Wolf to the Slaughter (3 page)

‘First stop Knobby Clark’s, sir?’

Burden nodded. How much longer was Drayton going to let his hair grow? For weeks and weeks until he looked like a drummer in one of those pop groups? Of course Wexford was right when he said they didn’t want all and sundry picking out an obvious cop from his raincoat and his shoes, but that duffel coat was the end. Line Drayton up with a bunch of villains and you wouldn’t be able to tell the sheep from the goats.

The car drew up outside a small shabby jeweller’s shop. ‘Not on the yellow band, Drayton,’ Burden said sharply before the handbrake was on. They went inside. A stout man, very short of stature, with a purple naevus blotching his forehead and the greater part of his bald pate, stood behind a glass-topped table, fingering a bracelet and a ring.

‘Nasty cold morning,’ Burden said.

‘Bitter, Mr Burden.’ Knobby Clark, jeweller and occasional receiver of stolen goods, shifted a step or two. He was too short to see over the shoulder of the woman whose trinkets he was pricing. His whole massive head came into view and it resembled some huge root vegetable, a swede perhaps or a kohlrabi, this impression being enhanced by the uneven stain of the birthmark.

‘Don’t hurry yourself,’ Burden said. ‘I’ve got all day.’

He transferred his attention to a display of carriage clocks. The woman Knobby was haggling with was, he could have sworn, utterly respectable. She wore a thick tweed coat that reached below her knees although she was a youngish woman, and the handbag from which she had produced the jewellery, wrapped in a thin plain handkerchief, looked as if it had once been expensive. Her hands shook a little and Burden saw that she wore a wedding ring on each. The shaking might have been due to the intense cold of Knobby’s unheated shop, but only nerves could have been responsible for the tremor in her voice, nerves and the natural reluctance of such a woman to be there at all.

For the second time that day he was surprised by a tone and an accent. ‘I was always given to understand the bracelet was valuable,’ she said and she sounded ashamed. ‘All my husband’s gifts to me were very good.’

‘Depends what you mean by valuable,’ Knobby said, and Burden knew that the ingratiating note, the servility that covered granite imperviousness to pleading, was for his benefit. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll give you ten for the lot.’

In the icy atmosphere her quickly exhaled breath hung like smoke. ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly.’ She flexed her hands, giving them firmness, but still they fumbled with the handkerchief and the bracelet made a small clink against the glass.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Knobby Clark. He watched indifferently as the handbag closed. ‘Now, then, Mr Burden, what can I do for you?’

For a moment Burden said nothing. He felt the woman’s humiliation, the disappointment that looked more like hurt love than wounded pride. She edged past him with a gentle, ‘Excuse me’, easing on her gloves and keeping that curious custody of the eyes that is said to be a nun’s discipline. Going on for forty, he thought, not pretty any more, fallen on evil days. He held the door open for her.

‘Thank you so much,’ she said, not effusively but with a faint surprise as if once, long ago, she had been accustomed to such attentions and thought them lost for ever.

‘So you haven’t seen any of this stuff?’ Burden said gruffly, thrusting the list of stolen glass under Knobby’s bulbous nose.

‘I already told your young lad, Mr Burden.’

Drayton stiffened a little, his mouth muscles hard.

‘I think I’ll take a look.’ Knobby opened his mouth to complain, showing tooth fillings as richly gold as the metal of the clocks. ‘Don’t start screaming for a warrant. It’s too cold.’

The search yielded nothing. Burden’s hands were red and stiff when they came out of the inner room. ‘Talk about Aladdin’s cave in the Arctic,’ he grumbled. ‘OK, that’ll do for the time being.’ Knobby was an occasional informer as well as a fence. Burden put his hand to his breast pocket where his wallet slightly disturbed the outline of the new suit. ‘Got anything to tell us?’

Knobby put his vegetable-like head on one side. ‘Monkey Matthews is out,’ he said hopefully.

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ Burden snapped.

The swing doors had been fixed when they got back. Now it was difficult to open them at all. Sergeant Camb sat at his typewriter with his back to the counter, one finger poised in the warm air, his expression bemused. When he saw Burden he said as wrathfully as his bovine nature permitted:

‘I’ve only just this minute got shot of him.’

‘Shot of who?’

‘That comedian who came in when you went out.’

Burden laughed. ‘You shouldn’t be so sympathetic.’

