End in Tears (2 page)

CHAPTER 3

T
he woman who emerged from the house as they came up the drive had a child of about a year in her arms. Wexford and Detective Sergeant Hannah Goldsmith introduced themselves and the woman said, “He's asleep. Our doctor has him under sedation.”

“I'd like to talk to you,” Wexford said. “You are Mrs. Marshalson?”

She nodded. Wexford had never before known a case of a father finding the murdered body of his daughter, never thought to see a bereaved parent prone over his child's corpse. He had daughters of his own, but he could barely imagine himself in George Marshalson's position.

Once the man had been persuaded to go home, had been taken home, the pathologist had come. The photographers had come, the scene-of-crime officer, the whole panoply of those who attend a murder scene. For his part Wexford had needed to register only that she was very young, still in her teens, very good-looking, and that death had come through a violent blow to the head with a brick or piece of masonry.

He questioned the paper man who had found him and her, then he and Hannah had walked down the lane toward Clifton, the Marshalsons' house. Already the heat they were so used to that it had begun to feel normal was closing in. You could almost feel the temperature rising. The air was as still and heavy as at noon. Mill Lane was overhung with densely foliaged trees through the branches of which shafts of glare penetrated.

Clifton's front garden was flowerless, its shrubs wilting and its lawns yellow. The front door of the house opened and the woman came out before they were in talking distance. Politically correct to a degree Wexford thought ridiculous, Hannah said to him in the kindly and forbearing tone she often used when speaking to him, “That will be his partner.”

“His wife, most likely.”

Hannah gave him the sort of look she kept for a middle-aged man who still called the woman he had married his wife. They followed Mrs. Marshalson into the house. The child, a little boy, looked heavy to carry and she set him down. Not yet able to walk, he crawled rapidly across the polished wood floor, saying, “Mama, Mama.”

Diana Marshalson took no notice of him. “Come in here. I don't know what I can tell you. When he came back he was speechless. He's absolutely broken.” Their expressions must have told her the misapprehension both were under. “Oh, I'm not her mother. I'm George's second wife.”

Wexford had learned to detect signs of satisfaction on DS Goldsmith's face and in what she would have called her body language. He saw them now, the approving set of the mouth, the relaxation of her usually tense shoulders. That would have been brought about by Diana Marshalson's revealing she was the dead girl's stepmother. Hannah liked complex family arrangements. In her world they signified freedom of choice and self-assertiveness. A bunch of children, thought Wexford, each with a different father and some with different mothers, all living under one roof with four or five unrelated adults would be her ideal.

They went into a spacious living room, its French windows wide open. He had already learned that the Marshalsons were interior designers, based at Marshalson's Studio, Design and Restoration, in the Kingsbrook Centre of Kingsmarkham, but he would have known without being told. Such people's homes are always unmistakable, beautiful, the taste displayed impeccable, the ornaments just right and not too numerous, the colors exactly what one would have chosen if one possessed the gift for it, and at the same time the reverse of cozy, not the kind of place in which one would feel like curling up with a book and a glass of wine. Wexford sat down on a dark-gray sofa, Hannah on a pale-gray armchair, Diana Marshalson in another, which looked as if it had started life in a palace in Mandalay. Carved faces of angry gods glowered from its high arched back.

“What made your husband go out into the lane first thing this morning, Mrs. Marshalson? What time was it exactly?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I was asleep. He worried terribly when she was out at night. I suppose he realized she hadn't come in.”

“He went out to look for her?” Hannah sounded incredulous.

“I suppose so. He must have known—well, either that she wouldn't be there or that something awful had happened. But I don't know. He went out. I woke up when the child cried. That was at six-thirty.” She listened as if for just such a cry. “I must go and check on George. Do you mind waiting a minute? I'll be back with you as soon as I can.”

As she went out the little boy came in, still on all fours, but managing to pull himself up by holding on to the edge of an inlaid table that looked as if made of ebony and some pale blond wood. He was a handsome boy, olive-skinned but with red cheeks, his hair dark and curly, clustering in those rings only seen in very young children.

