End in Tears (8 page)

CHAPTER 9

G
lobal warming had compelled the management of the Olive and Dove Hotel to install air-conditioning, a rarity in Kingsmarkham. On the grounds that the doors kept opening and shutting, it had not been extended to the public and saloon bars, only to the lounge bar. There Wexford and Burden sat, the television on, the early-evening news telling them that the temperature had been thirty-two degrees.

“It's actually cold in here,” Burden said, pressing the “off” button on the remote. “They can never get it right, can they?”

“It's okay for an hour or so.” Wexford took their two drinks proffered by the barman and passed one to Burden. Paying for them, he said, “Have one yourself. These glasses are quite cold enough. The day you start putting ice in beer I stop coming in here.”

“Excellent,” said the barman, “as that will never be.”

When he had gone, Wexford said, “That Hilland is a complete little shit. I know you don't like that word, but nothing else quite expresses him. He never once mentioned his child and he talks about Amber as if she were a one-night stand.”

Burden shrugged. He wasn't surprised. “The mother and the sister gave us a foretaste of how he'd be. An idea has occurred to me that I think we should do something about. That money that was in Amber's pocket, it must have got there after she went out, right? She wasn't so butterfly-minded that she went around with a thousand quid on her for days and days.”

“I suppose not. I mean, you're right.”

“So someone gave it to her that night. Not after she got to the Bling-Bling Club they didn't. She was with the others all the time and one of them would have noticed. I mean, it's not like handing someone a couple of pound coins, is it? Well, we know what time she left home to go to the club, but we don't know what time she got there. No one said, though Samantha Collins said she got there later than usual.”

“You mean, however she'd earned the money, someone gave it to her between the time she left her home and went to the club. There can't have been much time, Mike.”

“Why can't there? Diana Marshalson said she left between half-eight and nine. It's five minutes, if that, to the bus stop and the bus takes twenty minutes to Kingsmarkham. Even allowing for the bus being late and her taking ten minutes to get to the stop and not leaving till ten to nine, she'd still be in Kingsmarkham by nine-thirty. With a half hour for her transaction she could get to the club at ten.”

“Bit late, isn't it?”

“To you and me, Reg,” said Burden, “it's very late to go anywhere. It's more like the time to leave and get home. But not to the young. These places don't really get going till nearer midnight.”

“Okay, we must find out the bus times, whether the bus ran on time, and see if we can get a more precise time of her leaving from George Marshalson. I'm afraid I'd taken it for granted young Hilland was paying her child support. With that and Jobseekers' Allowance, which she'd presumably take, and child benefit, she'd have been just about all right. Now I'm beginning to see why she needed money.”

“I thought she wanted to go on to higher education?”

“Mike, I'm starting to believe that was George Marshalson's wishful thinking. How could she have? What would she do with Brand?”

“Come to that,” said Burden, “what did she do with him when she went to Thailand?”

“Left him with Dad and Diana, I suppose. But we must find out more about Thailand. It's possible, of course, that they all went. A family holiday. And we need to have a look at Amber's bank account, if she had one. The two thousand we've found may not be all she had. Shall we have another?”

“Why not?” said Burden.

He sat where he was while Wexford went off to fetch their drinks. An idea had come to him. A pretty obvious idea, he thought, wondering why he hadn't seized upon it in the girl's bedroom. Could she have taken such a risk? Could she have been such a fool? Coming back with a glass in each hand, Wexford said, “You look as if you've had a shock.”

“If I have I've given it to myself. Reg, I think we have to go back to Brimhurst and the Marshalsons and we have to go soon. What time is it?”

“Twenty past eight. What's come up?”

“When we were going through those drawers in Amber's bedroom,” Burden said, “we found something we said was spilt talcum powder. I didn't think anything of it at the time, I just accepted it, and then in conjunction with the other stuff we've found out, I understood something. Girls her age don't use talcum powder, they've never heard of it, they don't know what it's for. It's as out of date as—as—pound notes and phone boxes and gramophone records.”

