Wolf to the Slaughter (8 page)

‘Can I have a word with you, sir?’

‘The only person you need a word with is a barber,’ Burden snapped. ‘Four words to be precise. Short back and sides.’ Drayton’s face was impassive, secretive, intelligent. ‘Oh, very well, what is it?’

‘An advert in Grover’s window. I thought we might be interested.’ From his pocket he took a neat flat notebook and opening it, read aloud: ‘Quiet secluded room to let for evenings. Suit student or anyone wanting to get away from it all. Privacy guaranteed. Apply, 82, Charteris Road, Stowerton.’

Burden’s nostrils contracted in distaste. Drayton was not responsible for the advertisement, he told himself, he had only found it. Indeed it was to his credit that he
had
found it. Why then feel that this kind of thing, so squalid, so redolent of nasty things done in nasty corners, was right up his street?

‘Grover’s again, eh?’ said Wexford when they told him. ‘So this is their latest racket, is it? Last year it was – er, curious books. This place gets more like the Charing Cross Road every day.’ He gave a low chuckle which Burden would not have been surprised to hear Drayton echo. The fellow was a sycophant if ever there was one. But Drayton’s olive-skinned face was wary. Burden would have said he looked ashamed except that he could not think of any reason why he should be.

‘Remember the time when all the school kids were getting hold of flick knives and we knew for sure it was Grover but we couldn’t pin it on him? And those magazines he sells. How would you like your daughter to read them?’

Wexford shrugged. ‘They’re not for daughters, Mike, they’re for sons, and you don’t
read
them. Before we get around to convening the purity committee, we’d better do something about this ad.’ He fixed his eyes speculatively on Drayton. ‘You’re a likely lad, Mark.’ It irked Burden to hear the Chief Inspector address Drayton, as he very occasionally did, by his Christian name. ‘You look the part.’

‘The part, sir?’

‘We’ll cast you as a student wanting to get away from it all, shall we, Inspector Burden?’ Still viewing Drayton, he added, ‘I can’t see any of the rest of us capering nimbly in a lady’s chamber.’

The first time they went to the door there was no answer. It was a corner house, its front on Charteris Road, its side with a short dilapidated fence, bordering Sparta Grove. While Burden waited in the car, Drayton followed this fence to its termination in a lane that ran between the backs of gardens. Here the stone wall was too high to see over, but Drayton found a gate in it, locked but affording through its cracks a view of the garden of number eighty-two. On a clothes line, attached at one end to the wall and at the other to a hook above a rear window of the house, hung a wet carpet from which water dripped on to a brick path.

The house was seventy or eighty years old but redeemed from the slumminess of its neighbours by a certain shipshape neatness. The yard was swept – a clean broom stood with its head against the house wall – and the back step had been whitened. All the windows were closed and hung with crisp net curtains. As Drayton contemplated these windows, a curtain in one, probably the back bedroom, was slightly raised and a small wizened face looked out. Drayton put his foot on a projecting hunk of stone and hoisted himself up until his head and shoulders were above the grass-grown top of the wall. The brown simian face was still there. Its eyes met his and there appeared in them a look of terror, surely out of proportion to the offence or to the retribution for that offence the occupants of the house might be supposed to have committed. The face disappeared quickly and Drayton returned to the car.

‘There’s someone in,’ he said to Burden.

‘I daresay there is. Apart from the fact that we can’t force an entry over a thing like this, making a rumpus would rather defeat the object of the exercise, wouldn’t it?’

Theirs was just one of twenty or thirty cars lining Sparta Grove. At this end of the street there were neither garages nor space for them.

‘Someone’s coming now,’ Drayton said suddenly.

Burden looked up. A woman pushing a shopping basket on wheels was opening the gate of the corner house. Her head was tied up in a coloured scarf and she wore a coat with a huge showy fur collar. As the door closed behind her, he said:

‘I know her. Her name’s Branch, Mrs Ruby Branch. She used to live in Sewingbury.’

‘Is she one of our customers?’

This use, on Drayton’s lips, of one of Wexford’s favourite terms, displeased Burden. It seemed not so much an accidental echo as a calculated and ingratiating mimicry of the Chief Inspector’s racy style. ‘We’ve had her for shoplifting,’ he said stiffly, ‘larceny as a servant and various other things. This is a new departure. You’d better go in and do your stuff.’

