Somewhat calmer by three o’clock, he drove off to see Mrs. Thetford. According to a neighbour, she was out at her job of cleaning for Mrs. Dean. Wexford hung about till she got back and saw no reason to refuse her offer of a cup of tea and a piece of fruit cake. The Rushworths were both out all day, anyway, and he wanted to see them together rather than endure another interview with Rushworth in his estate agent’s office, their conversation constantly interrupted by phone calls from clients.
But tea and cake were all he got out of Mrs. Thetford. She repeated the story he had already heard from her husband. Mrs. Dean had given her the news about John Lawrence at five o’clock but she declared she had passed it on to no one except her husband and her brother-in-law.
He drove slowly up the lane and entered Sparta Grove. Lomax’s patient, Mrs. Foster, was his only hope now. She must have told someone what she had over heard at the doctor’s. Or been overheard herself? It was a possibility, perhaps the only one remaining.
Number 14 was her house. Wexford parked outside it and then he saw the boy. He was swinging on the gate of the house next door, number 18, and his rather long hair was bright gold.
By now all the children were home from school and Sparta Grove was full of them. Wexford beckoned to a girl of about twelve and she approached the car suspiciously.
“I’m not supposed to talk to strange men.”
“Very proper,” said Wexford. “I’m a policeman.”
“You don’t look like one. Show me your warrant card.”
“By gum, you’ll go far if you don’t come to a bad end.” He produced his card and the child scrutinised it with huge delight. “Satisfied?”
“Mmm.” She grinned. “I learnt how to do that off the telly.”
“Very educational, the telly. I wonder they bother to keep the schools open. You see that boy with the fair hair? Where does he live?”
“Where he is. That house he’s on the gate of.”
Ungrammatical but explanatory. “You needn’t tell him I was asking.” Wexford produced a coin which he knew he wouldn’t get back out of expenses.
“What shall I say, then?”
“Come, come. You’re a resourceful girl. Say I was a strange man.”
Now was not the time. He must wait until all the children were in bed. When the Piebald Pony opened he went into the saloon bar and ordered sandwiches and half a bitter. Any minute now, he thought, Monkey and Mr. Casaubon would come in. Delighted to see him in their local, they would try to ascertain how near they were to getting their hands on that two thousand, and it would give him much pleasure to tell them, they had never been farther from it. He would even be indiscreet and reveal his innermost conviction, that Swan was guiltless of any crime but that of indifference.
But nobody came. It was seven when Wexford left the Piebald Pony and walked three-quarters of the length of quiet, dimly-lit Sparta Grove.
He tapped on the door of number 16. No lights showed. Everyone of those children must now be safely in bed. In this house the golden-headed boy would be sleeping. From the look of the place - no blue-white glow of a television screen showed behind the drawn curtains his parents had gone out and left him alone. Wexford had a low opinion of parents who did that, especially now, especially here. He knocked again, harder this time.
To a sensitive astute person an empty house has a different feel from a house which simply appears to be empty but which, in reality, contains someone who is unwilling to answer a door. Wexford sensed that there was life somewhere in that darkness, conscious tingling life, not just a sleeping child. Someone was there, a tense someone, listening to the sound of the knocker and hoping the knocks would cease and the caller go away. He made his way carefully through the side entrance and round to the back. The Fosters’ house next door was well lit but all the doors and windows were shut. A yellow radiance from Mrs. Foster’s kitchen showed him that number 16 was a well-kept house, its path swept and its back doorstep polished red. The little boy’s tricycle and a man’s bike leaned against the wall and both were covered by a sheet of transparent plastic.
He hammered on the back door with his fist. Silence. Then he tried the handle very stealthily, but the door was locked. No getting in here without a warrant, he thought, and there was no hope of getting one on the meagre evidence he had.
Treading softly, he began to move round to the back of the house, feeling moist turf under his feet. Then, suddenly, a flare of light caught him from behind and he heard Mrs. Foster say, as audibly as if she were standing beside his ear, “You won’t forget to put the bin out, will you, dear? We don’t want to miss the dust men two weeks running.”
Just as he thought. Every word spoken in the garden of number 14 could be heard in this garden. Mrs. Foster hadn’t seen him. He waited until she had retreated into her kitchen before moving on.
Then he saw it, a thin shaft of light, narrower than the beam from a pencil torch, stretching across the grass from a french window. Tiptoeing, he approached the source of this light, a tiny gap between drawn curtains.
It was difficult to see anything at all. Then he saw that right in the middle of the window the edge of the curtain had been caught up on a bolt. He squatted down but still he couldn’t see in. There was nothing for it but to lie down flat. Thank God there was no one to see him or observe how hard he found it to perform what should have been one of man’s most natural actions.
Flat on his belly now, he got one eye up against the uncurtained triangle. The room unfolded itself before him. It was small and neat and conventionally furnished by a house-proud wife with a red three-piece suite, a nest of tables, wax gladioli and carnations whose petals were wiped each day with a damp cloth.
The man who sat writing at a desk was quite relaxed now and intent on his task. The importunate caller had gone away at last and left him to the special peace and privacy he demanded. It would show in his face, Wexford thought, that concentration, that terrible solitary egotism, but he couldn’t see his face, only the bare legs and feet, and sense the man’s rapt absorption. He suspected that under the fur coat he wore he was quite naked.
Wexford watched him for some minutes, watched him pause occasionally in his writing and pass the thick furry sleeve across nose and mouth. It made him shiver, for he knew he was eavesdropping on something more private than secret speech or love making or the confessional. This man was not alone with himself, but alone with his other self, a separate personality which perhaps no one else had ever seen until now.
To witness this phenomenon, this intense private fantasising in a room which epitomised conformity, seemed to Wexford an outrageous intrusion. Then he remembered those fruitless trysts in the forest and Gemma Lawrence’s hope and despair. Anger drove out shame. He pulled himself on to his feet and rapped hard on the glass.
Chapter 19
In his anxiety to reach the lift, Burden shoved Harry Wild out of the way.
“Manners,” said the reporter, “There’s no need to push. I’ve a right to come in here and ask questions if I . . .”
The sliding door cut off the rest of his remarks which would perhaps have been to the effect that, but for his modesty and fondness for the quiet life, he would have been exercising his rights in loftier portals than those of Kingsmarkham police station. Burden didn’t want to hear. He only wanted Harry’s statement, that they had found the boy, confirmed or denied.