“So what was it? Oh, yes, I see…I'm going to call Marshalson and then get Donaldson to pick us up here in ten minutes.”

 

“I very much doubt if there was more than, say, fifty pounds in Amber's account,” George Marshalson said. “I opened it for her”—he sighed heavily—“when she was sixteen. For her sixteenth birthday. With a hundred pounds. I doubt if she added to it. If they make any difficulties at the bank about letting you have access, I'll willingly give my permission.”

Wexford thanked him. The house seemed oppressively silent. At nine o'clock Brand had long been in bed. The temperature, though not to be described as “the cool of the evening,” had fallen a long way below the un-English heat of noon. Although all the windows were still wide open, a large bumblebee crept up one pane, hopelessly seeking a way of escape. Gnats danced in shadows on the lawn.

Diana Marshalson was walking about in the garden, watering dying plants from a can. She shook her head at a shrub whose leaves had turned yellow and came toward the house, dropping the empty can and stepping inside by way of the open French window. “It's hopeless,” she said, sinking into a chair. “Everything needs a downpour going on all night, not half a can of water. Still”—she looked at her husband—“what does it matter? What does anything really matter now?”

No one had an answer for that. “I see from her passport,” Wexford said, “that Amber went to Thailand last December?”

“We all went,” Diana said. “Well, not Brand. We left him with my sister.”

A three-month-old baby, Wexford thought indignantly, left with a comparative stranger. Then he told himself sternly to leave it, it wasn't his business. He was becoming obsessed about this child, sensitive to every possible hint of neglect or indifference. He must stop himself, get a grip. “That is, you, your husband, and Amber?”

“It was arranged a month before Brand was born,” Amber's father said. “Amber was all for taking him too, but of course she felt differently when the time came. Diana's sister Laura offered to have him and Amber jumped at the chance.”

“I'd like to have another look at Amber's bedroom,” Wexford said.

Just as they were going, Diana said, for no obvious reason, “If you're interested in Amber's lifestyle, you may care to know she went on a trip to Frankfurt in May.”

“Did she go alone?” Burden asked.

“A friend went with her. A girl—I don't remember her name.”

Annoyed with himself for asking, Wexford said, “Who looked after Brand? Your sister?”

“She wasn't going to take that on so soon after the first time, was she? I did, of course. The twenty-second of May it was and never mind that I had an important engagement. I'm actually surprised I was excused nursemaid duties and allowed to go to Thailand.”

“Diana,” said George Marshalson. “Please.” He sounded broken. “Poor Amber's dead.”

“I know, George. I'm sorry. We're all on edge.”

A curious way of defining bereavement, as Wexford remarked to Burden when they were upstairs.

“She hated that girl,” Burden said.

“Yes, but I'm wondering if what she felt for her when she was alive wasn't nearer indifference and maybe impatience. It was her
dying
which brought out the hatred because, by dying, she encumbered her with the child.”

Burden scraped a little of the white powder into a plastic envelope and sealed it. Then, moistening his forefinger, he ran it lightly across the remaining drift and sniffed it. “It's not what you thought and I thought,” he said. “It's not talcum either. I've smelled that smell before, years ago when my son John was at school, but God knows what it is.”

Downstairs they were together in the living room, George lying back in his armchair, his eyes shut, Diana with a laptop on her knees. The screen was filled with the largely turquoise-blue page, bidding users to search the Web. She turned around as they came in.

Burden said, “Mrs. Marshalson, perhaps you can tell us. Did Amber have athlete's foot?”

“How on earth did you know? She thought she picked it up at the new Kingsmarkham swimming pool and she found it humiliating.”

“And I was sure it was cocaine,” Burden said when they were outside once more. “But, of course, our failure so far to discover any evidence of drugs doesn't mean she wasn't trafficking. Maybe she was. Maybe that's where the money came from. By the way, who was the other girl?”

“One of the crowd at the Bling-Bling, I expect, but we shall have to find out.”

