Ruth Rendell - A Sleeping Life

‘Polly’s in an awful state,’ she said confidingly. ‘I can’t do anything with her. When I told her you were coming I thought she was going to faint, and then she cried so terribly. I didn’t know what to do.’

Perhaps, Wexford thought, you could have been a friend to her and comforted her, not spent surely a full hour making yourself look like something out of a seraglio. There was no time now, though, to dwell on forms of hypocrisy, on those who will seek to present themselves as pillars of virtue and archetypes of beauty even at times of grave crisis.

Making use of those fine eyes – could she even cry at will? – she said sweetly, ‘But I don’t suppose you want to talk to me, do you? I think Polly will be up to seeing you. She’s in there. I said to her that everything would be all right if she just told the truth, and then you wouldn’t frighten her. Please don’t frighten her, will you?’

Already the magic was working on Loring who looked quite limp. It had ceased to work on Wexford.

‘I’d rather frighten you, Miss Patel,’ he said. Her eyelashes fluttered at him. ‘And you’re wrong if you think I don’t want to talk to you. Let us go in here.’

He opened a door at random. On the other side of it was a squalid and filthy kitchen, smelling of strong spices and of decay, as if someone had been currying meat and vegetables that were already rotten. The sink was stacked up to the level of the taps with unwashed dishes. She took up her stand in front of the sink, too small to hide it, a self-righteous but not entirely easy smile on her lips.

‘You’re very free with your advice,’ he said. ‘Do you find in your experience that people take it?’

‘I was only trying to help,’ she said, slipping into her little’ girl role. ‘It was good advice, wasn’t it?’

‘You didn’t take my good advice.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Not to lie to the police. The scope of the truth, Miss Patel, is very adequately covered by the words of the oath one takes in the witness box. I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. After I had warned you, you obeyed – as far as I know – the first injunction and the third but not the second. You left out a vital piece of truth.’

She seized on only one point. ‘I’m not going into any witness box!’

‘Oh, yes you will. One thing you may be sure of is that you will. Yesterday morning you received a phone call, didn’t you? From the manager of the Trieste Hotel.’

She said sullenly, ‘Polly did.’

‘And when Miss Flinders realized that Mr West’s car had been found, you told her that the police would be bound to find out. Did you advise her to tell us? Did you remember my advice to you? No. You suggested that the best thing would be to bring her to us with the old story that your conscience had been troubling you.’

She shifted her position, and the movement sent the dirty plates subsiding over the edge of the bowl.

‘When did you first know the facts, Miss Patel?’

A flood of self-justification came from her. Her voice lost its soft prettiness and took on a near-cockney inflexion. She was shrill. ‘What, that Polly hadn’t been in a motel with a married man? Not till last night. I didn’t, I tell you, I didn’t till last night. She was in an awful state and she’d been crying all day, and she said I can’t tell him that man’s address because there isn’t a man. And that made me laugh because Polly’s never had a real boy-friend all the time I’ve known her, and I said, “You made it up?” And she said she had. And I said, “I bet Grenville never kissed you either, did he?” So she cried some more and…’ The faces of the two men told her she had gone too far. She seemed to remember the personality she wished to present and to grab at it in the nick of time. ‘I knew you’d find out because the police always did, you said. I warned her you’d come, and then what was she going to say?’

‘I meant,’ Wexford tried, ‘when did you know where Miss Flinders had truly been that night?’

Anxiety gone – he wasn’t really cross, men would never really be cross with her – she smiled the amazed smile of someone on whom a great revelatory light has shone. ‘What a weird thing! I never thought about that.’

No, she had never thought about that. About her own attractions and her winning charm she had thought, about establishing her own ascendancy and placing her friend in a foolish light, about what she called her conscience she had thought, but never about the aim of all these inquiries. What a curiously inept and deceiving term Freud had coined, Wexford reflected, when he named the conscience the super-ego!

‘It never occurred to you then that a girl who never went out alone after dark must have had some very good reason for being out alone all that evening and half the night? You didn’t think of that aspect? You had forgotten perhaps that that was the evening of Rhoda Comfrey’s murder?’

She shook her head guilelessly 'No, I didn’t think about it. It couldn’t have had anything to do with me or Polly.’

Wexford looked at her steadily. She looked back at him, her fingers beginning to pick at the gold embroideries on the tunic whose whiteness set off her orchid skin. At last the seriousness of his gaze affected her, forcing her to use whatever powers of reasoning she had. The whole pretty sweet silly facade broke, and she let out a shattering scream.

‘Christ,’ said Loring.

She began to scream hysterically, throwing back her head. The heroine, Wexford thought unsympathetically, going mad in white satin. ‘Oh, slap her face or something,’ he said and walked out into the hall. Apart from the screeches, and now the choking sounds and sobs from the kitchen, the flat was quite silent. It struck him that Pauline Flinders must be in the grip of some overpowering emotion, or stunned into a fugue, not to have reacted to those screams and come out to inquire. He looked forward with dread and with distaste to the task ahead of him.

All the other doors were closed. He tapped on the one that led to the living room where he had interviewed her before. She didn’t speak, but opened the door and looked at him with great sorrow and hopelessness. Everything she wore and everything about her seemed to drag her down, the flopping hair, the stooping shoulders, the loose overblouse and the long skirt, compelling the eye of the beholder also to droop and fall. Today there was no script on the table, no paper in the typewriter. No book or magazine lay open. She had been sitting there waiting – for how many hours? – paralysed, capable of no action.

‘Sit down. Miss Flinders,’ he said. It was horrible to have to torture her, but if he was to get what he wanted he had no choice. ‘Don’t try to find excuses for not telling me the name of the man you spent the evening of August eighth with. I know there was no man.’

She tensed at that and darted him a look of terror, and he knew why. But he let it pass. Out of pity for her, his mind was working quickly, examining this which was so fresh to him, so recently realized, trying to get enough grasp on it to decide whether the whole truth need come out. But even at this stage, with half the facts still to be understood, he knew he couldn’t comfort her with that one. She hunched in a chair, the pale hair curtaining her face.

‘You were afraid to go out alone at night,’ he said, ‘and for good reason. You were once attacked in the dark by a man, weren’t you, and very badly frightened?’

The hair shivered, her bent body nodded.

‘You wished it were legal in this country for people to carry guns for protection. It’s illegal too to carry knives but knives are easier to come by. How long is it. Miss Flinders, since you have been carrying a knife in your handbag?’