old friends.
By two Stevens, his driver, was heading the car towards London. Wexford relaxed, feeling his confidence returning, Sylvia and her troubles pushed to the back of his mind, and he felt stimulated by the prospect before him when Stevens set him down outside Kenbourne Vale Police Station.
‘Inspector Baker in?’
It was amusing, really. If anyone had told him, those few years before, that the day would come when he would actually be asking for Baker, wanting to see him, he would have laughed with resentful scorn. For Baker had been the reverse of pleasant to him when, convalescing after his thrombosis with Howard and Denise, he had helped solve the cemetery murder. But Howard, Wexford thought secretly, would have refused that word ‘helped’, would have said his uncle had done all that solving on his own. And that had marked the beginning of Baker’s respect and friendship. After that, there had been no more barbs about rustic policemen and interference and ignorance of London thugs. His request was answered in the affirmative, and two minutes later he was being shown down one of those bottlegreen painted corridors to the inspector’s office with its view of a brewery. Baker got up and came to him delightedly, hand outstretched.
‘This is a pleasant surprise, Reg!’
It was getting on for two years since Wexford had seen him. In that time, he thought, there had been more remarkable changes, and not just in the man’s manner towards himself. He looked years younger, he looked happy. Only the harsh corncrake voice with its faint cockney intonation remained the same.
‘It’s good to see you, Michael.’ Baker shared Burden’s Christian name. How that had once riled him! ‘How are you? You’re looking fine. What’s the news.’
‘Well, you’ll know Mr Fortune’s away in Tenerife. Things are fairly quiet here, thank God. Your old friend Sergeant Clements is somewhere about, he’ll be glad to see you. Sit down and I’ll have some tea sent up.’ There was a framed photograph of a fair-haired, gentle-looking woman on the desk. Baker saw Wexford looking at it. ‘My wife,’ he said, self-conscious, proud, a little embarrassed. ‘I don’t know if Mr Fortune mentioned I’d got married – ’ a tiny hesitation ‘ – again?’
Yes, Howard had, of course, but he had forgotten. The new ease of manner, the happiness, were explained. Michael Baker had once been married to a girl who had become pregnant by another man and who had left him for that other man. Finding that out from Howard had marked the beginnings of his toleration of Baker’s rudeness and his thinly veiled insults.
‘Congratulations. I’m delighted.’
‘Yes, well…’ Awkwardness brought out shades of Baker’s old acerbity. ‘You didn’t come here to talk about my domestic bliss. You came about this Rose – no, Rhoda – Comfrey. Am I right?’
Wexford said on a surge of hope, ‘You know her? You’ve got some…?’
‘Wouldn’t I have been in touch if I had? No, but I read the papers. I don’t suppose you’ve got much else on your mind at the moment, have you?’
Sylvia, Sylvia… ‘No, not much.’ The tea came, and he told Baker about the wallet and Grenville West.
‘I do know him. Well, not to say “know”. He’s what you might call our contribution to the arts. They put bits about him in the local paper from time to time. Come on, Reg, I always think of you as so damned intellectual. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Grenville West?’
‘Well, I haven’t. What does he do?’
‘I daresay he’s not that famous. He writes books, historical novels. I can’t say I’ve ever set eyes on him, but I’ve read one of his books – bit above my head – and I can tell you a bit about him from what I’ve seen in the paper. In his late thirties, dark-haired chap, smokes a pipe – they put his photo on his book jackets. You know those old houses facing the Green? He lives in a flat in one of them over a wine bar.’
Having courteously refused Baker’s offer of assistance, sent his regards to Sergeant Clements, and promised to return later, he set off up Kenbourne High Street. The heat that was pleasant, acceptable in the country, made of this London suburb a furnace that seemed to be burning smelly refuse. A greyish haze obscured the sun. He wondered why the Green looked different, barer somehow, and bigger. Then he noticed the stumps where the trees had been. So Dutch Elm disease denuded London as well as the country. He crossed the grass where black children and one white child were playing ball, where two Indian women in saris, their hair in long braids, walked slowly and gracefully as if they carried invisible pots on their heads. The wine bar had been discreetly designed not to mar the long elegant facade, as had the other shops in this row, and the sign over its bow window announced in dull gold letters: Vivian’s Vineyard.