CHAPTER 10

T
he bank in Kingsmarkham High Street made no difficulties about granting access to Amber Marshalson's bank account. “The poor girl's dead, after all,” as the manager said. George Marshalson had been wrong but not far wrong. The sum in Amber's account had swollen to seventy-five pounds. Nothing had been paid in for over two years and nothing had been drawn out.

“Either she didn't trust banks,” said Wexford, “or, more likely, she hadn't yet got around to paying that two thousand in. It must all have come to her very recently.”

“She went to Thailand, but if she was trafficking she wasn't paid, so it was probably an innocent holiday.”

“You mean, she didn't deposit whatever she was paid into her bank account. She may have had payment in cash and just spent it. It looks as if she and possibly the friend carried something to Frankfurt—one of the main European hubs, is Frankfurt—and met someone there who carried whatever it was on to its ultimate destination. When she came home she got paid.”

Wexford knew no more about drugs than any police officer in his position who hadn't specialized in them, but Burden had become an expert, largely through masterminding the big substance-abuse purge carried out in Kingsmarkham and the surrounding villages the year before. “She carried it?” he now said. “Do we mean carried in her luggage or was she a body packer?”

The idea of someone swallowing a package of hard drugs and then excreting it at the journey's end always turned Wexford queasy. “God, I hope not.”

“We've got a lot of work to do in this area. Find who the other girl was. Maybe get a sniffer dog into Clifton. Question all those pals of hers again.”

 

In his hot and stuffy little living room, Hannah and Bal were having what Bal cozily called “a little chat” with Henry Nash. In her eyes, the room was just like a section of a museum of bygones. Everything in it, including its owner, was close on a century old and a lot of it much older. The few books, which included a Bible and a
Hymns Ancient and Modern,
were bound in scuffed black leather and their fellows, with indecipherable titles, in dark green and dark red. Two tinted lithographs on the wall above Mr. Nash's head were of plump maidens in a Victorian idea of Grecian dress, drooping over draped urns. The carpet was the Turkish kind, very worn, and the chairs of the “fireside” type. One corner was filled by an upright piano, on whose stand rested the music for “The Bluebells of Scotland.”

The telephone was, naturally, nowhere near as old as the piano or the Grecian maidens, but it looked to Hannah to date back to the fifties. It was black with, instead of a keypad, a dial of a kind she had never seen before. On this instrument Mr. Nash had phoned Kingsmarkham CID to tell them he had important information. But now Hannah and Baljinder were here, he seemed to have no intention of imparting it until he had delivered a diatribe against a number of aspects of modern life. Single parents, fertility treatment, calling the unemployed “jobseekers,” benefit fraud, foreigners, particularly those of a different physical appearance and coloring from his own, all came in for vituperation. As Hannah's resentment mounted, she felt particularly for Bal, though he seemed impervious to such expressions as “blackie” and “slant-eyed,” listening with calm patience and smiling slightly.

Her indignation made her hotter than ever. She felt sweat pricking the skin of her face and a drop actually trickle down, warm and salty, onto her lips. As a postfeminist, she knew very well that she ought to take this in her stride. Hadn't she as much right to sweat as a man? But she knew, too, that a great gulf is fixed between what we think and what we feel. She had a right as a human being to sweat, but she
felt
Bal would notice and how dreadful it would be if damp patches appeared on her crisp snowy white shirt. Suddenly angry, she cut short Mr. Nash on the subject of television after the nine-o'clock watershed. “You have some information for us.”

Disgruntled, he frowned at her. “I was talking to this young man,” he said to her fury. “You people don't know the meaning of patience.”

Bal said, “Patience is a luxury, Mr. Nash. We haven't a lot of time.”

In spite of having insulted his ethnic group five minutes before and suggested that everyone of his origins should go back to “them temples and elephants and suchlike where they belong,” Henry Nash now looked at him with new respect. “All right,” he said. “You have to do your job. I know what work is, unlike some I could name.” He kept his eyes carefully averted from Hannah, as if he were some kind of ascetic and she a belly dancer. “It's the chap next door. Brooks, he's called. John Brooks. Must be hundreds of folks called John Brooks but there it is.”

