Wolf to the Slaughter (13 page)

She came away from the door and walked towards him quite slowly. Because her face had lost its smile and her arms hung stiffly at her sides, he thought that she was about to speak to him, perhaps apologise or state conditions. Instead, without a word or a movement of her hands, she lifted her mouth to his, opening her lips with a kind of sensuous gasp. He matched his mood to hers and for a moment they were joined only by the kiss. Then he took her in his arms and closed his eyes against the parody that mocked him from the book jackets, the orgy of writhing lovers, coupling above, below, beside each other, a massed fertility rite in modern undress.

He released her and murmured, ‘Let’s go.’ She gave a soft giggle which drew from him a low, reluctant laugh. They were laughing, he knew, at their own weakness, their defencelessness under the grip of emotion.

‘Yes, let’s go.’ She was breathing hard. The short staccato giggle she had given had nothing to do with amusement. ‘Mark,’ she said, faintly interrogative, and then, ‘Mark’ again, as if the repetition of his name settled something for her. To him it seemed like a promise.

‘We’ll go to Pomfret,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the car.’

‘To Cheriton Forest?’

He nodded, feeling a stab of disappointment. ‘You’ve been there before?’

The implication in the question was not lost on her. ‘With Mum and Dad on picnics.’ She looked at him gravely. ‘Not like this,’ she said. It might mean so much or so little. It might mean she had never been there with a boyfriend, with any man, to make love or just to walk hand in hand. Words were a disguise for thought and for intention.

She got into the car beside him and went through a small ritual of arranging her skirt, removing her gloves, placing her handbag under the dashboard. What strange compulsion women had with their genteelisms, their attention to their personal furnishings! And how seldom they abandoned themselves. The face which she had put on was not the one he had seen as they came out from their embrace, but a prideful smug mask arranged, as it were, in the framing of the car window so that the world might observe her serenity out in a car with a man.

‘Where would you like to eat?’ he asked. ‘I thought of the Cheriton Hotel, just where the Forest begins?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry. We could have a drink.’

A girl like this, had she ever been in such a place before? Could she resist being seen there? With all his heart he despised her for her origins, her poverty of conversation, the pitiful smallness of her world. And yet her physical presence excited him almost beyond bearing. How was he to endure an hour with her in an hotel lounge, what would they talk about, how could he keep from touching her? He had nothing to say to her. There were rules in this game, prescribed amorous badinage, corresponding to courtship in the ornithological world, a kind of dancing and fluffing out of feathers. Earlier in the evening, before he had come into the shop, Drayton had to some extent rehearsed these preambles, but now it seemed to him that they had passed beyond them. The kiss had brought them to the threshold. He longed for a little gaiety from her, a spark of joy that might change his excitement from lust into something more civilised.

‘I don’t know,’ he said dully. ‘The evening I get the car is the first one it hasn’t rained for weeks.’

‘We couldn’t have come here without it.’ Ahead of them the lights of Pomfret glimmered in the dusk through the greening trees. ‘It’s getting dark,’ she said.

Driven to despair for something to talk about, he broke a rule. ‘We’ve been questioning a fellow called Kirkpatrick today,’ he said. It was unorthodox, perhaps even wrong, to talk police business. ‘He’s a customer of yours. D’you know him?’

‘They don’t give their names,’ she said.

‘He lives around here.’ Exactly here, he thought. This must be it. The black escarpment of the forest rose before them and in front of it, lying like boxes dropped in a green meadow, were a dozen white and blue dwellings, styled ‘village houses’.

‘Oh, look!’ she said. ‘That car.’ There it was on one of the drives, its pink and lilac turned sickly in the light of a porch carriage lamp. ‘That’s the man you mean, isn’t it? Fancy driving around in a thing like that. I nearly killed myself laughing.’ Her animation over something so puerile chilled him. He felt his mouth go stiff. ‘What’s he done?’ she asked.

‘You mustn’t ask me that.’

‘You’re very careful,’ she said and he sensed that her eyes were on him. ‘Your bosses, they must think a lot of you.’

‘I hope so.’ He thought she was smiling at him, but he dared not turn. It came to him suddenly that her silence and her dullness perhaps sprang from the same source as his own and the thought rocked him. The road was dark here where the pinewoods began, too dark for him to take his eyes from it for an instant. In the distance, between black billows of conifers, he could see the lights of the hotel. She put her hand on his knee.

‘Mark,’ she said, ‘Mark, I don’t want that drink.’

