Some Lie and Some Die by Ruth Rendell Page B

had taken careful note of the girl’s appearance in order to tell her husband about her, she had never told him. But now he knew she must have seen her. How else could she, and she alone, have known of the bag and the purple border to the tunic?

9

    Three houses that backed on to Sundays, three garden gates opening on to a narrow strip of land beyond which was the quarry.… Each garden separated from its neighbours by high woven chestnut fencing, a strip of land overgrown with dense bushes and quite tall trees. Wexford thought how easy it would have been to carry a body out of one of those houses by night and drop it into the quarry. And yet, if Dawn had gone into one of those houses instead of across the fields, if Mrs Peveril had seen her do so and was a seeker after sensation, wouldn’t these facts have made a far greater sensation?
    ‘I thought you’d leave me alone after I’d told you the truth,’ said Mrs Peveril fretfully. ‘I shall be ill if you badger me. All right, Mrs Clarke did phone me. That doesn’t mean I didn’t see her too, does it? I saw her and I saw her walk across those fields.’
    ‘She couldn’t have gone into any of those houses, anyway, sir,’ said Burden. ‘Unless it was into Mrs Peveril’s own house. In which case Mrs P. presumably wouldn’t say she’d seen her at all. Dawn can’t have gone into Dunsand’s or Miss Mowler’s. We’ve checked at Myringham, at the university, and Dunsand didn’t leave there till six. He’d have been lucky to get home by six-thirty, more like twenty to seven. MissMowler was with her friend in Kingsmarkham till a quarter to eight.’
    They went back to the police station and were about to enter the lift when a sharp draught of wind told Wexford that the double doors to the entrance foyer had been swept unceremoniously open. He turned round and saw an extraordinary figure. The man was immensely tall—far taller than Wexford who topped six feet—with a bush of jet-black hair. He wore an ankle-length pony-skin coat and carried a canvas bag whose sopping wet contents had soaked the canvas and were dripping on to the floor. Once inside, he paused, looked about him confidently and was making for Sergeant Camb who sat drinking tea behind his counter when Wexford intercepted him.
    ‘Mr Mbowele, I believe? We’ve met before.’ Wexford put out his hand which was immediately gripped in a huge copper-coloured vice of bone-crushing fingers. ‘What can I do for you?’
    The young African was extremely handsome. He had all the glowing virile grace which has led clothes designers and model agencies and photographers to take up the slogan—‘ Black is beautiful’. Beaming at Wexford, his soft, dark eyes alight, he withdrew his hand, dropped the sodden bag on to the floor and undid the collar of his coat. Under it his chest was bare, hung with a chain of small green stones.
    ‘I don’t altogether dig this rain, man,’ he said, shaking drops of water off his hair. ‘You call this June?’
    ‘I’m not responsible for the weather.’ Wexford pointed to the bag. ‘And rain wasn’t responsible for that unless the floods have started.’
    ‘I fished it out of the river,’ said Louis Mbowele. ‘Not here. At Myringham. That’s quite a river now, your little Kingsbrook, man. I go down the river every morning and walk. I can think down there.’ He stretched out his arms. It was easy to imagine him striding by the full flowing river, his mind equally in spate, his body brimming with vibrant energy. ‘Iwas thinking,’ he said, ‘about Wittgenstein’s principle of atomicity.…’
    ‘About
what?
’
    ‘For an essay. It’s not important. I looked in the river and I saw this purple silk thing …’
    ‘Is that what’s in the bag?’
    ‘Didn’t you get that? I knew what it was, man, I’d read the papers. I waded in and fished it out and put it in this bag—it’s my girl friend’s bag—and brought it here.’
    ‘You shouldn’t have touched it,