No Man's Nightingale (27 page)

Why? Wexford didn’t say it aloud. ‘I think the whole thing, whatever it is, can wait till Friday. I hope I’m not being discourteous but I don’t see the need for a prior meeting. If you will go ahead with booking a private room we’ll all meet at the Olive and Dove at 11 a.m. on Friday. I will call for Clarissa and bring her with me.’

Steyner’s tone changed. He suddenly sounded weak and much younger than he was. The words he chose were strange.’I hope it will be all right,’ he said.

Making no attempt to decipher this, Wexford called Burden and asked to see him. ‘I’m having lunch sent in,’ Burden said. ‘Shall I double the order? It’s just sandwiches from the Italian place but nice ones.’

Poor Mike. No newspaper spy could catch him in his office and find fault in print with his daring to eat or drink while Duncan Crisp was still missing. The sandwiches had just arrived when he got there.

‘Smoked salmon,’ said Wexford. ‘For once they haven’t mixed it up with mozzarella or put it in focaccia.’ He stopped, met Burden’s eyes. ‘Am I becoming an old curmudgeon?’

‘Yes.’

‘I will strive to be tolerant and easy-going. Now, I’ve found the tattoo man. His name is Marty or Martin Dennison and he may once have been a bouncer in a nightclub. I think he lives somewhere in Ladysmith Road but I don’t know where.’

‘Well done,’ said Burden. ‘Have another sandwich.’

Wexford told him about the house in Oval Road and Dennison’s visitors while he lived there, his move to Kingsmarkham. ‘He’s a dealer, I think, among his other charming habits. I went to the house to see a woman called Nardelie Mukamba. I hope she’ll be OK. I don’t want him finding out she helped me.’

‘You think he’s dangerous?’

‘Well, don’t you?’

‘Where is he? And come to that where’s his mate and poor old Crisp? What do they want Crisp for, Reg?’

Wexford said slowly, ‘Crisp knows something. He’s in possession of a vital piece of information. I’ve spoken of it before but when I do you don’t want to hear. You don’t believe in it, you think it was Crisp’s invention, a ploy to get him off the hook. But Marty Dennison believes it and the man with him does and, more to the point, absolutely to the point, whoever is employing them does.’

‘Someone is employing those two?’

‘Of course. They’re just your run-of-the-mill villains, aren’t they? They’re thugs. An ex-nightclub bouncer and his pal. This won’t be new to them, they’ll have been involved in something like it before. I think Crisp is dead.’

Wexford stayed for a while, repeating his story until Burden admitted to a grudging belief in it. While he was there news came in that a green van had turned up, half sunk in a horse pond on a farm near Forby. A man’s tracksuit was in the back and immersion in half-frozen water hadn’t removed all the bloodstains on it. Soaking wet, it had previously been soaked in blood. The van was stolen. It had been reported missing a week before.

‘You may have been right all along. It looks like it. We’ve got samples of Crisp’s DNA to check against that on the tracksuit. That poor old guy.’

‘Your sympathy comes a bit late in the day,’ said Wexford nastily.

THE SEARCH FOR
Crisp continued. The weather changed, warming up, rain starting. The rain fell heavily, raising the water level of ponds, swelling the rivers. Meadows were waterlogged, some turning into shallow lakes. The Kingsbrook became a torrent, carrying with it the body of an old man, not naked but dressed only in underpants and a vest, and depositing it on the riverbank under Kingsmarkham High Street bridge.

Of course it was Crisp. There was never much doubt of that and none after the body had been identified by his landlord and a prison officer. His throat had been cut, the deed probably done in the Van, which would account for the excessive amount of blood on the tracksuit.

‘It shouldn’t be hard to find this Martin Dennison,’ said Burden. He scorned to use a nickname or diminutive employed by such a thug. ‘We’ve got a house-to-house going on in Ladysmith Road now. No, it shouldn’t be hard to find him.’

But it was.

ROBIN HAD CHANGED
his shift at Tesco, in order to have Friday free, and had worked Thursday night. It was he who opened Sylvia’s front door to Wexford. She had left for work an hour before. Clarissa came downstairs, not exactly dressed up but wearing a skirt (very short and black) and a sweater (very long and black) under a faux fur coat.

‘It was Mum’s. D’you think it’s all right?’

‘You look lovely,’ said Robin. ‘It’s more than all right, it’s perfect.’

