No Man's Nightingale (22 page)

It wasn’t anything like the voice he expected but rather high-pitched, very feminine, fluttery and breathless. ‘Yes, this is Vicky Steyner. Who is it?’

Vicky. The driver of the Jaguar had called her Victoria. ‘Mrs Steyner,’ he said, ‘you don’t know me. My name is Wexford, Reginald Wexford. I was a police officer, I’m now retired. I wonder if we might meet and talk.’

‘Me? Do you really mean me?’ The voice was even more fluttery. ‘Oh, it’s such a long time since a man has rung me up and wanted to meet me.’

‘I assure you I’m harmless,’ he said, thinking that this was exactly what a man would say if he was not. ‘It’s in connection with the lady who was once your daughter-in-law. There are some inquiries I’d like to make.’

She laughed, a shrill giggle. ‘Oh, how delightful! Are you a private detective? I know that gentlemen who’ve been policemen do that. Will you take my fingerprints? I can lend you a magnifying glass. I’ve got a new one now my reading glasses aren’t quite up to the mark.’

‘Nothing like that, Mrs Steyner,’ he said, wondering if this avenue he had decided to go down was in fact a dead end, not worth entering. ‘If I could just come and see you or we could meet outside somewhere. In a cafe, say.’

‘Oh, no! I’d love you to come here. A real man coming to tea with little me! You will come to tea, won’t you? Tea at five and then a glass of sherry. That’s what I like. Will you do that?’

Her manner had become flirtatious and suddenly he felt sorry for her. ‘I’d love to,’ he said heartily and they fixed a date and a time. ‘Tomorrow at five then.’

Not a flat, as he had supposed, but a terraced house in a street not far from Holland Park, the only part of Kensington he knew. Though small, number 12 looked grand from outside but the interior small and poky when she opened the front door. Her own appearance might have been a surprise if he hadn’t previously spoken to her. As it was, he rather expected the pink flowery garment he thought might have been called a tea gown, the high-heeled pink satin shoes and the heavy make-up on her wrinkled face.

She let him in while he was still showing her various items of identification he had brought with him. ‘Oh, Mr Wexford, I’m so delighted to see you! I’m thrilled. Now, may I call you Reginald? Please don’t say it’s forward of me, though it is. But I can’t help it. When I meet someone new I just don’t want them to be new for more than five minutes.’ She showed him into a very small sitting room that anyone buying the house today would have combined with the next room by taking down a wall. Furniture was crowded together so that the chair she sat in seemed to be trying to push over the chair he sat in and his to be thrusting aside a spindly-legged sofa. ‘I’ll tell you something in the strictest confidence,’ she said in her bird’s voice. ‘If my son knew I’d let a
strange man
into my house he would have a fit so I won’t tell him! I won’t tell him! As if I can’t tell when a man is a gentleman, an absolute White Knight, a Galahad!’ She laid a wrinkled hand on his sleeve. The nails were not red as he would have expected but powder blue. ‘Now, we’ll have tea, shall we? Sugar and milkies?’

Wexford said tea would be nice but no milk or sugar.

‘But you don’t need to slim. You’re just right. A man shouldn’t be too thin. A person should have some meat on his bones.’

It was the kind of thing men said in defence of their fat wives. But Wexford didn’t think Tony Kilmartin would ever say it. Left alone, he peered at some photographs, framed in sculpted silver, of the pale man who had held Victoria Steyner’s arm at the memorial service. So this was her son. There were no photographs of the man who had held the car door open for her. She herself was a laughable figure but how cruel life was to the old. What would she have to do and how would she have to act not to be laughed at at her age? Wear sober dark clothes and flat black shoes, let her sparse but blonde hair go back to its natural white, reveal unpainted her creased-up sunken face? Then she would simply be ignored, so invisible as almost to be tripped over. The way she looked at him he thought she might be one of those elderly people who hoped that sex might not be over for them. He and Dora hadn’t yet left that behind them, but it was not a matter of the unthinkable distant future. This old woman, though, still saw younger men – for he was a good deal younger – as potential partners, lovers. He was feeling an overwhelming pity for her and knowing at the same time that he mustn’t show it. She came back with a laden tray which he took from her.

‘Mrs Steyner –’

‘Vicky, please, Vicky.’

It had immediately turned into a situation where the other person is from this point called nothing at all. ‘I believe you were very fond of your daughter-in-law Sarah,’ he began.