The occasional slender tree grew out of the pavement, and some of the houses had window boxes with geraniums and petunias in them. Across the house next door to the bar rambled the vines of an ipomaea, the Morning Glory, its trumpet flowers open and glowing a brilliant blue. This might have been some corner of Chelsea or Hampstead. If you kept your eyes steady, if you didn’t look south to the gasworks or east to St Biddulph’s Hospital, if you didn’t smell the smoky, diesely stench, it might even have been Kingsmarkham.
He rang repeatedly at the door beside the shop window, but no one came. Grenville West was out. What now? It was nearly five and, according to the notice on the shop door, the Vineyard opened at five. He sat down on one of the benches on the Green to wait until it did. Presently a pale-skinned black girl came out, peered up and down the street and went back in again, turning the sign to ‘Open’. Wexford followed her and found himself in a dim cavern, light coming only from some bulbs behind the bar itself and from heavily shaded Chianti-bottle lamps on the tables. The window was curtained in brown and silver and the curtains were fast drawn. On a high stool, under the most powerful of the lamps, the girl had seated herself to leaf through a magazine. He asked her for a glass of white wine, and then if the owner or manager or proprietor was about.
‘You want Vie?’
‘I expect I do if he’s the boss.’
‘I’ll fetch him.’
She came back with a man who looked in his early forties. ‘Victor Vivian. What can I do for you?’
Wexford showed him his warrant card and explained. Vivian seemed rather cheered by the unexpected excitement, while the girl opened enormous eyes and stared.
‘Take a pew,’ said Vivian not ineptly, for the place had the gloom of a chapel devoted to some esoteric cult. But there was nothing priestly about its proprietor. He wore jeans and a garment somewhere between a T-shirt and a windcheater with a picture on it of peasant girls treading out the grape harvest. ‘Gren’s away. Went off on holiday to France, you know – let’s see now – last Sunday week. He always goes to France for a month at this time of the year.’
‘You own the house?’
‘Not to say “own”, you know. I mean, Notbourne Properties own it. I’ve got the underlease.’
He was going to be an ‘I mean-er’ and ‘you know-er’. Wexford could feel it coming. Still, such people usually talked a lot and were seldom discreet. ‘You know him well?’
‘We’re old mates, Gren and me, you know. He’s been here fourteen years and a damn good tenant. I mean, he does all his repairs himself and it’s handy, you know, having someone always on the premises when the bar’s closed. Most evenings he’ll drop in here for a drink, you know, and then as often as not I’ll have a quick one with him, up in his place, I mean, after we’ve knocked off for the night, and then, you know…’
Wexford cut this useless flow short. ‘It’s not Mr West I’m primarily interested in. I’m trying to trace the address of someone who may have been a friend of his. You’ve read of the murder of Miss Rhoda Comfrey?’
Vivian gave a schoolboy whistle. ‘The old girl who was stabbed? You mean she was a friend of Gren’s? Oh, I doubt that, I mean, I doubt that very much. I mean, she was fifty, wasn’t she? Gren’s not forty, I mean, I doubt if he’s more than thirty-eight or thirty-nine. Younger than me, you know.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting the relationship was a sexual one, Mr Vivian. They could just have been friends.’
This possibility was apparently beyond Vivian’s comprehension, and he ignored it. ‘Gren’s got a girl-friend. Nice little thing, you know, worships the ground he treads on.’ A sly wink was levelled at Wexford. ‘He’s a wily bird, though, is old Gren. Keeps her at arm’s length a bit. Afraid she might get him to the altar, you know, or that’s my guess, I mean. Polly something-or-other, she’s called, blonde – I mean, she can’t be more than twenty-four or five. Came to do his typing, you know, and now she hangs on like the proverbial limpet. Have another drink? On the house, I mean.’
‘No, thank you, I won’t.’ Wexford produced the photograph and the wallet. ‘You’ve never seen this woman? She’d changed a lot, she didn’t look much like that any more, I’m afraid.’
