Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (16 page)

   He ran. The waitress watched him go, a faint smile on her lips. Did he come in here with Virginia and she give public examples of her possessiveness?

   ‘Some people’, said Burden, when Wexford had paid the bill, ‘don’t seem to have a clue about self-preservation. Talk about out of the frying pan into the fire.’

   ‘He’s weak and he’s attracted by strong women. Unfortunately, he’s so far picked two with the kind of strength that’s malevolent. You could persuade him into anything, sell his grandmother into slavery, swallow cyanide, I dare say. Still, from our point of view he’s an improvement on everyone else we’ve questioned in this case, isn’t he? He’s given us some good stuff.’

Burden fell asleep in the car and Donaldson never spoke unless he was spoken to or felt obliged to intervene, so Wexford retreated into his own thoughts, mainly concentrated on Sylvia and their encounter the evening before. He and Dora had gone over to the Old Rectory after supper, ostensibly to check on their daughter’s condition after what she had witnessed at The Hide that morning. Chapman came to the door and seemed less than pleased to see them.

   ‘Sylvia didn’t say she was expecting you.’

   Dora had cautioned him to watch his tongue so Wexford remained silent. She asked how Sylvia was.

   ‘She’s OK. Why shouldn’t she be?’

   They found the boys occupied with their homework in what was known as the family room where the television was on, albeit turned very low, and where by the look of the half-full wineglass on the side table, the dent in the seat cushion of an armchair and the Radio Times on its arm, Chapman had been relaxing before their arrival. Wexford, who had put his head round the door and quickly absorbed all this, said hello to Robin and Ben, and followed Dora to the kitchen. There they found Sylvia cooking the evening meal, pasta boiling in a saucepan, mushrooms, tomatoes and herbs in another pan, the materials for a salad spread on the counter.

   ‘I’ve only just got home,’ she said, as if self-defence or excuse was necessary. ‘Cal was going to do it but there was this programme on TV it was important for him to watch and now he’s helping the boys with their homework.’

   Again Wexford was silent - on that subject, at least. ‘How are you?’

   ‘I’m fine. I ought to be used to that kind of thing by now. I’ve seen enough of it. Only usually I’ve not witnessed the actual attack, just heard about it afterwards. But I’m fine, had to be. Life goes on.’

   Any sort of man who called himself a man - Wexford was amazed at himself, using such an expression even in his thoughts - any decent sort of man would have sat her down with a drink, moved the kids elsewhere, got her to talk while he listened and sympathised.

   ‘It’s terribly late to eat but I couldn’t get away. D’you want anything? Drink?’

   ‘We only came in for a minute,’ Dora said soothingly. ‘We’ll go.’

   In the car, driving home, he’d said, ‘Wasn’t he supposed to be the New Man? I thought that was the point. What other point is there to him?’

   And Dora, who usually put a curb on his excesses, had agreed with him. He’d often heard it said that it wasn’t a man’s appearance or character that kept a woman with him but his sexual performance, but he’d never believed it. Surely the sex was fine if you loved the other person or were powerfully attracted to them. Otherwise it made men and women into machines with buttons to press and switches to turn on. He’d ask Burden’s view if the man weren’t so prudish about things like this. Besides, he was asleep. Pondering on Sylvia and Chapman and Sylvia’s jobs and Neil, he let Burden sleep for another ten minutes and then woke him up.

   ‘I wasn’t asleep,’ said Burden like an old fogey in a club armchair.

   ‘No, you were in a cataleptic trance. ‘What’s the name of the head teacher of Kingsmarkham Comprehensive?’

   ‘Don’t ask me. Jenny would know.’

   ‘Yes, but Jenny not here. No doubt she’s at work in that very school.’

   Donaldson, though he hadn’t been addressed, said, ‘Dame Flora Gregg, sir.’

   ‘Dame?’

   ‘That’s right,’ said Burden. ‘She got it in the Birthday Honours.’

   ‘For rescuing the school from the mess it was in. My fourteen-year-old’s a student there, sir.’

   ‘Then she must be relatively new,’ said Wexford. ‘This business with Joanna Troy happened - when? Fifteen years ago. Who came before Dame Flora?’

   Donaldson didn’t know. ‘A man,’ Burden said. ‘Let me think. He was there when I first met Jenny and she was teaching there. She used to say he was lazy, I particularly remember that, lazy and fussy about the wrong things. It’s coming back to me - Lockhart, that was his name. Brendon Lockhart.’