‘Oh, I adored her! She was the sweetest thing.’ He knew a good deal about Sarah Hussain by this time and that ‘sweetest’ was the last adjective to be applied to her. ‘I expect you know about the accident, don’t you?’ He nodded. ‘Of course I was devastated, my beloved husband, my darling son, but I was devastated for her too. Did you know darling Sarah?’

‘I never met her,’ he said.

‘She went completely mad, you know. After the accident she was a different person. Turning herself into a vicar! I couldn’t believe it when my son told me. But I said to him, the only explanation is that she went mad. When you know she lost her mind through grief you can understand everything. She used to come and visit me, she stayed once or twice, but she had changed, she was very strange. Obsessed with
God.
She lost all interest in her appearance and when a woman does that you know things are very serious. I wouldn’t have objected if she’d married again, you know, even though it was my son she’d been married to. I even – well, you’ll find this hard to believe, but I even thought she might marry my other son. Leo and Christian were twins, you know, the sweetest identical babies – I thought, why not? Nothing could have made it all right, but if they’d married, what they call the
healing process
might have started.’

‘But Sarah and Christian didn’t go along with that?’

‘Poor darlings, I don’t think they ever saw each other. Will you have some more tea? A piece of cake? It comes from Harrods.’

‘No, thank you,’ Wexford said firmly, though he liked the look of the cake. ‘Your son doesn’t live with you, does he?’

‘Oh, no, I’m all on my lonesome.’ Without actually moving her chair, she edged closer to him. ‘Did you think Christian was here?’

Starting to feel awkward, he shook his head, then shrugged.

‘He lives in Knightsbridge, he’s in business there and he’s got the most beautiful house he shares with his friend Mr Arkwright, Timon Arkwright. I expect you’ve heard of him, he’s in the fashion business, according to my son, whatever that may mean, but it sounds very grand, doesn’t it?’

Gay, Wexford thought. Not in the closet, though, not these days. Mother has been told but refuses to accept or even take it in. She laughed a shrill tinkling laugh.

‘I tell him – Christian, I mean – it’s such a waste of a good man, and so nice-looking, staying single, I mean, when the place is simply
brimming
with lovely young girls falling over themselves to marry him. Not Sarah any longer of course. She wouldn’t have suited Christian now. They’re the same sort of age but women grow older sooner, don’t they?’

And women like you, he thought, do their own sex no favours, selecting some thirty-year-old girl as a suitable mate for a near fifty-year-old, his contemporary having missed the boat.

‘And a vicar!’ said Victoria Steyner.

‘I expect you saw Sarah’s daughter Clarissa at the memorial service.’

‘Oh, yes. Very Indian-looking, isn’t she? I never seemed to mind that so much in Sarah. Sure you won’t have a piece of cake?’

‘Quite sure. I suppose it was Clarissa who invited you and your son.’

‘Heavens, no. I’ve never spoken to her and I’m sure my son hasn’t. It was a Mrs Bray who told me about it. She wrote. I wouldn’t say she invited me, she just said it was happening. I told you, I was absolutely devoted to Sarah and shattered when I heard what had happened to her. My son only went to take care of me, he’s wonderful like that, so good, and he got his friend to drive us in that gorgeous old car.’

She had not once asked him what his interest in Sarah Hussain was, shown no curiosity in his reasons for asking these questions, barely looked at the ID he had shown her. She was a total egotist, so wrapped up in her own concerns to have no room for anyone else except a small corner for her son whom she probably regarded as part of herself. If he, Wexford, had asked her to hand over her credit card so that he could have some detail on it checked and said it would be returned to her in a week’s time, she would very likely have done so, with a smile and another fondling of his sleeve. He got up to go, knowing she would plead with him not to, and she did.

‘But you’ve only just come.’

‘Thank you for the tea,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very kind.’

On the doorstep he thought she was going to kiss him. She brought her face within an inch of his but withdrew it at the last moment. ‘See you again soon, I hope.’

He doubted it but said nothing. She had been useless, he thought as he walked to South Kensington tube station. And yet there were one or two things. She had no interest in Clarissa but she had no interest in anyone. She knew Georgina Bray. How? Georgina must have known her address. He would ask Georgina about that. He hadn’t asked Victoria Steyner about Clarissa’s father because he was sure she wouldn’t know or if she knew she wouldn’t say. It was something she would have drawn a veil over, a love affair it would spoil her image of Sarah to admit to. Perhaps he would have to see her again . . .

