An Unkindness of Ravens (10 page)

‘How did you get on with the shrink?’

She resented the haste he was in. He wanted her cured, she felt, so that life could get back to normal again. ‘What do you expect? A miracle in two easy lessons?’

She sat down. That always made her feel a little less bad because the bulge was no longer so apparent. And, thank God, the child was still, not rolling about and kicking.

‘Don’t let him give you drugs.’

‘It’s a woman.’

She wanted to scream with laughter. The irony of it! She was a teacher and this other woman was a psychiatrist and Mike’s daughter Pat was very nearly qualified as a dentist, yet here she was reacting like a no-account junior wife in a harem. Because the baby was a girl.

He gave her a drink, orange juice and Perrier. He had a whisky, a large one, and in a minute he would have another. Not long ago he hadn’t needed to drink when he got home. She looked at him, wishing she could bring herself to touch his arm or take his hand. An apathy as strong as energy held her back.

‘Mike,’ she said, and said for the hundredth time, ‘I can’t help it, I wish I could. I have tried.’

‘So you say. I don’t understand it. It’s beyond my understanding.’

In a low voice, looking down, she said, ‘It’s beyond mine.’ The child began to move, with flutters only at first, then came a hearty kick right under her lower ribs, giving her a rush of heartburn. She cried out, ‘I wish to God I’d never had the thing done. I wish I’d never let them do it. They shouldn’t have told me. Why did I let them? If I’d been ignorant I’d have gone on being happy, I’d have had the baby and I wouldn’t have minded what it was, I’d have been pleased with any healthy baby. I didn’t even specially want a son, or I didn’t know I did. I didn’t mind what it was, but now I know what it is I can’t bear it. I can’t go through all this and all through having it and the work and the pain and the trouble and a lifetime of being with it, having it with me, for a girll’

He had heard it all before. It seemed to him that she said it every night. This was what he came home to. With slight variations, with modifications and changed turns of phrase, that was what she said to him on and on every evening. Until she grew exhausted or wept or slumped spent in her chair, until she went away to bed—earlier and earlier as the weeks passed. In vain he had asked why this prejudice against girls, she who was a feminist, a supporter of the women’s movement, who expressed a preference for her friends’ small girls over their small sons, who got on better with her stepdaughter than her stepson, who professed to prefer teaching girls to boys.

She didn’t know why, only that it was so. Her pregnancy, so long desired, at first so ecstatically accepted, had driven her mad. The worst of it was that he was coming to hate the unborn child himself and to wish it had never been conceived.

 The wine bar was dark and cool. The restoration of an old house in Kingsmarkham’s Queen Street had revealed and then opened up its cavernous cellars. The proprietor had resisted the temptations of roof beams, medieval pastiches, flintlocks and copper warming pans and simply painted the broad squat arches white, tiled the floor and furnished the place with tables and chairs in dark-stained pine.

Wexford and Burden had taken to lunching at the Old Cellar a couple of times a week. It had the virtue of being warm on cold days and cool on hot ones like this. The food was quiche and salad, smoked mackerel, coleslaw, pork pie, quiche, quiche and more quiche.

‘What did they serve in these places before quiche caught on? I mean, there was a time not long ago when an Englishman could say he’d never heard of quiche.’

‘He’s always eaten it,’ said Wexford. ‘He called it cheese and onion flan.’

He had the morning papers with him. The Kingsmarkham Courier was a weekly and wouldn’t be out till Friday. The national dailies had given no more than a paragraph to the discovery of Rodney Williams’s body and had left out all the background details he was sure Varney had passed on to them. The Daily Telegraph merely stated that the body of a man had been found in a shallow grave and later identified as Rodney John Williams, a salesman from Kingsmarkham in Sussex. Nothing about Joy, his children, his job at Sevensmith Harding or the fact that he had been missing for two months. True, they had put him, Wexford, on TV but only on the regional bit that came after the news and then only forty-five seconds of the half-hour-long film they’d made.

The corpses of middle-aged men weren’t news as women’s were or children’s. Women were always news. Perhaps they would cease to be when the day came that they got their equality as well as their rights. An interesting speculation and one which reminded him .. .

‘You were going to tell me but we were interrupted.’

‘It’s not that she’s anti-girls usually,’ Burden said. ‘For God’s sake, she’s a feminist. I mean, it’s not some stupid I-must-have-an-heir thing or every-woman’sgottohave-asontoprove-herself. In fact I think she secretly thinks women are better than men—I mean cleverer and more versatile, all that. She says she doesn’t understand it herself. She says she had no feelings about the child’s sex one way or the other, but when they told her, when she knew, she was—well, dismayed. That was at first. It’s got worse. It’s not just dismay now, it’s hatred.’

‘Why doesn’t she want a girl?’ Wexford remembered certain sentiments expressed by his daughter Sylvia, mother of two sons. ‘Is it that she feels women have a raw deal and she doesn’t want to be responsible for bringing another into the world?’ By way of apology for this crassness, he added, ‘I have heard that view put.’

‘She doesn’t know. She says that ever since the world began sons have been preferred over daughters and now it’s become part of race memory, what she calls the collective unconscious.’

‘What Jung called it.’

Burden hesitated and then passed over that one. ‘She’s mad, you know. Pregnancy has driven her mad. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’ve given up caring about being disloyal. I’ve given up damn well caring, if you must know. Do you know what she says? She says she can’t contemplate a future with a daughter she doesn’t want. She says she can’t imagine living for twenty years, say, with someone she hates before it’s born. What’s my life going to be like with that going on?’

‘At the risk of uttering an old cliche, I’d say she’ll feel differently when the baby’s born.’

