Ruth Rendell - A Sleeping Life

‘It’s what?'

‘I know. Now you can see why it stuck in my mind. Actually, it’s Pauline Flinders – heaven knows what her parents were thinking about – but Grenville – er, Mr West – refers to her as Polly. I’ve no idea where she lives.’

Next Wexford phoned Baker. The search of the electoral register had brought to light no Comfrey in the parliamentary constituency of Kenbourne Vale. Would Baker do the same for him in respect of a Miss Pauline Flinders? Baker would, with pleasure. The name seemed to afford him no amusement or even interest. However, he was anxious to help, and in addition would send a man to Kenbourne Green to inquire in all the local shops and of Grenville West’s neighbours.

‘It’s all so vague,’ said Dr Crocker who came to join them for lunch at the Carousel Cafe. ‘Even if the Comfrey woman was going under another name in London, this girl would have recognized her from the description in the papers. The photograph, unlike as it is, would have meant something to her. She’d have been in touch, she’d have read all your appeals.’

‘So therefore doesn’t it look as if she didn’t because she has something to hide?’

‘It looks to me,’ said Burden, ‘as if she just didn’t know her.’

Waiting to hear from Baker, Wexford tried to make some sort of reasonable pattern of it. Rhoda Comfrey, who, for some unknown motive, called herself something else in London, had been a fan and admirer of Grenville West, had become his friend. Perhaps she performed certain services for him in connection with his work. She might – and Wexford was rather pleased with this notion – run a photocopying agency. That would fit in with what Mrs Crown had told him. Suppose she had made copies of manuscripts for West free of charge, and he, in gratitude, had given her a rather special birthday present? After all, according to old Mrs Parker, she had become fifty years old on 5 August.

In some countries, Wexford knew, the fiftieth birthday was looked on as a landmark of great significance, an anniversary worthy of particular note. He had bought the wallet on the fourth, given it to her on the fifth, left for his holiday on the seventh, and she had come down to Kingsmarkham on the eighth. None of this got him nearer finding the identity of her murderer, but that was a long way off yet, he thought gloomily. Into the midst of these reflections the phone rang.

‘We’ve found her,’ said the voice of Baker. ‘Or we’ve found where she lives. She was in the register. West Kenbourne, All Souls Grove, number fifteen, flat one. Patel, Malina N. and Flinders, Pauline J. No number in the phone book for either of them, so I sent Dinehart round, and a woman upstairs said your Flinders usually comes in around half-four.

'D’you want us to see her for you? It’s easily done.’

‘No, thanks, Michael, I’ll come up.’

Happiness hadn’t eroded all the encrusting sourness from Baker’s nature. He was still quick to sense a snub where no snub was intended, still looking always for an effusively expressed appreciation. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said gruffly. ‘D’you know how to find All Souls Grove?’ Implicit in his tone was the suggestion that this country bumpkin might be able to find a haystack or even a needle in one, but not a street delineated in every London guide. ‘Turn right out of Kenbourne Lane Tube station into Magdalen Hill, right again into Balliol Street, and it’s the second on the left after Oriel Mews.’

Forebearing to point out that with his rank he did rate a car and a driver, Wexford said only, ‘I’m most grateful, Michael, you’re very good,’ but he was too late.

‘All in a day’s work,’ said Baker and put the phone down hard.

Wexford had sometimes wondered why it is that a plain woman so often chooses to live with, or share a flat with, or be companioned by, a beautiful woman. Perhaps choice does not enter into it; perhaps the pressure comes from the other side, from the beautiful one whose looks are set off by the contrast, while the ill-favoured one is too shy, too humble and too accustomed to her place to resist. In this case, the contrast was very marked. Beauty had opened the front door to him, beauty in a peacock-green sari with little gold ornaments, and on hands of a fineness and delicacy seldom seen in Western women, the width across the broadest part less than three inches, rings of gold and ivory. An exquisite small face, the skin a smoky gold, peeped at him from a cloud of silky black hair.

‘Miss Patel?’ She nodded, and nodded again rather sagely when he showed her his warrant card. ‘I’d like to see Miss Flinders, please.’

The flat, on the ground floor, was the usual furnished place. Big rooms divided with improvised matchwood walls, old reject furniture, girls’ clutter everywhere – clothes and magazines, pinned-up posters, strings of beads hanging from a door handle, half-burned coloured candles in saucers. The other girl, the one he had come to see, turned slowly from having been hunched over a typewriter. An ashtray beside her was piled with stubs. He found himself thinking:

Little Polly Flinders

Sat among the cinders,

Warming her pretty little toes…

As it happened, her feet were bare under the long cotton skirt, and they were good feet, shapely and long. Perhaps, altogether, she wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t seen Malina Patel first. She wouldn’t have been bad at all but for that awful stoop, assumed no doubt in an attempt to reduce her height, though it was less than his Sylvia’s, and but for the two prominent incisors in her upper jaw. Odd, he thought, in someone of her years, child of the age of orthodontics. She came up to him, unsmiling and wary, and Malina Patel went softly away, having not spoken a word. He plunged straight into the middle of things.

‘No doubt you’ve read the papers, Miss Flinders, and seen about the murder of a Miss Rhoda Comfrey. This photograph was in the papers. Imagine it, if you can, aged by about twenty years and its owner using another name.’ She looked at the photograph and he watched her. He could make nothing of her expression, it seemed quite blank. ‘Do you think you have ever seen her? In, let us say, the company of Mr Grenville West?’

A flush coloured her face unbecomingly. Victor Vivian had described her as a blonde, and that word is very evocative, implying beauty and a glamorous femininity, a kind of Marilyn Monroe-ishness. Pauline Flinders was not at all like that. Her fairness was just an absence of colour, the eyes a watery pale grey, the hair almost white. Her blush was vivid and patchy under that pale skin, and he supposed it was his mention of the man’s name that had caused it. Not guilty knowledge, though, but love.

‘I’ve never seen her,’ she said, and then, ‘Why do you think Grenville knew her?’

He wasn’t going to answer that yet. She kept looking towards the door as if she were afraid the other girl would come back. Because her flat-mate had teased her about her feelings for the novelist?

‘You’re Mr West’s secretary, I believe?’

‘I had an advertisement in the local paper saying I’d do typing for people. He phoned me. That was about two years ago. I did a manuscript for him and he liked it and I started sort of working for him part-time.’ She had a graceless way of speaking, in a low dull monotone.

‘So you answered his phone, no doubt, and met his friends. Was there anyone among his friends who might possibly have been this woman?’

‘Oh, no, no one.’ She sounded certain beyond a doubt, and she added fatuously, with a lover’s obsessiveness, ‘Grenville’s in France. I had a card from him.’ Why wasn’t it on the mantelpiece? As she slipped the postcard out from under a pile of papers beside her typewriter, Wexford thought he knew the answer to that one too. She didn’t want to be teased about it. A coloured picture of Annecy, and ‘Annecy’ was clearly discernible on the otherwise smudged postmark. ‘Greeting from France, little Polly Flinders, the sunshine, the food, the air and the belle aujourd’hui. I shan’t want to come back. But I shall – So, see you. G.W.’ Typical of one of those literary blokes, he thought, but not, surely, the communication of a lover. Why had she shown it to him with its mention of her whimsical nickname? Because it was all she had?