A LETTER FROM
Thora Kilmartin told him she was coming to Kingsmarkham to meet Clarissa and have lunch with her. The date would be 16 January.
I didn’t want to intrude on her on her birthday.
She went on to say that she thought this would be
all right with Mrs Bray
as she after all was Clarissa’s godmother. She evidently didn’t know that Clarissa had moved out and was now living in Sylvia’s house.
Perhaps we could have tea,
she wrote,
as I remember we did once before.
She might even stay the night, she suggested, in which case perhaps he and Mrs Wexford would have dinner with her.

What tale did she want to spin this time? But for a moment he wavered. Suppose she had been telling the truth and it was Tony Kilmartin who was the fabulist? It was the kind of doubt that makes your heart turn over. But no. Kilmartin’s story had all the elements of truth while hers was hedged about with caveats and warnings: ‘Don’t see my husband again’, ‘My husband disliked Sarah.’ Believing her was to swallow the description of the handsome Indian at Quercum Court, to ignore Clarissa’s
blue
eyes, to accept Sarah’s refusal either to have an abortion or to go to the police. But still his mind travelled forward to 20 January. Absurd as it was, he still seemed to see an emissary appearing on that day, a messenger from beyond the grave, come to the girl to tell her that indeed she was the result of rape.

His phone call to Georgina Bray was welcomed. ‘I am glad to hear from you. I’m still so ashamed of the way I spoke to you when Clarissa left me.’

‘Please don’t be,’ he said. ‘I’ve forgotten it.’

‘Well, I can’t believe that but if we can both put it behind us it would be a great relief to me. One thing – I think I must have misled you. I told you I’d been at university with Sarah and then I told you or I told that nice woman detective Lynn Fancourt that I’d only been friends with her for four years. I didn’t mean to mislead. The fact is that I barely knew Sarah at Keele, I’m two years older than she was. We only became friends when she came here.’

Interesting. He thanked her. A meeting with Burden first, though. Of course Georgina’s truthfulness made no difference to Thora’s veracity or lack of it but in a strange way he felt it did. He asked her if they could have a talk about Sarah’s family and the Steyners and she agreed. Would he call round at about seven and they could have a drink? She felt strange, she said, a woman asking a man round for a drink. Was that all right. ‘Quite all right,’ he said.

It troubled him a little that now Burden had someone awaiting trial for the murder of Sarah Hussain he had no objection to being seen drinking in public. Any press photographer could come into the bar at the Olive and Dove and get a shot of him sitting at a table with a glass of wine in his hand. If they printed it no one could say he was fiddling while Rome burned. Wexford wondered if Gibbon mentioned that or was it just another myth? For the first time in years, sitting together like this, he and Burden had nothing to say to each other. The weather, of course, that could always be discussed. They were Englishmen. The health of their children, and now in both cases grandchildren, could be enquired after. Desperate for something to say, Wexford mentioned that he was due at Georgina Bray’s at seven, and immediately the words were out he could see that this went down badly with his friend.

‘It’s too late for that, Reg,’ Burden said. ‘It’s flogging a dead horse. Since I can’t imagine that you’ve started up a personal friendship with that woman I can only suppose you’re drinking with her to manufacture a new perpetrator for the Hussain murder.’

‘Not manufacture, Mike. I don’t believe Crisp did it and I don’t think it’ll be long before you come round to my way of thinking.’

‘I notice you never come up with an alternative.’

‘Not yet,’ said Wexford, ‘but I will.’

Their meeting had lasted less than an hour and it was obvious to both that this coolness would resist, at least for this evening, any warming-up attempts. They parted outside the Olive, Burden to take a taxi home – first checking that no reporter from the
Kingsmarkham Courier
was on the watch – Wexford to walk through the lightly falling snow to Orchard Road. A Christmas tree was still standing on the table by a front window in the Brays’ house and still hung with fairy lights. It pleased him that Georgina Bray hadn’t dressed up for him but was wearing the clothes she had obviously been wearing all day, jeans and the kind of heavy dark blue sweater that is called a Guernsey. She and her husband Trevor were identically dressed, only the colour of their trainers differed, and it struck Wexford that it was only since the mid twentieth century that such costume, common to both men and women, was possible.