Those were perhaps the first serious sentences Wexford had ever heard uttered by Claudia Ricardo. “Did you give him any money?”
“As a matter of fact, we did.” Maeve took her hand from Tredown's brow. He had fallen asleep. “Things were very prosperous about then. The First Heaven had been a bestseller for a long time. Those were the days.” She glanced at the sleeping man. “He's never been able to write a sequel to come up to it. God knows why not. I gave Dusty a hundred pounds for a wedding present.”
“That was all?”
“I beg your pardon? He was bloody lucky to get that.”
“Where did the rest come from?”
Wexford watched the trickles of rain run down the big window in his office. The moving water distorted the trees outside to a melange of gold and brown. The sky was pale, colorless, all cloud. “She may be lying, Mike, and I wonder why. D'you realize, we don't even know his first name? We conclude from his nickname that he was called Miller and from the T-shirt that his first name was Sam. But that's guesswork. We know he's dead and Ronald McNeil killed him. Or to correct that, Irene McNeil says he killed him. We have to see Bridget Cook. Hannah can do that and pick her brains. She may know about the thousand pounds and she'll certainly know what Dusty's real name was.”
“I've never thought much of the tea we get in here,” Burden said, and with unusual and almost poetical exaggeration, “but compared with that muck Claudia gave us, it's the nectar of the gods.” He lifted the cup to his lips and savored the contents. “Excellent. A bit brutal what Maeve said about the sequels to that book of Tredown's not being very good.”
“She is brutal, but I'm afraid she's right.”
Burden raised his eyebrows.
“Dora fetched me two of his books from the public library, the recent ones, I mean. They're not a patch on The First Heaven. I didn't like The First Heaven, I don't like fantasy, but I could see it was good. I couldn't finish the others. I got halfway through one but couldn't finish it and I only managed one chapter of the other. The First Heaven ends with the coming of man to earth, that is man as we know him, not half an ape. In the first sequel-it's called In His Own Image and that says it all-he's writing about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden and God turning them out of the garden, while the point of The First Heaven is that it's about evolution and the death of gods. The man's obsessed with the Bible. That's his trouble.”
The glazed look that usually came over Burden's face when literature was mentioned, masked it now. “Why's that, then? I mean, is that why the others aren't so good?”
“I suppose he couldn't bring himself to leave biblical subjects for long. And biblical subjects don't interest people very much anymore. They don't interest me, but evolution does and classical mythology does too. His mistake was not just in reverting to his old subject but reverting to one which seems to deny his new subject. Do you see what I mean?”
“I suppose so, but it's not something I know anything about. Is it important?”
“I don't know,” Wexford said. “I don't know what's important in this case and what isn't.”
Finding Bridget Cook wasn't difficult, but calling on her in her home was. “She won't want you seeing her at her place,” Michelle Riley said. “Her bloke's there all the time, and if you say a word about any man she was seeing before him he'll go bananas. And when he does he'll beat her up, that's for sure.”
It was a piece of luck for Hannah that Bridget Cook's partner was out-“Down the benefit”-when she phoned. “I can't see you here,” Bridget said. “Not if you want to talk about Samuel.”
“Who?” said Hannah.
“Samuel. That's his name. Samuel Miller. I never called him Dusty, though all the rest of them did.”
They arranged to meet at a cafe in Norbury, half a mile from the flat where Hannah lived with Bal Bhattacharya. Hannah's mother had a term she used to describe women whose appearance was less than well cared for, which she generally applied to those interviewed on television on what she called sink estates or bog-standard schools. “She looks a bit rough” was the phrase Hannah had grown up with. She had rejected it as unacceptable, but it came into her head when Bridget Cook turned up-fifteen minutes late-at La Capuccella cafe.
She was a big tall woman, one who, it was easy to believe, could have performed heavier and more demanding farmwork than picking fruit. Her face had once been lovely, the features having a classical stern beauty, but now it was bruised and marked by time and perhaps by human mistreatment. It was the face of a sculpture from ancient Greece, damaged by long exposure to winds and weather. Hannah thought she looked like a Native American, what her mother would once have called a Red Indian, and her politically correct soul had shuddered at that.
Bridget Cook was nearing sixty but, in spite of her fading beauty, looked more. Yet this man she lived with, Hannah marveled, was jealous of a previous lover she hadn't seen for eight years. Rather to Hannah's surprise, she extended her right hand and shook hers, pumping it vigorously. “Hi, how are you? I'm Bridget Cook-or Williams, as my fellow likes me to say.”
Hannah thought she need not pander to this man's vanity. “I'd like to talk about Samuel Miller, Miss Cook, if you're happy about that.”
“Sure. Why not? Him and me, we were going to get married, but he walked out on me. Got cold feet, I guess. I'd been married before, but he never had. Still, it's all water under the bridge now, isn't it?”
Not quite, Hannah thought. “Before we go any further, Miss Cook, I'd better tell you Samuel Miller is dead. I'm sorry. I hope this won't upset you.”
She was silent. Her strong masculine features remained rigid. She passed one hand over her forehead and said, “He wrote poems, you know. He'd written a book too. Sam was no fool.”
Hannah noted the diminutive. “I didn't know.”
“No. People didn't. He wrote a poem for me, but Williams found it and tore it up. D'you want a coffee?”
“I'll get it,” Hannah said.
Looking over her shoulder when she was at the counter, she saw the big woman put her head into her hands. A wedding ring was on the third finger of her left hand and Hannah wondered if the jealous lover was resentful of that too. She took the two cups of coffee back to their table.
“Why did he go to see the Tredowns when you were all in Flagford?”
“I don't know. Did he?”
“He'd worked for them three years before, the last time he came fruit-picking in Flagford. A man called Grimble turned the pickers off his field and Samuel Miller went to see the Tredowns and they gave him a job repairing their car and then driving it.”
“D'you mean Tredown the book writer? The one that did that book called something about heaven? The one they're making a film of?”
“That's the one.”
“He lived in Flagford?”
“Still does,” said Hannah. “Samuel…” The name bothered her, it was inappropriate for what she had supposed Dusty was, not so odd for a writer and a poet. “Samuel-did he know it was that Tredown? I mean, if he was a writer, did he go to see Tredown because he was?”
“Don't ask me. I never knew Tredown lived there. Sam never said.”
“I'm wondering if he brought something he'd written with him to show Tredown.”
Bridget plainly wasn't interested. “If he did I never saw it. How did he die?”
Hannah longed to be able to say this was something Bridget Cook didn't need to know, but she couldn't do that. “I'm afraid he was killed. He was shot.” She said quickly, “The man who shot him is dead.” She let the words register, sink in, then said, “Miss Cook, do you know if Sam carried a knife?”
“It was for his own protection. The folks he hung out with-you needed a knife with that lot. He never used it, that I am sure of.”
“The last time you saw him-can you remember that?”
“That's not something you forget,” Bridget Riley said. “We'd fixed up to get married in three weeks. It wasn't just me, he really wanted it. I'm telling you that because people-well, they used to say things on account of Sam was so much younger than me. Anyway, that day, we'd finished picking for the day. We had a shower in the van but it got broke and Sam was going to mend it but he never did. He come in and said he'd found a place where he could
