’t actually live here, her dad lives here.’ Parker pointed back down the path. ‘Carlyle Villas, the one with the blue paint. She must have been stopping there. Her dad’s in hospital. He’s an old man, he broke his hip, and she must have come down to see him.’
‘Thanks, Mr Parker.’
Wexford crossed the sandy path, and Burden stepped aside for him to look down at the body. It was that of a middleaged woman, biggish and gaunt. The face was coated with heavy make-up, clotted scarlet on the mouth, streaky blue on the crepe eyelids, a ghastly ochreish layer on the planes of cheek and forehead. The grey eyes were wide and staring, and in them Wexford thought he saw – it must be his imagination – a sardonic gleam, a glare, even in death, of scorn.
A fringe of dark hair just showed under a tightly tied blue headscarf. The body was clothed in a blue and pink printed dress of some synthetic material, and the matching jacket had been drawn across the bodice. One of the high-heeled shoes had come off and hung suspended on a tangle of brambles. Across the hips lay a large scarlet handbag. There were no rings on the hands, no watch on either wrist, but a heavy necklace of red glass beads round the neck, and the nails, though short, were painted the same scarlet.
He knelt down and opened the handbag, covering his fingers with his handkerchief. Inside was a key ring with three keys on it, a box of matches, a packet of king-sized cigarettes from which four had been smoked, a lipstick, an old-fashioned powder compact, a wallet, in the bottom of the bag some loose change. No purse. No letters or documents.
The wallet, which was an expensive new one of black leather, contained forty-two pounds. She hadn’t been killed for the money she had on her. There was nothing to give him a clue to her address, her occupation or even her identity. No credit card, no bank card, no cheque book. He closed the bag and parted her jacket. The bodice of the dress was black with clotted blood, but plainly discernible in the dark matted mass were two cuts, the outward evidence of stab wounds.
Chapter 2
Wexford moved away, and the doctor came back and knelt where he had knelt. He said to Loring:
‘No sign of the weapon, I daresay?’
‘No, sir, but we haven’t made much of a search yet.’
‘Well, get searching, you and Gates and Marwood. A knife of some sort.’ The chances of it being there, he thought pessimistically, were slight. ‘And when you haven’t found it,’ he said, ‘you can do a house-to-house down Forest Road. Get all you can about her and her movements, but leave Parker and Carlyle Villas to me and Mr Burden.’ Back to Dr Crocker. ‘How long has she been dead, Len?’
‘Now, for God’s sake, don’t expect too much precision at this stage. Rigor’s fully established, but the weather’s been very hot, so its onset will have been more rapid. I’d say at least eighteen hours. Could be more.’
‘OK.’ Wexford jerked his head at Burden. ‘There’s nothing more here for us, Mike. Carlyle Villas and Parker next, I think.’
Michael Burden was properly of too high a rank to accompany a chief inspector on calls of inquiry. He did so because that was the way they worked, the way it worked. They had always done so, and always would, in spite of disapproving mutterings from the Chief Constable.
Two tall men. Nearly twenty years separated them, and once they had been so dissimilar in appearance as to provide that juxtaposition of incongruities which is the stuff of humour. But Wexford had lost his abundant fat and become almost a gaunt man, while Burden had always been lean. He was the better-looking of the two by far, with classical features that would have been handsome had they been less pinched by sour experience. Wexford was an ugly man, but his was the face that arrested the eye, compelled even the eyes of women, because it had in it so much lively intelligence and zest for life, so much vigour, and in spite of his seniority, so much more of the essence of youth.
Side by side, they walked along the footpath and down the alley into Forest Road, not speaking, for there was nothing yet to say. The woman was dead, but death by murder is in a way not an end but a beginning. The lives of the naturally dead may be buried with them. Hers would now gradually be exposed, event after event, obscure though she had been, until it took on the character of a celebrity’s biography. From the alley, they turned to the right and stood outside the pair of houses, cottages really, in front of which Wexford had parked his car. The houses shared a single gable, and in its apex was a plaster plaque bearing their name and the date of their construction: Carlyle Villas, 1902. Wexford knocked at the blue front door with little hope of getting an answer. There was none, and no one came when they rang the bell on the neighbouring front door, a far more trendy and ambitious affair of wrought iron and reeded glass.
Frustrated at this most promising port of call, they crossed the street. Forest Road was a cul-de-sac, ending in a stone wall, behind which meadows swelled and the forest sprawled. It contained about a dozen houses, apart from Carlyle Villas, a clutch of tiny cottages at the wall end, two or three newer bungalows, a squat grey stone lodge that had once stood at the gates of a long-vanished mansion. One of the bungalows, built at the period when Hollywood’s influence penetrated even this corner of Sussex, had windows of curved glass and a roof of green pantiles. Bella Vista.
The child Nicky was still up, sitting with his mother in a living room that had the same sort of untidy look as the one Wexford had left an hour before. But if Parker hadn’t introduced this girl as his wife, Wexford would have taken her for no more than an adolescent. She had the smooth brow and bunchy cheeks of a child, the silken hair, the innocent eyes. She must have been married at sixteen, though she looked no more than that now.
Parker said with ferocious winks, ‘This gentleman’s a doctor, come to tell us the poor lady’s all right.’ Nicky buried his face in his mother’s shoulder.
‘Quite all right,’ Wexford lied. ‘She’ll be fine.’ They say the dead are well…
‘You get along to Nanna’s room then, Nicky, and she’ll let you watch her TV.’
The tension lightened on his departure. ‘Thanks,’ said Parker. ‘I only hope it isn’t going to have a bad effect on him, poor kid.’
‘Don’t worry. He’s too young to see newspapers, but you’ll have to exercise a bit of censorship when it comes to the TV. Now, Mr Parker, I think you said Miss – er – Comfrey’s father was in hospital. D’you know which hospital?’
‘Stowerton. The infirmary. He had an accident last – when would it have been, Stell?’
‘About May,’ said Stella Parker. ‘Miss Comfrey came down to see him, came in a taxi from the station, and when he saw her he rushed out of the house and fell over on the path and broke his hip. Just like that it happened. Her and the taxi-man, they took him to the hospital in the same taxi and he’s been there ever since. I never saw it. Mrs Crown told me. Miss Comfrey’s been down once to see him since. She never did come much, did she, Brian?’