Wolf to the Slaughter (11 page)

‘Just to talk to him.’

Mrs Kirkpatrick seemed more interested in listening to the sound of her own voice and airing grievances than eliciting reasons from Martin. ‘If he’s been speeding again,’ she said, ‘he’ll lose his licence. Then he’ll lose his job.’ Far from being concerned, her voice held a note of triumph. ‘A firm like
Lipdew
aren’t going to keep on a salesman who can’t drive a car, are they? Any more than they’re going to give their people great showy cars for them to smash to smithereens just when it takes their fancy. I told him so before he went to Scotland. I told him on Tuesday morning. That’s why he never came in for his dinner Tuesday night. But he can’t be told. Pig-headed and stubborn he is and now it’s got him into trouble.’

Martin backed away from her. A barrage of gunfire would be preferable to this. As he went down the path he heard one of the children crying in the house behind him.

Monkey Matthews was lying on his bed, smoking, when Wexford went into the cell. He raised himself on one elbow and said, ‘They told me it was your day off.’

‘So it is, but I thought you might be lonely.’ Wexford shook his head reprovingly and looked round the small room, sniffing the air. ‘How the rich live!’ he said. ‘Want me to send out for more of your dope? You can afford it, Monkey.’

‘I don’t want nothing,’ Monkey said, turning his face to the wall, ‘except to be left alone. This place is more like a goods yard than a nick. I never got a wink of sleep last night.’

‘That’s your conscience, Monkey, the still, small voice that keeps urging you to tell me something, like, for instance, how you knew the girl’s name was Ann.’

Monkey groaned. ‘Can’t you give it a rest? My nerves are in a shocking state.’

‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ Wexford said unkindly. ‘Must be the result of my psychological warfare.’ He went out into the corridor and upstairs to Burden’s office. The inspector had just come in and was taking off his raincoat.

‘It’s your day off.’

‘My wife was threatening to cart me off to church. This seemed the lesser evil. How are we doing?’

‘Martin’s been talking to Mrs Kirkpatrick.’

‘Ah, the wife of Anita Margolis’s current boyfriend.’

Burden sat down by the window. This morning the sun was shining, not after the fashion of fitful April sunshine but with the strength and warmth of early summer. He raised the blind and opened the window, letting in with the soft light the clear crescendo of bells from Kingsmarkham church steeple.

‘I think we may be on to something there, sir,’ he said. ‘Kirkpatrick’s away, travelling for his firm in Scotland. He went off on Tuesday and the wife hasn’t seen him since. Moreover, he used to have a black car, had it up until last Monday, when his firm gave him a new one, white thing apparently, plastered all over with advertising gimmicks,’ he chuckled. ‘The wife’s a harridan. Thought he’d smashed the car when she saw Martin, but she didn’t turn a hair.’ His face hardening slightly, he went on, ‘I’m not one to condone adultery, as you know, but it looks as if there may have been some justification for it here.’

‘Is he small and dark?’ Wexford asked with a pained look at the open window. He moved closer to the central heating vent.

‘Don’t know. Martin didn’t care to go into too many details with the wife. It’s not as if we’ve much to go on.’ Wexford nodded a grudging approval. ‘Ah, well,’ Burden said, getting up. ‘Margolis may be able to help us there. For an artist he’s a rotten observer, but he has
seen
the man.’ He reached for his coat. ‘Lovely sound those bells.’

‘Eh?’

‘I said the bells were lovely.’

‘What?’ said Wexford. ‘Can’t hear a word you say for the sound of those bloody bells.’ He grinned hugely at the ancient joke. ‘You might have a look-in on Monkey on your way out. Just in case he’s getting tired of holding out on us.’

After careful examination by the police and a session at a garage to have its radiator repaired, Anita Margolis’s Alpine had been restored to its parking place on the grass verge outside Quince Cottage. Burden was not surprised to find it there, but his eyebrows went up as he saw ahead of him the rears of not one white car but two. He parked his own behind them and came out into the sunshine. As he walked up to it he saw that the new arrival was white only in that this was its background colour. Along its sides a band perhaps a foot wide had been painted in bright pink, adorned with sprays of purple flowers. This particular shade of purple had been used for the lettering above it:
Lipdew, Paintbox for a Prettier You
.

Burden grinned to himself. Only a brazen extrovert would enjoy being seen about in this car. He glanced through a side window at the pink seats. They were littered with leaflets and on the dashboard shelf were samples of the stuff the driver peddled, bottles and jars presumably, done up in mauve packages and tied with gold cord.