It was nearly nine when the call from the station came through to Burden’s house.

‘Ruby Branch is back again, sir.’ The voice was Martin’s. ‘She’s got Knobby Clark with her and she wants to see you. I can’t get a word out of them.’

He sounded apologetic and as if he expected a reprimand. But all Burden said was, ‘I’ll be straight down.’

At his throat, he could feel that old little stricture, that nervous pull, which meant something, was going to happen at last. His tiredness went.

Ruby was in the police station foyer, her attitude abject, almost martyred, and on her face an expression of stoicism. Beside her, on a spoon-shaped red chair inadequate to contain his bulky rotund body, sat the fence from Sewingbury. Looking at him, Burden recalled their last encounter. Knobby looked nervous now and he had the air of a suppliant, but on that previous occasion it was he who had been in a position to exercise scornful contempt, to bargain and reject. In his mind’s eye, Burden saw again the shy ladylike woman who had come to sell the jewels that were her husband’s gifts. His heart hardened and he was seized with a sudden anger.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘What d’you want?’

With a heavy mournful sigh, Ruby surveyed the colourful appointments of the hall where they sat and it was these she seemed to address. ‘A nice way to talk when I’ve taken the trouble to come all this way. It’s a real sacrifice I’ve made.’

Knobby Clark said nothing. His hands were in his pockets and he appeared to be concentrating on retaining his balance on a seat constructed for narrower buttocks than his own. The little eyes in cushions of fat were still and wary.

‘What’s he doing here?’ Burden asked.

An apparently self-appointed spokeswoman for both of them, Ruby said, ‘I guessed George’d go to him, them being old buddies. I had a bus ride to Sewingbury after I’d been here.’ She paused. ‘After I’d been helping you,’ she said with heavy meaning. ‘But if you don’t want to know, that’s OK by me.’ Clutching her handbag, she got up. Her fur collar undulated at the quivering of the big bosom beneath it.

‘You’d better come into my office.’

Still silent, Knobby Clark hoisted himself carefully from his chair. Burden could look down easily on to the top of his head. All that remained of his hair was a feathery tuft, again evocative of the stubbly crown on a great misshapen swede.

Intent on wasting no more time, he said, ‘Well, let’s see it, then. What is it?’ He was rewarded by nothing more than a slight tremor in Knobby’s mountainous shoulders.

‘D’you mind shutting the door?’ said Ruby. Here the lights were brighter and her face looked ravaged. ‘Show it to him, Mr Clark.’

The little jeweller hesitated. ‘Now, look, Mr Burden,’ he said, speaking for the first time. ‘You and me, we’ve had no trouble for a long time, have we? Must be seven or eight years.’

‘Six,’ said Burden crisply. ‘Just six next month since you had your little spot of bother over receiving those watches.’

Knobby said resentfully, ‘That was when I come out.’

‘I don’t see the point of it, anyway.’ Ruby sat down, gathering confidence. ‘I don’t see the point of trying to make him look small. I come here of my own free will . . .’

‘Shut up,’ Burden snapped at her. ‘D’you think I don’t know what’s been going on? You’re narked with your boyfriend, you want to do him down. So you took yourself over to this little rat’s shop in Sewingbury and asked him just what Monkey Matthews flogged to him last Thursday. Make him look small! That’s a laugh. If he was much smaller we’d trip over him.’ He swallowed hard. ‘It wasn’t public spirit, it was spite. Naturally Clark came with you when you told him we’d got Monkey here. Now you can fill in the rest but spare me the sob stuff.’

‘Knobby wants to make sure there won’t be no trouble for him,’ Ruby said, now reduced to a tearful whimpering. ‘He wasn’t to know. How was I to know? I left George alone for a couple of hours on Thursday while I was working, making money to keep him in luxury . . .’ Perhaps she recalled Burden’s caution as to sentimentality, for she went on more calmly, ‘He must have found it down the side of one of my chairs.’

‘Found what?’

A fat hand returned to a shapeless pocket, emerged and dropped something hard and shiny on to Burden’s desk. ‘There’s a lovely piece of workmanship for you, Mr Burden. Eighteen carat gold and the hand of a master.’

It was a cigarette lighter of gleaming red-gold, the length and breadth of a matchbox but thinner, its sides delicately chased with a design of grapes and vine leaves. Burden turned it over and pursed his lips. On its base was an inscription: ‘For Ann who lights my life’.