He’d have said that, Wexford thought, if she’d come down in a burka or bikini. He said nothing. Ever since he woke up that morning he had been troubled by misgivings and wished that he had never taken on this task but had refused at the start. Too late now, much too late. Steyner’s fault, of course, setting up for a melodrama when all of this could surely have been done on paper.

‘We’ll have to walk,’ he said, ‘or call a taxi. The Olive won’t let me into into their car park as I’m not a resident.’

‘Let’s walk,’ said Clarissa.

Robin and she held hands. They invariably did. No one speculated any longer on what might be the purpose of this meeting. They walked in silence until Robin spotted a friend on the other side of the street, raised his hand and called out, ‘Hey.’

The friend said, ‘Hey,’ and after he was out of earshot Clarissa asked who it was. ‘Guy I was at school with,’ said Robin. ‘Jonathan something.’

The high street was busy as it always was on a Friday morning. They went into the Olive and Dove and Wexford asked at reception for Christian Steyner. He was told that Mr Steyner had a private room on the ground floor, down a passage where the cloakrooms were and the Internet room. Wexford told Robin to stay in the reception area which was also a kind of lounge with sofas, a couple of coffee tables and a newspaper rack, and passing into the passage, noted the name on the foot of the doors on the new lifts: Luxelevators Ltd.

‘I’ll be right here,’ Robin said to Clarissa, taking both her hands. ‘I won’t move. ‘If you want me, whatever it is, and I mean whatever, call me on my phone. You’ll do that, won’t you, sweetheart?’

Wexford restrained himself, said nothing but thought a good deal. If Robin had been going to the wars and Clarissa left at home with a couple of babies, the two of them on a railway platform in 1914, the parting could hardly have been more fraught. He shook his head, said, ‘Come along, Clarissa,’ and headed for the passage and the private room, the girl reluctantly trailing behind him.

The room was as such rooms always are, beige, with beige carpet, floor-length beige curtains, a bowl of glass fruit on a coffee table, a vase of artificial lilies on the windowsill. There was a brown tweed sofa and three beige-and-brown-patterned armchairs. The door was ajar. Steyner looked as if he had been pacing up and down, though he was standing still when they came in. Wexford expected him to shake hands, it would be the normal thing to do, and it occurred to him that whereas Steyner would have had no objection to shaking hands with him, he wanted to avoid doing so with Clarissa. He said, ‘Do sit down,’ and then, ‘It’s good of you to come.’

If the three of them had never met before, they had all seen each other before. On that occasion, Sarah Hussain’s memorial service, Steyner had looked a normal healthy man if rather pale, his hair prematurely white. Today he looked unwell, rather as if he was recovering from flu. Perhaps he was. Many people were. Once Wexford and Clarissa were seated he too sat down but immediately got up again and walked across the room to stand in front of the girl.

‘When I asked if you would name someone to be with you here I really meant a woman. I think it would have been more suitable.’

Clarissa said, but very gently, ‘Why didn’t you say so then?’

‘I don’t know. All this has been a great strain for me.’

Neither of them knew what he meant. ‘I didn’t want a woman,’ Clarissa said. ‘I haven’t got any relations. Mr Wexford is the nearest I’ve got. He’s my fiancé’s grandfather.’

Wexford started at the word but managed not to show his surprise. Were those two really engaged? Surely not. Steyner made no comment on what she had said but returned to where he had been sitting. He was looking at Clarissa, his pale blue eyes meeting her deep blue eyes. ‘You don’t know me. I had better tell you something about myself. I am fifty years old and a doctor of medicine but I have never practised. I sit on the board of one of our major medical charities. Your mother’s husband was my twin brother. We were identical twins.

‘I am homosexual but my brother was not. So much for identical twins having everything as well as their appearance in common.’

He paused. Wexford noticed that he hadn’t referred to himself as gay but used the formal correct word. He wondered what all this was leading up to. Not what he had imagined, certainly. Clarissa had begun to look frightened. She looked as if she knew that something alarming, even deeply disturbing, was about to be said, and Steyner’s tone was certainly ominous. He went on. ‘Obviously I have never married. I live in a civil partnership. Your mother and I met soon after Leo, my brother, first met her. They were very happy together. Perhaps to say “happy” is inadequate. They adored each other.’ He paused again. ‘I need a drink.’ Both Wexford and Clarissa thought he meant alcohol but he helped himself from a carafe of water that stood on one of the coffee tables.

