‘On Tuesday he came back like he said, at eight sharp. But I never saw any car this time and I never saw his girl. He give my five pounds and said he’d be gone by eleven and when I came back he
had
gone. Now, I’d left the room like a new pin, as good as a hotel it was . . .’
‘I doubt if the court will look on that as a mitigating circumstance,’ Wexford put in coldly.
At this hint of the revenge society intended to take on her, Ruby gave another loud sniff. ‘Well,’ she gulped, ‘they’d messed it up a bit, moved the furniture, and of course I started putting the room to rights . . .’
‘D’you mind sparing me all these asides? I’m a detective, not a domestic science examiner.’
‘I have to tell you, don’t I? I have to tell you what I did.’
‘Tell me what you found.’
‘Blood,’ Ruby said. ‘I moved back the sofa, and there it was, a great big stain. I know I ought to have come to you, Mr Wexford, but I panicked, I was dead scared. All those convictions you’ve pinned on me. They’ll get me for an accomplice or whatever it is, I thought. Then, there was him, Geoff Smith. It’s all very well you saying you’d have looked after me. You and me, we know what that amounts to. You wouldn’t have put a bodyguard on my place night and day. I was scared stiff.’ She added in a querulous whimper, ‘Still am, come to that.’
‘Where does Matthews come into all this?’
‘I was all on my own. I kept going to the window to see if I could see a little dark fellow watching the house. He’s killed one girl, I thought. The odds are he won’t think twice about finishing me off. George and me, we’d always been good friends.’ For a moment Wexford wondered who she meant. Then he recalled Monkey’s long disused Christian name. ‘I’d heard he’d come out and I found him in the Piebald Pony.’ She put her elbows on Wexford’s desk and fixed him with a long supplicating stare. ‘A woman needs a man about at a time like that. I reckon I thought he’d protect me.’
‘She wanted someone to protect her,’ said Monkey Matthews. ‘Can I have another fag? I hadn’t got nowhere to go, being as my wife won’t have me in the house. Mind you, Mr Burden, I don’t know as I’d have gone back with Rube if I’d known what was waiting for me.’ He banged his thin concave chest. ‘I’m no bodyguard. Got a light?’ Unashamed, no longer afraid since he had been assured that any possible resemblance between Drayton and Geoff Smith was coincidental, he sat jauntily in his chair, talking with animation.
Burden struck a match to light the fourth cigarette he had had since his arrival and pushed an ashtray pointedly towards him.
‘It was blood on the carpet all right,’ Monkey said. The cigarette adhered to his lower lip and the smoke made him screw up his eyes. ‘I didn’t believe her at first. You know what women are.’
‘How much blood?’ Burden asked tightly as if the very effort of questioning this man hurt him.
‘Good deal. Nasty it was. Like as if someone had been playing silly beggars with a knife.’ He shuddered, but he cackled at the same time. The cigarette fell. When he had retrieved it, but not before it had marked the carpet, he said, ‘Rube was scared stiff of this Smith coming back, wanted to come to you. “That’s no bloody good,” I said, “not after all this time,” but not being one to flout the law when it’s a matter of real downright crime I thought I’d better give you a hint there was a body knocking about. So I wrote to you. Rube had got some paper about. She always has things nice.’
He gave Burden an ingratiating smile, hideously distorting his face. ‘I knew you’d only need a hint to get your hands on him. Anyone who finds fault with our local police, I always say, Mr Wexford and Mr Burden, they’re real educated tip-top men. They’d be up in London at the Yard if there was any justice in this world.’
‘If there’s any justice in this world,’ Burden said furiously, ‘it’ll put you away for the biggest stretch you’ve ever done for this.’
Monkey contemplated Burden’s green glass statuette as if he hoped to identify it with some known form of human or animal life. ‘Now don’t be like that,’ he said. ‘I haven’t done nothing. You could say I’d put myself out to help you. I never even set eyes on this Geoff Smith, but if he’d come back snooping around, I’d have been up the creek just the same as Rube.’ He gave a deep theatrical sigh. ‘It was a real sacrifice I made, helping you with your enquiries, and where’s it got me?’
The question was rhetorical but Burden answered it sharply. ‘A nice comfortable house to kip down in, for one thing. May Be you’re putting the squeeze on this Smith and you only made your “real sacrifice” when he wouldn’t play.’