   ‘I don’t suppose you know where we can find him.’

   ‘You don’t suppose right, as Roger Dade would say. Wait a minute, though. It’s going to be five or six years since he retired and Flora Gregg took over. He’d have been sixty-five then. He may be dead.’

   ‘Any of us might be dead at any old time. Where did he retire to?’

   ‘He stayed in the district, that I do know.’

   Wexford considered. ‘So who do we see first? Lockhart or the parents of poor Ludovic Brown?’

   ‘First we’ve got to find them.’

   Tracing Lockhart was the easier and done through the phone book Wexford left Lynn Fancourt with the unenviable task of phoning every one of the fifty-eight Browns in the local directory and asking as gently and tactfully as she could which one of them had lost a son to leukaemia at the age of twenty-one. He reflected, as he and Barry Vine were driven to Camelford Road, Pomfret, that the two possibly criminal incidents in Joanna Troy’s life were both school-related. First there was the assault on the fourteen-year-old, then the alleged theft. Was the school aspect significant? Or was it merely coincidence?

   Brendon Lockhart was a widower. He told Wexford this within two minutes of the policemen entering the house. Perhaps it was only to account for his living alone, yet in almost chilling order and neatness. It was a cottage he had, Victorian, detached, surrounded by what would very likely be a calendar candidate garden in the summer. He showed them into a living room entirely free of clutter, a characterless place rather like the kind of photograph seen in Sunday supplements advertising loose covers. Instinctively, Wexford knew no tea would be offered. He sat down gingerly on pristine floral chintz. Vine perched on the edge of an upright chair, its arms polished like glass.

   ‘The school, yes,’ said Lockhart. ‘A woman took over from me, you know. I don’t usually care for new importations into our vocabulary but I make an exception for “pushy”. A very good word “pushy’. It perfectly describes Dame Flora Gregg. What a farce, wasn’t it, giving a woman like that a title? I only met her once but I found her overbearing, didactic, distressingly left-wing and pushy. But women rule the world now, don’t they? How they have taken over our schools! Haldon Finch also have a woman head now, I hear. In an amazingly short time women have completely taken over, they have pushed themselves into every sphere once prohibited to them. I am very glad to see two policemen calling on me.’

   ‘In that case, Mr Lockhart,’ said Wexford, ‘perhaps you won’t mind answering some questions about two former pupils of yours, Joanna Troy and Ludovic Brown.’

   Lockhart was a small man, thin and spry, his face pink and smooth for his age, his white hair more evenly distributed than Ralph Jennings’s. But as he spoke that face contorted and stretched, taking on a skull-like look. ‘So glad to hear you use that word. “Pupil”, I mean. “Student” would be favoured by the good Dame, no doubt.’

   How very much Wexford would have liked to ask him if he’d thought of seeing someone about his paranoia. Of course he couldn’t. ‘Joanna Troy, sir. And Ludovic Brown.’

   ‘That was the young lady who mounted a savage attack on the boy, wasn’t it? Yes. In the cloakroom, if I remember rightly. After the Drama Group, as I was expected to call the Dramatic Society I believe she alleged afterwards that he’d done something to annoy her while they were rehearsing some play. Yes, I recall. Androcles and the Lion, it was. A choice much favoured by school dramatic societies, largely, I believe, because it has such a large cast.’

   ‘He was quite badly injured, wasn’t he, though no bones were broken?’

   ‘He had two black eyes. He had a lot of bruises.’

   ‘But the police weren’t called, nor an ambulance? I’ve been told it was hushed up.’

   Lockhart looked a little uncomfortable. He twisted up his face into a gargoyle mask before answering. ‘The boy wanted it that way. We sent for the parents - well, the mother. I believe there was a divorce in the offing. There usually is these days, isn’t there? She agreed with her son. Let’s not have any fuss, she said.’

   The boy had been only fourteen. Wexford tried to remember something about Androcles and the Lion but could only recall Ancient Rome and Christians thrown to wild beasts. ‘Ludovic would have been an extra, would he? A slave or minor Christian?’

   ‘Oh, yes, something like that. I believe she said he tripped her up or made a face at her or something. I do know it was totally trivial. By the by, it wasn’t leukaemia he died of. I think you said leukaemia?’

   Wexford nodded.

   ‘No, no, no. He had leukaemia, that part is true, but it was controlled by some drug or other. My dear late wife knew the boy’s grandmother. She was charwoman or some kind of servant to a friend. My wife told me what this woman told her. No, what happened was that he fell to his death off a cliff.’ 

