The Bridesmaid (35 page)

“You know why, Senta. It’s over. We can’t see each other again. It’s better never to see each other. You can go back to your life and I’ll start mine again.”

She said in a small still voice, suddenly calm, “I haven’t any life except with you.”

“Look, we only knew each other for three months. It’s nothing out of a lifetime. We’ll forget each other.”

“I love you, Philip. You said you loved me. I must see you, you must come here.”

“It won’t do any good. It won’t make any difference.” He said good night to her and put the phone down.

It rang again almost immediately and he answered it. He knew he would always answer it now. “I must see you. I can’t live without you.”

“What’s the use of it, Senta?”

“Is it Martin Hunt? Is it because of him? Philip, I’m not making this up, this is for real, the uttermost absolute truth. I never slept with him, I only went out with him once.
He didn’t want me, he wanted that girl
. He wanted her more than me.”

“It isn’t that, Senta,” he said. “It’s nothing to do with that.”

As if he hadn’t spoken, she went on feverishly, “That’s why the police never came near me. Because they didn’t know. They didn’t know I even knew him. Isn’t that proof? Isn’t it?”

What sort of a woman was she that she thought a man would mind more about a sexual relationship than an act of murder?

“Senta,” he said, “I won’t end this without seeing you again, I won’t do that. I promise. That would be cowardly. I promise I won’t do it. I’ll see you and we’ll end it.”

“Philip, if I said I’d never done it, if I said I’d made it all up?”

“I know it’s only the little things you tell lies about, Senta.”

She didn’t phone again. He lay in bed sleepless for hours. Among other things, he missed her physical presence, but when he thought how he had made love to someone who had killed a man in cold blood, when he relived that, he had to get up and go to the bathroom to be sick. Suppose she killed herself? He suddenly thought how unsurprised he would have been had she suggested a suicide pact. That would have been like her. Dying together, going on hand-in-hand to some glorious afterlife, Ares and Aphrodite, immortals in white robes….

The fine weather came back next day. He woke up to early hot sunshine, a bright band of light across his pillow from the window where he had neglected to draw the curtains. A sparrow sat on Flora’s outstretched hand. There was dew thick on the grass and the long densely blue shadows. It was a dream, he thought, all of it was a dream. Flora has always stood there, she was never removed to other owners, other gardens. Fee still lives here. I never met Senta. The murders didn’t happen, I dreamed them. I dreamed Senta.

Downstairs the woman called Moorehead had arrived to have her hair permed. It was the first perm Christine had done for several weeks. The rotten egg smell, seeping everywhere and making breakfast impossible, evoked earlier times, the time before Senta. It helped to keep the illusion going. He made a pot of tea and gave a cup to Mrs. Moorehead, and Christine said what a treat it was for two old women to have a young man wait on them. Mrs. Moorehead bristled up, and Philip knew that when the perm was done and she was leaving, she would tell Christine it was against her principles to tip the boss.

Cheryl came down. It was months since she had been up so early. She sat at the kitchen table drinking tea. Philip sensed that she wanted to catch him alone and borrow money from him. He escaped before she got the chance.

The car was going into the garage today to have the new radio put in. He left it there and was given a promise it would be ready by three. On the way back to head office he bought a newspaper. The evening paper had just come on to the streets and the front page headline told of a man charged with the murder of John Crucifer. Philip walked along reading the story. There was little to it but the basic facts. The alleged killer was Crucifer’s own nephew, an unemployed welder, Trevor Crucifer, aged 25.

It was extraordinary the feeling Philip had, as if he had finally and absolutely been exonerated. Someone else had killed the man and it was known. Officialdom and authority knew it. It was as if his own stupid, ill-considered confession had never been made. It seemed to set him free of guilt as his own knowledge of his innocence never could. Suppose he were to open the paper and on an inside page find that Harold Myerson’s true killer had also been found? That Senta’s involvement was illusory and everything she had told him the result only of a series of coincidences and circumstantial parallels?

Roy sat in his office with the air conditioning turned off and the windows open. A letter had been passed to him from the managing director. It was from Mrs. Ripple and listed seven separate faults she had found in her new bathroom.

“I’m without a car till three,” Philip said.

“Then you’d better take mine.”

