Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

Roy sat in his office with the air conditioning turned off and the windows open. A letter had been passed to him from the managing director. It was from Mrs. Ripple and listed seven separate faults she had found in her new bathroom.

“I’m without a car till three,” Philip said.

“Then you’d better take mine.”

Roy said the keys were in the pocket of his jacket, which was hanging up in Lucy’s room. As Philip went into the room, the phone began to ring. Lucy wasn’t there, so he answered it. A voice asked if Mr. Wardman was expected in that day.

“This is Philip Wardman speaking.”

“Oh, good morning, Mr. Wardman. I’m a police officer. Detective Sergeant Gates, CID.”

They had offered to come to him at home or at work but Philip said, quite truthfully, that he had to go to Chigwell anyway. Gates had given him some idea of what it was about. He thought about it, turning it over and over in his mind, as he drove Roy’s car through the lumbering congestion of London’s eastern suburbs.

“We’re making enquiries about a missing statue, Mr. Ward-man. Well, a stolen statue.”

Briefly he had been aghast, stricken silent. But Gates hadn’t been hectoring or accusatory. He had spoken to Philip as to a potentially helpful witness, one of those who genuinely help the police in their enquiries. Philip had several times been in the area—wasn’t that a fact? The district of Chigwell Row, that is, from which the statue had disappeared. If they could come and talk to him or alternatively he could spare the time to come in and answer a few questions….

At the wheel of Roy’s car, the windows wide open, the sun shining, Philip told himself that was literally all they wanted: him to tell them if he had seen any suspicious persons in the neighbourhood. It occurred to him quite suddenly that Flora must be valuable, really valuable. That brought him a sense of chill. He thought of his job. But they didn’t know, they couldn’t know.

Gates had someone with him who introduced himself as a detective inspector. Philip thought this was rather a high-ranking officer to be deployed on an enquiry into the theft of a garden ornament. The inspector’s name was Morris. He said “We’ve asked you to come here as the result of a rather interesting coincidence. I understand your young sister has been in a spot of trouble?”

Philip nodded. He was mystified. Why didn’t they talk about Chigwell and Mrs. Ripple’s neighbourhood?

“I’m being very frank with you, Mr. Wardman, perhaps franker than you’ve been led to believe we usually are. I don’t personally care for secrets. A woman officer searched your home and saw a certain statue in the garden. She very intelligently made the connection between that statue and the one which was missing from Mrs. Myerson’s garden, having acquainted herself with the description of the missing one from the Metropolitan Police computer link.”

“Is she worth a lot, then?” Philip managed to say.

“She?”

“Sorry. I meant the statue. Is it valuable?”

Gates said, “Mrs. Myerson’s late husband paid eighteen pounds for it at auction. I don’t know if you call that valuable. Depends on your standards, I suppose.”

Philip had been going to say he didn’t understand, but he did now. It wasn’t a question of Flora’s value. They knew he had stolen her. The woman police sergeant had seen her when they brought Cheryl home, had identified her by that chip out of her ear and the green stain. The two officers were looking at him and he returned their gaze steadily. There was nothing for it. If he denied it, they might accuse poor Cheryl. He couldn’t understand why they hadn’t accused Cheryl, come to that; she in the circumstances seemed a natural choice.

“All right,” he said, “I did take the statue. I stole it, if you like. But I did think, mistakenly as it happens, that I had some sort of right to it. Are you—” His strength wavered and he cleared his throat. “Are you going to charge me with stealing it?”

“Is that your chief concern, Mr. Wardman?” said Gates.

The question was incomprehensible. Philip rephrased what he had said. “Am I going to be prosecuted?” Receiving no reply, he asked if they wanted him to make a statement.

It was strange the way they seemed to latch on to this as if they would never have thought of it for themselves, as if Philip had had a brilliant and original idea. A girl with a typewriter, who might or might not have been a police officer herself, took a statement from him. He told the truth, which sounded untrue when expressed aloud. When he had finished, he sat and looked at them, the two policemen and the girl who might or might not have been a policewoman, and waited for those words to be uttered which he had read in detective stories and heard on television: you are not obliged to say anything in answer to the charge….

Morris got up. He said, “All right, Mr. Wardman. Thank you very much. We needn’t keep you any longer.”

“Is that all, then?” Philip made himself say it in a firm, calm voice.

“All for now, yes.”

“Are you going to prosecute me for taking the statue?”

There was some hesitation. Morris was gathering up papers from the desk. He looked up and said in a slow deliberate way,

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that will be necessary. That would be rather a waste of time and the public’s money, don’t you think?”

Philip didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question to which an answer was expected. He suddenly felt embarrassed, he felt foolish. Once he was outside, relief came surging in to dispel the embarrassment. He would restore Flora to Mrs. Myerson, he thought, it was the least he could do. If the police didn’t come and collect her, he would bring her to Chigwell himself.

He drove to Mrs. Ripple’s and was conducted up to the bathroom, where all the flaws in the list were pointed out to him to the accompaniment of a great deal of vituperative abuse and reiteration of what it had all cost. Pearl was nowhere to be seen, had perhaps gone home.

He drove back past Mrs. Myerson’s house. There was an estate agent’s FOR SALE board in the front garden. The Scottie dog Senta had named Ebony was asleep on the path in the shade. Philip had a sandwich in a pub in Chigwell and drove back to London when the traffic was at its lightest. He parked Roy’s car and walked down to the garage to fetch his own.

Lucy said to him as he came into the office. “A Mr. Morris has been on the phone for you.”

For a moment Philip couldn’t think who that was. Then he knew. The policeman was being discreet in not naming his function or his rank at Philip’s place of work. But why had he phoned at all? Had they changed their minds?

“Did he leave a number?”

“He’ll call back. I said you wouldn’t be long.”

It was a lengthy fifteen minutes. Philip relived his earlier fears. If they were going to charge him, he made up his mind to go and tell Roy immediately, get it over, face the worst. Then he knew he couldn’t go on waiting like this. He looked up the police number in the phone directory and phoned Morris himself. It took a little while to locate him. Philip’s mouth had grown dry and his heartbeats unpleasantly palpable.

When Philip told him who this was, Morris said, “Have you got a girl friend, Mr. Wardman?”

It was the last thing Philip expected. “Why do you ask?” he said.

“Perhaps you know a girl with very long blond hair—well, silver-blond? A rather small girl, no more than five feet tall?”

“I haven’t got a girl friend,” Philip said, unsure whether he spoke the truth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

His mind presented the explanation to him. It was like one of those puzzles in a newspaper. You look up the answer on the back page, and when you read it, it is so clear and so obvious you wonder how you could have failed to see it in the first place.