No Man's Nightingale (17 page)

All her attention seemed concentrated on these dreadful jerks. She was voiceless, not crying, showing no pain or fear, simply caught up in what her father could recognise, though he had never seen it before, as a fit. Standing there, aghast, sick with terror, he pulled his mobile from his pocket and dialled first 999 and then his mother. Then he shouted out to Nicky. She came in, the words of reproach for his calling her from sleep stilled on her lips. She ran to Isabella and would have lifted her up but for Jason’s shouting at her to leave the child alone, help was coming, an ambulance was coming.

Maxine arrived a minute before the paramedics. She had seen a baby ‘fitting’ before, her own brother when she was five and he was nearly one and she had never forgotten it. But what had caused it she couldn’t remember, if she had ever known. He had grown out of it and while she was telling Jason that Isabella would surely grow out of it the ambulance arrived, the paramedics were let in by Nicky and came upstairs. They called Isabella’s condition a seizure which sounded worse than ‘fit’ to Jason. The jerks had stopped now, she was still, her lips were blue and she seemed to have fallen asleep.

‘Maybe it’s in the family,’ said Maxine.

‘Not in mine,’ shouted Nicky.

‘Never,’ said Jason grimly. ‘I know what’s caused it. I know.’

But no one was very interested in Jason’s diagnosis. Isabella was taken to the Princess Diana Memorial Hospital and her parents and grandmother went with her. There the doctor told them that seizures were quite common in infants, the cause often unknown, they seldom lasted more than a minute and seemed not to cause any permanent harm. They would do some tests and meanwhile she was sure there was nothing to worry about.

Jason could have gone to work, Isabella was in no danger, but he said in an ominous tone that he had better things to do and phoned in to say his daughter was seriously ill. They would have the test results in a day or two but meanwhile – a favourite word with the lady doctor – they should take her home. Jason also returned home and went immediately on to the Internet where he looked up seizures and children and found that such phenomena could be caused, as he already knew, by some accident or trauma to the head. A doctor would have told him how unwise it was to consult the Internet about medical matters. But Jason didn’t ask a doctor and if he had done he would only have interpreted such advice as fear of patients taking away their jobs. He didn’t ask anyone. He jumped into his car and drove straight to Stringfield.

Having been released on police bail, Jeremy Legg was at home. Jason saw him peering out of one of the upstairs windows. He parked the car in the lane, close up under the overhanging hedge which was dripping water from the recent rain. All the way here he had been feeding his rage, reminding himself how Jeremy had insisted on driving Nicky and Isabella the shortish distance to Ladysmith Road, how he had withheld the key until the last possible moment and, worst of all, how he had been drinking prior to that drive. Jason himself wasn’t much of a drinker. He was one of those people who seldom drink because they don’t like the taste. Therefore, he deeply disapproved of people who drank, particularly those who drank to excess. All these things that he had been thinking about on the way to Stringfield had exacerbated his anger. If he had looked at himself in the car’s mirror he would have seen that his normally whey-coloured face had grown a blotchy dark pink. He could feel a pulse beating in his neck. He clenched his fists and on his way up the path kicked at a tree trunk.

Jeremy was at home alone and expected to be for the next two days. Fiona was going to her mother’s in Pomfret after work and intended to stay there, returning home on Friday. Audrey Morrison was down with flu and Fiona would be looking after her, doing the shopping, and monitoring her condition as her mother had a tendency to pneumonia. Jeremy was glad to see the back of Fiona for a while. It seemed to him that when she was with him she talked of nothing but the coming baby and her talk consisted mainly in lecturing him on how to care for infants, what you fed them on, watching them for signs of malaise and, worst of all, changing their nappies. A new trouble had come upon him. Diane had phoned and followed up her call with one of her handwritten letters, not an email. The house in Peck Road was in ‘a disgusting state’. The carpets were stained, with blood and ‘worse’. Someone had papered the walls in the bedrooms, one with a paper patterned in scenes from
SpongeBob SquarePants
, the other with bunches of red roses and blue ribbons, her pictures, which still hung on the walls when she left for Spain, had been taken down and stacked in the cupboard under the stairs, two of them with their glass cracked. She had estimated the cost of the damage at eight hundred pounds and expected to retrieve that sum of money either from him or ‘those people who have been illegally squatting in my house’. He could have a week in which to pay up or he could deal with her solicitor. There was no mention of the house being rented and not belonging to her.

