to come to grips with the London life, and I’ve got an idea how to do it. Through that wallet she had in her handbag.’
‘I’m listening,’ said Burden with a sigh.
‘I’ve got it here.’ Wexford produced the wallet from a drawer in his desk. ‘See the name printed in gold on the inside? Silk and Whitebeam.’
‘Sorry, it doesn’t mean a thing to me.’
‘They’re a very exclusive leather shop in Jermyn Street. That wallet’s new. I think there’s a chance they might remember who they sold it to, and I’m sending Loring up first thing in the morning to ask them. Rhoda Comfrey had a birthday last week. If she didn’t buy it herself, I’m wondering what are the chances of someone else having bought it for her as a gift.’
‘For a woman?'
‘Why not? If she was in need of a wallet. Women carry banknotes as much as we do. The days of giving women a bottle of perfume or a brooch are passing, Mike. They are very nearly the people now. Sic transit gloria mundi.’
‘Sic transit gloria Sunday, if you ask me,’ said Burden.
Wexford laughed. His subordinate and friend could still surprise him.
Chapter 6
As soon as he had let himself into his house, Dora came out from the kitchen, beckoned him into it and shut the door. ‘Sylvia’s here.’
There is nothing particularly odd or unusual about a married daughter visiting her mother on a Sunday afternoon, and Wexford said, ‘Why shouldn’t she be? What d’you mean?’
‘She’s left Neil. She just walked out after lunch and came here.’
‘Are you saying she’s seriously left Neil just like that? She’s walked out on her husband and come home to mother? I can’t believe it.’
‘Darling, it’s true. Apparently, they’ve been having a continuous quarrel ever since Wednesday night. He promised to take her to Paris for a week in September – his sister was going to have the children – and now he says he can’t go, he’s got to go to Sweden on business. Well, in the resulting row Sylvia said she couldn’t stand it any longer, being at home all day with the children and never having a break, and he’d have to get an au pair so that she could go out and train for something. So he said – though I think she’s exaggerating there – that he wasn’t going to pay a girl wages to do what it was his wife’s job to do. She’d only train for something and then not be able to get a job because of the unemployment. Anyway, all this developed into a great analysis of their marriage and the role men have made women play and how she was sacrificing her whole life. You can imagine. So this morning she told him that if she was only a nurse and a housekeeper she’d go and be a nurse and housekeeper with her parents – and here she is.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘In the living room, and Robin and Ben are in the garden. I don’t know how much they realize. Darling, don’t be harsh with her.’
‘When have I ever been harsh with my children? I haven’t been harsh enough. I’ve always let them do exactly as they liked. I should have put my foot down and not let her get married when she was only eighteen.’
She was standing up with her back to him. She turned round and said, ‘Hallo, Dad.’
‘This is a sad business, Sylvia.’
Wexford loved both his daughters dearly, but Sheila, the younger, was his favourite. Sheila had the career, the tough life, had been through the hardening process, and had remained soft and sweet. Also she looked like him, although he was an ugly man and everyone called her beautiful. Sylvia’s hard classical features were those of his late mother-inlaw, and hers the Britannia bust and majestic bearing. She had led the protected and sheltered existence in the town where she had been born. But while Sheila would have run to him and called him Pop and thrown her arms round him, this girl stood staring at him with tragic calm, one marmoreal arm extended along the mantlepiece.
‘I don’t suppose you want me here, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’d nowhere else to go. I won’t bother you for long. I’ll get a job and find somewhere for me and the boys to live.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that, Sylvia. Please don’t. This is your home. What have I ever said to make you speak to me like that?’
She didn’t move. Two great tears appeared in her eyes and coursed slowly down her cheeks. Her father went up to her and took her in his arms, wondering as he did so when it was that he had last held her like this. Years ago, long before she was married. At last she responded, and the hug he got was vice-like, almost breath-crushing. He let her sob and gulp into his shoulder, holding her close and murmuring to this fugitive goddess, all magnificent five feet ten of her, much the same words that he had used twenty years before when she had fallen and cut her knee.
More negative results awaited him on Monday evening. The phone calls were still coming in, growing madder as time went by. No newspaper in the country knew of Rhoda Comfrey either as an employee or in a freelance capacity, no Press agency, no magazine, and she was not on record as a member of the National Union of Journalists. Detective Constable Loring had left for London by an early train, bound for the leather shop in Jermyn Street.
Wexford wished now that he had gone himself, for he was made irritable by this enforced inactivity and by thoughts of what he had left behind him at home. Tenderness he felt for Sylvia, but little sympathy. Robin and Ben had been told their father was going away on business and that this was why they were there, but although Ben accepted this, Robin perhaps knew better. He was old enough to have been affected by the preceding quarrels and to have understood much of what had been said. Without him and Ben, their mother would have been able to lead a free, worthwhile and profitable life. The little boy went about with a bewildered look.
That damned water rat might have provided a diversion, but the beast was as elusive as ever.
And Neil had not come. Wexford had been sure his son in-law would turn up, even if only for more recriminations and mud-slinging. He had neither come nor phoned. And Sylvia, who had said she didn’t want him to come, that she never wanted to see him again, first moped over his absence, then harangued her parents for allowing her to marry him in the first place. Wexford had had a bad night because Dora had hardly slept, and in the small hours he had heard Sylvia pacing her bedroom or roving the house.
Loring came back at twelve, which was the earliest he could possibly have made it, and Wexford found himself perversely wishing he had been late so that he could have snapped at him. That was no way to go on. Pleasantly he said: ‘Did you get any joy?’
‘In a sort of way, sir. They recognized the wallet at once. It was the last of a line they had left. The customer bought it on Thursday, August fourth.’
‘You call that a sort of way? I call it a bloody marvellous break!'
Loring looked pleased, though it was doubtful whether this was praise or even directed at him. ‘Not Rhoda Comfrey, sir,’ he said hastily. ‘A man. Chap called Grenville West. He’s a regular customer of Silk and Whitebeam. He’s bought a lot of stuff from them in the past.’
‘Did you get his address?’
‘Twenty-two, Elm Green, London, West 15,’ said Loring.
No expert on the metropolis, Wexford nevertheless knew a good deal of the geography of the London Borough of Kenbourne. And now, in his mind’s eye, he saw Elm Green that lay half a mile from the great cemetery. Half an acre or so of turf with elm trees on it, a white-painted fence bordering two sides of it, and facing the green, a row of late Georgian houses, some with their ground floors converted into shops. A pretty place, islanded in sprawling, squalid Kenbourne which, like the curate’s egg and all London boroughs, was good in parts.
It was a piece of luck for him that this first possible London acquaintance – friend, surely – of Rhoda Comfrey had been located here. He would get help, meet with no obstruction, for his old nephew, his dead sister’s son, was head of Kenbourne Vale CID. That Chief Superintendent Howard Fortune was at present away on holiday in the Canary Islands was a pity but no real hindrance. Several members of Howard’s team were known to him. They were
