Speaker of Mandarin by Ruth Rendell

Author:Ruth Rendell [Rendell, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-82950-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

‘Where did you get that from?’

Wexford told them. ‘I got the library here to trace it for me. It’s a Chinese poem from a collection of T’ang verse, ninth century. The poet was called Shen Hsun and a curious note to it is that he and his wife were murdered by a slave.

‘We keep coming back to China, don’t we? I’ve got a feeling, I’ve had it almost since the murder really, that the key to all this was in China.’

‘You can’t very well go back there,’ said the doctor.

‘No, but I can at least see the people Adela Knighton travelled across Asia with. I met them too, remember. There were some strange things …’ He told them about the two men who hadn’t spoken to each other from Irkutsk to Kweilin, about Wong who had drowned. ‘She and he took photographs in China, they were always making with the camera. What’s happened to those photographs? Why aren’t they in her album or sculling about the house in packets? No, I’m more and more sure it’s to China and what happened there that we have to look. I just wish I’d taken more notice. I wasn’t to know, of course, but usually I like watching people, seeing how they behave. I was too damned preoccupied with that woman with the bound feet.’

Crocker looked at him. ‘What woman?’

Diffidently Wexford told him. He had often felt he should have told him long before but he never had. When the symptoms disappear who cares about the cause of the disease? Crocker, who hadn’t even smiled at Burden’s marital confidings, now burst out laughing.

‘What had you been reading?’

‘OK, I know, something called Masterpieces of the Supernatural and I never finished it.’

‘I wouldn’t have your imagination for all the tea in China.’

‘Sure, but all hallucinations are from the imagination. That doesn’t make them any less real to the hallucinator. D’you think it was just that book and lack of sleep?’

‘And getting dehydrated and drinking that filthy Maotai you brought home a bottle of.’

‘Start getting worried,’ said Burden, ‘when you see the lady tottering over the Kingsbrook Bridge.’

Wexford gave him a bland look. ‘We mustn’t risk not investigating the possibilities of this revenge motive, so you can make it your business to inquire into the present circumstances of every villain Knighton prosecuted in, say, the fifteen years prior to his retirement. And for good measure into those of every villain he failed successfully to defend. That should keep you busy for a bit.

‘As for me, I shall “fire a mine in China here with sympathetic gunpowder”.’

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