End in Tears Read Free

down the lane, found him and her. When he refused to move, the deliveryman phoned the police and waited for them to come.

CHAPTER 3
----
    T he woman who emerged from the house as they came up the drive had a child of about a year in her arms. Wexford and Detective Sergeant Hannah Goldsmith introduced themselves and the woman said, “He’s asleep. Our doctor has him under sedation.”
    â€œI’d like to talk to you,” Wexford said. “You are Mrs. Marshalson?”
    She nodded. Wexford had never before known a case of a father finding the murdered body of his daughter, never thought to see a bereaved parent prone over his child’s corpse. He had daughters of his own, but he could barely imagine himself in George Marshalson’s position.
    Once the man had been persuaded to go home, had been taken home, the pathologist had come. The photographers had come, the scene-of-crime officer, the whole panoply of those who attend a murder scene. For his part Wexford had needed to register only that she was very young, still in her teens, very good-looking, and that death had come through a violent blow to the head with a brick or piece of masonry.
    He questioned the paper man who had found him and her, then he and Hannah had walked down the lane toward Clifton, the Marshalsons’ house. Already the heat they were so used to that it had begun to feel normal was closing in. You could almost feel the temperature rising. The air was as still and heavy as at noon. Mill Lane was overhung with densely foliaged trees through the branches of which shafts of glare penetrated.
    Clifton’s front garden was flowerless, its shrubs wilting and its lawns yellow. The front door of the house opened and the woman came out before they were in talking distance. Politically correct to a degree Wexford thought ridiculous, Hannah said to him in the kindly and forbearing tone she often used when speaking to him, “That will be his partner.”
    â€œHis wife, most likely.”
    Hannah gave him the sort of look she kept for a middle-aged man who still called the woman he had married his wife. They followed Mrs. Marshalson into the house. The child, a little boy, looked heavy to carry and she set him down. Not yet able to walk, he crawled rapidly across the polished wood floor, saying, “Mama, Mama.”
    Diana Marshalson took no notice of him. “Come in here. I don’t know what I can tell you. When he came back he was speechless. He’s absolutely broken.” Their expressions must have told her the misapprehension both were under. “Oh, I’m not her mother. I’m George’s second wife.”
    Wexford had learned to detect signs of satisfaction on DS Goldsmith’s face and in what she would have called her body language. He saw them now, the approving set of the mouth, the relaxation of her usually tense shoulders. That would have been brought about by Diana Marshalson’s revealing she was the dead girl’s stepmother. Hannah liked complex family arrangements. In her world they signified freedom of choice and self-assertiveness. A bunch of children, thought Wexford, each with a different father and some with different mothers, all living under one roof with four or five unrelated adults would be her ideal.
    They went into a spacious living room, its French windows wide open. He had already learned that the Marshalsons were interior designers, based at Marshalson’s Studio, Design and Restoration, in the Kingsbrook Centre of Kingsmarkham, but he would have known without being told. Such people’s homes are always unmistakable, beautiful, the taste displayed impeccable, the ornaments just right and not too numerous, the colors exactly what one would have chosen if one possessed the gift for it, and at the same time the reverse of cozy, not the kind of place in which one would feel like curling up with a book and a glass of wine. Wexford sat down on a dark-gray sofa,