Speaker of Mandarin Read online

  ‘It strikes me as being highly probable he expected to find a safe, Chief Inspector. My father did in fact have a safe in this house at one time but when break-ins became so frequent in Sewingbury he had it taken out. Its presence did seem to advertise that one had rather special things to protect.’

  ‘It was while we were still using this house as a weekend retreat,’ said his father. ‘On a Sunday night before we left to go back to Hampstead I used to put our few valuables in the safe. Could he have been looking for that? Is that at all feasible? Do you think it conceivable my wife was shot by accident? That this man threatened her with the gun if she refused to reveal the whereabouts of the safe to him and when she did refuse the gun went off by accident? Is that at all a useful theory?’

  The man had been a distinguished, even brilliant, counsel. It was hard to believe it in the face of this nonsense. Wexford remembered reading of him in the newspapers, ‘Mr Adam Knighton, defending …’ ‘Mr Adam Knighton’s masterly presentation of the prosecution’s case …’ Something soft and weak had come into the hard aquiline face. When they were in China it had been like the face of some noble bird of prey but now it was as if those features had been made of wax and a warm hand had passed, smudging, across them. There had been a pathetic loosening of the muscles around the mouth. The uncomfortable thought came to Wexford, became a conviction, that when he was alone, when he went to his bedroom and shut the door on all those sympathizing considerate children, he wept. His face was the face of a man who has soaked it with tears.

  ‘Have you ever possessed a gun, sir?’ The question was addressed to Julian Knighton who exclaimed, ‘Good God, no! Certainly not!’

  Wexford’s eyes rested on Adam Knighton.

  ‘When I first came here and fancied myself a weekend country gentleman I had a shotgun. I sold it five years ago.’

  Jennifer Norris whispered something to her sister-in-law. They both looked truculently at Wexford.

  ‘I should like to have another look over the house, if I may,’ he said.

  ‘I thought my brother made it plain the safe isn’t here any more,’ said Jennifer Norris in the tone of a nineteenth-century chatelaine addressing a bailiff.

  ‘Quite plain, thank you.’ Wexford looked at Adam Knighton.

  ‘You must do as you please, Chief Inspector.’

  Wexford closed the living room door after him and went upstairs to the bedroom where Adela Knighton had slept alone that Tuesday night and from where she had been peremptorily and terrifyingly summoned. Since his last visit the bed had been made. There was nothing to be learned from a perusal of Mrs Knighton’s clothes. Their pockets, as were her handbags, were empty. On the windowsill, between looped-up rose-printed curtains, stood a china candlestick, a pomander and bookends encompassing the reading matter of someone who stopped reading when she was in her teens: two or three Jeffery Farnols, Precious Bane, The Story of an African Farm, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford. Wexford was looking for something he hadn’t been consciously looking for when, two days before, he had searched the desk downstairs.

  The dressing table had only one drawer. He opened it. Handkerchiefs, a box of tissues, a card of hairclips, two unused face flannels, a cardboard carton of cotton wool. Mahogany bedside cabinets supported pink porcelain lamps with pink tulle shades. Each cabinet had a drawer. In Mrs Knighton’s were a bottle of aspirin, two more handkerchiefs, an old-fashioned silver-handled manicure set, nasal drops, a pair of glasses in a case; in Knighton’s a pair of glasses in a case, two ballpoint pens, a scribbling pad, a tube of throat pastilles and a battery shaver in a leather case. Each cabinet had a cupboard under its drawer. Mrs Knighton’s held a pair of black corded velvet bedroom slippers and a brown leather photograph album, Knighton’s a stack of books, evidently his reading-in-bed for some weeks or months past, for the present and possibly the immediate future. They were, to Wexford, an unexpected collection.

  Han Suyin’s A Mortal Flower and a book of linguistics called About Chinese. Understandable inclusions, those two. The man had recently been in China. Anna Karenina, The Return of the Native, Elizabeth Barrett’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and The Browning Love Letters. Wexford looked at them, intrigued. ‘Romantic’ was the word that had come into his mind. With the exception of that linguistics book they were all voluptuously romantic. They seemed highly unlikely reading matter for that white-haired, dried-up, unhappy old lawyer downstairs. Yet they must be there because he had read them, was reading them now or had at any rate intended to read them.

