The Speaker of Mandarin by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

nothing in either of the upper berths. He had just recalled a particularly unpleasant story by F. Marion Crawford in which a traveller at sea finds a drowned corpse, or the ghost of a drowned corpse, in the upper berth of his cabin.
    When he had had a second cup of tea he put out the light. After several hours of tossing and turning he got
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    about an hour's sleep but no more. It was still only three when he awoke and he knew he wouldn't get any more sleep that night.
    He sat up, switched the light on and asked himself a question. Was it possible that what he had seen lying in that berth was Lois Knox?
    Wexford was a modest man with a humble idea of his own attractions insofar as he ever thought about them. To his own wife he seemed to be unfailingly attractive after thirty years of marriage, but this was something to be thankful for and dismissed rather than speculated about. His life hadn't been devoid of feminine admiration; he had taken none of it very seriously. He hadn't taken Lois Knox seriously at all, yet now he came to think of it . . . if what Fanning said was true, or even partly true, this holiday was for her a kind of sex tour. Wexford knew very well that a woman of this sort need not even find her selected partner attractive; it would be enough that he were a man and accessible, someone to boost her drooping ego, for an evening or an hour, someone to quell her panic, push old age and death an inch or two further away.
    Foolishly, he had smiled at her on leaving the restaurant car. Had she taken this smile for an invitation? She had been in the corridor when he came back from the bathroom. She had been wearing a short white shift or at any rate a short white dressing gown, and she had seemed offended with him, in high dudgeon. Had it been she, then, lying in that berth, waiting for him? What must she have felt when he recoiled, closed his eyes in horror and stumbled out without a word?
    Wexford was aware that a good many people would have found this funny. After all, the woman, no longer young, no longer attractive, but as forward and brazen as any young beauty, had only got what she deserved. At least, thank God, she didn't know he had mistaken her for a two-thousand-year-old, diseased, disembowelled corpse.
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    But had he? Again, closing his eyes in the dim warm jogging compartment, he saw what he had seen. The Marquise of Tail The face wasn't Lois's face - God preserve him! And that shortened right arm? Those thighs, scored with deep striations?
    Perhaps he needed glasses for daily wear, not just for reading. Perhaps he was going mad. Presumably if you developed schizophrenia - which was quite possible, there was such a thing as spontaneous schizophrenia coming on in middle age- presumably then you had hallucinations and didn't know they were hallucinations and behaved, in short, just as he had. Don't be a fool, he told himself. Get some sleep. No wonder you see visions when you never get any sleep. Towards morning he dozed, until the sunrise came in and the fan came on again.
    Things always seem different in the morning. We reiterate this truism always with wonder perhaps because it is such a remarkable truth. It is invariably so. The fearful, the anxious, the monstrous, the macabre, all are washed away in the cool practical morning light. The light which filled Wexford's compartment wasn't particularly cool but it per- formed the same cleansing function. He wasn't mad, he could see perfectly, and no doubt he shouldn't have drunk that big glass of Maotai on the previous evening.
    Events quickly confirmed that it had been Lois Knox in the lower berth. In the restaurant car she and Hilda Avory were sharing their table with the barrister, his wife and the wife's friend, and all but Lois looked up to say good morning to him. Lois, who had been reading aloud from her guide to Kweilin, paused, stared out of the window, and once he had passed on, continued in a gushing voice.
    Wexford took a seat opposite