Part 18 (1/2)

”Possibly,” said Maeve. ”About then. I can't be all that sure of the date.”

”I can. You gave him some money. Why?”

”Really! I told you why or my wife-in-law did.” Here a sly smile at Claudia. ”It was a wedding present. He had found some woman, one of the fruit-pickers, he was going to marry.”

”A thousand pounds, I think you said?”

”Then you think wrong.” Claudia dissolved into silent laughter. ”We'd better things to do with that sort of money.”

He sat down again but this time on an upright chair well away from her. A wasp had got into the room, wheeled about sluggishly before making for the open jam jar. He watched it crawl onto the jam's smooth golden crust. ”Miller had read the book Mr. Tredown had concocted from his ma.n.u.script and was blackmailing you for plagiarism, for pa.s.sing off his work as Mr. Tredown's.”

”I know what plagiarism is, thank you very much.” Claudia shook even more with silent mirth. Then, suddenly she was serious. She frowned and swept the wings of charcoal-colored hair away from her face. ”How did he die? Dusty, I mean.”

Didn't she know? Then Wexford recalled that, apart from him and his discreet team, Miller's death was known only to Irene McNeil and Bridget Cook. He was almost sure there had been some kind of s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p between Miller and Claudia Ricardo, brief perhaps, a quick coupling in the bushes or in Grimble's house, but something. ”That I can't tell you,” he said.

”But he is dead?”

”I've told you so, Miss Ricardo.”

She said nothing.

”I'm sorry,” he said, ”if it upsets you.”

”Upsets me?” Her reply came as a strident shout. ”You must be mad. I'm delighted. I've a little holiday in my heart.” It was evidently a favorite phrase of hers. ”You've made my day.”

The wasp was satiated. It had crawled up to the rim of the jar. Maeve said, ”Claudia,” in a warning tone, got up, and crossed to the table. The wasp was grooming itself, lifting its wings, wiping or was.h.i.+ng traces of lemon curd from its legs. Maeve put out her hand, picked it up swiftly between finger and thumb and, before it could sting her, crushed the life out of it.

Claudia started laughing again. With an exasperated glance at her, Maeve dropped the wasp corpse onto the tray.

”He came away from here with the money you gave him,” Wexford said, ”and instead of going back to the site where the fruit-pickers were camped, went next door to wash himself and find other clothes to wear. Your delight, I suppose, is typically that of the blackmailer's victim when she or he knows the extortion can't be repeated.”

”For a policeman,” said Maeve, ”you have a most unusual command of the English language.”

This he ignored. Her almost clinical extermination of the wasp had disturbed him. Was he being too fanciful in thinking that if she could do that so ruthlessly she might be capable of other, more serious, executions? Probably he was. He got up. ”I shall visit Mr. Tredown in the hospice tomorrow afternoon,” he said. ”Perhaps you'll tell him to expect me. I shall be on my own.”

His evenings he treasured when he could spend them at home, but when the case in hand was as important as this one, they were rare. To Selina and Vivien Hexham he thought he owed a visit rather than expecting them to come once more to him, and he arranged to call at Selina's house at seven. Hannah came with him. So difficult and p.r.i.c.kly in some circ.u.mstances, she was an ideal companion for the coming encounter. Her sympathies were always with stalwart young women who postponed or refused marriage in favor of independence and a career.

During the day she had had another meeting with Bridget Cook, this time on a park bench about half a mile from where Bridget lived with Williams. The purpose had been to discover, if she could, where Miller had lived in the years between his first fruit-picking adventure in Flagford and his second and ultimate.

”Where was he living when you met him?”

Bridget had known that. ”In a trailer park outside G.o.dalming.” Hannah noted with amus.e.m.e.nt how she used the American phrase, culled no doubt from television, rather than the British ”caravan site.” ”It was a van belonging to a pal who'd given him a lend of it.”

”Did you ever go there?”

”Once or twice. We was like in a relations.h.i.+p.” Seeing from her expression that Hannah wanted more, she said, ”My mum lives there. She went into the hospital to have her knee done. She'd fallen over and she had to have her knee replaced. I was stopping in her house and I met Sam. In a pub. Then he come back home with me.”

”Right. This-er, van he was living in, did he have a computer there or a typewriter, pens and paper, dictionaries, and that sort of thing?”

