When he got back from London he had phoned Burden’s house. He needed to discuss that interview with someone and he thought too that this might be a way of reawakening Burden’s interest. But Grace Woodville had told him her brother-in-law was out, she didn’t know where.
“I think he may just be sitting somewhere in his car, brooding about Jean and - and everything.”
“He’s supposed to leave a number where he can be found.”
“Cheriton Forest doesn’t have a number,” said Grace.
On Saturday afternoon two men walked into Kingsmarkham police station to say that they had read the Courier and believed they were two of the three missing men. They were brothers, Thomas and William Thetford, who lived in adjoining houses in Bury Lane, a half-slum, half-country road on the far side of Stowerton, not far from Sparta Grove. News of John Lawrence’s disappearance had been brought to them by William’s wife who cleaned for Mrs. Dean and who had reached home at five-thirty. The Thetford brothers were on shift work, had both finished for that day. Guessing a search party might be got up - hoping for a bit of excitement to brighten up their day, Wexford thought - they had got into William’s car and driven to Fontaine Road.
Neither man had a squeaky voice or even a voice Wexford could remember hearing before. They denied having passed the news on to anyone and said they had discussed it only with each other. Wexford supposed that routine demanded an interview with Mrs. Thetford. Monday would be time enough for that.
“Golf in the morning?” said Dr. Crocker, bouncing in after the Thetfords had gone.
“Can’t. I’m going to Colchester.”
“Whatever for?” Crocker said crossly, and then, without waiting for an answer, “I wanted to have a little chat with you about Mike.”
“I’d really rather you didn’t. I’d rather you saw him. You’re his doctor.”
“I think he’s found a better doctor than I,” said Crocker slyly. “I saw his car again last night.”
“Don’t tell me. In Cheriton Forest. And he was in it, brooding.”
“It wasn’t and he wasn’t. It was parked at the bottom of Chiltern Avenue at midnight.”
“You’re ubiquitous, you are,” Wexford grumbled. “You’re like the Holy Ghost.”
“It was at the bottom of Chiltern Avenue, next to Fontaine Road at midnight. Come on, Reg. I knew you were thick round the middle but not . . .” The doctor tapped his head “. . . not up here.”
“That’s not possible,” said Wexford sharply. His voice faltered. “I mean . . . Mike wouldn’t . . . I don’t want to talk about it.” And he cast upon the doctor a fierce glare. “If I don’t know about it,” he said with none of his usual logic, “it isn’t happening.”
“I know it would be like a miracle,” said Gemma, “but if - if John is ever found and comes back to me, I shall sell this house, even if I only get what the land’s worth, and go back to London. I could live in one room, I shouldn’t mind. I hate it here. I hate being in here and I hate going out and seeing them all look at me.”
“You talk like a child,” said Burden. “Why talk about what you know can’t happen? I asked you to marry me.”
She got up, still without answering, and began to dress, but not in the clothes she had taken off when she and Burden had come into the bedroom. He watched her hungrily, but puzzled as he always was by nearly every facet of her behaviour. She had pulled over her head a long black dress, very sleek and tight. Burden didn’t know whether it was old, a garment of her aunt’s, or the latest fashion. You couldn’t tell these days. Over her shoulders and around her waist she wrapped a long scarf of orange and blue and green, so stiff and encrusted with embroidery that it crackled as she handled it.
“We used to dress up a lot, John and I,” she said, “dress up and be characters from the Red Fairy Book. He would have grown up to be a great actor.” Now she was hanging jewellery all over herself, long strings of beads draped from her neck and wound about her arms. “That sometimes happens when one of your parents, or both of them, has been a second- rate artist. Mozart’s father was a minor musician.” She swayed in the soft red light, extending her arms. There was a ring on every finger to weigh down her thin hands. She shook down her hair and it fell in a flood of fire, the light catching it as it caught all the stones in the cheap rings and made them flash.
Burden was dazzled and fascinated and appalled. She danced across the room, drawing out the scarf and holding it above her head. The jewels rang like little bells. Then she stopped, gave a short abrupt laugh, and ran to him, kneeling at his feet.
“ 'I will dance for you, Tetrarch,' ” she said. “ 'I am awaiting until my slaves bring perfumes to me and the seven veils and take off my sandals.' ”
Wexford would have recognised the words of Salome. To Burden they were just another instance of her eccentricity. Very distressed and embarrassed, he said, “Oh, Gemma . . .!”
In the same voice she said, “I will marry you if . . . if life is to go on like this with nothing, I’ll marry you.”
“Stop play-acting.”
She got up. “I wasn’t acting.”
“I wish you’d take those things off;’ he said.
“You take them off.”
Her huge staring eyes made him shiver. He reached out both hands and lifted the bunch of chains from her neck, not speaking, hardly breathing. She lifted her right arm, curving it in a slow sweep and then holding it poised. Very slowly he slid the bracelets down over her wrist and let them fall, pulled the rings from her fingers one by one. All the time they stared into each other’s eyes. He thought that be had never in his life done anything as exciting, as overpoweringly erotic, as this stripping a woman of cheap glittering jewellery, although in doing so he had not once touched her skin.
Never . . . He hadn’t even dreamed that such a thing might be possible for him. She stretched out her left arm and .he made no other move towards her until her last ring had joined the others in a heap on the floor.
It wasn’t until he awoke in the night that he realised fully what had happened, that he had proposed and been accepted. He told himself that he ought to be elated, in a seventh heaven of happiness, for he had got what he wanted and there would be no more agony or struggling or loneliness or dying small daily deaths.
The room was too dark for him to see anything at all, but he knew exactly what the first light would show him here and downstairs. Yesterday it hadn’t mattered much, the mess and the chaos, but it mattered now. He tried to see her installed in his own house as its mistress, caring for his children and cooking meals, tending on them all as Grace did, but it was impossible to conjure up such a picture, he hadn’t enough imagination. What if Wexford were to call one night for a chat and a drink as he sometimes did and Gemma appear in her strange dress and her shawl and her long beads? And would she expect him to have her friends there, those itinerant subactors with their drugs? And his children, his Pat . . . !
But all that would change, he told himself, once they were married. She would settle down and be a housewife. Perhaps he could persuade her to have that mane of hair cut, that hair which, at one and the same time, was so beautiful and so evocative of desire and yet so unbecoming in a policeman’s wife. They would have a child of their own, she would make new suitable friends, she would change . . .