Defeated, flattened, bludgeoned and nearly stunned, Wexford got up. ‘I must go, Mrs Parker.’
‘I won’t quarrel with that,’ she said tartly and, showing no sign of fatigue, ‘You’ve fair worn me out, roaring at me like a blooming bull.’ She handed him the colander and the potatoes. ‘You can make yourself useful and give these to Stell. And tell her to bring me in a pie dish.’
Chapter 5
Had she perhaps been a freelance journalist?
At the press conference Wexford gave that afternoon he asked this question of Harry Wild, of the Kingsmarkham Courier, and of the only reporter any national newspaper had bothered to send. Neither of them had heard of her in this connection, though Harry vaguely remembered a plain featured dark girl called Comfrey, who twenty years before, had been secretary to the editor of the now defunct Gazette.
‘And now,’ Wexford said to Burden, ‘we’ll adjourn to the Olive for a well-earned drink. See if you can find Crocker. He’s about somewhere, dying to get the low-down on the medical report.’
The doctor was found, and they made their way to the Olive and Dove where they sat outside at a table in the little garden. It had been the sort of summer that seldom occurs in England, the sort foreigners believe never occurs, though the Englishman of middle age can look back and truthfully assert that there have been three or four such in his lifetime. Weeks, months, of undimmed sunshine had pushed geraniums up to five feet and produced fuchsias of a size and profusion only generally seen inside a heated greenhouse. None of the three men wore a jacket, but the doctor alone sported a tee-shirt, a short-sleeved adolescent garment in which he made his rounds and entranced his female patients.
Wexford drank white wine, very dry and as cold as the Olive was able to produce it which, tonight, was around blood heat. The occasional beer was for when Crocker, a stern medical mentor, wasn’t around. It was a while now since the chief inspector had suffered a mild thrombosis, but any excesses, as the doctor never tired of telling him, could easily lead to another. He began by congratulating his friend on the accuracy of his on-the-spot estimate of the time of death. The eminent pathologist who had conducted the post-mortem had put it at between seven and nine-thirty.
‘Eight-thirty’s the most probable,’ he said, ‘on her way home from the bus stop.’ He sipped his warm wine. ‘She was a strong healthy woman – until someone put a knife in her. One stab wound pierced a lung and the other the left ventricle. No signs of disease, no abnormalities. Except one. I think in these days you could call it an abnormality.'
‘What do you mean?’ said Crocker.
‘She was a virgin.’
Burden, that strait-laced puritan, jerked up his head. ‘Good heavens, she was an unmarried woman, wasn’t she? Things have come to a pretty pass, I must say, if a perfectly proper condition for a single woman is called abnormal.’
‘I suppose you must say it, Mike,’ said Wexford with a sigh, ‘but I wish you wouldn’t. I agree that a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, even twenty, such a thing wouldn’t be unusual in a woman of fifty, but it is now.’
‘Unusual in a woman of fifteen, if you ask me,’ said the doctor.
‘Look at it this way. She was only thirty when she left home, and that was just at the beginning of the stirrings of the permissive society. She had some money. Presumably, she lived alone without any kind of chaperonage. All right, she was never very attractive or charming, but she wasn’t repulsive, she wasn’t deformed. Isn’t it very strange indeed that in those first ten years at least she never had one love affair, not even one adventure for the sake of the experience?’
‘Frigid,’ said Crocker. ‘Everyone’s supposed to be rolling about from bed to bed these days, but you’d be surprised how many people just aren’t interested in sex. Women especially. Some of them put up a good showing, they really try, but they’d much rather be watching the TV.’
‘So old Acton was right, was he? “A modest woman”,’ Wexford quoted, ‘ “seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband but only to please him and, but for the desire for maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions.” ‘
Burden drained his glass and made a face like someone who had taken unpalatable medicine. He had been a policeman for longer than Rhoda Comfrey had been free of paternal ties, had seen human nature in every possible seamy or sordid aspect, yet his experience had scarcely at all altered his attitude towards sexual matters. He was still one of those people whose feelings about sex are grossly ambivalent. For him it was both dirty and holy. He had never read that quaint Victorian manual, Dr Acton’s Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, male-orientated, prudish, repressive and biologically very wide of the mark, but it was for such as he that it had been written. Now, while Wexford and the doctor – who for some reason beyond his comprehension seemed to know the work well – were quoting from it with scathing laughter and casting up of eyes, he said brusquely, interrupting them:
‘In my opinion, this has absolutely nothing to do with Rhoda Comfrey’s murder.’
‘Very likely not, Mike. It seems a small point when we don’t even know where she lived or how she lived or who her friends were. But I hope all that will be solved tomorrow.’
‘What’s so special about tomorrow?’
‘I think we shall see that this rather dull little backwoods killing will have moved from the inside pages to be frontpage news. I’ve been very frank with the newspapers – mostly via Harry Wild who’ll scoop a packet in lineage – and I think I’ve given them the sort of thing they like. I’ve also given them that photograph, for what it’s worth. I’ll be very much surprised if tomorrow morning we don’t see headlines such as “Murdered Woman Led Double Life” and “What Was Stabbed Woman’s Secret?” ‘
‘You mean,’ said Burden, ‘that some neighbour of hers or employer or the man who delivers her milk will see it and let us know?’
Wexford nodded. ‘Something like that. I’ve given the Press a number for anyone with information to ring. You see, that neighbour or employer may have read about her death today without its occurring to them that we’re still in ignorance of her address.’
The doctor went off to get fresh drinks. ‘All the nuts will be on the blower,’ said Burden. ‘All the men whose wives ran away in 1956, all the paranoiacs and sensation-mongers.’
‘That can’t be helped. We have to sort out the sheep from the goats. God knows, we’ve done it before often enough.’
The newspapers, as he put it, did him proud. They went, as always, too far with headlines more bizarre than those he had predicted. If the photograph, touched up out of recognition, struck no chords, he was sure the text must. Rhoda Comfrey’s past was there, the circumstances of her Kingsmarkham life, the history of her association with the old Gazette, the details of her father’s illness. Mrs Parker and Mrs Crown had apparently not been so useless after all.
By nine the phone began to ring.
For Wexford, his personal phone had been ringing throughout the night, but those calls had been from newspapermen wanting more details and all ready to assure him that Rhoda Comfrey hadn’t worked for them. In Fleet Street she was unknown. Reaching the station early, he set Loring to trying all the London local papers, while he himself waited for something to come from the special line. Every call that had the slightest hint of genuineness about it was to be relayed to him. Burden, of course, had been right. All the nuts were on the blower. There was the spiritualist whose sister had died fifteen years before and who was certain Rhoda Comfrey must have been that sister reincarnated; the son whose mother had abandoned him when he was twelve; the husband, newly released from a mental hospital, whose wife that he declared missing came and took the receiver from him with embarrassed apologies; the seer who offered to divine the dead woman’s address from the aura of her clothes.