A big split opened in Knobby’s face, the rift in the mangold that has grown too pulpy for its skin. He was smiling. ‘Thursday morning it was, Mr Burden.’ The bloated hands spread and quivered. ‘“Take a butcher’s at this,” Monkey says to me. “Where d’you get it?” I says, knowing his reputation. “All that glisters is not gold,” I said . . .’

‘But if it wasn’t gold,’ said Burden nastily, ‘it could glister on till kingdom come for all you cared.’

Knobby looked at him narrowly. ‘ “My old auntie left it me,” he says, “my auntie Ann.” “Lively old geezer she must have been,” I said. “She leave you her cigar case and her hip flask as well?” But that was only my fun, Mr Burden. I never thought it was hot. It wasn’t on the list.’ His face split again, virtuously this time. ‘I gave him twenty for it.’

‘Don’t be childish. I’m not senile and you’re no philanthropist.’ Again Burden remembered the woman with the jewels. ‘You gave him ten,’ he said contemptuously.

Knobby Clark did not deny it. ‘It’s my loss, Mr Burden. Ten or twenty, it doesn’t grow on trees. You won’t make anything of it? No trouble, eh?’

‘Oh, get out,’ Burden said tiredly. Knobby went. He looked smaller than ever, yet he seemed to be walking on his toes. When he had gone Ruby put her ginger head in her hands.

‘It’s done then,’ she said. ‘My God, I never thought I’d shop George.’

‘Hear the cock crowing in the distance, can you?’

‘You’re a hard man. You get more like your boss every day.’

Burden was not displeased at this. ‘You can go, too,’ he said. ‘We won’t say any more about the other thing. You’ve wasted enough public time and public money as it is. I should stick to char-ing in future.’ He grinned, his good temper almost restored. ‘You’ve got a genius for cleaning up other people’s mess.’

‘Would you let me see George?’

‘No, I wouldn’t. Don’t push your luck.’

‘I didn’t think you would.’ She sighed. ‘I wanted to say I was sorry.’ Her face was ugly and painted and old. ‘I love him,’ she said and her voice sounded very tired. ‘I’ve loved him for twenty years. I don’t reckon you can understand that. You and the others, it’s a dirty joke to you, isn’t it?’

‘Good night, Ruby,’ he said. ‘I’ve got things to do.’ Wexford would have managed things better. He would have said something ironic and tough – and tender. It was as she had said. He, Burden, could not understand, never would, did not want to. To him that kind of love was a closed book, pornography for Grover’s library. Presently he went down to see Monkey Matthews.

‘You ought to get yourself a lighter, Monkey,’ he said through the smoke, viewing the litter of match ends.

‘Can’t seem to get on with them, Mr Burden.’

‘Not even a nice gold one? Or would you rather have the lolly?’ He let it lie in the palm of his hand, then raised it to catch the light from the bare bulb. ‘Stealing by finding,’ he said. ‘What a comedown!’

‘I don’t suppose it’s any use asking you how you found out?’

‘Not a bit.’

‘Ruby wouldn’t do that to me.’

Burden hesitated for a second. She had said he was getting like Wexford and he had taken it as a compliment. Perhaps it was not only the Chief Inspector’s toughness he could emulate. He opened his eyes wide in wrathful indignation. ‘Ruby? I’m surprised at you.’

‘No, I don’t reckon she would. Forget I said it. Different to that lousy old git, Knobby Clark. He’d sell his own grandmother for cats’ meat.’ With slow resignation, Monkey lit another cigarette. ‘How long’ll I get?’ he asked.

The car lights were off. He had parked it in a clearing surrounded by dense trees, tall black firs and pines, grown for ship’s masts and flagpoles. Their trunks looked grey but even these straight shapes were indiscernible a few yards in from the edge of the wood. Beyond them there was neither night nor day, only a dark labyrinth.

He held her in his arms and he could feel her heart beating. It was the only sound. He thought it would be dark when he opened his eyes – their kiss had been long and blind – and the pallid dusk was a shock.

‘Let’s walk,’ he said, taking her hands. They were all right now. It had come right. He did not know why, but instead of triumph there descended upon him a subtle and hitherto unexperienced fear. It was not in any sense a fear of physical inadequacy, nor of psychological failure, but an apprehension rather of some terrible involvement. Until now his sexual adventures had been transient, sometimes gay, never the spur to introspection. But he felt that they had not in any way been a practice or a rehearsal. Indeed the feelings they had evoked and those by which they had been promoted were quite unlike the sensations he now had both in kind and in degree. He was totally engulfed by something new and terrifying. It might almost have been the first time for him.