‘It’s a dirty lie,’ said Monkey passionately. ‘I tell you I never saw him. I thought that young bloke of yours was him. God knows, I reckoned I could spot a copper a mile off, but then they tog themselves up so funny these days. Rube and me we’d been scared stiff and then there he was, poking his long nose over the wall. I tell you, I thought my number was up. Put the squeeze on him! That’s a proper laugh. How could I put the squeeze on him when I never set foot in Rube’s place before Wednesday?’ More ape-like than ever, he scowled at Burden, his eyes growing bulbous. ‘I’ll have another fag,’ he said in an injured tone.
‘When did you write the letter?’
‘Thursday morning while Rube was out working.’
‘So you were all by yourself?’
‘Yes, on my tod. I wasn’t putting Mr Geoff Smith through the third degree if that’s what you’re getting at. I leave that kind of thing to you.’ Indignation brought on a coughing fit and he covered his mouth with deeply stained yellowish-brown fingers.
‘I reckon you must have DTs of the lungs,’ Burden said disgustedly. ‘What d’you do when you’re – er, behind bars? Start screaming like an addict in a rehabilitation centre?’
‘It’s my nerves,’ Monkey said. ‘I’ve been a mass of nerves ever since I saw that blood.’
‘How did you know what to put in the letter?’
‘If you’re going to trap me,’ Monkey said with distant scorn, ‘you’ll have to be more bloody subtle than that. Rube told me, of course. Be your age. Young, dark and got a black car, she says. Name of Geoff Smith. Come in at eight and was due out at eleven.’
His dog-end was stubbed out on the base of the glass sculpture. Lacking for a brief moment its customary cigarette, Monkey’s face reminded the inspector of a short-sighted man without his glasses. There was about it something naked yet unnatural.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘You know all this about him, because Ruby told you, but you never saw him and you never saw the girl.’ At the last word Monkey’s indignant eyes wavered. Burden was not sure whether this was from apprehension or because he was in need of further stimulation. He snatched the cigarette box and put it in a drawer. ‘How did you know her name was Ann?’ he said.
7
‘How did you know her name was Ann?’ Wexford asked.
The look Ruby Branch gave him was one of simple incomprehension. She appeared not merely unwilling to answer his question; she was utterly at sea. With Geoff Smith and his description she had been on firm ground. Now he had plunged her into uncharted and, for some reason possibly known to her, dangerous waters. She turned away her eyes and contemplated one of her veined legs as if she expected to see a ladder running up the stocking.
‘You never even saw that letter, did you, Ruby?’ He waited. Silence was the worst thing, the thing all policemen fear. Speech, no matter how clever and how subtly phrased, is necessarily a betrayal. ‘Geoff Smith never told you that girl’s name. How did you know? How does Matthews know?’
‘I don’t know what you’re getting at,’ Ruby cried. She clutched her handbag and shrank away from him, her mouth trembling. ‘All those sarcastic things you say, they go in one ear and out the other. I’ve told you all I know and I’ve got a splitting headache.’
Wexford left her and went to find Burden. ‘I don’t even begin to understand this,’ he said. ‘Why does Geoff Smith tell her his name? She didn’t want to know. “No names, no pack drill” is what she said to Drayton.’
‘Of course it’s an assumed name.’
‘Yes, I expect it is. He’s an exhibitionist who uses an alias for fun, even when no one’s interested.’
‘Not only does he give his name unasked, he gives his girlfriend’s too.’
‘No, Mike,’ Wexford said crossly, ‘my credulity won’t stretch that far. “My name’s Geoff Smith and I’ll be bringing Ann with me.” Can you visualise it? I can’t. Besides, I’ve been over and over it with Ruby. I’d stake a year’s salary on it. He never told her the girl’s name and the first time she heard it was from me in there just now.’
‘But Monkey knew it,’ said Burden.
‘And Monkey wasn’t even there. I don’t think Ruby’s lying. She’s scared to death and late in the day though it is, she’s throwing herself on our mercy. Mike, would Ann Margolis go to a place like that? You know what the paper said. “Ex-model and Chelsea playgirl!” Why wouldn’t she just take her boyfriend home with her?’