   Vine said, “Where was this, sir?’

   ‘I’m coming to that. Let me finish. His mother and - well, stepfather, I suppose. He may have been Mrs Brown’s paramour, I know nothing of these things. They took him on a holiday to somewhere on the south coast, not all that far. He went out alone one afternoon and fell off a cliff. It was really a very tragic business. There was an inquest but no suspicious circumstances, as you would put it. He was weak, he wasn’t able to walk far, and the suggestion was that he was too near the edge and he collapsed.’

   Wexford got up. ‘Thank you, Mr Lockhart. You’ve been very helpful.’

   ‘I heard Joanna Troy had become a teacher. Can that be right? She was a most unsuitable woman to be in charge of children.’

‘So where was Joanna while Ludovic Brown was in Eastbourne or Hastings or whatever?’

   Wexford asked this rhetorical question of Burden while they shared a pot of tea in his office. And how are we going to find that out?’ said Burden. ‘It must have been - let’s see - eight years ago. I suppose she was teaching at Haldon Finch. Shacked up with Jennings, though not yet married to him. No reason why she shouldn’t have popped down to the south coast for a couple of hours. It wouldn’t be much of a drive.’

   ‘There seems to be some doubt as to what Brown did to annoy her. Insulted her mother, says Jennings. Tripped her up or made a face, says Lockhart. ‘Which is it? Or is it both? Did she still know Ludovic Brown? Had she ever really known him beyond being somehow insulted or affronted by him at a play rehearsal? ‘When they were both teenagers?’

   ‘There’s a possible yes to all that if she’s a criminal psychopath.’

   ‘We’ve no evidence that she is. If you don’t want another cup we’ll make our way chez Brown. Lynn found her in a flat at Stowerton and she’s still called Brown in spite of the paramour.’

   ‘The what?’

   ‘It’s what that old dinosaur Lockhart called him.’

   It looked as if Jacqueline Brown had done far less well out of her divorce than Joanna Troy had from hers. Her home was half a house in Rhombus Road, Stowerton, and the house had been small to start with. The front window overlooked the one-way traffic system. Thumps, a heavy beat and the voice of Eminem penetrated the wall that divided this flat from next door. Jacqueline Brown thumped on it with her fist and the volume was very slightly reduced.

   ‘I don’t know why she attacked Ludo.’ Her voice was weary, greyish, like her appearance. Life had drained her of colour and joy and energy, and it showed. ‘Silly name, isn’t it? It was his father’s choice. That girl Joanna, he didn’t even know her, she was a lot older than him. Well, it’s a lot older when you’re in your teens. She’d never done it before to anyone, or so they said. And all he’d done was make a face at her when she was acting that part. He put out his tongue, that’s all.’

   ‘I’m sorry to have to ask you these questions, Mrs Brown,’ said Wexford. ‘I will try to make them as pain less as possible. You took your son on holiday in 1993 - to where exactly?’

   ‘Me and my partner it was. He’s called Mr Wilkins. It was his idea, he’s always kind. We went to Eastbourne, stayed with his sister.’

   Burden intervened. ‘Neither you nor your son had ever encountered Ms Troy since her assault on Ludovic?’

   ‘No, never. Why would we? Ludo went for a walk most afternoons. The doctor said it was good for him. Mr Wilkins usually went too but that day he’d got a bad, foot, couldn’t hardly put it to the ground, we don’t know what it was, never did know, but the upshot was he couldn’t walk so Ludo went alone. Most times he was only out twenty minutes at the most. This time he never came back.’

   Footsteps sounded on the stairs, the door opened and a man came in. He was short and round, and he had several chins. He was introduced as ‘Mr Wilkins’. Wexford wished Lockhart could see him. That might stop him describing this unromantic man as a ‘paramour’. ‘We were discussing Ludovic’s unfortunate death.’

   ‘Oh, yes?’

   At the arrival of her partner, Jacqueline Brown ha brightened. Now she repeated what she had said earlier but in a far more cheerful voice. ‘Silly name, isn’t it? It was my husband’s choice.’

   ‘You want to know where he got it from?’ Wilkins sat down and took Jacqueline’s hand. ‘He’d been reading a book.’ He spoke as if this was an esoteric activity comparable perhaps to collecting sigmodonts or studying metaplasm. ‘A book called Ten Rillington Place by Ludovic Kennedy - see? Funny thing, that, calling your only child after the author of a book about a serial killer.’