Jeremy was rereading this letter and sipping grappa from the bottle when the doorbell rang. Having seen him come, he already knew it must be Jason at the door. Was he going to take this opportunity of asking him about Diane’s money? His usual course in like situations was to postpone, always to put off till tomorrow what he could do today. He opened the front door, said ‘Hi’ and stepped aside to let Jason in.

Jason said nothing. He went inside and slammed the door behind him. Jeremy said in an ingratiating tone, ‘Come along through. What can I do for you?’

‘You’ve done enough,’ said Jason, smelling the grappa on Jeremy’s breath. Pulling back his right arm, he punched him on the jaw. Jeremy gave a choking cry as his body crumpled, sinking from the waist down, his horrified eyes staring as he fell. But before he touched the ground, Jason had grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him to his feet. Pushing him against the wall, which he began feebly to slide down, Jason aimed a second punch at him and as he fell, groaning, kicked his crumbling shins.

He was still lying there, moaning now, his eyes staring, when Jason left, walked out to his car and drove to the supermarket. At least he could put in half a day’s work. Unable to resist telling someone what he had done, he first phoned Nicky, then his mother. Nicky he first asked how Isabella was, was told she was fine, then gave an account of his prowess at Stringfield that morning. Instead of congratulating him, Nicky asked what he wanted to do that for and she hoped there wouldn’t be any trouble. His mother was a more gratifying audience. Jeremy Legg had got what he’d been asking for. Driving drunk and with an innocent baby in the car! Could she tell Mr Wexford what had happened? Would he mind? Tell him what you like, said Jason. I’m in good with the cops, they love me.

Jeremy had promised to call Fiona at her mother’s that evening but this promise, like most that he made, was broken. When it got to nine thirty she phoned him but got no reply. This wasn’t unusual. His mobile phone was stuffed full of unread messages, and as for the landline, he seldom got to it in time. She wasn’t worried. Knowing that she might not be in touch with him for forty-eight hours hardly perturbed her. She would see him soon enough. Since she had discovered her pregnancy, Fiona had almost ceased to think about Jeremy. Her thoughts and inner musings were concentrated on the coming baby. Jeremy she already regarded as a childminder but one without as yet a child to mind. She tried phoning him again in the morning from the optician’s but after four rings she ended the call, it wasn’t worth the trouble.

The weekend came and with it, on the Saturday, Sarah Hussain’s memorial service. Dora and Wexford attended it, she because she was a parishioner and a church attender, he in the hope of seeing everyone who knew the murdered vicar gathered together under St Peter’s angel roof. They were among the first arrivals as were their grandson Robin and Clarissa Hussain, probably the first occasion in their lives, Wexford thought unkindly, that those two had been on time for anything. Both were unsuitably dressed in jeans (in Robin’s case, the ragged kind, with holes in the knees), T-shirts with pictures on them of endangered species, and distressed leather jackets. Stepping out of an ancient Jaguar just outside the church gate, and on a double yellow line, was an old woman in an equally ancient fur coat holding the arm of a man in his late forties, a tall handsome man whose once-golden hair had faded to straw, his light complexion reddened and his blue eyes paled to silver, as often happens with very fair men. He reminded Wexford of someone, not his colouring but his classical features, but who it was he couldn’t remember. Left behind in the old Jaguar, seated at the wheel, was a dark-haired man of much the same age, good-looking in a surly way, who looked as if he intended to remain there, for he had taken a book from the glove compartment and was reading it. Had he stayed where he was in case some assiduous traffic warden told him to move? Was he waiting for the fair man and the old woman to return at the end of the service?