She subjected him to a careful and at first alarmed scrutiny through the glass panel of the door before opening it. The alarm faded and the door gave a few inches. Drayton put his foot on the mat.

‘I understand you have a room to let.’ He spoke pleasantly and she was disarmed. She smiled, showing excellent false teeth with lipstick on them. The scarf and the coat had not yet been removed and between the feather boa-like sides of her collar he could see a frilly blouse covering a fine bosom. The face was middle-aged – early fifties, Drayton thought – and bravely painted particularly about the eyelids. ‘I happened to see your advert in Grover’s window, Mrs Er . . . ?’

‘No names, no pack drill, dear,’ she said. ‘Just call me Ruby.’

‘OK, Ruby.’

The door was closed behind him and he found himself in a tiny narrow hall, its floor covered in cheap bright red nylon carpet. On the threshold of the front room he stopped, staring, and his face must have shown his astonishment, for she said quickly:

‘Don’t take any notice of the bare boards, duckie. I like everything to be spick and span, you see, and I’m just giving the carpet a bit of an airing.’

‘Spring-cleaning, eh?’ Drayton said. All the furniture had been moved back against the walls. There was a three-piece suite, covered in moquette, whose pattern showed what seemed like, but surely could not be, blue fishes swimming through a tangle of red and pink climbing roses. On a huge television set stood a naked lady in pink porcelain whose eternally raised right arm held aloft a lamp in a plastic shade. The wallpaper was embossed in gilt and the single picture was of the late King George the Fifth and Queen Mary in full court regalia. ‘I can see you keep it nice,’ he said heartily.

‘You wouldn’t get things nicer in any of your hotels. When did you think of coming? Any night would be convenient to me.’ She gave him a long look, partly coy, partly assessing. ‘You’ll be bringing a young lady with you?’

‘If you haven’t any objection. I thought perhaps this evening. Say eight till eleven. Would you . . . ?’

‘I’ll get my things on by eight sharp,’ she said. ‘If you’ll just tap on the door you needn’t bring the young lady in till after I’ve gone. Some do feel a bit shy-like. Say a fiver?’

Burden had agreed to give him ten minutes. Things could hardly have gone more smoothly. He glanced up at the window and saw the inspector approaching the front door. That she had seen him too and knew who he was he guessed from the little gasp of fear that came from her.

‘What’s going on, then?’ she said, her voice dying to a whimper.

Drayton turned and addressed her severely. ‘I am a police officer and I have reason to believe you are engaged in keeping a disorderly house . . .’

Ruby Branch sat down on the red and blue sofa, put her head in her hands and began to cry.

Drayton had expected they would simply take her down to Kingsmarkham and charge her. It was all cut and dried and there had been neither denial nor defiance. She had put the advertisement in Grover’s window to make a little extra money. What with freezes and squeezes, it was a job to make ends meet . . . Burden listened to it all. His eyes were on the scarf Ruby Branch had unwound from her head and was using to wipe her eyes, or perhaps on the ginger curls the removal of that scarf had revealed.

‘You were a blonde last time I saw you, Ruby,’ he said.

‘Since when do I have to ask your permission when I want to have my hair tinted?’

‘Still working for Mrs Harper in Waterford Avenue, are you?’

She nodded tearfully, then glared at him. ‘What business is it of yours who I work for? If it wasn’t for you I’d still have my job at the supermarket.’

‘You should have thought of that,’ Burden said, ‘before your little
contretemps
with six dozen packets of soap powder. You always were houseproud and it’s been your undoing. Quite a vice with you, isn’t it? I see you’ve been at it again.’

He stared at the bare boards and thence from Ruby’s varicose veined legs in their thin black nylons to her suddenly terrified face. To Drayton he said conversationally:

‘There’s not many working women would find the time to wash a big carpet. Go over it with a damp cloth, may be. That’s what my wife does. Let’s go outside and see what sort of a job she’s made of it, shall we? It’s not a bad morning and I could do with a spot of fresh air.’

Ruby Branch came with them. She tottered in her high-heeled shoes and it seemed to Drayton that she was dumb with terror. The kitchen was neat and fresh and the step so clean that Burden’s not very dirty shoe made a black print on it. Of the man seen at the window – husband? lodger? – there was no sign.

