Wolf to the Slaughter (15 page)

‘What were you doing in Stowerton on Tuesday night?’ Wexford snapped.

‘I don’t have to tell you that.’ He said it limply, not defiantly. Then he unbuttoned his coat as if he had suddenly grown hot.

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ said Burden, ‘not if you’re going. As you said yesterday we can’t keep you here.’

Kirkpatrick stood up. He looked weary to the point of distress. ‘I can go?’ He fumbled with his coat belt, his fingers jerking. ‘There’s nothing more I can tell you, anyway.’

‘Perhaps it’ll come to you,’ Wexford said. ‘I’ll tell you what, we’ll drop by later in the day.’

‘When the children are in bed,’ Burden added. ‘May be your wife knows what you were doing in Stowerton.’

‘If you do that,’ Kirkpatrick said fiercely, ‘you’ll lose me my children.’ Breathing heavily, he turned his face to the wall.

‘He can cool off in there with Drayton for company,’ Wexford said over a cup of coffee in the Carousel Café. It was opposite the police station and he preferred it to their canteen. His entry always had the effect of clearing the place of less desirable elements and now they were alone with the espresso machine, the rubber plants and the jukebox playing Mantovani.

‘Funny Ruby recognising him like that,’ said Burden, ‘yet not being sure she recognised him as Geoff Smith.’

‘I don’t know, Mike. According to your moral code and may be mine too, his behaviour wasn’t exactly ethical, but it wasn’t suspicious. She wouldn’t have taken much notice of him.’

‘Enough to know he was short, young and dark. Kirkpatrick’s not that short, must be five feet eight or nine. It’s the alias that puzzles me. Smith’s obvious, but why Geoff? Why not John, for heaven’s sake, or William?’

‘May be Geoffrey is Kirkpatrick’s middle name. We’ll have to ask him.’ Wexford drew his chair in from the gangway. A slim fair girl in skirt and sweater had come into the café and was making for a table beyond the room divider. ‘Little Miss Grover,’ he whispered. ‘Let off the lead for once. If her father was up and about she wouldn’t have the chance to pop out even for five minutes.’

‘I’ve heard he’s a bit of a tyrant,’ Burden said, watching the girl. Her expression was dreamy, far away. ‘Wonder what he was up to, slipping a disc? It’s not as if he did manual work.’

‘Save your detecting for what you get paid for,’ said Wexford with a grin.

Linda Grover had ordered a raspberry milk shake. Burden watched her suck it up through a straw and look round with faint embarrassment as the straw made gurgling sounds in the dregs. A little drift of pink foam clung to her upper lip. Her hair, soft and satiny as a child’s, was yet another golden eye-catcher on this golden day. ‘Regular customer of theirs, Kirkpatrick,’ he said. ‘Buys his evening paper there. I wonder if he bought a knife too?’

‘Let’s go back and see,’ said Wexford. The sun and the warmth made their walk across the street too short. ‘Makes all the difference to the place, doesn’t it?’ he said as they passed up the steps and the cold stone walls of the police station enclosed them.

Drayton sat at one end of the office, Kirkpatrick at the other. They looked like strangers, indifferent, faintly antagonistic, waiting for a train. Kirkpatrick looked up, his mouth twitching.

‘I thought you were never coming,’ he said desperately to Wexford. ‘If I tell you what I was doing in Stowerton you’ll think I’m mad.’

Better a madman than a murderer, Wexford thought. He drew up a chair. ‘Try me.’

‘She wouldn’t come out with me,’ Kirkpatrick mumbled, ‘on account of that damned car. I didn’t believe she was going to that party, so,’ he said defiantly, ‘I went to Stowerton to check up on her. I got there at eight and I waited for hours and hours. She didn’t come. God, I just sat there and waited and when she didn’t come I knew she’d lied to me. I knew she’d found someone richer, younger, harder – Oh, what the hell!’ He gave a painful cough. ‘That’s all I did,’ he said, ‘waited.’ He lifted his eyes to Burden. ‘When you found me yesterday morning at the cottage, I was going to tell her, ask her who she thought she was to cheat on me!’

Black against the sunlight, Drayton stood staring his contempt. What was he thinking? Wexford wondered. That he with his dark glow of virility, a glow that today was almost insolent, could never be brought so low?

‘It got dark,’ Kirkpatrick said. ‘I parked my car by the side of Cawthorne’s under a tree. They were making a hell of a racket in there, shouting and playing music. She never came. The only person to come out was a drunk spouting Omar Khayyám. I was there for three hours, oh, more than that . . .’