‘I reckon he thought I’d send Constable Peach down to his cottage to clean up for him if he went on long enough. He lives in Quince Cottage down in Pump Lane, lives there with his sister only she’s upped and left him to his own devices. Went to a party on Tuesday night and never came back.’

‘And he came in here because he wanted a
charwoman
?’ Burden was faintly intrigued, but still they didn’t want to add to their Missing Persons list if they could avoid it.

‘I don’t know what to do, he says. Ann’s never gone off before without leaving me a note. Ann this and Ann that. Talk about Am I my brother’s keeper?’

The sergeant was a loquacious man. Burden could hardly help wondering how much Camb’s own garrulity had contributed to Rupert Margolis’s long diatribe. ‘Chief Inspector in?’ he asked.

‘Just coming now, sir.’

Wexford had his overcoat on, that hideous grey overcoat which would never be at the cleaner’s during cold spells because it was never cleaned. Its colour and its ridged, hide-like texture added to the elephantine impression the Chief Inspector made as he strode heavily down the stairs, his hands thrust into pockets which held the shape of those fists even when empty.

‘Carousel for a spot of lunch, sir?’ said Burden.

‘May as well.’ Wexford shoved the swing door and shoved again when it stuck. With a half-grin, Camb returned smugly to his typewriter.

‘Anything come up?’ Burden asked as the wind hit them among the potted hyacinths.

‘Nothing special,’ Wexford said, ramming his hat more firmly on his head. ‘Monkey Matthews is out.’

‘Really?’ said Burden and he put out his hand to feel the first spots of icy rain.

That Chief Inspector Wexford should be sitting at his rosewood desk reading the
Daily Telegraph
weekend supplement on a Friday morning was an indication that things in Kingsmarkham were more than usually slack. A cup of tea was before him, the central heating breathed deliciously and the new blue and grey folkweave curtains were half-drawn to hide the lashing rain. Wexford glanced through a feature on the beaches of Antigua, pulling down an angle lamp to shed light on the page. His little eyes, the colour of cut flints, held a mocking gleam when they lighted on a more than usually lush advertisement for clothes or personal furnishings. His own suit was grey, double-breasted, sagging under the arms and distorted at the pockets. He turned the pages, slightly bored. He was uninterested in after-shave, hair-cream, diets. Corpulent and heavy, he had always been stout and always would be. His was an ugly face, the face of a Silenus with a snub nose and wide mouth. The classics have it that Silenus was the constant companion of Bacchus, but the nearest Wexford ever got to Bacchus was an occasional pint with Inspector Burden at the Olive and Dove.

Two pages from the end he came upon an article which caught his eye. He was not an uncultured man and the contemporary fashion of investment by buying pictures had begun to interest him. He was looking at coloured photographs, two of paintings and one of a painter, when Burden came in.

‘Things must be quiet,’ Burden said, eyeing the
Weekend Telegraph
and Wexford’s pile of scattered correspondence. He came up behind the Chief Inspector and glanced over his shoulder. ‘Small world,’ he said. Something in his tone made Wexford look up and raise one eyebrow. ‘That bloke was in here yesterday.’ And Burden stabbed his finger at the photographed face.

‘Who? Rupert Margolis?’

‘Painter, is he? I thought he was a Mod.’

Wexford grinned. ‘It says here that he’s a twenty-nine-year-old genius whose picture, “The Dawn of Nothing”, has just been bought by the Tate Gallery.’ He ran his eye down the page. ‘ “Margolis, whose ‘Painting of Dirt’ is contemporaneous with the Theatre of Cruelty, uses coal dust and tea leaves in his work as well as paint. He is fascinated by the marvellous multifarious textures of matter in the wrong place, et cetera, et cetera.” Come, come, Mike, don’t look like that. Let us keep an open mind. What was he doing in here?’

‘Looking for a home help.’

‘Oh, we’re a domestic service agency now, are we? Burden’s Buttling Bureau.’

Laughing, Burden read aloud the paragraph beneath the Chief Inspector’s thick forefinger. ‘ “Some of Margolis’s most brilliant work is the fruit of a two-year sojourn in Ibiza, but for the past year he and his sister Anita have made their home in Sussex. Margolis works in a sixteenth-century studio, the converted living room of Quince Cottage, Kingsmarkham, and it is here under the blood-red quince tree that he has given birth after six months painful gestation to his masterpiece, or ‘Nothing’ as he whimsically calls it.” ’

‘Very obstetric,’ said Wexford. ‘Well, this won’t do, Mike. We can’t afford to give birth to nothing.’