Roy said the keys were in the pocket of his jacket, which was hanging up in Lucy’s room. As Philip went into the room, the phone began to ring. Lucy wasn’t there, so he answered it. A voice asked if Mr. Wardman was expected in that day.

“This is Philip Wardman speaking.”

“Oh, good morning, Mr. Wardman. I’m a police officer. Detective Sergeant Gates, CID.”

They had offered to come to him at home or at work but Philip said, quite truthfully, that he had to go to Chigwell anyway. Gates had given him some idea of what it was about. He thought about it, turning it over and over in his mind, as he drove Roy’s car through the lumbering congestion of London’s eastern suburbs.

“We’re making enquiries about a missing statue, Mr. Ward-man. Well, a stolen statue.”

Briefly he had been aghast, stricken silent. But Gates hadn’t been hectoring or accusatory. He had spoken to Philip as to a potentially helpful witness, one of those who genuinely help the police in their enquiries. Philip had several times been in the area—wasn’t that a fact? The district of Chigwell Row, that is, from which the statue had disappeared. If they could come and talk to him or alternatively he could spare the time to come in and answer a few questions….

At the wheel of Roy’s car, the windows wide open, the sun shining, Philip told himself that was literally all they wanted: him to tell them if he had seen any suspicious persons in the neighbourhood. It occurred to him quite suddenly that Flora must be valuable, really valuable. That brought him a sense of chill. He thought of his job. But they didn’t know, they
couldn’t
know.

Gates had someone with him who introduced himself as a detective inspector. Philip thought this was rather a high-ranking officer to be deployed on an enquiry into the theft of a garden ornament. The inspector’s name was Morris. He said “We’ve asked you to come here as the result of a rather interesting coincidence. I understand your young sister has been in a spot of trouble?”

Philip nodded. He was mystified. Why didn’t they talk about Chigwell and Mrs. Ripple’s neighbourhood?

“I’m being very frank with you, Mr. Wardman, perhaps franker than you’ve been led to believe we usually are. I don’t personally care for secrets. A woman officer searched your home and saw a certain statue in the garden. She very intelligently made the connection between that statue and the one which was missing from Mrs. Myerson’s garden, having acquainted herself with the description of the missing one from the Metropolitan Police computer link.”

“Is she worth a lot, then?” Philip managed to say.

“She?”

“Sorry. I meant the statue. Is it valuable?”

Gates said, “Mrs. Myerson’s late husband paid eighteen pounds for it at auction. I don’t know if you call that valuable. Depends on your standards, I suppose.”

Philip had been going to say he didn’t understand, but he did now. It wasn’t a question of Flora’s value. They knew he had stolen her. The woman police sergeant had seen her when they brought Cheryl home, had identified her by that chip out of her ear and the green stain. The two officers were looking at him and he returned their gaze steadily. There was nothing for it. If he denied it, they might accuse poor Cheryl. He couldn’t understand why they hadn’t accused Cheryl, come to that; she in the circumstances seemed a natural choice.

“All right,” he said, “I did take the statue. I stole it, if you like. But I did think, mistakenly as it happens, that I had some sort of right to it. Are you—” His strength wavered and he cleared his throat. “Are you going to charge me with stealing it?”

“Is that your chief concern, Mr. Wardman?” said Gates.

The question was incomprehensible. Philip rephrased what he had said. “Am I going to be prosecuted?” Receiving no reply, he asked if they wanted him to make a statement.

It was strange the way they seemed to latch on to this as if they would never have thought of it for themselves, as if Philip had had a brilliant and original idea. A girl with a typewriter, who might or might not have been a police officer herself, took a statement from him. He told the truth, which sounded untrue when expressed aloud. When he had finished, he sat and looked at them, the two policemen and the girl who might or might not have been a policewoman, and waited for those words to be uttered which he had read in detective stories and heard on television: you are not obliged to say anything in answer to the charge….

Morris got up. He said, “All right, Mr. Wardman. Thank you very much. We needn’t keep you any longer.”

“Is that all, then?” Philip made himself say it in a firm, calm voice.

“All for now, yes.”

“Are you going to prosecute me for taking the statue?”