Wexford moved closer to the desk, folded his hands and rested his wrists on the rosewood. ‘Mr Kirkpatrick,’ he said gravely, ‘this story of yours may be true, but you must realise that to me it sounds a bit thin. Can you produce anyone who might help to verify it?’

Kirkpatrick said bitterly, ‘That’s my affair, isn’t it? You’ve done your job. I’ve never heard of the police hunting up witnesses to disprove their own case.’

‘Then you have a lot to learn. We’re not here to make “cases” but to see right is done.’ Wexford paused. Three hours, he thought. That covered the time of arrival at Ruby’s house, the time when the neighbour heard the crash, the time when two people staggered from the house. ‘You must have seen the party guests arriving. Didn’t they see you?’

‘I put the car right down the side turning till it got dark, down by the side of the launderette.’ His face grew sullen. ‘That girl saw me,’ he said.

‘What girl?’

‘The girl from Grover’s shop.’

‘You saw her at seven when you bought your evening paper,’ Wexford said, trying to keep his patience. ‘What you were doing at seven isn’t relevant.’

A sulky flush settled on Kirkpatrick’s face. ‘I saw her again,’ he said. ‘In Stowerton.’

‘You didn’t mention it before.’ This time impatience had got the upper hand and every word was edged with testiness.

‘I’m sick of being made to look a fool,’ Kirkpatrick said resentfully. ‘I’m sick of it. If I get out of this I’m going to chuck in my job. May Be someone’s got to flog soap and powder and lipstick, but not me. I’d rather be out of work.’ He clenched his hands. ‘If I get out of this,’ he said.

‘The girl,’ said Wexford. ‘Where did you see the girl?’

‘I was down the side road by the back of the launderette, just a little way down. She was coming along in a car and she stopped at the traffic lights. I was standing by my car, then. Don’t ask me what time it was. I wouldn’t know.’ He drew his breath in sharply. ‘She looked at me and giggled. But she won’t remember. I was just a joke to her, a customer who’d kept her late. She saw me standing by that thing and it was good for a laugh.
Lipdew!
I reckon she thinks about me and has a good laugh every time she washes her . . .’

Drayton’s face had gone white and he stepped forward, his fingers closing into fists. Wexford interposed swiftly to cut off the last word, the word that might have been innocent or obscene.

‘In that case,’ he said, ‘she will remember, won’t she?’

Sunshine is a great healer, especially when it is the first mild sunshine of spring. Paradoxically it cooled Drayton’s anger. Crossing the street, he was once more in command of himself and he could think calmly and even derisively of Kirkpatrick. The man was an oaf, a poor thing with a pansy’s job, emasculate, pointed at and pilloried by women. He had a pink and mauve car and he peddled cosmetics. Some day a perfume plutocrat would make him dress up in a harlequin suit with a powder puff on his head, make him knock on doors and give soap away to any housewife who could produce a coupon and sing out a slogan. He was a puppet and a slave.

The shop was empty. This must be a time of lull, lunchtime. The bell rang loudly because he was slow to close the door. Sunlight made the shop look frowstier than ever. Motes of dust hung and danced in its beams. He stood, listening to the pandemonium his ringing had called forth from upstairs, running feet, something that sounded like the dropping of a saucepan lid, a harsh bass voice calling, ‘Get down the shop, Lin, for God’s sake.’

She came in, running, a tea towel in her hand. When she saw him the anxiety went out of her face and she looked petulant. ‘You’re early,’ she said, ‘hours early.’ Then she smiled and there was something in her eyes he was not sure that he liked, a look of conquest and of complacency. He supposed that she thought him impatient to be with her. Their date was for the evening and he had come at half past one. That was what they always wanted, to make you weak, malleable in their long frail hands. Then they kicked you aside. Look at Kirkpatrick. ‘I can’t come out,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the shop to see to.’

‘You can come where I’m taking you,’ Drayton said harshly. He forgot his rage at Kirkpatrick’s words, the passion of last night, the tenderness that had begun. What was she, after all? A shop assistant – and what a shop! A shop girl, afraid of her father, a skivvy with a tea cloth. ‘Police station,’ he said.

Her eyes went very wide. ‘You what? Are you trying to be funny or something.’

He had heard the stories about Grover, the things he sold over the counter – and under it. ‘It’s nothing to do with your father,’ he said.

‘What do they want me for? Is it about the advert?’

‘In a way,’ he said. ‘Look, it’s nothing, just routine.