“Hello,” said Wexford. “What's your name? Let me guess. James? Jack? The most popular name of the moment is Archie, they tell me.”

“He's too young to know what you're saying, guv.”

Resisting the temptation to tell her he knew that, he'd had two of his own and four grandchildren, he said mildly that small children like people to talk to them, they like the sound and the attention. It doesn't much matter what you say. Hannah achieved a minimal shrug, a favorite gesture of hers. Diana Marshalson, he thought, looked young enough to be this child's mother but only just. Maybe forty-five or forty-six, a second wife who had perhaps never been married before and wanted a baby before it was too late. He rather admired her looks. Tall, handsome, dark-haired women with full figures were his type. His own wife was such a one.

She came back. “He's fast asleep. It's the best thing for him, though I dread what it will be like when he wakes. He'll have to wake sometime. He adored Amber. She was only just eighteen. What happened?”

“Early days to say,” said Hannah. “She's dead. She was attacked. Really, that's all we know.”

The little boy tried to climb onto Diana Marshalson's lap. To Wexford it seemed that she hauled him up wearily and without much enthusiasm. “Amber went out last evening? What time would that have been and where did she go?”

Amber's stepmother was choosing her words carefully. “She went clubbing. To a place called Bling-Bling in Kingsmarkham. Between eight-thirty and nine, I'd say. It sounds awful, I know, but they all do it. The friend who brought her home would have dropped her at the end of Mill Lane. It's happened before, she went to the club regularly and she was always all right.” The child caught hold of the pearl string she was wearing and began tugging at it. “No, Brand, no, please.” She prised his fingers apart. “Amber was waiting for her A level results. She'd just left school. Look, my husband's asleep, but I think I should be with him. Sitting with him, you know. In case he wakes. I can't leave him alone any longer.”

“We'd just like…” Hannah began, but Wexford stopped her.

“We will come back later in the day, Mrs. Marshalson. Then perhaps you or your husband can give us the name of the friend and a few more details about Amber herself. We'll leave you now.”

Diana Marshalson stayed just long enough to open the door for them, the little boy seated on her hip.

“We could have got the friend's name, you know, guv,” said Hannah. “It's not like she was the woman's mother.”

Although he knew it was accepted practice in police forces all over the country, Wexford very much disliked being called “guv.” He didn't expect “sir” these days, but he would almost rather she had called him by his given name than that awful abbreviation. When she first joined his team he had gently asked her not to do it, but it was as if he hadn't spoken. If she had been in any way disrespectful he would have had reason to reprove her, but she hadn't, she never was. He was sure she liked, even admired, him—apart, that is, from his old-fashioned speech patterns and terminology.

Now she repeated what she had said because he hadn't replied. “She may have been very attached to the girl,” he said. “We don't yet know how long she had been her stepmother. Maybe from Amber's early childhood.”

Returning to the crime scene, Hannah said no more. It irked her that Wexford used the word “girl.” Amber was a woman, she was eighteen. He would have to learn correct terms, she thought, or the rapidly changing world would simply leave him behind. Only the other day she had heard him talk about “people” when he meant “community.”

 

The body had gone. There were still several uniformed officers standing on the grass, half a dozen cars filling the entrance to the lane, and the scene-of-crime officer stretching blue and white crime tape around the place where Amber Marshalson had lain. DS Karen Malahyde was standing next to a woman of about forty wearing jeans and a white T-shirt.

“This is Miss Burton, sir. She lives in one of those houses opposite. She was out last night and came home about midnight.”

“Lydia Burton,” the woman said. “I live at number three Jewel Terrace. I was out with a friend. He brought me home in his car and after he'd gone I took my dog for a walk. Not for long, you know. But you have to walk them or they make a fuss.”

She was pretty rather than beautiful, with healthy pink skin and curly fair hair, her face without makeup but for mascara on her long eyelashes. This and the dangling silver dog-face earrings she wore gave a frivolous note to her austerity.

