Wolf to the Slaughter (21 page)

‘You said he worked in a garage. Is he a mechanic?’

‘I suppose he is. What else could he do?’ Her gloves were on the floor at her feet. She picked them up and looked at them as at two wet dead things, dredged up from the bottom of a pond. ‘You wanted him all along?’ Her face went a sickly white and she struggled up out of the chair. ‘It was my
husband
you wanted, not Geoff?’ Wexford nodded. ‘What’s he done?’ she asked hoarsely.

‘A girl is missing, probably dead . . .’

‘The knife,’ she said. Her eyes went out of focus. Wexford took a step towards her and caught her in his arms.

‘Where did your sister get her car serviced?’ Burden said. Margolis looked up from his late breakfast of coffee, orange juice and unappetising hard-boiled eggs, his expression helplessly apathetic.

‘Some garage,’ he said, and then, ‘it would be Cawthorne’s, wouldn’t it?’

‘Come, Mr Margolis, you must know. Don’t you have your own car seen to?’

‘Ann looked after that side of things. When it wanted doing, she’d see to it.’ The painter turned the eggshells upside down in their cups like a child playing April Fool tricks. ‘There was something, though . . .’ His long fingers splayed through his hair so that it stood up in a spiky halo. ‘Some trouble. I have a remote recollection of her saying she was going to someone else.’ He put the tray on the sofa arm and got up to shake crumbs from his lap. ‘I wish I could remember,’ he said.

‘She took it to that Ray, Mr M.,’ said Mrs Penistan sharply. ‘You know she did. Why don’t you pull yourself together?’ She shrugged at Burden, turning her litter eyes heavenwards. ‘He’s gone to pieces since his sister went. Can’t do nothing with him.’ She settled herself beside Margolis and gave him a long exasperated stare. Burden was reminded of a mother or a nanny taking a recalcitrant child to a tea party, especially when she bent over him and, with a sharp clucking of her tongue, pulled his dressing gown over to hide his pyjama legs.

‘Ray who?’

‘Don’t ask me, dear. You know what she was like with her Christian names. All I know is she come in here a couple of months back and says, “I’ve had about as much as I can stand of Russell’s prices. I’ve a good mind to get Ray to do the cars for me.” “Who’s Ray?” I says, but she just laughed. “Never you mind, Mrs P. Let’s say he’s a nice boy who thinks the world of me. If I tell you who he is he might lose his job.” ’

‘Did he come here to service the cars?’

‘Oh, no, dear. Well, he wouldn’t have the facilities, would he?’ Mrs Penistan surveyed the studio and the window as if to imply that nothing of practical use to a sane human being could be found in cottage or garden. ‘She always took them to him. He lived local, you see. Somewhere local. I’d see her go off but I’d always gone when she got back.
He’d
have been here.’ She shoved her elbow into Margolis’s thin ribs. ‘But he don’t listen to what folks tell him.’

Burden left them together, sitting side by side, Mrs Penistan coaxing Margolis to finish his coffee. The heavy rain had made the path slippery and there were wet petals everywhere underfoot. The garage doors were open and for the first time Burden saw Margolis’s own car and saw that it was green.

He was beginning to discern a pattern, a way that it could all have been done. Now he thought he could understand why a black car and a green car had been used and where Anita’s white car had been until the small hours. A new excitement made him walk jauntily to the cottage gate. He opened it and the hawthorn bush showered him with water as effectively as if someone had put a tilted bucket in its branches.

This is how it must feel to be a psychiatrist, Wexford thought. Noreen Anstey lay on the couch in the rest room, staring at the ceiling, and he sat beside her, letting her talk.

‘He always had a knife,’ she said. ‘I saw it that first day, the first time he came up from the garage. Geoff was working downstairs. I used to take coffee down to him and then I started taking it to Ray as well. One day he came up instead.’ For a while she was silent, moving her head from side to side. ‘God, he was beautiful. Not handsome, beautiful, perfect. Like people ought to be, like I never was. Not very tall, black-haired, red mouth like a flower . . .’ He did’t want to interrupt, but he had to. He wasn’t a real psychiatrist.

‘How old is he?’