There could hardly be two cars in Sussex like this. Kirkpatrick must be somewhere about. Burden unlatched the gate and entered the cottage garden. The wind had scattered the petals of the quince blossom and underfoot the ground was slippery scarlet. When nobody answered his knock, he went round the side of the house and saw that the doors of the garage where Margolis kept his own car were open and the car gone.

Fat buds on the apple branches brushed his face and all around him he could hear the soft twittering of birds. The atmosphere and appearance of rustic peace was somewhat marred by the ragged sheets of paper, vestiges of Margolis’s inexpert tidying up, which still clung to bushes and in places fluttered in the treetops. Burden stopped by the back door. A man in a stone-coloured belted raincoat was standing on a wooden box and peering in at the kitchen window.

Unseen, Burden watched him in silence for a moment. Then he coughed. The man jumped, turned to face him, and came slowly down from his perch.

‘There’s nobody in,’ he said diffidently, and then, ‘I was just checking.’ The man was undeniably good-looking, pale, dapper and with curling dark brown hair. The chin was small, the nose straight and the eyes liquid and lashed like a girl’s.

‘I’d like a word with you, Mr Kirkpatrick.’

‘How d’you know my name? I don’t know you.’ Now that they were standing level with each other, Burden noted that he was perhaps five feet eight inches tall.

‘I recognised your car,’ he said. The effect of this was electric. Two dark red spots appeared on Kirkpatrick’s sallow cheekbones.

‘What the hell does that mean?’ he said angrily.

Burden looked at him mildly. ‘You said no one was in. Who were you looking for?’

‘That’s it, is it?’ Kirkpatrick took a deep breath, clenching his fists. ‘I know who you are.’ He nodded absurdly and with grim satisfaction. ‘You’re a snooper, what they call an enquiry agent. I suppose my wife put you on to me.’

‘I’ve never seen your wife,’ said Burden, ‘but I’m certainly an enquiry agent. More commonly called a police officer.’

‘I overheard you asking the sergeant where you could hire a car,’ Wexford said.

‘In my lunch hour, sir,’ Drayton replied quickly.

Wexford shook his head impatiently. ‘All right, man, all right. Don’t make me out an ogre. You can hire an articulated lorry for all I care and you won’t do it in your lunch hour, you’ll do it now. There are only three firms in the district doing car hire, Missal’s and Cawthorne’s in Stowerton and the Red Star where you took Miss Margolis’s in York Street here. What we want to know is if anyone hired a green car from them last Tuesday.’

After Drayton had gone, he sat down to think it all out and to try to solve the enigma of the cars. The man called Geoff Smith had used a black car on Saturday, a green one on Tuesday, if Mrs Collins could be believed. He thought she could. Last night he and Bryant had tested a black car under the pearly lamplight in Sparta Grove and it had remained black. He had looked at it through clear glass and through stained glass. No amount of contriving or exercise of the imagination could make it green. Did that mean that Geoff Smith possessed two cars, or that on Sunday or Monday he had sold the black one and bought a green? Or could it be that because his new car was conspicuous, he had hired the green one for his dubious and clandestine adventure?

Drayton, too, asked himself these questions as the tumultuous ringing of the church bells ceased and he turned the corner into York Street. In the strengthening sunshine the rhinestone ropes glittered at him from the window of Joy Jewels. He thought of the silver chain Linda wore around her neck and simultaneously of that smooth warm skin, silky to his touch.

He had to shake himself and tighten his mouth before going into the Red Star Garage. They showed him two ageing red Hillmans and he turned away to catch the bus for Stowerton. There he found Russell Cawthorne in his office. On the one bit of solid wall behind his head was a calendar of a girl wearing three powder puffs and a pair of high-heeled shoes. Drayton looked at it with contempt and a certain unease. It reminded him of the magazines in Grover’s shop. Cawthorne sat up stiffly when Drayton told him who he was and gave a brisk nod, the C in C receiving a promising subaltern.

‘’Morning. Sit down. More trouble brewing?’

Affected old bore, Drayton thought. ‘I want to ask you about hiring cars. You do hire cars, don’t you?’

‘My dear boy, I thought you were here in your official capacity, but if you just . . .’

‘I am. This is an official question. What colour are they, these hire cars of yours?’

Cawthorne opened a fanlight. The fresh air made him cough. ‘What colour are they? They’re all the same. Three black Morris Minors.’

‘Were any of them hired on Saturday, the third?’

‘Now when would that have been laddie?’

‘Last week. There’s a calendar behind you.’ Cawthorne’s face darkened to an even maroon. ‘It’ll be in the book,’ he muttered.

