‘You’re sure she said that about a holiday?’ Wexford interrupted.
‘Course I’m sure. There’s nothing wrong with my memory. Tell you another thing. She called me darling. I was amazed. “I’ll come down for a couple of days first, darling,” she said. Mind you, there was someone else with her while she was phoning. I know what she was up to. She’d got some woman there with her and she wanted her to think she was talking to a man.’
‘But she called you Lilian.'
‘That’s not to say the woman was in there with her when she started talking, is it? No, if you want to know what I think, she’d got some friend in the place with her, and this friend came in after she’d started talking, so she put in that “darling” to make her think she’d got a boy-friend she was going to see. I’m positive, I knew Rhoda. She said it again, or sort of “My dear”, she said. “Thought you might be worried if you saw lights on, my dear. I’ll come in and see you after I’ve been to the infirmary.” And then whoever it was must have gone out again, I heard a door slam. Her voice went very low after that and she just said in her usual way, “See you Monday then. Good-bye.” ‘
‘You didn’t wish her Many Happy Returns of the day?’
If a spider had shoulders they would have looked like Lilian Crown’s. She shrugged them up and down, up and down, like a marionette. ‘Old Mother Parker told me afterwards it was her birthday. You can’t expect me to remember a thing like that. I knew it was in August sometime. Sweet fifty and never been kissed!’
‘That’s all, Mrs Crown,’ said Wexford distastefully and escorted her back to the front door. Sometimes he thought how nice it would be to be a judge so that one could boldly and publicly rebuke people. With his sleeve he rubbed out of the dust the arrowed heart – B loves L – she had drawn there, wondering as he did so if B were the ‘gentleman friend’ she went drinking with, and wondering too about incidence of adolescent souls lingering on in mangy old carcases.
He made the phone call from home.
‘I can tell you that here and now,’ said Baker. ‘Dinehart happened to mention it. Rose Farriner runs a Citroen. Any help to you?’
‘I think so, Michael. Any news of my Chief Constable’s get-together with your Super?’
‘You’ll have to be patient a bit longer, Reg.’ Wexford promised he would be. The air was clearing.
Rhoda Comfrey Farriner had made that call to her aunt from Princevale Road on the evening of her birthday when, not unnaturally, she had had a friend with her. A woman, as Lilian Crown had supposed? No, he thought, a man. Late in life, she had at last found herself a man whom she had been attempting to inspire with jealousy. He couldn’t imagine why. But never mind. That man, whoever he was, had indeed been inspired, had heard enough to tell him where Rhoda Rose Comfrey Farriner was going on Monday. Wexford had no doubt that that listener had been her killer.
It had been a crime of passion. Adolescent souls linger on, as Mrs Crown had shown him, in ageing bodies. Not in everyone does the heyday in the blood grow tame. Had he not himself even recently, good husband though he tried to be, longed wistfully for the sensation of being again in love? Hankered for the feeling of it and murmured to himself the words of Stendhal – though it might be with the ugliest kitchen-maid in Paris, as long as he loved her and she returned his ardour.
The girl who sat in the foyer of Kingsmarkham Police Station was attracting considerable attention. Sergeant Camb had given her a cup of tea, and two young detective constables had asked her if she was quite comfortable and was she sure there was nothing they could do to help her? Loring had wondered if it would cost him his job were he to take her up to the canteen for a sandwich or the cheese on toast Chief Inspector Wexford called Fuzz Fondue. The girl looked nervous and upset. She had with her a newspaper at which she kept staring in an appalled way, but she would tell no one what she wanted, only that she must see Wexford.
Her colouring was exotic. There is an orchid, not pink or green or gold, but of a waxen and delicate beige, shaded with sepia, and this girl’s face had the hue of such an orchid. Her features looked as if drawn in charcoal on oriental silk, and her hair was black silk, massy and very finely spun. For her country-women the sari had been designed, and she walked as if she were accustomed to wearing a sari, though for this visit she was in Western dress, a blue skirt and a white cotton shirt.
‘Why is he such a long time?’ she said to Loring, and Loring who was a romantic young man thought that it was in just such a tone that the Shunamite had said to the watchman: Have ye seen him whom my soul loveth?
‘He’s a busy man,’ he said.’but I’m sure he won’t be long.’
And for the first time he wished he were ugly old Wexford who could entertain such a visitor in seclusion. And then, at half past twelve, Wexford walked in.
‘Good morning. Miss Patel.’
‘You remember me!’
Loring had the answer to that one ready. Who could forget her, once seen? Wexford said only that he did remember her, that he had a good memory for faces, and then poor Loring was sharply dismissed with the comment that if he had nothing to do the chief inspector could soon remedy that. He watched beauty and the beast disappear into the lift.
‘What can I do for you, Miss Patel?’
She sat down in the chair he offered her. ‘You’re going to be very angry with me. I’ve done something awful. No, really, I’m afraid to tell you. I’ve been so frightened ever since I saw the paper. I got on the first train. You’re all so nice to me, everyone was so nice, and I know it’s going to change and it won’t be nice at all when I tell you.’
Wexford eyed her reflectively. He remembered that he had put her down as a humorist and a tease, but now her wit had deserted her. She seemed genuinely upset. He decided to try a little humour himself and perhaps put her more at ease. ‘I haven’t eaten any young women for months now,’ he said, ‘and, believe me, I make it a rule never to eat them on Fridays.’
She didn’t smile. She gave a gulp and burst into tears.
Chapter 11
He could hardly comfort her as he would have comforted his Sylvia or his Sheila whom he would have taken in his arms. So he picked up the phone and asked for someone to bring up coffee and sandwiches for two, and remarked as much to himself as to her that he wouldn’t be able to get angry when he had his mouth full.
Crying did nothing to spoil her face. She wiped her eyes, sniffed and said, ‘You are nice. And I’ve been such an idiot. I must be absolutely out of my tree.’
‘I doubt it. D’you feel like beginning or d’you want your coffee first?’
‘I’ll get it over.’
Should he tell her he was no longer interested in Grenville West, for it must have been he she had come about, or let it go? Might as well hear what it was.
‘I told you a deliberate lie,’ she said.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘You aren’t the first to do that by a long chalk. I could be in the Guinness Book of Records as the man who’s had more deliberate lies told him than anyone else on earth.’
‘But I told this one. I’m so ashamed.’
The coffee arrived and a plate of ham sandwiches. She took one and held it but didn’t begin to eat. ‘It was about Polly,’ she said. ‘Polly never goes out in the evenings alone, but never. If she goes to Grenville’s he always runs her home or puts her in a taxi. She had a horrible thing happen about a year back. She was walking along in the dark and a man came up behind her and put his arms round her. She screamed and kicked him and he ran off, but after that she was afraid to be out alone in the dark. She says if people were allowed to have guns in this country she’d have one.’
Wexford said gently, ‘Your deliberate lie. Miss Patel? I think you’re stalling.’
‘I know I am. Oh, dear. Well, I told you Polly was at home with me that Monday evening, but she wasn’t. She went out before I got home from work and she came back alone – oh, I don’t know, after I was in bed. Anyway, the next day I asked her where she’d been because I knew Grenville was away, and she said she’d got fed up with Grenville and she’d been out with someone else. Well, I knew she’d been unhappy about him for a long time, Grenville, I mean. She wanted to go and live with him. Actually, she wanted to marry him, but he wouldn’t even kiss her.’ Malina Patel gave a little shudder. ‘Ooh, I wouldn’t have wanted him to kiss me! There’s something really funny about him, something queer – I don’t mean gay-queer, or I don’t think so but something sort of hard to…’