  He opened Sonnets from the Portuguese where the place (‘If thou must love me, let it be for naught Except for love’s sake only …’) was kept by a marker. The marker was a scrap of paper torn from the scribbling pad and on it, in Knighton’s stylized ‘ronde’ handwriting, were written a few lines of verse. Not Elizabeth Barrett, nor the piece Knighton had quoted leaning over the parapet in Kweilin, but a fragment that was also, unmistakably, Chinese poetry:

  ‘Shoot not the wild geese from the south;

  Let them northward fly.

  When you do shoot, shoot the pair of them,

  So that the two may not be put asunder.’

  Very curious indeed. Of course it might be assumed that Knighton had written that down after his wife’s death, after someone had in fact shot her and put the two of them asunder. Somehow Wexford didn’t think so. Those words hadn’t been written since Tuesday. The paper was creased from many usings, many insertions into that volume of sonnets. And when he went out on to the landing again and looked through the open doorway of the ‘green’ bedroom opposite, he saw the bed-cover turned down and a brown plaid dressing gown lying over a chair. Temporarily, the widower had removed himself from the room he had shared with his wife.

  They were still in the living room, all four of them. Jennifer Norris still reclined with her feet up. She and her father were drinking tea. Barbara Knighton was arranging the last roses of summer in a copper bowl, October blooms from a second or third flowering. They were a little pale and worn, those roses, with a papery look.

  ‘Just one thing, Mr Knighton. What has become of the photographs you and Mrs Knighton took while you were on holiday?’

  ‘Photographs?’

  ‘They aren’t in the album I found in Mrs Knighton’s bedside table, though pictures from your previous holidays are.’

  ‘Probably you didn’t take any this time, did you, Father?’

  Knighton hesitated. Wexford guessed he might clutch at the straw Julian offered him and to prevent this said firmly, ‘I don’t think there’s much doubt that both you and Mrs Knighton took photographs, do you?’

  Their eyes met. Wexford wondered if he was reading the other man’s expression accurately. Or was he imagining the reaction that nothing could have been less fortunate than that he and this policeman had happened to encounter each other on that Chinese holiday? ‘We did take a few snaps, yes,’ he said languidly. ‘If they came out, if they were ever developed, no doubt they’re somewhere about the house.’

  But they were not.

  Wexford said no more about it. He pondered on Adam Knighton, his wistful predilection for romance, his listless, sometimes hag-ridden or haunted look, the possibility that he who loved poetry and the great love stories had held a gun to his wife’s scalp and sent a bullet into her brain.

  The inquest was on Monday morning, the funeral the following day at All Saints, Sewingbury. By that time it had been established that no car hire company within a three-mile radius of Adrian Dobson-Flint’s home had hired a car to a man answering Adam Knighton’s description. By then the search for the gun in the vicinity of Thatto Vale had been called off.

  Sewingbury has about four thousand inhabitants, a golf course, a convent and girls’ school, a disused mill on the Kingsbrook and a huge market square, usually packed tight with parked cars. The church is halfway down the hill that leads to the river and the new ‘weir’. Wexford’s driver took the route along Spring
hill Lane, over the newly built bridge, along the river bank past where the footpath from Thatto Vale comes out and up River Street.

  All the Knighton family were assembled: Adam, lean, gaunt, bareheaded, wearing a waisted black overcoat; Roderick in a dark suit with a black tie, and Roderick’s wife Caroline in a tight black suit and high-heeled black patent shoes. Julian and his wife were in light colours, grey and green respectively, but wore the most doleful expressions, perhaps to compensate. The fair young man with the beaky nose and the thin dark Greek-looking girl Wexford decided must be Colum and his wife. Only Jennifer was absent, though represented by her husband who arrived late and on foot.

  Leaving the church when it was all over, after the family had filed out, Wexford, who had been sitting in the very back row, happened to look over his shoulder along the aisle. The small elderly woman he remembered from China as Adela Knighton’s friend was walking towards him from where she had been sitting in one of the front pews. He had forgotten all about her until now.

  He could tell she was astounded at seeing him. She looked at him as he must have looked when he saw his persecutor with the bound feet. And then her eyes turned sharply away.