‘I don’t know why Leo went to a football match. He had never shown the least interest in football. It must have been his first time. I don’t even know which teams were playing. I think one was Manchester United. My father was a supporter and I suppose Leo went with him because Dad asked him to. It was his birthday, my father’s, I mean, and Leo didn’t like to say no. There was a pile-up on the motorway and a lorry crashed into them. Both were killed instantly.’

Clarissa, who had been silent up to then, said, ‘Oh, awful. Poor Mum.’

‘Yes. Your poor mother. Poor all of us. I’m making too much of a speech of this. I must get to the point. After that, your mother went on seeing my mother for a few years. She and I met once or twice. Leo had no money to leave. Sarah – your mother – was earning but my mother worried about her and wanted to make her some sort of allowance but she wouldn’t take it. You’ve met my mother, I think,’ he said to Wexford. ‘She’s in the early stages of dementia and she’s very different from what she was then.’

Wexford nodded, said nothing. Christian Steyner went on. ‘Then one day I had a letter from Sarah. She wanted a meeting. We met after not having seen each other for two years. She was very direct, she always was. She said she would never remarry. More than that, she would never have a relationship. She supposed I would never marry or have a relationship with a woman and there she was right. I remember she looked hard at me, harder than anyone had ever looked at me, and she said that though I and Leo – she called him “my beloved husband” – were not alike in character, I was practically a carbon copy of him or he was of me.’ He began to speak very rapidly. ‘Therefore, would I be a sperm donor so that she could have a child that would be as near as possible Leo’s. Eventually, not that day but later, I said I would. I did.’

As rigid and as pale as a statue, Clarissa stared at him. Then, staring, she screamed.

Her screams came quickly, one after another, the classic hysteria. To stop them you were supposed to slap her face. He couldn’t, he dared not. Christian Steyner was aghast. He made a little sound of pain or dismay. Wexford stood up, spoke to the screaming girl but afterwards he couldn’t recall what he had said to her. Someone came to the door, knocked at it, called out, ‘Is everything all right?’ as if it could possibly be.

‘There’s a man called Fairfax in reception.’ It was the first time he had ever referred to Robin as a man. ‘Ask him to come here, would you?’

Clarissa was sobbing now, throwing herself up and down against the back of the armchair she sat in. On an impulse he added, ‘And brandy. Would you bring some brandy?’

Robin’s footsteps sounded running down the passage. He burst in, drawn by the sound of Clarissa’s crying. ‘What have you done to her?’ he demanded of Wexford as a waiter or barman arrived with a glass of brandy on a tray.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Wexford said, and to Steyner, ‘Let’s go outside somewhere.’

Clarissa was in Robin’s arms. Wexford led the way out and Steyner followed, visibly shaken. The two of them finding their way to the lounge, he said, ‘I didn’t expect her to take it like that.’

‘It’s not every day you’re told by your father that he was presented to your mother in a bottle.’

‘Don’t.’

They sat down. Wexford took his eyes from Steyner’s face. Now, for the first time, and oddly it was when the girl was out of sight, he saw the resemblance. The same blue eyes, but brighter, the same features, the same smooth and rather shiny skin, though hers was darker.

‘It was like that, though,’ Steyner said. ‘The bottle, I mean. I never saw her again. She wrote and told me she had had a daughter born on 20 January 1995. She would tell her about her – her origins on her eighteenth birthday. I never had a description of the child, I never had a photograph. But I never wanted any of that. As far as I was concerned, I was just a – well, a producer of a biological constituent. I told no one but my partner and that was years later.’

Wexford nodded. He could think of nothing to say.

‘My partner told me to forget all about it. He advised me not to make contact with the girl, to keep out of it. He said the chances were that Sarah would fabricate some story of a love affair when the time came but I knew Sarah. I knew that wasn’t on. And then Sarah was killed and what was I to do?’

‘What you did, evidently,’ said Wexford. ‘Tell me something. If we’d had that meeting you wanted, the one that was to be prior to this one, would you have told me what you told Clarissa?’

‘I don’t know.’

Wexford shrugged. ‘I’ve never in my life advised anyone to lie but I think that’s the advice I’d have given you. Lie. Say her mother had confided in your mother that she’d had an affair. Something like that. It would have been better than this.’