‘Ten years younger than me,’ she said and he knew it hurt her to say it. ‘He came up that day. We were quite alone and he had this knife, a little flick knife. He took it out of his pocket and put it on the table. I’d never seen one before and I didn’t know what it was. We didn’t talk much. What was there for us to talk about? We didn’t have anything in common. He sat there smiling, making little sort of sly innuendoes.’ She almost laughed but it was a gasp Wexford heard. ‘I was sick with wanting him.’ Her face turned to the wall, she went on, ‘I’d had that lighter a few months and I remember lighting a cigarette for Ray. He said, “No, light it in your mouth”. He looked at the lighter and he said, “He give you this? Does he give you toys because he can’t give you anything else?” That wasn’t true, but it must have been the way it looked, the way I looked. I’ve got a toy too, he said, and he picked up the knife and held it against my throat. The blade came out. I kept still or it would have cut me. My God, I was a teacher of French in a girls’ school. I’d never been anywhere or done anything You’d have though I’d have screamed. D’you know, I’d have let him kill me, then? Afterwards, after he’d gone, there was blood on my neck from a little scratch and I knew he’d been looking at it all the time he was making love to me.’

‘Smith divorced you?’ Wexford said to fill up the great silence.

‘He found out. That wasn’t difficult. I’ve never been much good at hiding my feelings. Geoff would have forgiven me and started afresh. He couldn’t believe I’d want to marry a man ten years younger than myself, a garage hand . . . I was mad to have him. I knew he was a sadist and a moron. He’d cut me, really cut me since then.’ She pulled open her dress. On the left breast, where the flesh swelled under the collarbone, was a small white cicatrice. For all his years of experience, Wexford felt sickness catch at the back of his throat like a fingernail plucking.

‘You were always unhappy?’

‘I was never
happy
with him.’ She said it almost reproachfully. ‘I don’t think there was a moment when I could say I was
happy
. He loathed Geoff. D’you know what he used to do? He’d give Geoff’s name, pretend he was Geoff.’ Wexford nodded, guessing this was to come. ‘When the phone rang he’d pick it up and say – well, sort of absent-mindedly, “Geoff Smith speaking”. Then he’d correct himself and say he’d made a mistake. Once he took some clothes to the cleaners, filthy overalls, and when I went to collect them they couldn’t find the ticket. It was made out to Smith, you see. Anything a bit nasty or disreputable he was involved in and he’d always give Geoff’s name. A girl came round once – she couldn’t have been more than seventeen – and asked if this was where Geoff Smith lived. He’d dropped her and she wanted him back, even though he’d used the knife on her too. She showed me a scar on her neck. I told him he’d go too far one day. He’d kill one of them or she’d go to the police.’

‘He’s gone too far,’ Wexford said.

‘He had to see their blood, you see.’ She spoke very calmly, without horror. Not for the first time Wexford pondered on the dulling effect of custom, how habit dulled the edge of shock. All pity choked with custom of fell deeds . . . ‘I used to think,’ she said, ‘that one day there’d be a girl who wasn’t mesmerised by him but just plain frightened and that may be she’d turn the knife on him. He wasn’t big and strong, you see, not powerful physically. His power was the other sort. I used to take the knives away but he always got new ones. Then he left me.’

‘This must have been about the time you lost your lighter.’

Noreen Anstey raised herself on one elbow, then turned and swung her legs on to the floor. ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ she said. ‘Ray must have taken it. He took things from Geoff and me when we were still married. I couldn’t prove it, but I thought he had, jewellery, things like that.’ She sighed, covered her face and then brought her hands down again. ‘I suppose Geoff guessed too. There were so many things,’ she said, ‘we both knew and never put into words. Oh, I’m sorry!’ she cried, clenching her fists and pressing them into her lap. ‘I’m so bitterly sorry. I want to find where he’s buried and lie on his grave and cry into the earth that I’m sorry!’

So many women who were sorry, Wexford thought, Noreen Anstey because she had thrown away love for love’s ugly shadow, Ruby Branch because she had betrayed an old crook, and Anita Margolis? The dead have no regrets. She could not be sorry that she had played her dangerous game once too often, played it with a man and a knife.

‘Have you got a friend who could stay with you?’ Wexford asked. ‘Mother, sister, a neighbour?’

Noreen Anstey seemed to have shrunk. Deprived of her vitality, she was just a little plain woman wilting into middle-age. ‘My mother’s dead,’ she said. ‘Ray lost me most of my friends.’

‘A policewoman will go back with you. She’ll try and find someone to keep you company.’

‘And when you find him?’ she asked with wistful bitterness.

‘We’ll keep in touch, Mrs Anstey. Why do you suppose he ever came to Kingsmarkham?’

