Wolf to the Slaughter (6 page)

‘Yes, and Dickie Fairfax came all the way down from London just to see her.’ Mrs Cawthorne moved closer to Margolis’s side. ‘They used to be friends. Very close friends, I may add.’ She fluttered beaded eyelashes.

‘Fairfax, the writer?’ Burden had never heard of him until that morning, but he did not wish to be branded a philistine for the second time that day.

Mrs Cawthorne nodded. ‘Poor Dickie was rather peeved when she didn’t turn up and drifted away around eleven.’

‘Left one of my best brandy glasses on a diesel pump,’ said Cawthorne gruffly. ‘Damned inconsiderate blighter.’

‘But he was here all the evening?’ Between eight and eleven, Burden thought. That was the crucial time if the anonymous letter was to be trusted.

‘He was here all right. Came on the dot of eight and got started in on the hard stuff right away.’

‘You are so mean,’ Mrs Cawthorne said unpleasantly. ‘Mean and jealous. Just because Ann preferred him.’ She gave a tinny laugh. ‘She and Russell have a sort of thing.’ Burden glanced at Margolis but the painter had gone off into a brooding abstraction. Mrs Cawthorne thrust a bony finger into her husband’s ribs. ‘Or that’s what he kids himself.’ The blood rushed into Cawthorne’s already pink face. His hair was like white wool or the coat of a West Highland terrier.

Suddenly Margolis roused himself. He addressed Burden, rather as if there was no one else in the room.

‘Ann gave Dickie the out months ago. There’s someone else now. I’m trying to remember his name.’

‘Not Geoff Smith, by any chance.’ Burden watched the three faces, saw nothing but blankness. He had memorised the message in that letter.
He is small and dark and young and he has a black car. Name of Geoff Smith
. Of course, it wouldn’t be his real name. Smith never was.

‘All right. That’s all for now. Thanks for your help.’

‘I don’t call that help.’ Mrs Cawthorne giggled. She tried to take Margolis’s hand but failed. ‘You’ll be lost without her, Roo,’ she said. ‘Now, if there’s anything Russell and I can do . . .’

Burden expected Margolis to maintain his silence, or possibly say something rude. He gave Mrs Cawthorne a blind hopeless stare. ‘Nobody else has ever been able to do anything,’ he said. Then he walked out of the room, his shoulders straight. For a brief moment he had attained Burden’s notion of the heights of genius. He followed, Cawthorne behind him. The garage owner’s breath smelt of whisky. His was a soldier’s face, brave, hearty, a little stupid. The military air about him extended, Burden thought, even to his name. All those years ago his mother had called him Russell because it sounded so well with Cawthorne, auguring great things. General Sir Russell Cawthorne,
KCB
.,
DSO
 . . . Burden knew something of his history. The man had never won a battle or even led a troop. He kept a garage.

‘I’m looking for a Geoff Smith who might be a friend of Miss Margolis’s.’

Cawthorne gave a braying laugh. ‘I daresay he might, only I’ve never heard of him. She’s got a lot of boyfriends. Lovely girl, lovely little driver and a good head for business. I sold her that car of hers. That’s how we met. Haggled, you know, drove a hard bargain. I admire that. Only natural she’d have a lot of boyfriends.’

‘Would you include yourself among them?’

It was grotesque. The man was all of sixty. And yet boyfriend could be applied these days to a lover of any age. It was in two senses a euphemism.

For a moment it seemed that Cawthorne was not going to reply and when he did it was not to answer the question.

‘Are you married?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Horrible business, isn’t it?’ He paused and gazed lugubriously at a pump attendant giving green stamps with change. ‘Growing old together . . . Horrible!’ He braced his shoulders as if standing to attention. ‘Mind you, it’s your duty to stay young as long as you can. Live it up, keep going, go around with young people. That’s half the battle.’ The only one he was ever likely to fight.

‘Did you “go around” with Miss Margolis, Mr Cawthorne?’

The garage proprietor brought his face and his whisky breath closer to Burden. ‘Once,’ he said. ‘Just the once. I took her out to dinner in Pomfret, to the Cheriton Forest Hotel. Stupid, really. The waiter knew me. He’d seen me there with my wife. I was ordering, you see, and he said, “Will your daughter have the smoked salmon too, sir?” ’

Why do it, then? Why make such a crass fool of yourself? Burden had no temptations, few dreams. He got into the car beside Margolis, wondering why the defenceless put themselves into the firing line.