‘Mark,’ she said, ‘Mark, you tried to frighten me.’ The sun flowed down her body in a river of gold. It’s only a physical thing, he thought, just an itch and a rather worse one than usual. Repeat last night often enough and it would go. She came up to him, smiling, a little nervous. ‘I know you don’t mean it, but you mustn’t frighten me.’ The smile teased him.

He stood quite still, the sun between them like a sword. He wanted her so badly that it took all his strength and all his self-control to turn and say, ‘Let’s go. Tell your parents you won’t be long.’ She was gone two minutes, leaving behind her a breath of something fresh and sweet to nullify the smell of old worn-out things. He moved about the shop, trying to find things to look at that were not cheap or meretricious or squalid. When she came back he saw that she had neither changed her clothes nor put on make-up. This both pleased and riled him. It seemed to imply an arrogance, a careless disregard of other people’s opinion, which matched his own. He did not want them to have things in common. Enough that they should desire each other and find mutual satisfaction at a level he understood.

‘How’s your father?’ he said and when he said it he realised it was a foolish catch-phrase. She laughed at him.

‘Did you mean that or were you fooling?’

‘I meant it.’ Damn her for reading thoughts!

‘He’s all right,’ she said. ‘No, he’s not. He says he’s in agony. You can’t tell, can you, with what he’s got? It’s not as if there was anything to show.’

‘Seems to me he’s a slave driver,’ he said.

‘They’re all slave drivers. Better your own dad than some man.’ At the door she basked in the sun, stretching her body like a long golden animal. ‘When they talk to me,’ she said, ‘you’ll be there, won’t you?’

‘Sure I’ll be there.’ He closed the door behind them. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said, ‘or I’ll want to do what I did last night.’ You could want it like mad, he thought, and still laugh. You could with this girl. My God, he thought, my God!

There was, Wexford thought, something between those two. No doubt Drayton had been chatting her up on the way. Only that would account for the look she had given him before sitting down, a look that seemed to be asking for permission. Well, he had always supposed Drayton susceptible and the girl was pretty enough. He had seen her about since she was a child but it seemed to him that he had never before noticed the exquisite shape of her head, the peculiar virginal grace with which she moved.

‘Now, Miss Grover,’ he said, ‘I just want you to answer a few routine questions.’ She smiled faintly at him. They ought not to be allowed to look like that, he thought wryly, so demure, so perfect and so untouched. ‘I believe you know a Mr Kirkpatrick? He’s a customer of yours.’

‘Is he?’ Drayton was standing behind her chair and she looked up at him, perhaps for reassurance. Wexford felt mildly irritated. Who the hell did Drayton think he was? Her solicitor?

If you don’t recognise the name, perhaps you know his car. You probably saw it outside just now.’

‘A funny pink car with flowers on it?’ Wexford nodded. ‘Oh, I know
him
.’

‘Very well. Now I want you to cast your mind back to last Tuesday night. Did you go to Stowerton that evening?’

‘Yes,’ she said quickly, ‘I always do on Tuesdays. I take our washing to the launderette in my dad’s car.’ She paused, weariness coming into her young fresh face. ‘My dad’s ill and Mum goes to a whist drive most nights.’

Why play on my sympahies? Wexford thought. The hint of tyranny seemed to be affecting Drayton. His dark face looked displeased and his mouth had tightened. ‘All right, Drayton,’ he said, not unpleasantly, ‘I shan’t need you any longer.’

When they were alone, she said before he had time to ask her, ‘Did Mr What’s-his-name see me? I saw him.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Oh, yes. I know him. I’d served him with an evening paper earlier.’

‘It wasn’t just the car you identified, Miss Grover, not just an empty car?’

She put up one hand to smooth the soft shiny knob of hair. ‘I didn’t know the car. He used to have a different one.’ She gave a nervous giggle. ‘When I saw him in it and knew it was his it made me laugh. He thinks such a lot of himself, you see, and then that car . . .’

Wexford watched her. She was far from being at ease. On her answer to his next question, the significant question, so much depended. Kirkpatrick’s fate hung upon it. If he had lied . . .

‘What time was it?’ he asked.

‘Late,’ she said firmly. Her lips were like two almond petals, her teeth perfect. It seemed a pity she showed them so seldom. ‘I’d been to the launderette. I was going home. It must have been just after a quarter past nine.’ He sighed within himself. Whoever had been at Ruby’s had certainly been there at nine fifteen. ‘I’d stopped at the traffic lights,’ she said virtuously. God, he thought, she’s like a child, she doesn’t differentiate between me and a traffic cop. Did she expect him to congratulate her? ‘He’d parked that car down by the side of the garage . . .’