Speaker of Mandarin Read online

  ‘I shan’t fall foul of them. As long as you don’t take anything out of China that’s more than a hundred and twenty years old you’re OK.’

  Wexford thanked him for his opinion and his tea and left him wrapping up and packing a blue, crimson and gold ikon. In his own room, standing in the corner by the air conditioner, was the old woman with the bound feet. He stared and she changed into the wooden coat stand over which he had hung his jacket.

  Her shadow flitted across the window blind. He knew she wasn’t real now and because of something that had happened to his eyes or his mind he was imagining her. In the book of supernatural stories he was reading was one by Somerset Maugham called ‘The End of the Flight’, which had nothing to do with aircraft but was about a man in the Far East who had done some sort of injury to an Achinese and thereafter, no matter where he fled to, was haunted by this Achinese or his spirit or ghost. He, Wexford, had of course never done any sort of injury to an old Chinese woman.

  The room was empty again, not a trace of her. The air-conditioning made it rather too cool. He went to bed, pulling the quilt up over his head. It was impossible to sleep, so in the middle of the night he got up again and made tea. There was no sign of the old woman but still he couldn’t sleep, and to keep sleep still further at bay, at about four in the morning the drone of the air conditioner was augmented by a rushing roaring sound. It was raining.

  When it began to get light he got out of bed and looked at the rain. He could see the rain crashing against the windows and that was about all he could see, the lake, the city roofs, the mountains were all blotted out by dense white fog.

  It was absurd to attempt to go out unless one had to. The train party had to. They were embarking on a journey to Canton that was only about two hundred miles as the crow flies but which would take two days in a train. Their luggage was piled in the hotel lobby. In twos and threes they came down in the lift to await Mr T’chung and the bus.

  Wexford sat in the rattan chair, reading Maugham’s story about the ghost of the Achinese. The Knightons came first with their friend, who was wearing her dark blue trouser suit but not looking much like the old woman with the bound feet. The bus had drawn up outside. Lois Knox came out of the lift with Hilda Avory behind her.

  ‘I suppose we must say goodbye,’ Lois said with a meaning look as if she and he had been on intimate terms.

  Wexford shook hands with her, then with Hilda and Vinald. ‘Have a good journey.’

  ‘And you,’ said Vinald. ‘Flying off in a nice little Fokker Friendship aren’t you? We should be so lucky.’

  The Baumanns and Margery waved to him. Fanning got out of the lift with Mr T’chung. ‘So help me God,’ whispered Fanning to Wexford, ‘but once I get home the furthest bloody abroad I’m going ever again will be the Isle of Wight.’

  Under umbrellas held up by their guides they filed out to the bus, joined at the last moment by the two women from New Zealand. The beautiful Pandora was in tight yellow trousers and a yellow tee shirt and Wexford saw Lois give her a glare of dislike.

  The rain swallowed the bus as it went splashing off towards the railway station. Wexford drank some tea, tried to sleep, read a story by M. R. James about a man dogged by the ghost of a Swedish nobleman whom he had inadvertently released from a tomb. He didn’t finish it. He had seen the old woman with the bound feet cross the lobby just after the bus had left and now he could see her most of the time hovering on the edge of his sight. When he stared hard she would disappear and then, as he looked away, he would be dimly aware of her waiting, so to speak, in the wings of his vision.

  It was useless to worry about it. When he got home he would get Dr Crocker to send him to an oculist or specialist in allergies or maybe, if it had to be, a psychiatrist. Instead of worrying, or instead of worrying more than he could help, he began to wonder if he ought to go and call on the local police. After all, he had originally come to China because he was a policeman, he had come at the express invitation of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Having actually been on the boat at the time of Wong’s fatal accident, should he not go and inform them of this fact? Rather glumly he thought about it. With his lack of Chinese and their undoubted lack of English? With Mr Sung as his interpreter? And what help could he be? He had been asleep at the time.

  No, he wouldn’t go. Such an action would smack of ‘putting himself forward’, of showing off his greater sophistication and that of the nation he came from. Besides, he could do nothing, tell them nothing, beyond revealing himself as possibly the least effective witness on the boat.