There were pictures on the stairs and pictures on the landing. The light was fading and Sergeant Martin stumbled over a pile of washing on the floor outside Anita Margolis’s bedroom door.

‘No letters and no diaries, sir,’ he said to Burden. ‘I never saw so many clothes in all my life. It’s like a – a draper’s shop in there.’

‘A boutique, you mean,’ said Drayton.

‘Been in many, have you?’ Burden snapped. Drayton looked the type who would buy blacknylon underwear for his women and not turn a hair. Through the half-open door, propped ajar with a gilt sandal, he caught sight of garments spread on the bed and hung, crammed closely, in two wardrobes. ‘If your sister went away of her own accord,’ he said to Margolis, ‘she’d have taken clothes with her. Is anything missing?’

‘I really wouldn’t know. It’s absolutely useless asking me things like that. Ann’s always buying clothes. She’s got masses of them.’

‘There’s just one thing,’ Drayton said. ‘We can’t find a raincoat.’

Martin nodded agreement. ‘That’s right. Furs and suede things and all sorts, but no woman’s raincoat. It was raining cats and dogs on Tuesday night.’

‘Sometimes she takes clothes,’ said Margolis, ‘and sometimes she doesn’t. She’s quite likely to have gone just as she was and then buy anything she needed.’

Leaving them to finish their search, Burden followed the painter downstairs. ‘She had money, then?’ The woman in the portrait, the woman who possessed this vast and apparently expensive wardrobe, would hardly be content with something off the peg from Marks and Spencer. Or was the lover expected to cough up? In this set-up anything was possible. ‘How much money did she have on her?’

‘One of her cheques came on Monday. She has this money of her own, you see. My father left all his money to her. He didn’t like me and I couldn’t stand him, so he left it all to Ann. They pay it out every three months.’

Burden sighed. Anyone else would have spoken of a private income, of payments made quarterly. ‘Do you know how much this cheque was for?’

‘Of course I do,’ Margolis said crossly. ‘I’m not a halfwit. It’s always the same, five hundred pounds.’

‘And she had this cheque with her?’ Here, at last, was something for him to get his teeth into. The beginning of a motive loomed.

‘She cashed it as soon as it came,’ Margolis said, ‘and she put the money in her handbag.’

‘All five hundred!’ Burden gasped. ‘You mean she set off for a party with five hundred pounds in her handbag?’

‘Bound to have done. She always carried it about with her,’ Margolis said casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘You see, she might be out and see something she wanted to buy and then she’d have the money on her, wouldn’t she? She doesn’t like paying for things with cheques because then she gets overdrawn, and Ann’s rather middle-class in some ways. She gets worried if she’s overdrawn.’

Five hundred pounds, even if it was in fivers, would make a big wad in a woman’s handbag. Would she be careless about where she opened the handbag and to whom she revealed the contents? The woman was thoroughly immoral too. Decent women had clean tidy homes. They were either married or had jobs or both. They kept their money in the bank. Burden thought he could see just what had happened to Anita Margolis. She had gone into a shop or a garage on her way to the party, opened her bag and its contents had been seen by that villain Smith. A good-looking plausible villain, probably. Young, dark and with a black car. They had gone off together and he had killed her for the money. The letter writer had got wind of it, may be tried blackmail; blackmail which hadn’t worked?

But a casual pick-up would be next to impossible to find. A regular boyfriend, especially if he was down on his luck, might fill the bill.

‘Have you remembered the name of Fairfax’s successor?’ he asked.

‘Alan Something. He’s got no money and he’s very provincial. I don’t know what she sees in him, but Ann’s rather inclined to go slumming, if you know what I mean. Fitz something. Fitzwilliam? It isn’t exactly Fitzwilliam but it’s something like that. I’ve only spoken to him once and that was enough.’

Burden said tartly, ‘You don’t seem to like anyone very much, sir.’

‘I like Ann,’ Margolis said sadly. ‘I tell you who might know. Mrs Penistan, our late char. I should go and ask her, and if she’s just pining to come back and clean this place, don’t discourage her, will you?’

A chill grey drizzle was falling as they emerged from the cottage door. Margolis accompanied Burden to the garden gate.

‘You haven’t found a charwoman, then?’

