Free Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life by Ruth Rendell Page B

up. She did nothing but stare at it with that same guarded expression.
       ‘Have you ever seen this before, Miss Flinders?’
       She looked at it inside and out. ‘It looks like Grenville’s wallet,’ she said, ‘the one he lost.’
       ‘Lost?’ said Wexford.
       She seemed to gain self-confidence and her voice some animation. ‘He was coming back from the West End on a bus, and when he came in he said he’d left the wallet on the bus. That must have been Thursday or Friday week. Where did you find it?’
       ‘In Miss Rhoda Comfrey’s handbag.’ He spoke slowly and heavily. So that was the answer. No connection, no relationship between author and admiring fan, no fiftieth birthday present. She had found it on a bus and kept it. ‘Did Mr West report his loss?’
       When she was silent she tried to cover her protruding teeth, as people with this defect do, by pushing her lower lip out over them. Now the teeth appeared again. They caused her to lisp a little. ‘He asked me to but I didn’t. I didn’t exactly forget. But someone told me the police don’t really like you reporting things you’ve lost or found. A policeman my mother knows told her it makes too much paperwork.’
       He believed her. Who knew better than he that the police are not angels in uniform, sacrificing themselves to the public good? Leaving her to return to her typewriter, he went out into the big gloomy hall of the house. The flat door opened again behind him and Malina Patel appeared with a flash bright as a kingfisher. Her accent, as English and as prettily correct as his Sheila’s surprised him nearly as much as what she said.
       ‘Polly was here with me all the evening on the eighth. She was helping me to make a dress, she was cutting it out’ Her smile was mischievous and her teeth perfect. ‘You’re a detective, aren’t you?’
       ‘That’s right.’
       ‘What a freaky thing to be. I’ve never seen one before except on the TV.’ She spoke as if he were some rare animal, an eland perhaps. ‘Do people give you a lot of money? Like “Fifty thousand dollars to find my daughter, she’s all the world to me” that kind of thing?’
       ‘I’m afraid not, Miss Patel.’
       He could have sworn she was mocking her friend’s dull naivety. The lovely face became guileless, the eyes opened hugely. ‘When you first came to the door,’ she said, ‘I thought you might be a bailiff. We had one of those before when we hadn’t paid the rates.’

Chapter 8

    A red-hot evening in Kenbourne Vale, a dusty dying sun.
       The reek of cumin came to him from Kemal’s Kebab House, beer and sweat from the Waterlily pub. All the eating and drinking places had their doors wide open, propped back. Children of all ages, all colours, pure races and mixed races, sat on nights of steps or rode two-and three-wheelers on hard pavements and up and down narrow stuffy alleys. An old woman, drunk or just old and sick, squatted in the entrance to a betting shop. There was nothing green and organic to be seen unless you counted the lettuces, stuffed tight into boxes outside a green-grocer’s, and they looked as much like plastic as their wrappings.
       One thing to be thankful for was that now he need not come back to Kenbourne Vale ever again if he didn’t want to. The trail had gone cold, about the only thing that had this evening. Sitting in the car on the road back to Kingsmarkham, he thought about it. At first Malina Patel’s behaviour had puzzled him. Why had she come out voluntarily to provide herself or Polly Flinders with an unasked-for alibi? Because she was a tease and a humorist, he now reflected, and in her beauty dwelt with wit. Everything she had said to him had been calculated to amuse - and how she herself had smiled at the time! - all that about telly detectives and bailiffs. Very funny and charming from such a pretty girl.
       But no wonder Polly kept the postcard hidden and feared her