There was some hesitation. Morris was gathering up papers from the desk. He looked up and said in a slow deliberate way,

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that will be necessary. That would be rather a waste of time and the public’s money, don’t you think?”

Philip didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question to which an answer was expected. He suddenly felt embarrassed, he felt foolish. Once he was outside, relief came surging in to dispel the embarrassment. He would restore Flora to Mrs. Myerson, he thought, it was the least he could do. If the police didn’t come and collect her, he would bring her to Chigwell himself.

He drove to Mrs. Ripple’s and was conducted up to the bathroom, where all the flaws in the list were pointed out to him to the accompaniment of a great deal of vituperative abuse and reiteration of what it had all cost. Pearl was nowhere to be seen, had perhaps gone home.

He drove back past Mrs. Myerson’s house. There was an estate agent’s FOR SALE board in the front garden. The Scottie dog Senta had named Ebony was asleep on the path in the shade. Philip had a sandwich in a pub in Chigwell and drove back to London when the traffic was at its lightest. He parked Roy’s car and walked down to the garage to fetch his own.

Lucy said to him as he came into the office. “A Mr. Morris has been on the phone for you.”

For a moment Philip couldn’t think who that was. Then he knew. The policeman was being discreet in not naming his function or his rank at Philip’s place of work. But why had he phoned at all? Had they changed their minds?

“Did he leave a number?”

“He’ll call back. I said you wouldn’t be long.”

It was a lengthy fifteen minutes. Philip relived his earlier fears. If they were going to charge him, he made up his mind to go and tell Roy immediately, get it over, face the worst. Then he knew he couldn’t go on waiting like this. He looked up the police number in the phone directory and phoned Morris himself. It took a little while to locate him. Philip’s mouth had grown dry and his heartbeats unpleasantly palpable.

When Philip told him who this was, Morris said, “Have you got a girl friend, Mr. Wardman?”

It was the last thing Philip expected. “Why do you ask?” he said.

“Perhaps you know a girl with very long blond hair—well, silver-blond? A rather small girl, no more than five feet tall?”

“I haven’t got a girl friend,” Philip said, unsure whether he spoke the truth.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-ONE

His mind presented the explanation to him. It was like one of those puzzles in a newspaper. You look up the answer on the back page, and when you read it, it is so clear and so obvious you wonder how you could have failed to see it in the first place.

The police must have taken note of every event in Harold Myerson’s recent past, spoken to every acquaintance he had, all his neighbours, noted every visitor to his house. Their interest would have been aroused by the theft of Flora and the description of the thief given them by Myerson’s next-door neighbour. One, or perhaps more than one, witness had described to them the small young girl with the long silver hair seen in the neighbourhood of Myerson’s murder that Sunday morning, and later seen in a tube train. Might there be a connection between that girl and the thief of the statue? It was a long shot but the police did not neglect long shots.

Philip understood that if they had never seen Flora in his own garden, they would never have found him. They would never, except through him, have found Senta. It was he who had led them to Senta. He had led them to Senta by means of the statue she resembled.

All this passed through his mind while he was on his way to Tarsus Street. He hadn’t waited, had said nothing to Roy. It was strange how the old longing for Senta had come back to him when he heard Morris describe her. He had no idea what he would say or do when he got there, but he knew he had to go there and tell her and somehow help her. He couldn’t deceive himself that the police wouldn’t find her now.

The overcast sky had begun spilling out rain. First it came in separate isolated drops like large flat coins, then in a downpour such as falls in the tropics. But it didn’t simply fall—it tore out of the sky and lashed in a splintered wall of water, a steel shutter of water dropped with a harsh clang. Instead of lightening as the rain was shed, the sky seemed to grow darker and all along his route lights were coming on in houses and office blocks. Cars had their lights on. The beams of his headlights made misty paths in the torrent.

Joley and the old woman with the dog in the basket on wheels were sitting together in the shelter of the church porch. The dog looked like one of those you sometimes see on sentimental birthday cards, peeping over the rim of the basket with its face between its paws. Joley waved. Philip thought suddenly, remembering it for some reason, that this was the day he and Senta had been due to start work on the upstairs flat. Last weekend they had decided, that sunny lovely happy weekend that seemed a thousand years away. On Friday evening they would go up to the flat and see what there was to do, and he would help her with things she wanted done.