From behind him the painter’s voice held a note of childlike pride. ‘I put an advertisement in Grover’s window,’ he said. ‘I wrote it on a little card. Only half-a-crown a week. I really can’t imagine why people spend all that money on the agony column of
The Times
when this way is so cheap and easy.’

‘Quite,’ said Burden, stifling an incipient desire to roar and stamp. ‘This Mrs Penistan, she hasn’t got ginger hair, has she?’

Margolis stood against the hedge, picking the new shoots off a hawthorn bush. These he put into his mouth and began to chew them with evident relish. ‘She always wore a hat,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what colour her hair is, but I can tell you where she lives.’ He paused for congratulation perhaps on this unlooked-for feat of memory. Burden’s expression seemed to gratify him, for he went on, ‘I know that because I drove her home once when it was raining. It’s in Glebe Road, on the left, past the fifth tree and just before you get to the pillar box. Red curtains downstairs and . . .’

Burden cut him short with a snort of exasperation. If this was genius he hadad enough of it. ‘I’ll find it.’ He could have recourse to the electoral register himself. Penistan was surely as rare a name as Smith was common.

Mark Drayton rented a room down by Kingsmarkham station. His landlady was a motherly woman who liked to make her lodgers feel at home. She hung pictures on the walls, provided flowered counterpanes and scattered little ornaments about like seeds. As soon as he moved in Drayton put all the vases and ashtrays into the bottom of the cupboard. There was nothing to be done about the counterpane. He wanted the room to look like a cell. Someone – it was a girl – had told him he had a cold nature and he had since cultivated his personality in this direction. He liked to think he was austere and without emotion.

He was very ambitious. When he had first come to Kingsmarkham he had set out to make Wexford like him and he had succeeded. He carried out all Wexford’s instructions meticulously, absorbing the Chief Inspector’s homilies, lectures, digressions and pleasantries with courteously inclined head. The district was now as familiar to him as his own hometown and he used his library tickets for works on psychology and forensic medicine. Sometime she read a novel, but nothing lighter than Mann or Durrell. One day he hoped to be a commissioner. He would marry the right wife, someone like Mrs Wexford, good-looking, quiet and gracious. Wexford had a daughter, a pretty girl and clever, they said. But that was a long way off. He had no intention of marrying until he had attained distinguished rank.

His attitude to women was a source of pride to him. Being intensely narcissistic, he had little admiration left over, and his idealism was reserved for his own career. His affairs had been practical and chilly. In his vocabulary love was a banned verb, the most obscene of the four letter words. He had never used it between ‘I’ and ‘you’. If he ever felt anything stronger than a physical need he called it desire with complications.

That, he thought, was what he felt for the Grover girl. That was why he was going into the shop now to buy his evening paper. May Be she would not be there. Or may be when he saw her close-to, not through glass or in someone else’s arms, it would all fade away. On the whole, he hoped that would happen.

The shop squatted under a towering wall of brown brick. It seemed to lurk there as if it had something to hide. A street lamp in a black iron cage stuck out beside its door but the lamp was still unlit. As Drayton opened this door a little bell made a cold tinkle. The interior was dim and it smelt unpleasant. Behind the paperback stand and a rusty refrigerator hung with lop-sided ice-cream posters, he could see the shelves of a lending library. The books were the kind you buy at jumble sales, nineteenth century three-volume novels, explorers’ reminiscences, school stories.

A thin dried-up woman was behind the counter, standing under a naked light bulb. Presumably this was her mother. She was serving a customer with tobacco.

‘How’s the governor?’ said the customer.

‘Ever so bad with his back,’ said Mrs Grover cheerfully. ‘Hasn’t left his bed since Friday. Did you say Vestas?’ Drayton noted with distaste the girlie magazines, the stand of paper patterns (two swinging mini-skirts to cut out and sew in an evening), the ninepenny thrillers, Ghosty Worlds, Cosmic Creatures. On a shelf among mock-Wedgwood ashtrays stood a pottery spaniel with artificial flowers growing from a basket on its back. The flowers were furred with dust like a grey fungoid growth. ‘That’s five and three, then. Thanks very much. It’s what they call a slipped disc. He just bent over fiddling with the car and – crack!’

‘Nasty,’ said the customer. ‘You thinking of letting your room again? I heard your young man had gone.’