  Wexford went out and waited for her in the porch.

  ‘My name is Irene Bell, I don’t believe we were ever introduced in China.’

  ‘Chief Inspector Wexford of Kingsmarkham CID. How do you do, Miss Bell?’

  ‘So you’re a policeman and living here. How very odd! That must have been quite a shock for poor Adam on top of everything else. He’s very cut up, isn’t he? Well, we all are. Adela and I were at school together, we’d known each other nearly all our lives. I suppose we’d been friends for something like half a century.’

  ‘It’s a long time,’ said Wexford. ‘Can you and I have a talk, Miss Bell?’

  ‘Now, d’you mean? I suppose so. I wouldn’t go back to the house anyway. I don’t care for all this eating and drinking at funerals. People don’t mean to be irreverent but somehow they forget what they’re there for, someone starts laughing and before you know where you are it’s turned into a party. I call that very bad taste.’

  Wexford nodded in agreement. She seemed a woman of character. ‘I’ll see you get to Kingsmarkham station afterwards. You wouldn’t think a cup of tea irreverent, would you?’

  ‘I could do with a cup of good hot tea,’ said Miss Bell.

  She was short and sturdily built, though not fat, with a round sharp-featured face and dark hair that still hadn’t much grey in it and was crisply permed. The blue trouser suit would have been unsuitable for today and in any case too light in weight, for the previous night had seen the first frost of the winter and a little white frost still lay in shady places. She had on a dark grey tweed suit, beige silk blouse and black court shoes that were nevertheless ‘sensible’ ones. Up until three years before, she told Wexford, she had been the manager of a travel agency at Swiss Cottage near where she lived. In fact it was this agency that had arranged the trans-Asia trip for her and the Knightons. It wasn’t the first time the three of them had been away together. She had gone with them to Egypt as well as on various European holidays. It was company for Adela, she said, which Wexford thought an interesting remark.

  Back in Kingsmarkham Wexford took her into the Willow Pattern, a café in the High Street, and ordered tea for two. Irene Bell refused food, perhaps once again on the grounds of the unsuitability of eating just after one has buried one’s best friend. For this was what Mrs Knighton had evidently been, a devoted dear friend, as close as a sister, and when Miss Bell referred to her in this way a look of heavy bitter sadness came into her sharp face. She was, she said, godmother to Jennifer, ‘Aunt Irene’ to all the young Knightons, as nearly a member of the family as one could be who was not allied by blood. Wexford let her talk for a while about her long friendship with the dead woman, noting that though she referred to all Mrs Knighton’s children by name and spoke of their children, Adam Knighton was never mentioned. He interrupted her by reverting to what she had said in the car.

  ‘You said you were company for Mrs Knighton. Wasn’t her husband company enough for her?’

  She lifted her shoulders and gave a half-smile.

  ‘Was it a happy marriage, Miss Bell?’

  ‘Someone said the state of marriage is unhappy only insofar as life itself is unhappy.’

  ‘Samuel Johnson said it. What do you say?’

  ‘In general, Mr Wexford, I don’t think much of it. It goes on too long. If it could be for five years, say, I think it would be an excellent institution. Who can stand the same person morning, noon and night for forty years? People think a single woman of my age hasn’t married because she hasn’t had the chance. That’s not so of course.’ Irene Bell chuckled. It was a grim chuckle that hadn’t much to do with amusement or pleasure. ‘I’m not much to look at and never have been but neither are most of the married women you see around you. If folks only got married because they were pretty or charming it’d be a world of singles. No, I never fancied marriage myself. I don’t much like sharing. I don’t like cooking or housework or babies or sex. Oh, yes, I’ve tried sex. I tried it three times forty years ago and those three times were enough for a lifetime in my opinion.

  ‘But those are my views. That’s marriage in general. In particular, which is what you’re asking, I daresay the Knightons were as happy as most people. She was very fond of him, poor Adela. She made her choice and she stuck to it and she was a good wife, no one could have had a better wife.’

  You don’t like him, Wexford thought to himself. Or is it more complex than that? Is it that once you liked him too much?