  It rained all day. But twenty-four hours later, when he was starting to think his flight would be cancelled because of the bad weather, the sky cleared, the sun came back and the looped mountains stood out so sharply against the translucent blue that it seemed one could pick out every tree on their slopes. Mr Sung escorted him to the airport in a taxi.

  ‘I like to say,’ said Mr Sung, ‘the very great pleasure it has been to me to be your guide and I wish you good journey and pleasant stay in Guangzhou.’

  This, Wexford knew, was what the Chinese called Canton, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that in trying to pronounce Guangzhou, Canton was the best those European merchants who had come there had been able to do.

  ‘You will please convey best wishes to your friends and relations in UK and say they are welcome to China. All friends are welcome to China.’

  The aircraft had no air-conditioning. Once they were airborne steam poured across the non-pressurized interior and the passengers fanned themselves with fans painted with the Kweilin mountains which the stewardess provided. Wexford was the only European on board. He knew that the stewardess walking up and down the aisle with fans and sweets on a tray was a young girl in her early twenties but for a moment he had seen her as an old woman with bound feet. Would he see her in Canton? In Hong Kong? Would he—like Maugham’s man with the Achinese—would he see her in England?

  At Canton he was met by his new guide, Lo Nan Chiao. Mr Lo shook hands and said he was welcome to Guangzhou and if he was agreeable, while his luggage went on to the hotel, they would proceed straight to Martyrs’ Mausoleum.

  The old woman with the bound feet was there waiting for him. He closed his eyes and opened them and she had changed back into the uniformed attendant. She emerged from the doors of the Sun Yat-sen Monument and came across the bridge from Sha Mian to meet him. By that time he would have been convinced of his own madness if Mr Lo hadn’t gone up to speak to her, remarking afterwards to Wexford that she was an acquaintance of his mother’s.

  Wexford sweated. She wasn’t always an acquaintance of Mr Lo’s mother. It was even hotter here and the humidity was intense. When he tried to make tea he found the water in his thermos flask was only lukewarm and repeated requests to the hotel staff failed to produce boiling water. But at dinner he discovered a new brand of Lao Shan, the coldest and best mineral water he had so far tasted, and he bought a dozen bottles to the amazement of the waitress to whom such extravagance perhaps represented a week’s wages. The food was good too and the coffee was drinkable.

  He dozed in his bedroom and this time it might have been a dream and not a vision he had. He never knew. But he took the traditional action honoured in ghost stories. He threw something. Almost anywhere else in the world a holy book would have been provided in an hotel bedroom, the Bible or the Koran or the Gita, but here he had to make do with Masterpieces of the Supernatural. The old woman disappeared. Wexford felt worn out. He was sure he wouldn’t sleep and he prepared for another white night, only to fall into a heavy dreamless slumber he didn’t come out of until six when the phone rang.

  ‘Good morning. Time to get up,’ said a chirpy voice, habituated to the rhythms of Cantonese.

  Wexford felt much better. The sun was shining on the green wooded mountains that he could see from his window. Breakfast and then off to the porcelain factory with Mr Lo, to the factory at Fu-shan where all the great Chinese porcelain of the
past was made and from where it had been exported to Europe, where the peach-blossom vase acquired by Gordon Vinald certainly had been shaped and painted and glazed.

  It was while he was having dinner back once more at the Bai-yun Hotel that he realized he hadn’t seen the old woman once she had scuttled out of sight at the factory behind a group of girls modelling figurines. She didn’t appear in his room that evening nor next day in Tung Shan Park nor was she anywhere around to spoil the beauty of the orchid garden.

  Mr Lo came with Wexford’s exit visa and a packed lunch to eat on the train to Kowloon. They went to the station and the old woman wasn’t there. She wasn’t waiting for him in his carriage either. The train had dun-coloured cotton covers with pleated valances on the seats and net curtains and pale blue velvet curtains at the windows. There was closed-circuit television on which sometimes a girl announcer appeared and sometimes acrobats gyrated. Wexford couldn’t yet believe the old woman had gone and he even tried to catch glimpses of her round the edges of his vision but he achieved nothing by this beyond a headache.

