Since those days Wexford had put Monkey away for shop-breaking, larceny as a servant, attempting to blow up one of Ruby’s rivals with a home-made bomb, and stealing by finding. Monkey was nearly as old as Wexford, but there was as much life left in him as in the chief inspector, although he smoked sixty cigarettes a day, had no legitimate means of support and, since his wife had finally thrown him out, no fixed abode.
Returning to his office, Wexford wondered about him. Monkey could never be free for long without getting into trouble. Busy as he was, Wexford decided to do the checking he had resolved on outside the newsagent’s.
His notion that Monkey had been in Walton was soon confirmed. He had been released in September. The conviction had been for receiving, knowing it to have been stolen, so huge a quantity of tights, nylon briefs, body stockings and other frippery which, had it ever been sold, would surely have supplied the entire female teenage population of Liverpool for months to come.
Shaking his head, but smiling rather wryly, Wexford dismissed Monkey from his mind and concentrated on the pile of reports that awaited his attention. He had read through three of them when Sergeant Martin came in.
“No one turned up, of course?” he said, looking up.
“I’m afraid not, sir. We separated, according to instructions. It’s out of the question we could have been spotted, the forest’s so thick there. The only person to come along the road was the receptionist at the Cheriton Forest Hotel. No one came down the ride. We stayed there till ten.”
“I knew it would be a dead loss,” said Wexford.
Burden shared his chief’s antipathy to Ivor and Rosalind Swan but he found it impossible to view them with Wexford’s cynicism. They had something, those two, the special relationship of two people who love each other almost exclusively and who mean their love to survive until death parts them. Would he ever again find a love like that for himself? Or was to have it once all that any man could expect, knowing that few ever found it at all? Rosalind Swan had lost her only child in a hideous way but she could bear that loss without too much pain while she had her husband. He felt that she would have sacrificed a dozen children to keep Swan. How had Stella fitted into this honeymoon life? Had either or both of them felt her a hindrance, a shadowy and undesired third?
Wexford had been questioning them for half an hour and Mrs. Swan looked tired and pale, but she seemed to feel the enormity of her husband’s interrogation more keenly than its cause. “Ivor loved Stella,” she kept saying, “and Stella loved him.”
“Come, Mr. Swan,” Wexford said, ignoring this, “you must often since then have thought about that ride of yours and yet you can’t name to me a single person, apart from Mr. Blain, who might have seen you.”
“I haven’t thought about it much,” Swan said, holding his wife’s hand closely in both his own. “I wanted to forget it. Anyway, I do remember people, only not what they looked like or their car numbers. Why should I go about taking car numbers? I didn’t know I’d have to give anyone an alibi.”
“I’ll get you a drink, my love.” She took as much trouble over it as another woman might over the preparation of her baby’s feed. The glass was polished on a table napkin, Gudrun was sent for the ice. “There. Have I put too much soda in?”
“You’re good to me, Rozzy. I ought to be looking after you.”
Burden saw her grow pink with pleasure. She lifted Swan’s hand and kissed it as if there was no one there to see. “We’ll go away somewhere,” she said. “We’ll go away tomorrow and forget all this beastliness.”
The little scene which had brought a pang of envy to Burden’s heart had no softening effect on Wexford. “I’d rather you didn’t go anywhere until we’ve got a much clearer picture of this case,” he said. “Besides, there will be an inquest which you must attend and, presumably,” he added with stiff sarcasm, “a funeral.”
“An inquest?” Swan looked aghast.
“Naturally. What did you expect?”
“An inquest,” Swan said again. “Will I have to attend it?”
Wexford shrugged impatiently. “That’s a matter for the coroner, but I should say, yes, certainly you will.”
“Drink up your drink, my love. It won’t be so bad if we’re together, will it?”
“There’s a mother for you!” Wexford exploded.
Burden said nothing for a moment. He was wondering if most of the ideas he held on mother love were perhaps fallacious. Until now be had supposed that to a woman the death of her child would be an insupportable grief. But maybe it wouldn’t. People were very resilient. They recovered fast from tragedy, especially when they had someone to love, especially when they were young. Rosalind Swan had her husband. Whom would Gemma Lawrence have when she was fetched away to view a body in a mortuary?
It was three days since he had seen her, but hardly an hour had passed without his thinking of her. He relived that kiss and each time he experienced it again in retrospect he felt a shivering thrill of excitement. Telling himself to stop dwelling on it and on her was useless, and there was no question for him of out of sight, out of mind. She was almost more vivid to him in her absence than her presence, her body softer and fuller, her hair more thick and brilliant, her childlike sweetness sweeter. But while he kept away he felt that he was safe. Time would dull the memory if only he had the strength to stay away.
In the back of the car Wexford’s probing eyes were on him. He had to say something.
"What about the father, Rivers?” he managed at last. “You must have got on to him way back in February.”
“We did. Immediately after the divorce he married again and his airline sent him to San Francisco. We did more than get on to him. We checked him very closely. There was always the chance that he had popped over and smuggled the child into the States.”
“What, just like that? Hopped on a plane, grabbed her and flown off again? He can’t be a rich man.”
“Of course he isn’t,” Wexford retorted, “but he could have done it just as easily as if he were a millionaire with a private aircraft. Don’t forget he works for an airline and like any of their employees travel at only a small surcharge. The same applies within reason to any dependent he might take with him. Also he’d have access to any aircraft, provided there was a vacant seat. Gatwick’s only about thirty miles from here, Mike. If he had found out the girl’s movements, fiddled a passport and a ticket, he could have done it all right.”
“Only he didn’t.”
“No, he didn’t. He was at work in San Francisco all day on February the twenty-fifth. Naturally, he came over when he was told Stella had disappeared and, no doubt, he’ll be over again now.”
Detailed reports from forensics had come in during Wexford’s absence. They confirmed Crocker’s diagnosis and, for all the expertise of those who had compiled them, added little to it. Eight months had elapsed since the child’s death, but the conclusion was that she had died from manual pressure on her throat and mouth. Her mildewed and tattered clothes afforded no clues and neither did the slab which had covered the cistern.