No Man's Nightingale by Ruth Rendell Page A

wouldn’t be long in coming. This encounter wasn’t going at all the way she had hoped. She had to get on to Clarissa’s antecedents but she couldn’t just leave things there. ‘You’ll be going to university next autumn and that means you’ll have somewhere to live. Meanwhile –’ she knew she was ducking the issue – ‘we’ll have to find a place for you.’ She retrieved things. ‘I’ll see what I can do. I’ll ask around.’
    Simultaneously with the arrival of the coffee and pastries of a standard Lynn would hardly have thought Twice capable of, Clarissa burst into tears. ‘Why did Mum have to die?’ she sobbed. ‘Why?’
    Lynn wanted to get on but she had to make some sort of answer and she could only say that this was something no one knew. To Clarissa’s rejoinder that God should have stopped it only God didn’t exist she could only shrug and shake her head. Clarissa grabbed a handful of paper napkins and scrubbed at her eyes.
    ‘I’ll be all right now. It’s just that I liked the Vicarage, I
loved
it, even though Mum died there. But now I know I’ll never live there with Mum again it – well, it breaks my heart.’
    ‘I can imagine,’ Lynn said, though she couldn’t. She watched Clarissa reach for consolation in the shape of a chocolate eclair, then said, ‘I’m sorry to have to talk to you about this but I assure you it’s necessary. Do you ever see your father?’
    At any rate, she hadn’t shocked or even astonished the girl. ‘I don’t know who he is.’
    Lynn said nothing, just continued to look enquringly at Clarissa.
    ‘I’ll tell you everything I know but that’s not much. I think he’s still alive, he may not be any older than Mum was. She said she’d tell me when I like got to be eighteen. That’s in January, January the twentieth.’ Clarissa turned away from Lynn, stared at the cafe window. A sob caught at her throat. ‘But I’ll never get there, will I? Not for Mum.’ The tears came fast after and she sobbed into her hands.
    Lynn gave her a tissue, then the whole packet. She would have liked to hug her but of course she couldn’t. Unreasonably perhaps, she felt suddenly angry with Sarah Hussain. Keeping the girl in the kind of suspense that now might never end. Clarissa scrubbed at her face with handfuls of tissues, took a deep breath and then gave a long sigh. Crying had made her face swell without disfiguring it.
    ‘Go on. I’ll be OK now.’
    Lynn thought the next question that came to mind was worth a try, though fairly hopeless. She was to be surpised.
    ‘Gerry Watson? He was always turning up, like a stalker, I suppose you’d say.’
    ‘The solicitor?’ The one who lives in Stevenage? Are we talking about the same man?’
    ‘Got a smooth flat face and a very little mouth. Pompous.’
    Lynn had never seen him. ‘He came here? He knew who your mother was and what she did?’
    ‘Sure.’
    ‘Tell me about him,’ said Lynn.
    A lot had happened since yesterday. Those were Burden’s words when he phoned Wexford and invited him to come into the police station. Wexford wanted to say sarcastically, ‘Not another conference?’ but he restrained himself. No doubt discoveries had been made, perhaps the identity of Clarissa’s father. Even if it had, what good could that be to Burden? Imagining alien motives and mindsets, Wexford tried to picture a rapist who would kill his victim. During or immediately after the attack, yes, that was common, his motive to prevent the woman identifying him, but eighteen years later? Because perhaps he had asked to see his daughter? Why wait all those years? A distant father or putative father might make that request when his child was a baby of two or three years old but when she had become a woman? There might be an explanation for such behaviour (apart from paranoid schizophrenia) but he couldn’t think of one.
    As he crossed the police station forecourt, a car swept past him, stopped by a flight of steps leading to the