  ‘They never had much to say to each other. That’s partly what I mean when I say I don’t think much of marriage. How else do we communicate but in words when all’s said and done? You hear a lot of nonsense about the language of the eyes, the language of love, silent communion, all that kind of thing. There wasn’t anything of that sort with Adela and Adam, I can tell you. Adela wasn’t that sort of woman anyway. Adam—well, it always seems a funny thing to me, a man who reads poetry.’

  ‘Most of it was written by men.’

  ‘That’s different,’ said Miss Bell. ‘Don’t confuse me. I mean it’s not very robust, it’s affected, if you ask me, a man reading—what d’you call ’em?—sonnets.’

  Wexford said abruptly, ‘Was he unfaithful to her? Did he have love affairs with other women?’

  She was taken aback. She had been raising her teacup to her lips. The motion was arrested in mid-air, then slowly she restored the cup to the saucer. ‘Good God, no. What an extraordinary idea! He was sixty-three.’

  ‘He wasn’t always sixty-three. In any case he’s a very handsome man, with what I’d call an attractive presence.’ Wexford paused. How intimate they had become, how frank, in ten minutes over the teacups! It seemed at that moment as if there were nothing they couldn’t have said to each other. It was a pity she hadn’t more to say. ‘There’s many a man of sixty-three,’ he said, ‘would be horrified at a suggestion his emotional life was over.’

  She gave a short, rather harsh cackle. ‘See the day looming yourself, can you? No, there was nothing like that with Adam, you can forget that. Who would he carry on with? Never saw a woman but the vicar’s wife. If you’re thinking he shot poor Adela to take up with someone else, you’re cold like they say in “hunt the thimble”, you’re stone cold. Adam wouldn’t point a gun at anyone, let alone fire it. He gave up shooting pigeons because he said it wasn’t ethical. I once saw him get stung by a wasp trying to put it out of the window because he wouldn’t kill it.’ She laughed again, then set down her cup with a rattle. ‘I knew it!’ she said. ‘This is turning into a party, a beanfeast, and I’m not having it. I call it very bad taste. It was good of you to give me tea but now you’ll take me to the station, please.’

  Wexford pleaded, ‘Five more minutes, Miss Bell, and I promise I will. I want to ask you something about China. Do you remember when w
e were all sitting in that bar on the hotel roof in Kweilin?’

  She was putting on her gloves. ‘The temperature was ninety and they were playing “White Christmas”. Of course I remember.’

  ‘Mr Knighton had a shock. He went white. He saw something or someone and he was absolutely astounded by what he saw. Did you notice that?’

  ‘I can’t say I did.’

  ‘A minute or two later Mrs Knighton said she thought she would go to bed and you and she got up to leave.’

  ‘Maybe, but I don’t remember.’

  ‘And the next day he didn’t mention it to you? Or to Mrs Knighton in your presence? I mean, he didn’t say, “Something I saw on the roof last night amazed me”?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. Why don’t you ask him?’

  ‘I will. You took a lot of photographs. So did Mrs Knighton. Did she show you the ones she took?’

  ‘Weeks ago,’ said Irene Bell. ‘She came up to town. She always had lunch with me when she did that. We had lunch and we looked at each other’s snaps.’

  ‘What did she do with hers?’

  ‘Took them away, of course. She was going to put them in an album she’d got.’

  Up in his office on the second floor of the police station he found Burden and Dr Crocker talking about guns. Burden even had a replica of a Walther PPK 9 mm, one which they had taken off a young tearaway who had threatened a visiting pop star with it and which, after the case was over, had unaccountably got into Wexford’s desk drawer and remained there ever since.

  ‘I feel more at home with a scalpel,’ said the doctor. ‘Had a nice funeral, Reg? It beats me why people who aren’t religious have funerals. Boring, embarrassing, awkward affairs with no grace or beauty to them now the old prayer book’s more or less gone.’

  ‘You have to have a funeral, don’t you?’ said Burden.

  ‘If you mean by law, certainly not. People have them because they think they’ve got to but they haven’t. You can just get your undertaker to do a quiet little disposal when the crematorium’s not busy. Nothing to it. Mind you, it’ll cost you much the same. Five hundred quid give or take a little, that’s what a funeral comes to these days.’