“You’ve solved something for me,” Wexford said, and then more soberly, because this was only the beginning of an investigation, not a solution: “Sergeant, the night we were searching for John Lawrence you told a man in the search party to put on thicker shoes - you must have a thing about it - and he too told you to mind your own business, Remember?”
“I can’t say I do, sir.”
“I spoke to him too,” Wexford said wonderingly. “He tried to stroke the dogs.” Fur, he thought, fur and rabbits. He had tried to stroke the alsatian, his hand seemingly impelled towards that soft thick coat. “God, I can’t remember what he looked like! But I remember that voice. That voice! Sergeant, the man you spoke to, the man who tried to stroke the dogs, is the writer of those letters.”
“I just don’t recall him, sir.”
“Never mind. It should be easy to find him now.”
But it wasn’t.
Wexford went first to Mr. Crantock, the husband of Gemma Lawrence’s neighbour, who was head cashier at the Kingsmarkham branch of Lloyd’s Bank. Certain that this man would know every member of the search parties by sight if not by name, Wexford was disappointed to learn that not every searcher had been drawn from the three streets, Fontaine Road, Wincanton Road and Chiltern Avenue.
“There were a lot of chaps I’d never seen before,” said Crantock. “Heaven knows where they came from or how they got to know the kid was missing that early. But we were glad of anyone we could get, weren’t we? I remember there was one character came on a bike.”
“News of that kind travels fast,” Wexford said. “It’s a mystery how it does, but people get to know of things before there’s time for them to be on television or radio or in the papers.”
“You could try Dr. Lomax. He led one of the parties until he had to go back on a call. Doctors always know everybody, don’t they?”
The supplier of Gemma Lawrence’s sleeping pills practised from his own home, a Victorian Gothic house of considerable dimensions that was superior to its neighbours in Chiltern Avenue. Wexford arrived in time to catch the doctor at the end of his afternoon surgery,
Lomax was a busy harassed little man who spoke with a shrill voice, but it wasn’t the shrillness Wexford was listening for and, besides, the doctor had a faint Scottish accent. It seemed that he too was unlikely to be of much help.
“Mr. Crantock, Mr. Rushworth, Mr. Dean . . .” He enumerated a long list of men, counting them on his fingers, though of what use this was Wexford didn’t know, as the search parties had never been counted. Lomax, however, seemed certain when he reached the end of his list that there had been three strangers, one the cyclist.
“How they even knew about it beats me,” he said, echoing Crantock. “I only knew myself because my wife came in and told me while I was holding surgery. She acts as my nurse, you see, and she’d overheard someone talking in the street while she was helping an elderly patient out of a car. She came straight in here and told me and when my last patient had gone I went outside to see what I could do and saw all your cars.
“What time would that have been?”
“When my wife told me or when I went outside? It would have been something after six when I went out, but my wife told me at twenty past five. I can be sure of that because the old lady she helped from the car always comes at five twenty on the dot on Thursdays. Why?”
“Were you alone when your wife told you?”
“No, of course not. I had a patient with me.”
Wexford’s interest quickened. “Did your wife come up to you and whisper the news? Or did she say it aloud so that the patient could have heard?”
“She said it aloud,” said Lomax rather stiffly. “Why not? I told you she acts as my nurse.”
“You will remember who the patient was, naturally, Doctor?”
“I don’t know about naturally. I have a great many patients.” Lomax reflected in silence for a moment. “It wasn’t Mrs. Ross, the old lady. She was still in the waiting room. It must have been either Mrs. Foster or Miss Garrett. My wife will know, she has a better memory than I”
Mrs. Lomax was called in.
“It was Mrs. Foster. She’s got four children of her own and I remember she was very upset.”
“But her husband didn’t come in the search party,” said Lomax, who seemed now to be following Wexford’s own line of reasoning. “I don’t know him, he’s not my patient, but he couldn’t have. Mrs. Foster had just been telling me he’d broken one of his big toes.”
Except to say in an embarrassed low tone, “Of course, I’ll stay till you’ve made other arrangements,” Grace had scarcely spoken to Burden since telling him of her plans. At table - the only time they were together - they kept up a thin polite pretence of conversation for the sake of the children. Burden spent his evenings and his nights with Gemma.
He had told her, but no one else, that Grace was deserting him, and wondered, not understanding at all, when her great wistful eyes widened and she said how lucky he was to have his children all to himself with no one to come between or try to share their love. Then she fell into one of her terrible storms of weeping, beating with her hands on the dusty old furniture, sobbing until her eyes were swollen and half-closed.
Afterwards she let him make love to her, but let was the wrong word. In bed with him she seemed briefly to forget that she was a mother and bereaved and became a young sensual girl. He knew that sex was a forgetting for her, a therapy - she had said as much - but he told himself that no woman could show so much passion if her involvement was solely physical. Women, he had always believed, were not made that way. And when she told him sweetly and almost shyly that she loved him, when she hadn’t mentioned John for two hours, his happiness was boundless, all his load of cares nothing.
He had had a wonderful idea. He thought he had found the solution to the sorrows of both of them. She wanted a child and he a mother for his children. Why shouldn’t he marry her? He could give her another child, he thought, proud in his virility, in the potency that gave her so much pleasure. She might even be pregnant already, he had done nothing to avoid it. Had she? He was afraid to ask her, afraid to speak of any of this yet. But he turned to her, made strong and urgent by his dreams, anxious for quick possession. Even now they might be making a child, the two of them. He hoped for it, for then she would have to marry him . . .
The Fosters lived in Sparta Grove, a stone’s throw from the Piebald Pony, in a little house that was one of a row of twelve.
“I didn’t tell a soul about that poor kid,” said Mrs. Foster to Wexford, “except my husband. He was sitting in a deckchair, resting his poor toe, and I rushed out to tell him the good news.”
“The good news?”
“Oh dear, what must you think of me? I don’t mean the poor little boy. I did mention that, but only in passing. No, I wanted to tell him what the doctor said. Poor man, he’d been going up the wall and so had I, for that matter. My husband, I mean not the doctor. We thought we was going to have another one you see, thought I’d fallen again and me with four already. But the doctor said it was the onset of the change. The relief! You’ve no idea. I give the kids their tea and then my husband took me up the Pony to celebrate. I did mention the poor little boy when we was in there. I mean, you like to have a bit of a natter, don’t you, especially when you’re on top of the world. But it was well gone seven before we got there, that I do know.”
It had looked like a promising lead, had proved a dead end.
It was still half-light and Sparta Grove full of children, playing on the pavements. No one seemed to be supervising them, no one peeping from behind a curtain to keep an eye on that angelic-looking boy with the golden curls or guarding the coffee-skinned, sloe-eyed girl on her tricycle. No doubt the mothers were there, though, observing while themselves remaining unobserved.