Because he had fallen silent, Hannah said, “What about him, Mr. Nash?”

He answered her, but he looked at Bal while he was speaking as if it was the man rather than the woman who had asked the question. “He goes out in the nighttime,” he said on a note of triumph.

“Goes out?” Bal said. “What do you mean, ‘goes out'? What sort of time? You've seen him?”

“I've heard his car. He keeps it in the road. Why, you may well ask, when he's got a bit of concrete at the side. I'll tell you.
Because his wife sleeps in the back.
They have separate rooms if you've ever heard of such a thing. I sleep in the front and when he starts the car it wakes me up.”

“What time, Mr. Nash?”

“Any time it is, one, two, three, but it's mostly around one. She won't hear him in the back. She won't know he's gone. That's what comes of separate rooms. No wonder she don't have no babies. He snores, she says. Yes, I bet he snores. Does it on purpose to get himself in another room.”

“Did he go out on the night Amber Marshalson was killed?”

“Don't know. I don't always wake up, not if I've got nothing on my mind. Not if I'm not tossing and turning, thinking about the state of the world.”

The thought of tossing and turning, as against remaining perfectly still, brought a fresh flow of sweat to Hannah's face. She could feel it on her body now, a stream of it running down between her breasts. She got up, feeling she might faint if she stayed another minute in that hot and airless room. Outside, in the shade, it was cooler and at least the air felt fresher.

“We'll have to talk to this Brooks,” she said, “and he won't be home till the evening. If he was out that night he may have seen something, but I can't see him as the perpetrator. If he wanted to kill Amber he'd hardly have got into his car and driven off somewhere.”

“No,” said Bal, “but driving off would give him an alibi and he could sneak back on foot to do the deed.”

“I suppose he could.”

He was looking hard at her and suddenly she thought how people of what she called “Asian subcontinental origin”—she wouldn't have objected to being described as of “Caucasian-Celtic origin” herself—were so often as immaculate as if all their clothes were new. A damp patch had definitely appeared across her midriff.

“You look so hot, Hannah.” It was the first time he had called her by her given name as against “sarge.” “Come on, I've got sparkling water in a refrigerated bag in the car. That'll set you up.”

 

Daniel Hilland's friends with whom he had spent his Finland holiday had not yet been run to earth. It seemed that they had gone, in Daniel's own words, on to “Iceland or Latvia or somewhere like that” and the hunt for them was so far unsuccessful. Ben Miller's alibi, resting solely on his word that he had dropped Amber off on the Myfleet Road at twenty minutes to two and reached home ten minutes later, couldn't be substantiated. Neither his mother nor his sister had heard him come in. He often came home late and had learned to be silent about it, even taking off his shoes at the foot of the stairs. Mrs. Miller's “But I know he came in—what else would he have done?” was worse than useless.

George and Diana Marshalson alibied each other, an unsatisfactory state of affairs, but in the absence of motive, seeing that Diana, at least, had the best of reasons for wanting to keep Amber alive, this was no line to pursue. Besides, Wexford was sure that George's love for his daughter was far stronger than what he felt for his wife, and if it came to Amber's murder, he would never consider shielding his wife. That marriage, and what the Marshalsons felt for each other, interested Wexford. He had begun to believe there was some reason for the fading of the love George had once felt, perhaps something Diana had done. But that something was certainly not the murder of his only child.

The scrapings from the drawer in Amber's bedroom were analyzed and it was as Burden had thought. The powder was the usual widely used remedy for athlete's foot. Did he have to abandon his theory of why Amber had been twice out of the country this year? Not yet. The fashion for drinking bottled water had largely passed Wexford by, but now, with the temperature once again moving up, he was gulping down glass after glass of it. Sitting opposite Hannah Goldsmith, a bottle of the sparkling kind and a pile of paperwork on the desk between them, he listened while she told him about John Brooks and Henry Nash's malice.