  He was leaving China. Quietly, without pause or frontier fuss, the train crossed the border into the Hong Kong New Territories at Sum-chun. By now Wexford had a feeling of complete certainty he would never again see the old woman with the bound feet. Ghost or hallucination, for some reason she had come to him in Shao-shan and, equally inexplicably, left him in Canton. He felt tired, shaky, with relief. The cool airy train raced pleasantly along towards the Crown Colony, back to luxury, ordinariness, a ‘too high’ standard of living, soft beds, capitalism.

  Dora was there to meet him on the platform at Kowloon Station. She had missed her husband and guessed he had missed her but they had been married, after all, for more than thirty years and so she was a little surprised by the ardour of his embrace.

  Thatto Hall Farm stands about a mile outside the small town of Sewingbury in pleasant hilly wooded country. The Hall itself was pulled down many years ago and the smaller house, which was bought by a London couple in 1965 and converted for use as a weekend residence, is now the only dwelling in Thatto Vale. Paunceley is the nearest village, a collection of cottages and a small council estate linked to Sewingbury by a B-class road and a system of footpaths that run close by the farmhouse.

  It is a long low brick house, about a hundred and sixty years old, comprising six rooms, two bathrooms, a small washroom and a kitchen. The gardens have been well kept and the house has acquired a tended, even luxurious appearance. In October the Virginia Creeper which covers half the front of the house turns to a blaze of crimson and the two circular flowerbeds in the two front lawns are filled with dwarf Michaelmas daisies in shades of purple, rose and deep blue.

  It was on a morning in October that Mrs Renie Thompson, the cleaner at Thatto Hall Farm, arrived at nine to find her employer lying dead on the dining room floor.

  Wexford got to work half an hour later and that was the first thing they told him. The name rang a bell and so did the address.

  ‘Who is it that’s dead?’ he said to Detective Sergeant Martin.

  ‘A Mrs Knighton, sir. A Mrs Adela Knighton. The woman who found her said she’d been shot.’

  ‘And Inspector Burden’s gone over there, has he, with the doctor and Murdoch? I think we’ll go too.’

  It was a fine sunny day, a little morning mist still lingering. The leaves had not yet begun to fall. Where the footpath met the road, just before the farmhouse, a man came over the stile, carrying a shotgun and with two dead rabbits slung over his shoulder. Thatto Hall Farm lay in a misty golden haze. On its well-trimmed dewy lawns lay a scattering of red and yellow fruit from crab apple trees. The front door was open and Wexford walked in.

  Murdoch, the Scene-of-Crimes Officer, was in the dining room with Dr Crocker and the body. Naughton, the fingerprint man, was busy in the hall. At the kitchen table with Burden opposite her, drinking strong tea, sat Renie Thompson. She was much the same age as her dead employer had been, somewhere in the middle sixties, a big gaunt woman with dyed brown hair in a hairnet and wearing a skirt and jumper covered by a mauve flowered overall.

  ‘Where is Mr Knighton?’ Wexford asked.

  ‘Don’t ask me.’ Mrs Thompson kept up a bold and truculent manner even while in shock. ‘I always come in nine sharp Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and this is the first time I’ve known him not be here as well as her. I went upstairs and looked. I mean he might have been dead and laying up there too for all I knew. They had twin beds and his wasn’t slept in. I’ve never known that before, not all the time I’ve worked here and that’s donkey’s years.’

  Wexford went upstairs. The staircase was of polished oak, uncarpeted, and, though the bedrooms were carpeted, the spacious upper hall had a polished floor on which lay blue and silvery grey rugs. The principal bedroom, with its made bed and its unmade bed, was done in shades of rose, the other three in blue, green and gold respectively. Victorian furniture, chintz curtains pinch-pleated or on rings, Arthur Rackham drawings in narrow silver-coloured frames, on a console table a bunch of everlasting flowers in a Bing and Grondahl bowl, and in every bedroom a jar of potpourri. All very correct and tasteful. Wexford looked in all the cupboards, he even looked under the beds. He went downstairs and looked in the large, similarly conventionally furnished living room. Having looked in the bathrooms, he looked in the washroom where he noticed a pane of glass was missing from the window. Knighton, alive or dead, wasn’t in the house.