But Burden had settled down with the magazine on his knees. ‘Interesting stuff, this,’ he said. ‘ “Anita, a former model and Chelsea playgirl, is often to be seen in Kingsmarkham High Street, shopping from her white Alpine sports car . . .” I’ve never seen her and once seen never forgotten, I should think. Listen. “Twenty-three years old, dark and exquisite with arresting green eyes, she is the Ann of Margolis’s portrait for which he was offered two thousand pounds by a South American collector. Her devotion to Margolis’s interests is the inspiration of some of his best work and it is this which, some say, led to the breaking off six months ago of her engagement to writer and poet Richard Fairfax.” ’

Wexford fingered his own sample of the glass sculpture which with the desk and the curtains had just been allocated to the station. ‘Why don’t you buy the
Telegraph
yourself if you’re so keen,’ he grumbled.

‘I’m only reading it because it’s local,’ Burden said. ‘Funny what goes on around you and you don’t know it.’

Wexford quoted sententiously, ‘Full many a gem of purest ray serene the dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.’

‘I don’t know about dark unfathomed caves.’ Burden was sensitive to criticism of his hometown. He closed the magazine. ‘She’s a gem all right. Dark and exquisite, arresting green eyes. She goes to parties and doesn’t come home . . .’

The glance Wexford gave him was sharp and hard and the query cracked out like a shot. ‘What?’

Surprised, Burden looked up. ‘I said she goes to parties and doesn’t come home.’

‘I know you did.’ There was a hard anxious edge to Wexford’s impatience. The teasing quality present in his voice while they had been reading was quite gone and from facetious mockery he had become suddenly alert. ‘I know what you said. I want to know what made you say it. How d’you know?’

‘As I said, genius came hunting for a charwoman. Later he got talking to Camb and said his sister had been to a party on Tuesday night and he hadn’t seen her since.’

Wexford got up slowly. The heavy lined face was puzzled and there was something else there as well. Doubt? Fear? ‘Tuesday night?’ he said, frowning. ‘Sure it was Tuesday night?’

Burden did not care for mysteries between colleagues. ‘Look, sir, he didn’t even report her missing. Why the panic?’

‘Panic be damned!’ It was almost a shout. ‘Mike, if her name is Ann and she went missing Tuesday night, this is serious. No picture of
her
, is there?’ Wexford flicked expertly through the magazine, having snatched it roughly from Burden. ‘No picture,’ he said disgustedly. ‘What’s the betting the brother hasn’t got one either?’

Burden said patiently, ‘Since when have we got all steamed up because a single girl, a good-looking, probably rich girl, takes it into her head to run off with a boyfriend?’

‘Since now,’ Wexford snapped. ‘Since this morning, since this.’ The correspondence, Wexford’s morning post, looked like a pile of litter, but he found the envelope unerringly and held it out to Burden. ‘I don’t like this at all, Mike.’ He shook out a sheet of thick folded paper. The glass sculpture, indigo blue and translucent, shed upon it a gleaming amorphous reflection like a bubble of ink. ‘Things are slack no longer,’ he said.

It was an anonymous letter that lay where the magazine had been and the words on it were handwritten in red ballpoint.

‘You know what a hell of a lot of these we get,’ Wexford said. ‘I was going to chuck it in the basket.’

A back-sloping hand, large writing, obviously disguised. The paper was not dirty nor the words obscene. The distaste Burden felt was solely on account of its author’s cowardice and his desire to titillate without committing himself.

He read it to himself.

Discarding it with a grimace, he turned to the envelope. ‘Posted in Stowerton,’ he said. ‘Twelve-fifty yesterday. Not very discreet of him, writing it. In our experience, the usual line is to cut words out of newspapers.’

‘Assuming the infallibility of handwriting experts?’ Wexford scoffed. ‘Have you ever heard one of those johnnies give a firm opinion one way or the other, Mike? I haven’t. If your recipient hasn’t got a sample of your normal handwriting you might just as well save your newspaper and your scissors. Slope backwards if you normally slope forwards, write large if you usually write small, and you’re perfectly incognito, safe as houses. No, I’ll send this down to the lab but I’ll be very much surprised if they can tell me anything I haven’t deduced for myself. There’s only one thing I haven’t deduced for myself. There’s only one thing here that’ll lead me to my correspondent.’