“Oh, yes, of course,” she said in answer to his question as to whether she had known Amber Marshalson. “I'm the head teacher of Brimhurst Primary School. Amber was there for two or three years when her father first came to Brimhurst.”

“You saw her last night?”

“I only wish I had.”

“What happened?”

“I'm afraid I'm not a very observant person.”

Hannah Goldsmith disliked hearing people, women especially, belittle themselves. A sign of low self-esteem perhaps. It was surely by now a well-known fact that everyone was as valuable as everyone else. All had skills and gifts, and each was uniquely her (or just possibly his) own person. “You took your dog out at—what? Twelve-thirty?”

“I suppose so. About that. It was very dark down the lane because of the trees and I hadn't brought a flashlight. There was a bit of a moon and I walked the other way, up to the Myfleet Road, and went along perhaps two hundred yards.” Meters, thought Hannah, meters. Why did it take people so long to learn? “When I was coming back—back to the corner of Mill Lane, I mean—I saw a man. He was standing among the trees, in there.” Lydia Burton pointed into the woodland where Amber Marshalson's body had been found. “It gave me quite a shock. He had his back to me. I don't think he saw me. I crossed the road. I was anxious to get home—I mean, seeing him there made me want to get home.”

“Can you describe this man, Miss Burton?”

Hannah shook her head impatiently. Why couldn't Wexford remember to say “Ms.”? “I didn't see his face. He was wearing a hood. I mean, he was wearing a fleece with a hood. Well, mostly it's the young that wear them. I don't think he was that young. He wasn't a boy.”

“Tall or short? Fat or thin? How old?”

“Tallish,” she said. “Quite thin, I think. I wish I'd taken more notice. But people always say that, I expect, don't they? I don't think he was that young, though I couldn't say how I know. Forty, I think. At least forty.”

“A pity you can't be more precise,” said Hannah. “You didn't see Amber? No, I suppose not. Do you know if she often went clubbing?”

Wexford wished Hannah could bring herself to sound less censorious. She was a beautiful woman in any man's eyes, tall, slender, with the face of an El Greco saint and raven's-wing hair, but he wondered if she had ever been clubbing or possibly been up after eleven
P.M
. except in the course of duty.

“I really don't know,” Lydia Burton said. “I was never close to Amber. We just said hi when we saw each other.” Wexford asked her who lived in the other houses in Jewel Terrace. “The elderly man at number one is Mr. Nash, then Mr. and Mrs. Brooks at number two, they're called John and Gwenda.”

They watched her let herself into the first house in the terrace, a neat cottage as each of them was, red brick with a slate roof. Her front garden was a small square lawn surrounded by lavender bushes, Mr. Nash's a plantation of huge sunflowers, ten feet tall, their sun-shaped faces turned skywards, the Brookses' stone paving within a rectangle of closely trimmed box hedges. The morning was already very hot with that heat which is peculiarly English, the air heavy with humidity, the sun scalding where it touched. Hannah Goldsmith looked to Wexford as unruffled as ever, her pale smooth skin as white as in winter, not a hair out of place.

“You can start on Jewel Terrace, Hannah,” he said. “Before the occupants go to work. Take Baljinder with you.”

They made a beautiful couple, he thought, as Hannah and DC Bhattacharya crossed the road, the woman so slender, her hair streaming down her back like a dark waterfall, and the tall very upright man, impossibly thin, his cropped hair making hers look brown, his own was so pitch black. Their profiles were somewhat alike, regular, classical, utterly Caucasian. They might have been brother and sister, offspring perhaps of a father from Iran and a mother from Iberia. Thinking how this area had changed in the short time since the Simisola case, when there had been no more than twelve people from ethnic minorities, he walked with Karen Malahyde back to his car, where Donaldson waited at the wheel.

“Going to be a hot day, Jim.”

Donaldson said, “Yes, sir,” in a stony way, treating this deeply banal remark with the contempt it deserved.

“You know, I don't think I've ever been here before. To Brimhurst, I mean.”

“It's not the sort of place you come to unless you know someone. All there is is the village hall and the church, and that's been locked up since the vicar went. The shop closed ten years ago.”