‘She likes slumming,’ said Burden. ‘Margolis told me that. Smith, so-called, booked the room on Saturday. Anita knew Margolis would be out on Tuesday evening but she probably thought he’d come home fairly early. He didn’t know and she didn’t know the gallery manager would ask him out to dinner.’
‘Yes, it ties up. Have they started going over Ruby’s place?’
‘Taking it apart now, sir. The carpet’s gone down to the lab. Martin’s found a neighbour who saw something. Old girl called Collins. She’s waiting for us now.’
She was nearly as large as Wexford himself, a stout old woman with a square jaw. Before he began to question her, she launched forth on a long account of her suffering consequent on being Ruby Branch’s next-door neighbour. Hardly an evening passed without her having to bang on the common wall between the houses. Ruby worked all day and did her cleaning after six. The television was always full on and often the vacuum cleaner at the same time. Monkey she knew. He had lived there from Ruby’s arrival two years before until six months before he went to prison. It was disgusting, a crying scandal. As soon as she saw him come home with Ruby on Wednesday morning she knew trouble would start. Then there was a married niece and her husband from Pomfret way – if they
were
married – who came a couple of times a week, and who got drinking and laughing until the small hours.
‘That’s who I thought it was I saw leaving on Tuesday,’ she said. ‘Staggering down the path and holding on to each other. As much as they could do to walk it was.’
‘Two of them?’ Wexford said, his voice rising. ‘You saw two of them?’
Mrs Collins nodded emphatically. ‘Yes, there was two. I didn’t look long, I can tell you. I was too disgusted.’
‘Did you see them come?’
‘I was in my kitchen till gone nine. I come into the front and I thought, thank the Lord she’s gone out. There was dead silence until half past. I know I’m right about the time on account of looking at the clock. There was something on telly I wanted at twenty-five to. I’d just got up to switch it on when there comes this great mighty crash from next-door. Here we go, I thought, more hi-jinks, and I banged on the wall.’
‘Go on,’ Wexford said.
‘For two pins, I said to myself, I’ll go in and have it out with her. But you know how it is, you don’t like to make trouble with the neighbours. Besides, there was three of them and I’m not so young as I used to be. Anyway, I got so far as putting my coat on and I was standing just inside the front door, sort of hesitating, when I saw these two come down the path.’
‘How well did you see them?’
‘Not that well,’ Mrs Collins admitted. ‘It was through the little glass bit in the door, you see. They was both in macs and the girl had a scarf on her head. His hair was dark, that I do know. I never saw their faces, but they were drunk as lords. I thought the girl was going to fall flat on her face. And she did fall when he got the car door open, fell right across the front seat.’ She nodded indignantly, her expression smug and self-righteous. ‘I gave them five minutes to get out of the way and then I went next-door, but there was no answer and I saw her come in myself at eleven. What’s been going on? I thought. It wasn’t the married niece from Pomfret. She never had no car. Couldn’t keep money in her pocket long enough to get one.’
‘This was a black car you saw them get into, Mrs Collins?’
‘Black? Well, it was under one of them street lamps, and you know what they are, make you go all colours.’ She paused, searching in her mind. ‘I’d have said it was green,’ she said.
Linda Grover flushed when Drayton told her to take the advertisement out of the window. The blood poured into her madonna’s face and he knew it was because his explanation had been too crude.
‘Didn’t you realise what it meant?’ he said harshly. ‘I should have thought one look at that old tart would have told you she wasn’t a legitimate landlady.’
They were alone in the shop. She stood behind the counter, her eyes on his face and her fingers picking at the dog-eared corner of a magazine. ‘I didn’t know you were a policeman,’ she said in a voice which had grown throaty.
‘You know now.’
On his way here from Ruby Branch’s house he had stopped at the library, not for the sake of the crime section this time, but to look at the big coloured books of paintings by old masters. There, amid the Mantegnas, the Botticellis and the Fra Angelicos, he had found her face under cracked haloes and he had stared at it in a kind of wonder before rage had taken over and he had slammed the book shut so that the librarian looked up with a frown.
‘Is that all you came for?’ Her first fright was gone and her voice took on an aggressiveness as he nodded. ‘All that song and dance about an old advert card?’ With a shrug, she walked past him and out of the shop, her body held straight as if she had an invisible weight on her head. He watched her come back, fascinated by the clean, pure curves of jaw and arm and thigh and by the small graceful movements her hands made as she tore Ruby’s card into shreds.