“I'm going back,” she said, “when he's likely to get home.”

“Be careful what you say if the wife's there.”

“Surely it's best if she knows, guv. A relationship is no more than a sham if the partners aren't honest with each other.”

“‘Each other' are the operative words there,” said Wexford. “It's not for you to be honest with them and they won't thank you if you are.”

His advice had less than the effect he desired on DS Goldsmith, who was planning the direct and brusque words she would use on that womanizer, that two-timing Brooks, in his wife's presence, when she encountered Bal Bhattacharya downstairs, cool and sweat-free from a thorough though fruitless attempt with Ben Miller's mother's neighbors to establish his alibi. Could there be something in that old reactionary belief that people with dark skins were less affected by heat than the fair? She felt a rush of blood to her face, making her even hotter. That had probably been the most racist thought she had ever had!

“Back to Mill Lane, then, DC Bhattacharya,” she said sharply, forgetting how he'd called her Hannah so caringly that morning.

“Yes, I've been thinking about how to ask the guy without arousing his wife's suspicions.”

Hannah's retort that Mrs. Brooks's suspicions should be aroused and soon, faded on her lips. “That's your feeling too, is it? That we should tread a bit softly?”

“Well, it is. What did you mean by ‘too'? Did someone else take the same line?”

“The guv,” said Hannah.

Sure enough, John Brooks's red VW was parked in the roadway, just where Henry Nash said it would be. But repeated ringing at the doorbell and rapping on the knocker fetched no one. It was Lydia Burton, her front door wide open to cool the house, who came out to tell them no one was at home. The Brookses were out celebrating their wedding anniversary. A taxi had come to pick them up ten minutes before and take them to a restaurant in Myringham.

“So John can have a drink, you know,” said Lydia Burton.

“It's really appalling,” said Hannah when she was out of earshot, “how two-faced some people can be. Celebrating your wedding anniversary in the evening and shagging another woman by night, because that's what he must be doing.”

“Not so bad as murdering,” said Baljinder, and then, as if he were the superior officer, “‘Shagging' is not an attractive word for a beautiful woman to use.”

If anyone else in Bal's position had reprimanded her, DS Goldsmith would have rounded on him with a sharp scathing phrase, but whether it was being called beautiful that mollified her or simply Bal's own undeniable beauty and style, she couldn't tell but she said nothing, only looked at him, hoping he would smile, which suddenly he did.

“Come along, Sarge,” he said. “There's a pub down the road called the Lamb and Flag. I'm going to take you in there and buy you a drink.”

 

He was thinking about going home. Sylvia was coming over, leaving the boys with a sitter. His conscience troubled him over their last meeting. He had been unkind to her (though not as unkind as her mother) and nothing she had done or meant to do excused that. When he saw her he meant to make it up to her, not changing his point of view, of course, but being gentler and more sympathetic. He should be flattered, he should be proud, he told himself, that his daughters actually took notice of what he said. Other people's daughters, as far as he could see, paid no attention whatever to their fathers' views.

The temperature was falling. He went to the window and looked down across Kingsmarkham to the west where the drooping sun was sinking through narrow bands of cloud that were almost black. A flock of starlings rose from the water meadows by the Kingsbrook and sailed in perfect formation across the treetops. He heard the door behind him open and turned to see Burden.

“I was thinking of going home,” he said.

“You may think again when I tell you. A girl's gone missing. She's twenty-one, works in that souvenir shop in the High Street—Gew-Gaws is it called?—lives with her boyfriend in a flat over the shop. She's called Megan Bartlow.”

“Bartlow, Bartlow…Where have I heard that name before? It was somewhere quite recently…”

Burden ignored him. “We've no reason to think there's any connection between her and Amber Marshalson. This Bartlow girl may just turn up unharmed. It's a dodgy sort of setup, no one knowing exactly when she went missing or where she might have gone or even if she's just run off with another chap. The boyfriend and the mother are downstairs. They came in to report her missing. I don't know if you'll want to—”