She shrugged her shoulders, pulling the creased raincoat tightly around her. Every movement now was a kind of shiver, a hunching and shrinking of her body in a gradual process of contraction. ‘If I say to haunt him,’ she said, ‘you’ll think I’m mad. But that would be like Ray. He’d go to – to Geoff and say he’d wrecked two lives, but he’d left me now and all the agony was for nothing. He’s a sadist. Then he’d have started it all over again, that business of giving Geoff’s name, telling girls he was Geoff and giving them his address.’

‘Mrs Anstey, you thought we were friends of your husband, didn’t you? When we called and asked if you were Mrs Smith. You thought Anstey had put us on to you.’

She nodded limply.

‘He must have known Mr Smith was dead. Would he give his name, knowing he was dead?’

‘He might have done. Not to a girl. There wouldn’t be any point in that. But if he was going to do something disreputable or underhand, he might then. It would be a joke to him, dishonouring Geoff’s memory. And it would be habit too.’

‘I wonder why he stayed.’

‘I suppose he liked it here or got a good job that suited him. His idea of heaven would be an easygoing employer who’d pay him well and turn a blind eye if Ray took his customers away from him and serviced their cars on the cheap. That was always one of the ways he got to know his girls.’

Wexford did not want to hurt her more than he need, but he did not think she could sustain any further injury from a recital of Anstey’s misdemeanours.

‘By going round to their homes while their husbands were at work, I imagine?’ he said. ‘Sitting in their cars with them, the personal touch?’

‘He wasn’t doing too well in Sewingbury,’ she said. ‘People got to know too much about him. Some of these garage proprietors give their mechanics a car or let them borrow one. Ray’s boss got hard about that when he smashed up a hire car. No, you can be sure he found a job and a good one.’ She turned way from him and covered her eyes. ‘If Geoff had been alive,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, if only he’d been alive! Ray wouldn’t have been able to hurt him or me any more. When Geoff had seen him, seen him once and heard he’d left me, he’d have come back to me. I often used to think, he’ll find out, he’ll know sooner or later. We used to be able to read each other’s minds. Married people can. He’s lonely too, I thought. He’s been lonely longer than I have.’ She began to cry softly, the calm gentle tears of a grief beyond consolation. ‘It’s a fallacy that, about reading thoughts. He was dead.’ She spoke evenly, as if she were just talking and not crying as well. ‘And I sat and waited for him, quite happy really and peaceful. I didn’t long for him or feel passionate or anything. I had peace and I thought, one day, this week, next week, sometime – well, it was never, wasn’t it?’ Her fingers dabbed at the tears. ‘May I have my lighter?’ she said.

He let her hold it but shook his head at the request. ‘In a little while.’

‘The name of the design,’ she said, ‘came from a poem of Baudelaire. Geoff knew I loved that verse. “. . . 
et tes seins
”,’ she quoted, ‘ “
Les grappes de ma vigne
.” ’ Wexford’s French wasn’t up to much but he could just understand. She had shown him the scar Anstey, the thief and the sadist, had made with his knife. He turned away his eyes.

It looked as if Russell Cawthorne had a young girl in the office with him. Her back was to the door and she wore a red mac, the glistening hot red of a fire engine with the paint still wet. Burden drove through the rain and up under the trading stamps banner. He and Wexford dived for the office. The girl opened the door for them and illusion snapped, for it was Mrs Cawthorne’s face that appeared between the scarlet collar and the frothy yellow hair.

‘Better go into the house,’ said Cawthorne. He heaved himself up, grunting. ‘Come on, troops, run for it!’

In the living-room the Pre-Raphaelite lady contemplated her lily with pitying scorn. She had seen plenty in that room, she seemed to be saying, most of it unedifying. Mrs Cawthorne took off the red coat and stood revealed in lemon wool. Her Christmas tree earrings hung to her shoulders. Red and shining, they reminded Wexford of toffee apples.

‘Ray Anstey was with me for six months,’ Cawthorne said. ‘He was a good lad, knew his job.’ They sat down among the piecrust tables, the wax fruit, the candelabra. My God, thought Wexford, is it all coming back? Is this the way my Sheila will do up her house when the time comes? ‘When he came he said he wanted something temporary. He’d only come here to hunt up a friend, but then he said the friend had died and he’d like to stay on.’ Geoff Smith, Wexford reflected, Smith, the injured, the bait, the perpetually fascinating.