The book looked well-kept. Cawthorne opened it and turned back a few pages, frowning slightly. ‘I remember that morning,’ he said. ‘I lost my best mechanic. Impertinent young devil, treating the place like he owned it. I gave him the push, lost my temper . . .’ Drayton fidgeted impatiently. ‘About the cars,’ Cawthorne said moodily. ‘No, they were all in.’

‘What about sales? You wouldn’t have sold anyone a green car about that time?’

One of the veined, not very steady hands, went up to twitch at his moustache. ‘My business hasn’t been exactly booming.’ He hesitated, eyeing Drayton warily. ‘I’ll tell you frankly,’ he said, ‘I haven’t made a sale since Mr Grover took delivery of his Mini in February.’

Drayton felt his face grow hot. The name was enough to do it. ‘I want to hire a car myself,’ he said. ‘For tonight.’

Blustering, confident as only the weak can be, Alan Kirkpatrick stood defiantly in Wexford’s office. He had refused to sit down and a constantly reiterated, ‘Rubbish’ and ‘I don’t believe it’ had greeted Wexford’s hints as to Anita Margolis’s probable death.

‘In that case,’ Wexford said, ‘you won’t mind telling us about your movements last Tuesday, the night you had a date with her.’

‘A date?’ Kirkpatrick gave a short sneering laugh. ‘I like the way you put it. I got to know that woman solely because I’m keen on art. The only way to get into that place and look at Margolis’s pictures was through her.’

Burden got up from his corner where he had been sitting quietly and said, ‘Interested in his work, are you? So am I. I’ve been trying to remember the name of that thing he’s got in the Tate. Perhaps you can refresh my memory.’

That it was so obviously a trap did not derogate from its significance as a question and a question which, if Kirkpatrick were to sustain his role as a seeker after artistic enlightenment, must be answered. His soft mobile mouth twitched.

‘I don’t know what he calls them,’ he muttered.

‘Funny,’ said Burden. ‘Any admirer of Margolis would surely know “Nothing”.’ For a moment Wexford himself stared. Then he recalled the
Weekend Telegraph
lying close to his hand in the desk drawer. As he listened to the inspector who had suddenly launched into an esoteric review of modern art, he was lost in admiration. Instead of reaching for his gun, Burden had evidently reached for a work of reference. Kirkpatrick, also perhaps overcome, sat down abruptly, his face puzzled and aggressive.

‘I don’t have to answer you questions,’ he said.

‘Quite right,’ Wexford said kindly. ‘As you rightly say, we can’t even prove Miss Margolis is dead.’ And he nodded sagely as if Kirkpatrick’s wisdom had recalled him from sensational dreams to reality. ‘No, we’ll just make a note that you were probably the last person to see her alive.’

‘Look,’ said Kirkpatrick, on the edge of his chair but making no move to get up, ‘my wife’s a very jealous woman . . .’

‘Seems to be infectious in your family. I’d have said it was jealousy made you threaten Miss Margolis a couple of weeks ago.’ Wexford quoted Mrs Penistan. ‘“I might kill you myself one of these fine days”. Was last Tuesday one of those fine days? Funny way to talk to a woman you were only interested in because of her brother’s painting, wasn’t it?’

‘That date, as you call it, she never kept it. I didn’t go out with her.’

Ruby would know him again. Wexford cursed the paucity of their evidence. He did not think it would be an easy matter to persuade this man to take part in an identification parade. Kirkpatrick’s confidence had been slightly shaken by Burden’s questions, but as he sat back in the chair some of his bravado seemed to return. With a look that was part impatience, part resignation, he took out a pocket-comb and began to arrange his curly hair.

‘We’re not interested in your wife’s possible divorce proceedings,’ Wexford said. ‘If you’re frank with us there’s no reason why it should go further, certainly not to your wife’s ears.’

‘There’s nothing to be frank about,’ Kirkpatrick said in a less belligerent tone. ‘I was going up North on Tuesday for my firm. It’s true I’d arranged to meet Miss Margolis before I went. She was going to show me some of Margolis’s – er, early work. He wouldn’t have had it if he’d been there but he was going out.’ Wexford raised his eyes and met Burden’s calm, polite gaze. How green and gullible did this cosmetic salesman think they were? This story which seemed to fill its teller with pride was so near what Wexford called the ‘old etching gag’ that he could hardly suppress a chuckle of derision. Early work, indeed! ‘I was going home first for a meal but I was late and it was seven when I got to Kingsmarkham. Grover’s were closing and I remember that girl made a bit of a scene because I wanted my evening paper. There wasn’t time to go home then, so I went straight round to Pump Lane. Ann – Miss Margolis, that is – had forgotten all about me coming. She said she was going to a party. And that’s all.’