works for visitors to scrutinize the culinary arrangements. Anyway, no knife. I asked him if there'd been a knife in any of the cupboards or drawers when he first arrived and did all this tidying up but he said no. I said I'd wait for Mrs. McNeil to wake up. I wanted to get back to this story of hers about the knife being stolen by the cleaner. For some reason I'd begun to believe it.”
Up till now having looked increasingly bored, Burden brightened. He lifted his beer tankard to his lips as if celebrating.
“Greg gave me tea. He gave me biscuits. He talked to me about all the various jobs he'd had, the hotels he'd worked in, his training as a nurse, as an overnight carer, on and on. I thought she'd never wake up. In the end I got him to wake her and he did-gently yet effectively, I must say.”
Burden nodded. “What happened?”
“I asked her. It always amazes me, Mike, the way our-er, customers lie and lie and when we finally tell them we know they've lied, we can prove they've lied, their lying is a fact, they're not ashamed, they don't say they're sorry or they feel guilty and what must we think of them, they just say, ‘Okay,’ or, ‘Right, so what?’ ”
Burden was quickly dismissive. “Well, they're a bunch of villains, aren't they? Low life. And Irene McNeil may be an upper-class snob, but she's as bad as any of them. What did she say?”
“When she went back to the house two years ago-on her way to have tea with the Pickfords, if you recall-she says she didn't look at the body, but she saw the knife lying on the floor of the cellar. She put it in her bag, where it presumably remained during the old ladies' tea party, then took it home with her. At this point she seems to have got confused because instead of seeing it as a useful piece of evidence in Ronald McNeil's defense, she decided it was a dangerous weapon, as indeed it is, and would somehow further implicate her husband and herself. I was angry by this time, Mike. I asked her if she knew wasting police time was an offense and she had recourse to ‘women's weapons, waterdrops.’ ” Wexford shook his head ruefully. “Hannah would lose all respect for me if she heard me say that.”
“You mean she cried?”
“That's it. Then she says she had a cleaner at the time-I had to listen to a long catalog of the woman's shortcomings-and this cleaner found the knife in a drawer somewhere and stole it.”
“And you believed her?”
“Just wait. I got the woman's name out of her and who do you think it is?”
“How should I know, Reg?”
“You're exactly the one who would know. She's called Leeanne Fincher, mother of Darrel Fincher. Remember her? She's the woman who gave her son a knife ‘for his own protection.’ ”
Burden laughed. “Amazing. We took the knife off him. We've still got it.”
“Excellent,” said Wexford. “I may add obstructing the police to the charges she already faces just the same. I've lost patience with Mrs. M. She may be old, but she's old in sin too. I'm going to show that knife to Bridget Cook, though I'm not at all sure what's the point of it, no pun intended.”
“So Miller did take the knife into the bathroom with him?”
“I don't think so. After McNeil shot Miller I think he searched the clothes in the kitchen, found the thousand pounds, which of course he was far too upright and honest to touch, but he also found the knife. He put it in the bathroom beside the body and later removed it to the cellar, maybe thinking it would help his cause with his wife if she could be made to believe he'd acted in self-defense.” Wexford cast up his eyes. “He need not have bothered. She's quite as ruthless as he was.”
22
He met Iman Dirir by chance in the High Street as she was coming out of Kingsmarkham's only Asian dress shop. She was carrying one of their black and gold bags.
“They're not supposed to be for Africans, but we wear much the same clothes,” she told Wexford. “I've been buying a salwar kameez for my niece's wedding. She's marrying a very handsome Englishman at St. Peter's next Saturday.”
Wexford looked his inquiries.
“She's a Christian, Mr. Wexford. You get all sorts in Somalia, animists too.”
As far as he knew, the latter worshipped stones and trees but he might be wrong, so he left it. “Will the Imrans be there?”
“At the wedding? Oh, no, I doubt it. My sister and her husband hardly know them, and my niece doesn't at all.”
“But they'll be back by then?”
“I think so. I think they're expected back on Thursday.”
He walked back to the police station, passing A Passage to India, where, behind the glass, the shimmering curtains, and the artificial lilies, he glimpsed Matea setting tables. Bridget Cook was expected in his office at two. Williams, the partner apparently without a first name, put up no opposition to her traveling to Kingsmarkham, though Wexford doubted if she had told him the true reason for her journey. As he waited he thought about people who make prisons for themselves where none need exist. This woman had landed herself with a man who was a jealous jailer, simply to avoid being alone. Tredown, who evidently cared very little for either of his two wives, had been put under house arrest by them, who wanted him only as a slave to labor for their keep. Now that The First Heaven was to be a film, for which Tredown had no doubt been liberally paid and from which his widow and ex-wife would enjoy the royalties, they were indifferent to his life or death.
Hannah brought Bridget into the office. An old-fashioned expression came into his mind when he saw her: “raw-boned.” A description everyone understood but which seemed meaningless. She wasn't thin yet the bones seemed to protrude through her skin. Her hands were like a man's and the ring on the left one, with its delicate tracery of leaves, looked incongruous. She sat down heavily but flinched a little when Wexford showed her the knife.
“I don't know,” she said. “I only saw it the once. It was the guys he hung out with, a rough lot, they were. He said he needed it for his own protection. He never used it, though. I'm sure he never did.”
“You said he was a poet. He wrote poetry to you.” Wexford was conscious of how absurd this would sound and look to an unseen observer, the human fly on the wall. This woman and poetry could hardly be set side by side without raising a raucous laugh. Yet love, he knew, is no respector of beauty or grace. Like the wind that blows where it lists, it can strike almost anyone for almost anyone else. People have no need of love potions in order to fall in love with the ass's ears. He noted the serious nod she gave, the acceptance that she was worthy of verses dedicated to her. “Did he write anything else?” he asked. “A play? A piece of fiction?”
“I don't know. Maybe. He wasn't educated, but he told me he'd written a book once. Poems and a sort of diary, he said it was.”
“When did you first meet Samuel Miller, Miss Cook?”
“Sometime in '98, it would have been. He moved in with me like in the winter. We was on a site near Southend then. He'd go away a bit, but he always came back. We went strawberry picking up near Hereford in the June, and he said they wanted pickers at Morella's in Flagford in the September. That was when he said we'd best get married. I said I was years older than him, but he said, So what? He'd always fancied older women.”
Claudia Ricardo, Wexford thought. “He'd been to Flagford three years before?”
“That's right. Morella's had got a proper campsite, not like the field they had to camp on when he was there before and two guys went after them with guns.”
“Guns?”
“That's what he said.”
Adam Thayer brought in the tea. It was scalding hot, but Bridget Cook drank hers greedily. “Go on, Miss Cook.”
“He wanted to look up old pals while he was there, he said. Them was his words, ‘old pals.’ There might be some money in it. They owed him. The day after he'd fixed up our wedding we went picking-it was Victorias-and when we got back he said he was off to see his pals and then have a bit of a wash in a house that was empty on account of our shower going wrong. I waited and waited for him, but when it got to midnight I just knew he wasn't
