Chapter 16
No word came from Commissaire Laquin that day. But Loring’s inquiries were more fruitful, clearing up at last the matter of the wallet.
‘Those girls weren’t lying,’ Wexford said to Burden. ‘He did lose a wallet on a bus, but it was his old one he lost. That’s what he told the assistant at Silk and Whitebeam when he went on Thursday, 4 August, to replace it with a new one.’
‘And yet it was the new one we found in the possession of Rhoda Comfrey.’
‘Mike, I’m inclined to believe that the old one did turn up and he gave her the new one, maybe on the Saturday when it was too late to tell Polly Flinders. She told him she had reached the age of fifty the day before, and he said OK, have this for a present.’
‘You think he was a sort of cousin of hers?’
‘I do, though I don’t quite see yet how it can help us. All these people on the list have been checked out. Two of them, in any case, are dead. One is in an institution at Myringham, the Abbotts Palmer Hospital. One is seventy-two years old. One had emigrated with his wife to Australia. The last of them, Charles Grenville West, is a teacher, has been married for five years and lives in Carshalton. The father, also John Grenville West, talks of cousins and second cousins who may bear the name, but he’s doddery and vague. He can’t tell us the whereabouts of any of them. I shall try this Charles.’
Almost the first thing Wexford noticed when he was shown into Charles Grenville West’s living room was a shelf of books with familiar titles: Arden’s Wife, Apes in Hell, Her Grace of Amalfi, Fair Wind to Alicante, Killed with Kindness. They had pride of place in the bookcase and were well cared for. The whole room was well cared for, and the neat little house itself, and smiling, unsuspicious, cooperative Mrs and Mrs West.
On the phone he had told Charles West only that he would like to talk to him about the death of a family connection of his, and West had said he had never met Rhoda Comfrey – well, he might have seen her when he was a baby – but Wexford would be welcome to call just the same. And now Wexford, having accepted a glass of beer, having replied to kind inquiries about the long journey he had made, looked again at the books, pointed to them and said:
‘Your namesake would appear to be a favourite author of yours.’
West took down Fair Wind to Alicante. ‘It was the name that first got me reading them,’ he said, ‘and then I liked them for themselves. I kept wondering if we were related.’ He turned to the back of the jacket and the author’s photograph. ‘I thought I could see a family resemblance, but I expect that was imagination or wishful thinking, because the photo’s not very clear, is it? And then there were things in the books, I mean in the ones with an English setting…’
‘What sort of things?’ Wexford spoke rather sharply. His tone wasn’t one to give offence, but rather to show Charles West that these questions were relevant to the murder.
‘Well, for instance, in Killed with Kindness he describes a manor house that’s obviously based on Clythorpe Manor near Myringham. The maze is described and the long gallery. I’ve been in the house, I know it well. My grandmother was in service there before she married.’ Charles West smiled. ‘My people were all very humble farm workers and the women were all in service, but they’d lived in that part of Sussex for generations, and it did make me wonder if Grenville West was one of us, some sort of cousin, because he seemed to know the countryside so well. I asked my father but he said the family was so huge and with so many ramifications.’
‘I wonder you didn’t write to Grenville West and ask him,’ said Wexford.
‘Oh, I did. I wrote to him care of his publishers and I got a very nice letter back. Would you like to see it? I’ve got it somewhere.’ He went to the door and called out, ‘Darling, d’you think you could find that letter from Grenville West? But he’s not a relation,’ he said to Wexford. ‘You’ll see what he says in the letter.’
Mrs West brought it in. The paper was headed with the Elm Green address. ‘Dear Mr West,’ Wexford read. ‘Thank you for your letter. It gives me great pleasure that you have enjoyed my novels, and I hope you will be equally pleased with Sir Bounteous, which is to be published next month and which is based on Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters. This novel also has an English setting or, more precisely, a Sussex setting. I am very attached to your native country and I am sorry to have to tell you that it is not mine, nor can I trace any connection between your ancestry and mine. I was born in London. My father’s family came originally from Lancashire and my mother’s from the West Country. Grenville was my mother’s maiden name. ‘So, much as I should have liked to discover some cousins – as an only child of two only children, I have scarcely any living relatives – I must disappoint myself and perhaps you too. ‘With best wishes, ‘Yours sincerely, ‘Grenville West.’
With the exception, of course, of the signature, it was typewritten. Wexford handed it back with a shrug. Whatever the information, or lack of it, had done for the author and for Charles West, it had certainly disappointed him. But there was something odd about it, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. The style was a little pretentious with a whisper of arrogance, and in the calculated leading from paragraph to paragraph, the almost too elegant elision of the professional writer. That wasn’t odd, though, that wasn’t odd at all… He was growing tired of all these hints, these ‘feelings’, these pluckings at his mind and at the fingerspitzengefuhl he seemed to have lost. No other case had ever been so full of whispers that led nowhere. He despised himself for not hearing and understanding them, but whatever Griswold might say, he knew they were sound and true.
‘A very nice letter,’ he said dully. Except, he would have liked to add, that most of it is a carefully spun fabric of lies.
There was one more Grenville West to see, the one who dragged out his life in the Abbotts Palmer Hospital. Wexford tried to picture what that man would be like now, and his mind sickened. Besides, he knew he had only contemplated going there to keep himself away from the police station, away from hearing that Laquin had nothing for him, that Griswold had called in the Yard over his head, for it was getting to the end of the week now, it was Thursday.That was no attitude for a responsible police officer to take. He went in. The weather was hot and muggy again, and he felt he had gone back a week in time, for there, waiting for him again, was Malina Patel.
An exquisite little hand was placed on his sleeve, limpid eyes looked earnestly up at him. She seemed tinier and more fragile than ever. ‘I’ve brought Polly with me.’
Wexford remembered their previous encounters. The first time he had seen her as a provocative tease, the second as an enchanting fool. But now an uneasiness began to overcome his susceptibility. She gave the impression of trying hard to be good, of acting always on impulse, of a dotty and delightful innocence. But was innocent dottiness compatible with such careful dressing, calculated to stun? Could that sweet guilelessness be natural? He cursed those susceptibilities of his, for they made his voice soft and gallant when he said:
‘Have you now? Then where is she?’
‘In the loo. She said she felt sick and one of the policemen showed her where the loo was.’
‘All right. Someone will show you both up to my office when she’s feeling better.’
Burden was there before him. ‘It would seem, according to your pal, that the whole of France is now being scoured for our missing author. He hasn’t been in Annecy, whatever your little nursery rhyme friend may say.’
‘She’s on her way up now, perhaps to elucidate.’
The two girls came in. Pauline Flinders’ face was greenish from nausea, her lower lip trembling under the ugly prominent teeth. She wore faded frayed jeans and a shirt which looked as if they had been picked out of a crumpled heap on a bedroom floor. Malina too wore jeans, of toffee-brown silk, stitched in white, and a white clinging sweater and gold medallions on a long gold chain.