  Dr Crocker came out of the dining room and said, ‘Old Tremlett’s on his way. I managed to get him at home before he left for the infirmary.’

  ‘Is it true she was shot?’

  ‘Through the back of the head. He must have brought the barrel of the gun right up against the occipital itself. All her back hair was singed.’

  ‘He shot her through the back of the head? Put the gun against the back of her head and shot her? The mind boggles a bit. What do you think, Sergeant, she heard a sound, came down to see what it was, he crept up behind her and shot her?’

  ‘She might have heard glass breaking, sir. There’s a piece of glass missing from the window in there.’

  ‘Except that it was cut out. You can get together with Mrs Thompson and find out what sort of valuables they’ve got or had in this house.’

  Wexford knelt down and looked at the body. It was cold and heavy to the touch and rigor was already established. What he had seen of Adela Knighton in China he hadn’t cared for but he forgot that in a rush of pity. She was a sad sight and there was no dignity in her death. While alive and in health she had been a plain, stocky, rather aggressive, no-nonsense sort of woman. Now in death she lay as a flabby heap, her face having a look of half-melted wax, her grizzled sandy hair burned black at the nape of her neck and around the red, charred-edged hole the bullet had drilled there. She wore an expensive-looking nightgown of some thick, shiny, peach-coloured silky material with lace borders and lace insertions and over it a dressing gown of dark blue velour. On her feet were flat-heeled slippers of quilted black velvet. Her wedding ring, a chased platinum band worn down to the thinness of wire, was on her left hand.

  ‘It doesn’t look as if anything very alarming fetched her down,’ said Wexford. ‘There’s a phone extension by her bed and the wires haven’t been cut.’

  A black Daimler drew up on the gravel drive. Sir Hilary Tremlett, the pathologist, had arrived. Wexford went into the washroom off the hall. It contained a lavatory pan with low flush cistern, a vanity table with bowl insert, a small round mirror on the wall above the bowl. The window was the sash kind divided into four panes, each about fifteen inches square, and from one of these the glass had been cut. Wexford decided there was no way he himself could have squeezed through the aperture thus obtained but he was a large man with a big frame. Most women could have got through there and any average-sized man.

  Directly below the window outside was a small narrow flowerbed in which pink sedum was blooming. Wexford knew there wouldn’t be
any footprints. He went out to look and there weren’t, though someone had plainly kicked over the remains of what footprints there had been.

  Mrs Thompson was telling Martin that the Knightons had never kept money in the house as far as she knew. Mrs Knighton, like a lot of well-off people, Renie Thompson implied, was always short of cash and as often as not would pay her with a cheque. No ornaments were missing, no attempt had been made to remove heavy equipment, television, record player or any kitchen machinery.

  ‘Presumably she had some jewellery.’

  ‘Must have done,’ said Martin in a way that indicated he wouldn’t have thought of it if his chief hadn’t reminded him. ‘How about jewellery, Mrs Thompson?’

  ‘I only saw her in the mornings, didn’t I? It’s no good asking me what rings and whatnot she had.’

  Wexford remembered, from China, a platinum watch and an engagement ring with, he thought, a square-cut stone. He mentioned those items to Mrs Thompson.

  ‘If you say so. Don’t ask me where she kept them.’

  ‘Very well, we won’t ask you,’ said Wexford, irritated by her truculent huffy manner. ‘We’ll look. There are a limited number of places. She didn’t keep them in the fridge or up a chimney.’

  Sir Hilary had finished his preliminary examination and they were about to take the body away. Murdoch was still meticulously at work on table surfaces, banisters, door jambs. The doctor, about to leave, said to Wexford, ‘Did she live here alone?’

  ‘There’s a husband,’ said Wexford.

  ‘Where is he then?’

  ‘I wish I knew.’

  Martin came downstairs. ‘There’s no jewellery or jewel case in her room or any of the bedrooms, sir.’

  ‘Right.’ He said to Mrs Thompson, remembering a table on a hotel roof, a yellow envelope of snapshots, ‘She had children. Where do they live?’

  ‘The daughter in Sewingbury, that I do know. Don’t ask me where you’ll find the sons, all off abroad somewhere, I daresay. There might be numbers in that book.’