“I’ve only been here in summer. The slabs wouldn’t be so overgrown in wintertime.”
“I wonder?” Wexford called Peach over. “You were with the search parties in February, Peach. Did you notice the cisterns?”
“We covered this ground the day after Stella went missing, sir. The Friday, it was. It poured with rain all the previous night and it was raining hard when we were here. The whole of this area was a sea of mud. I don’t reckon you could have guessed the cistern slabs were there.”
“I think we’ll go and have a word with Mrs. Fenn.” She was a small fair woman, anxious to help, appalled at the discovery which had been made less than a quarter of a mile from her home.
“She was the most promising pupil I had,” she said in a quiet voice with an edge of horror to it. “I used to boast about her to my friends. Stella Rivers, I used to say - er Stella Swan, you never knew which was her right name - Stella Rivers will be a first-class show jumper one day. She won’t, will she? God, it’s so awful. I’ll never forgive myself for letting her go off on her own that day. I should have phoned Mr. Swan. I knew he was a bit absent-minded. That wasn’t the first time he’d let her down and forgotten to come.”
“You mustn’t blame yourself,” said Wexford. “Tell me, did you know those fountains had cisterns? If you knew, it means other local people would know.”
“Of course I knew.” Mrs. Fenn looked puzzled. “Oh you mean they get overgrown in summer?” Her brow cleared. “I often ride up there in dry weather and take my guests for walks or on picnics. I know I’ve pointed out the fountains to people because the statues are so pretty, aren’t they?” With a little tremor in her voice she said, “I shan’t feel like going there ever again?’ She shook her head with a kind of shudder. “After heavy rain the slabs might get covered, especially if a lot of earth got washed down from the side of the house.”
They were carrying the slab out to the waiting van now. It would go to the lab for extensive tests.
“If he left any prints,” said Wexford, “all the mud and water will have got rid of them. The weather was on his side, wasn’t it? What’s the matter? Had an idea?”
“I’m afraid not.” Burden contemplated the quiet lane and the surrounding meadows. He didn’t look back at the house but he felt its blind empty eyes on him. “I was wondering about Mrs. Lawrence’ he said. “I mean, ought I to go and . . .”
Wexford snapped off the sentence in his scissors voice. “Martin’s been. I sent him to Fontaine Road as soon as we heard what you’d found. It wouldn’t do for her to hear we’d found a body and not know whose.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“So you needn’t bother with her tonight. She won’t want coppers hanging around her place all the time. Let her have a bit of peace. Besides, she said she’d got a friend corning down from London.”
He needn’t bother with her tonight . . . Burden wondered who the friend was. Man or woman? Actress? Artist? Maybe someone who would listen avidly while Gemma told her about the kiss she had received from a sex-starved policeman. No, he needn’t go there again tonight or any other night come to that. The Stella Rivers case would take up all his time and it would be better that way. Far better, said Burden firmly to himself.
The national press had arrived in force on Sunday evening, and Wexford, most unwillingly, had held a conference. He didn’t like reporters, but they had their uses. On the whole, he supposed, the publicity they gave to pain and horror did more good than harm. Their stories would be inaccurate, with most of the names spelt wrong - a national daily had once repeatedly referred to him as Police Chief Waterford - but the public would be alerted, someone might come up with something helpful. Certainly there would be hundreds of phone calls and, no doubt, more anonymous letters of the kind that this morning had sent Martin, Gates and Loring to keep a date in Cheriton Forest.
Wexford had left home before his morning paper arrived, and now, at nine, he entered Braddon’s to buy all the dailies. The shop had only just opened, but there was someone ahead of him. Wexford sighed. He knew that round grizzled head, that short spare figure. Even now, when innocently purchasing sixty Number Six, the man had an air of lurking.
“Good morning, Monkey,” said Wexford softly.
Monkey Matthews didn’t jump. He froze briefly and then turned round. It was easy to see when you regarded him full-face how he had acquired his nick name. He stuck out his prognathous jaw, wrinkled up his nose and said glumly, “Small world. I come in here with Rube, just for the bus ride, minding my own business, and before I get me first fag on I’ve got the fuzz on me tail.”
“Don’t be like that,” said Wexford pleasantly. He bought his papers and shepherded Monkey out on to the pavement.
“I haven’t done nothing.”
Monkey always made this remark to policemen, even when he encountered one by chance, as on this present occasion. And Burden had once replied, “Two negatives make an affirmative, so we know where we are, don’t we?”
“Long time no see.” Wexford abhorred the expression, but Monkey would understand it and find it irritating.
He did. To cover a slight confusion he lit a cigarette and inhaled voraciously. “Been up north,” he said vaguely. “Had a spell in the rag trade. Liverpool”
Later, Wexford decided, he would check. For the present he made an inspired guess. “You’ve been in Walton.”
At the name of the prison, Monkey removed the cigarette from his lip and spat. “Me and my partner,” he said, “as straight a feller as you’d wish to meet, we had this stall like and a dirty little bastard of a fuzz cadet planted fifty dozen pair of fishnet tights on us. Seconds, they were supposed to be, but half of them hadn’t got no crotch. Bleeding little agent provoker.”
“I don’t want to hear that sort of talk,” said Wexford, and then less severely, “Back with Ruby, are you? Isn’t it about time you made an honest woman of her?”
“Me with a wife living?” Unconsciously, Monkey echoed the Lear Limerick. “Bigamy, sir, is a crime,” he said. “Pardon me, but that’s my bus coming. I can’t stand about nattering all day.”
Grinning broadly, Wexford watched him scuttle off to the bus stop on the Kingsbrook bridge. He scanned the front page of the first of his papers, saw that Stella had been found by a Sergeant Burton in a cave not far from the tiny hamlet of Stowerton, and changed his grin to a scowl.
Chapter 9
Monkey Matthews had been born during the First War in the East End of London and had been educated for the most part in Borstal institutions. His marriage at the age of twenty to a Kingsmarkham girl had brought him to her home town where he had lived - when not in jail - with his wife in her parents’ house. Violence was foreign to him, but only perhaps because he was a coward, not from principle. He stole mostly. He stole from private houses, from his own wife and her aged parents and from those few people who were foolish enough to employ him.
The second war absorbed him into the Army, where he stole stores, officers’ uniforms and small electrical equipment. He went to Germany with the army of occupation; he became an expert in the black market and, on his return home, was probably Kingsmarkham’s first spiv. Patiently, his wife took him back each time he came out of prison.
In spite of his looks, he was attractive to women. He met Ruby Branch in Kingsmarkham magistrates’ court as she was leaving it after being put on probation and he entering between two policemen. They didn’t, of course, speak. But Monkey sought her out when he was free again and became a frequent visitor to her house in Charteris Road, Stowerton, especially when Mr. Branch was on night work. He suggested to her that the wasn’t getting the most out of her job at the underwear factory and soon, on his advice, she was clocking out most Fridays wearing three bras, six slips and six suspender belts under her dress An ardent lover, Monkey was waiting for her when she came back from Holloway.