lively sort of stuff, really, and the last thing you’d feel is that their author’s homosexual.’
‘But you say he is.’
‘And he wants to keep it dark. He’s queer but he’s still thinking of settling down with Polly – they do that when they get middle-aged – and Rhoda mightn’t have liked the idea of only being able to see him with a wife around. So she threatens to spill the beans unless he gives Polly up. And there’s your motive.’
‘It doesn’t account for how he happens to have the same name as a whole tribe of her aunt’s relatives.’
‘Look,’ said Burden, ‘your Charles West wrote to him, thinking he might be a cousin. Why shouldn’t Rhoda have done the same thing years ago, say after she’d read his first book? Charles West didn’t pursue it, but she may have done. That could be the reason for their becoming friends in the first place, and then the friendship was strengthened by Rhoda doing research for him for that book that’s dedicated to her. The name is relevant only in that it brought them together.’
‘I just hope,’ said Wexford, ‘that tomorrow will bring West and us together.’
Robin came up and opened the car door for him.
‘Thanks very much,’ said Wexford. ‘You’re the new hall porter, are you? I suppose you want a tip.’ He handed over the ices he had bought on the way home. ‘One for your brother, mind.’
‘I’ll never be able to do it again,’ said Robin.
‘Why’s that? School starting? You’ll still get in before I do.’
‘We’re going home, Grandad. Daddy’s coming for us at seven.’
To the child Wexford couldn’t express what he felt. There was only one thing he could say, and in spite of his longing to be alone once more with Dora in peace and quiet and orderliness, it was true. ‘I shall miss you.’
‘Yes,’ said Robin complacently. Happy children set a high valuation on themselves. They expect to be loved and missed. ‘And we never saw the water rat.’
‘There’ll be other times. You’re not going to the North Pole.’
The little boy laughed inordinately at that one. Wexford sent him off to find Ben and hand the ice over, and then he let himself into the house. Sylvia was upstairs packing. He put his arm round her shoulder, turned her face towards him.
‘Well, my dear, so you and Neil have settled your differences?’
‘I don’t know about that. Not exactly. Only he’s said he’ll give me all the support I need in taking a degree if I start next year. And he’s – he’s bought a dishwasher!’ She gave a little half-ashamed laugh. ‘But that’s not why I’m going back.’
‘I think I know why.’
She pulled away from him, turning her head. For all her height and her majestic carriage, there was something shy and gauche about her. ‘I can’t live without him. Dad,’ she said. ‘I’ve missed him dreadfully.’
‘That’s the only good reason for going back, isn’t it?’
‘The other thing – well, you can say women are equal to men but you can’t give them men’s position in the world. Because that’s in men’s minds and it’ll take hundreds of years to change it,’ She came out with a word that was unfamiliar to her wellread father. ‘One would just have to practise aeonism,’ she said.
What had she been reading now? Before he could ask her, the boys came in.
‘We could have a last try for the water rat, Grandad.’
‘Oh, Robin! Grandad’s tired and Daddy’s coming for us in an hour.’
‘An hour,’ said Robin with a six-year-old’s view of time, ‘is ever so long.’
So they went off together, the three of them, over the hill and across the meadow to the Kingsbrook. It was damp and misty and still, the willows bluish amorphous shadows, every blade of grass glistening with water drops. The river had risen and was flowing fast, the only thing in nature that moved.
‘Grandad carry,’ said Ben somewhat earlier in the expedition than usual.
But as Wexford bent down to lift him up, something apart from the river moved. A little way to the right of them, in the opposite bank, a pair of bright eyes showed themselves at the mouth of a hole.
‘Ssh,’ Wexford whispered. ‘Keep absolutely still.’
The water rat emerged slowly. It was not at all rat-like but handsome and almost rotund with spiky fur the colour of sealskin and a round alert face. It approached the water with slow stealth but entered it swiftly and began to swim, spreading and stretching its body, towards the bank on the side where they stood. And when it reached the bank it paused and looked straight at them seemingly without fear, before scurrying off into the thick green rushes.
Robin waited until it had disappeared. Then he danced up and down with delight. ‘We saw the water rat! We saw the water rat!’
‘Ben wants to see Daddy! Ben want to go home! Poor Ben’s feet are cold!’
‘Aren’t you pleased we saw the water rat, Grandad?’
‘Very pleased,’ said Wexford, wishing that his own quest might come to so simple and satisfying an end.
Chapter 17
Grenville West’s elusiveness could no longer be put down to chance. He was on the run and no doubt had been for nearly three weeks now. Everything pointed to his being the killer of Rhoda Comfrey, and by Friday morning Wexford saw that the case had grown too big for him, beyond the reach of his net. Far from hoping to dissuade the Chief Constable from carrying out his threat, he saw the inevitability of calling in Scotland Yard and also the resources of Interpol. But his call to the Chief Constable left him feeling a little flat, and the harsh voice of Michael Baker, phoning from Kenbourne Vale, made him realize only that now he must begin confessing failure…
Baker asked him how he was, referred to their ‘red faces’ over the Farriner business, then said:
‘I don’t suppose you’re still interested in that chap Grenville West, are you?’
To Wexford it had seemed as if the whole world must be hunting for him, and yet here was Baker speaking as if the man were still a red herring, incongruously trailed across some enormously more significant scent.
‘Am I still interested! Why?’
‘Ah,’ said Baker. ‘Better come up to the Smoke then. It’d take too long to go into details on the phone, but the gist is that West’s car’s been found in an hotel garage not far from here, and West left the hotel last Monday fortnight without paying his bill.’
Wexford didn’t need to ask any more now. He remembered to express effusive gratitude, and within not much more than an hour he was sitting opposite Baker at Kenbourne Vale Police Station, Stevens having recovered from his flu or perhaps only his antipathy to London traffic.
‘I’ll give you a broad outline,’ said Baker, ‘and then we’ll go over to the Trieste Hotel and see the manager. We got a call from him this morning and I sent Clements up there. West checked in on the evening of Sunday, August seventh, and parked his car, a red Citroen, in one of the hotel’s lock-up garages. When he didn’t appear to pay his bill on Wednesday morning, a chambermaid told Hetherington – that’s the manager – that his bed hadn’t been slept in for two nights.’
‘Didn’t he do anything about it?’ Wexford put in.
‘Not then. He says he knew who West was, had his address and had no reason to distrust him. Besides, he’d left a suitcase with clothes in it in his room and his car in the garage. But when it got to the end of the week he phoned West’s home, and getting no reply sent someone round to Elm Green. You can go on from there, Sergeant, you talked to the man.’
Clements, who had come in while Baker was speaking, greeted Wexford with a funny little half-bow. ‘Well, sir, this Hetherington, who’s a real smoothie but not, I reckon, up to anything he shouldn’t be, found out from the girl in that wine bar place where West was, and he wasn’t too pleased. But he calculated West would write to him from France.’
‘Which didn’t happen?’
‘No, sir. Hetherington didn’t hear a word and he got to feeling pretty sore about it. Then, he says, it struck him the girl had said a motoring holiday, which seemed fishy since West’s car was still at the Trieste. Also West had gone off with his room key and hadn’t left an ignition key with the hotel. Hetherington began to feel a bit worried, said he suspected foul play, though he didn’t get on to us. Instead he went through West’s case and found an