Wexford and Dora went into the church and were presented with an order of service. Just ahead of them was Dennis Cuthbert holding on to the arm of a man in his thirties who looked rather like him and was even taller. Dora nodded to both of them, smiling in the decorous way that is correct at such functions. Nardelie Mukamba, the Congolese woman from Oval Road, Stowerton, was a surprise attender, though Wexford reproved himself with racism for thinking that way. The organist was playing a voluntary. Handel, Wexford recognised, but which Handel he couldn’t tell, only that it wasn’t the Dead March in
Saul
. They took their seats more or less in the middle and found themselves one row in front of Dennis Cuthbert who was now seated next to a woman Dora whispered was the president of the Young Wives’ Group. Cuthbert could be heard speaking scornfully about the ‘modern’ hymns Clarissa had chosen, scoffing at the folk singer she had chosen to sing ‘She Moved Through the Fair’ and pontificating in outraged tones about the Alternative Service Book. The people who had been in the Jaguar were in the front row as if they were family, which Wexford doubted they could be.

Georgina Bray arrived with her husband, a mild-looking man, though appearances of course were deceptive, and behind them Thora Kilmartin. A host of parishioners followed, many of whom Wexford knew by sight, and, rather to his surprise, Mike Burden. The detective superintendent came to sit beside him.

‘What brings you here?’

‘When you had my job,’ said Burden, ‘didn’t you always attend things like this?’

‘I suppose I did.’

As the organist moved on to some Handel Wexford did recognise, the Overture to
Scipione
, Mrs Morgan of Dragonsdene and her housekeeper Miss Green arrived. Clarissa walked up to the communion rail and then into the chancel, unaccompanied this time by Robin who came to sit down beside Dora. Clarissa was so beautiful, Wexford thought, her loveliness transcending those hideous garments she wore, that the sight of her made him wonder why comely women bothered to spend so much on clothes and so much time choosing them when their own good looks were enough. An old proverb came back to him: good wine needs no bush. She spoke about her mother, how good she had been, a true Christian, a perfect mother, one who, if she had been spared, would have brought many errant souls back to this church. Wexford listened but all the time he was watching the pale-faced man in the front row whose profile he could see from where he sat and whose eyes were fixed on the speaker, who leaned forward and lifted his head the better to devour with his eyes everything about the girl who stood and spoke. Who could he be? Sarah Hussain had had so few men in her life. A cousin? A one-time boyfriend no one knew about? He would ask him, but ask as a private person, not a former police officer.

Clarissa went up into the pulpit and read a poem by George Herbert. The last lines Wexford thought might have applied to Sarah; they were well chosen.

‘I envy no man’s nightingale or spring;

Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme

Who plainly say, My God, My King.’

Dennis Cuthbert looked angry. No doubt he expected and would have preferred a passage from the Authorised Version of the Bible. They sang a hymn Wexford didn’t know but Dora did. The rector of the parish of St Cyprian, Myringham, gave a twenty-minute-long tribute, there was a prayer, then another hymn, during which the fair man and old woman in the fur coat left. ‘Slipped out’ would be the phrase, Wexford thought. He attempted to follow them but Dora stopped him. ‘No, darling, you mustn’t, you really mustn’t.’

When it was over and they were all filing out, the woman in the fur coat and the pale man were getting into their car, the Jaguar driver holding the door open for the old woman. He no longer looked surly but solicitous. Wexford heard him say, ‘There you are, Victoria. Take your time,’ as she slowly eased herself into the back seat. He looked for Thora Kilmartin among the departing guests but she had gone.

IT WAS SUNDAY
evening when Fiona left Framhurst and drove home. Her mother was much better. Her next-door neighbour would look in next morning and do the necessary shopping. Fiona would of course phone as soon as she got home and if she said she would do it, she would do it. In this respect as in many others she was unlike Jeremy. It was ten minutes to eight when she let herself into the cottage. Jeremy was lying on the hall floor. She dropped down onto her knees beside him and laid her hand on his forehead. It was ice-cold and she didn’t have to feel for a pulse, she knew he was dead. She walked, rather unsteadily, into the living room where she sat down on the sofa and called 999. He was just dead, she thought, a natural death, he hadn’t been strong, he had those sort of fugues and maybe his heart was bad. For a moment she felt a flash of guilt for all the times she had been impatient with him. She was on the phone to her mother, saying she was home, saying nothing about finding Jeremy dead, when an ambulance arrived.

One of the paramedics told her what she already knew, that Jeremy had ‘passed away’, but he added that he didn’t like the look of those bruises on his face and the police should be called. That made her feel rather weak and she had to sit down, fearful she would faint. By this time her pregnancy showed and it was the paramedic who called the police before making her a cup of tea. Jeremy’s body lay where she had found it.