Bridget stared. ”I never saw nothing like that. I mean, pens he had. Like a ballpoint and a pad for writing on. He wrote his poems there. That's when he wrote that poem for me.”

”And where had he been living before he came to G.o.dalming?”

”He said he used to have a van.” Describing the difference between this shortened form of ”caravan” and the commercial vehicle eluded her. All she could do was point to the distant roadway where a red Royal Mail van was parked. ”Like that only bigger. He drove about, getting work where he could.”

”Did he sleep in it?”

”Sure. Why not? He had a mattress in the back.”

That some people, quite a lot of people, lived liked this was no news to Hannah, but every fresh time she heard of it or witnessed it, her thoughts went to her conventional middle-cla.s.s mother and Bal's conventional middle-cla.s.s professional parents and she wondered if they had ever heard of these lifestyles. Her only astonishment came from her awareness that the man had never been in prison or even charged with any offense, as to her certain knowledge he had not.

It was in the report she had written, but she told Wexford about it later in the car after they had met on Barnes Common. ”I said you might want to see her and I've got a phone number and an address to contact her. Not her home address, of course. The dreaded Williams might be on the watch. She's got a cleaning job three days a week and I can get in touch with her any Tuesday or Thursday.”

”Where's the woman who employs her then?” Wexford asked, amused.

”It's a man, guv. You won't believe this but he's a cabinet minister and he's in his government department from nine a.m.”

Selina Hexham must have been watching, for she opened the front door to them before they were halfway up the path. Vivien wasn't with her this time. Since coming home from work Selina had changed into a black tunic and tracksuit pants and her only jewelry, apart from the ring, were small gold studs in her ears. They sat down in that living room, which had seen so much anxiety, hateful realization, and pain. It seemed not to touch Hannah, who hadn't been made aware of it in the way he had, and because she hadn't eaten since a kind of brunch at eleven in the morning, fell upon the milky coffee and biscuits they were offered, while Wexford took his coffee black and let his thoughts drift briefly to a gla.s.s of claret.

”I want you to tell me, Selina, why you think your father kept his . . . life up here in his study a secret from your mother. From you all really, but especially from your mother. If he was doing research for authors, as I think he was, what was the point of not being open about it?”

She seemed puzzled. ”You mean research in biology?”

”He was interested in various mythologies too, wasn't he?”

”Yes, but I don't think he had any particular knowledge. He just liked them. Do you mind if I ask you why?”

”You can ask me anything you like,” said Wexford. ”There may be some things I wouldn't think it right to tell you at this stage, but if there are I'll let you know. I'm asking this because I have an idea-and it's only an idea at the moment-that your father may have gone to call on Owen Tredown after he'd left the Davidsons. And if he did, could it have been to advise him on the writing of The First Heaven The First Heaven?”

Selina frowned a little. She was very young but already two parallel lines were cut into the s.p.a.ce between her black eyebrows. ”I've been thinking a lot about that. And I've come to rather a strange conclusion. I've been wondering if he did keep it a secret from her or if maybe she knew and they both kept it a secret from us. We were children. Maybe they thought it wouldn't have interested us, and I suppose they were right.”

”But it was a perfectly respectable thing to be doing, a useful, valuable thing.”

She agreed rather reluctantly, ”Yes. Perhaps so. But Vivien and I, we'd have thought it a dull thing, we'd have thought it boring, and we wouldn't have understood how it could have been important enough to take him away from us almost every evening. I mean, I can understand now that Dad and Mum could have needed the extra money, but I wouldn't have done then. They never talked to us about money. Mum said to me after he-well, after he'd gone, that children could have terrific anxieties if they thought their parents were short of cash. They imagined themselves without a home, sleeping in the street, that sort of thing. But then I thought, if he'd taken on this researching thing, Mum would have mentioned it when Dad went missing-and she didn't.”

”We wondered,” said Wexford, recalling that this had been Burden's idea. ”We also wondered if your father had perhaps embarked on something which, if it was successful, would bring him a lot of kudos, but if it failed might make him seem ridiculous. Forgive me, but that's the way I have to put it.”

”That's all right. I'm past all that. But I don't know, I just don't know.”

He nodded. ”All right.”