Drayton wondered that the clothes line was strong enough to bear the weight of the carpet, for it was soaking wet and looked as if it had been totally immersed in a bath. The high wind hardly caused it to sway. Burden advanced on it curiously.

‘Don’t you touch it,’ Ruby said shrilly. ‘You’ll have the lot down.’

Burden took no notice of her. He gave the carpet a twitch and suddenly, as she had predicted, the line snapped. Its load subsided with a squelch, half on to the path and half on to the lawn, giving off from its heavy soaking folds a strong animal smell of sodden wool.

‘Look what you’ve done! What d’you want to come out here poking about for? Now I’ll have to do it all again.’

‘No, you won’t,’ Burden said grimly. ‘The only people who are going to touch that are scientific experts.’

‘Just giving it an airing?’ Drayton exclaimed.

‘Oh, my God!’ Ruby’s face had become a yellowish white against which the quivering red lips stood out like a double gash. ‘I never meant any harm, I was scared. I thought may be you’d pin it on me, may be you’d get me for a – a. . .’

‘An accessory? That’s a good idea. May Be we shall.’

‘Oh, my God!’

Back in the disarranged sitting room, she sat for a moment in petrified silence, twisting her hands and biting what remained of the lipstick from her mouth. Then she said wildly:

‘It’s not what you’re thinking. It wasn’t blood. I was bottling raspberries and I . . .’

‘In April? Do me a favour,’ said Burden. ‘You can take your time.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got a very slack morning, haven’t we, Drayton? We can sit here till lunchtime for all I care. We can sit here till tomorrow.’

Again she said nothing and in the renewal of silence shuffling footsteps were heard outside in the passage. The door opened cautiously and Drayton saw a little man with thin grey hair. The face was the face he had seen at the window. With its prognathous jaw, its many furrows in dark brown skin, and its bulbous nose and mouth, it was not prepossessing. The terrified expression had undergone a change. The eyes were fixed on Drayton just as they had been previously, but the agony of fear had been replaced by a kind of gloating horror comparable to that of a man shown a five-legged sheep or a bearded lady.

Burden got up and, because the newcomer seemed inclined to make a bolt for it, closed his hand over the doorknob.

‘Well, if it isn’t Mr Matthews,’ he said, ‘Can’t say I think much of your coming-out togs. I thought they made them to measure these days.’

The man called Matthews said in a feeble grating voice, ‘Hallo, Mr Burden,’ and then automatically, as if he always did say it, just as other men say, ‘How are things?’ or ‘Nice day’, ‘I haven’t done nothing.’

‘When I was at school,’ said Burden, ‘they taught me that a double negative makes an affirmative. So we know where we are, don’t we? Sit down, join the gathering. There aren’t any more of you, are there?’

Monkey Matthews skirted the room carefully, finally sitting down as far as possible from Drayton. For a moment nobody said anything. Matthews looked from Burden to Ruby and then, as if unwillingly compelled, back again at Drayton.

‘Is that Geoff Smith?’ he asked at last.

‘You see,’ said Ruby Branch, ‘he never saw them. Well, come to that,
I
never saw the girl.’

Wexford shook his head in exasperation. His whole body had shaken with fury when Burden first told him, but now his anger had begun to abate, leaving a sour disgust. Four days had passed since Tuesday, four days of doubt and disbelief. Half a dozen men had been wasting their time, working in the dark and perhaps asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. And all because a silly woman had been afraid to go to the police lest the police stop a racket that promised to be lucrative. Now she sat in his office snivelling into a handkerchief, a scrap of cotton and lace streaked with make-up that the tears had washed away.

‘This Geoff Smith,’ Wexford said, ‘when was the first time you saw him?’

Ruby rolled the handkerchief into a ball and gave a deep choking sigh. ‘Last Saturday, Saturday the third. The day after I put the advert in. It was in the morning, about twelve. There was a knock at the door and there was this young chap wanting the room for Tuesday night. He was dark and ever so nice-looking and he spoke nice. How was I to know he was a killer?’ She shifted in Wexford’s yellow chair and crossed her legs. ‘ “My name’s Geoff Smith”, he said. Proud of it, he was. I didn’t ask him for his name. Well, he said eight till eleven and I said that’d cost him five pounds. He didn’t argue so I saw him off the premises and he got into his black car.