‘Oh, she will? You can be sure of that? She’ll love it when it’s put into her arms? Shall I tell you what else she says? That she never wants to see it. We’re to put it up for adoption immediately without either of us seeing it. I told you she was mad.’

All this made Wexford feel like a drink. But he couldn’t start drinking at lunchtime with all he’d got ahead of him. Burden wasn’t going to drink either. Judging by the look of him some mornings, he saved that up for when he got home. They paid the bill and climbed up the stone steps out of the Old Cellar into a bright June sunshine that made them blink.

‘She’s seeing a psychiatrist. I pin my faith to that. Me of all people! I sometimes wonder what I’ve come to, saying things like that.’

Sir Hilary Tremlett’s report of the results of the postmortem had come. To decipher the obscurer bits for Wexford, Dr Crocker came into the office as Burden was departing. They nearly passed each other in the doorway, Burden long-faced, monosyllabic. The doctor laughed.

‘Mike’s having a difficult pregnancy.’

Wexford wasn’t going to enlighten him. The other chair had been pushed under the desk. He shoved it out with his toe.

‘He says here he found three hundred and twenty milligrammes of cyclobarbitone in the stomach and other organs. What’s cyclobarbitone?’

‘It’s an intermediate-acting barbiturate—that means it has about eight hours’ duration of effect—a hypnotic drug, a sleeping pill if you like. The proprietary brand name would be Phanodorm, I expect. Two hundred milligrammes is the dose. But three hundred and twenty wouldn’t kill him. It sounds as if he took two tablets of two hundred each.’

‘It didn’t kill him, though, did it? He died of stab wounds.’

Wexford looked up to see the doctor looking at him. They were both thinking the same thing. They were both thinking about Colin Budd and Brian Wheatley.

‘What actually killed him was a wound that pierced the carotid.’

‘Did it now? The blood must have spouted like a fountain.’ ‘There were seven other wounds in the neck and chest and back. A lot of stuff here’s about fixed and mobile underlying tissues.’ Wexford handed the pages across the desk, retaining one. ‘I’m more interested in the estimate he makes of the proportions of the knife. A large kitchen knife with a dagger point, it would seem to have been.’

‘I see he suggests death occurred six to eight weeks ago. What d’you reckon? He took two sleeping pills and someone did him in while he was away in the land of nod?

If it happened as you seem to think soon after he left his house at six that evening, why would he take sleeping pills at that hour?’

‘He might have taken them,’ said Wexford thoughtfully, ‘in mistake for something else. Hypertension pills, for instance. He had high blood pressure.’

While the doctor was reading Wexford picked up the phone and asked the telephonist to get him Wheatley’s number. Wheatley had said he worked in London on only three days a week so there was a chance he might be at home now. He was.

‘I didn’t think you showed much interest,’ he said in an injured way.

That one Wexford wasn’t going to answer. It was true anyway. They hadn’t shown all that much interest in a man getting his hand scratched by a girl hitchhiker. Things had taken on a different aspect since then.

‘You gave me a detailed description of the girl who attacked you, Mr Wheatley. The fact that you’re a good observer makes me think you may have observed more. Will you think about that, please, and try and remember everything that happened? Principally, give us some more information about what the girl looked like, her voice and so on. We’d like to come and see you.’

Mollified, Wheatley said he’d give it some thought and tell them everything he could remember and how about some time that evening?

The doctor said, ‘It couldn’t have happened inside a car, you know, Reg. There’d have been too much blood.’

‘Perhaps in the open air?’

‘And tied his neck up in a Marks and Spencer’s floral printed teatowel?’

‘It doesn’t say that there!’

‘I happened to notice it when the poor devil was resurrected. We’ve got one like it at home.’

The phone rang. The telephonist said, ‘Mr Wexford, there’s a Mrs Williams here wanting to talk to someone about Mr Rodney Williams.’

Joy, he thought. Well.

‘Mrs Joy Williams?’

‘Mrs Wendy Williams.’

‘Have someone bring her up here, will you?’

The sister-in-law? The wife of the brother in Bath? When you don’t know what to do next, Raymond Chandler advised writers of his sort of fiction, have a man come in with a gun. In a real-life murder case, thought Wexford, what better surprise visitor than the mysterious Wife of Bath?

He looked up as Burden re-entered the room. Burden had been going through the clothes found on Williams’s body: navy blue briefs—very different from the white underwear in the cupboard in Alverbury Road—brown socks, fawn cavalry-twill slacks, blue, brown and cream striped shirt, dark blue St Laurent sweater. The back pocket of the slacks had contained a cheque book for one of the accounts with the Anglian-Victoria at Pomfret (R. W. Williams, private account), and a wallet containing one fiver, three 1 pound notes and two credit cards, Visa and American Express. No car keys, no house keys.

‘He probably kept his house key on the same ring as his car keys,’ Burden said. ‘It’s what I do.’

‘At any rate, we’ll get at that bank account now. The doctor here says there was a teatowel wrapped round his neck. To staunch the blood presumably.’

There came a knock at the door. Bennett came into the room with a young woman, not anyone’s idea of a Wife of Bath.

‘Mrs Wendy Williams, sir.’

She looked about twenty-five. She was a pretty girl with s a delicate nervous face and fair curly hair. Wexford asked her to sit down, the doctor having sprung to his feet. She slid into the chair, gripping the arms of it, and jumped as Crocker passed behind her on his way to the door. Burden closed the door behind him and stood there.

‘What did you want to see me about, Mrs Williams?’

She didn’t answer. She had fixed him with a penetrating stare and her tongue came in and out, moistening her lips.

‘I take it you’re Rodney Williams’s sister-in-law? Is that right?’

She moved her body back a little, hands still tight on the chair arms. ‘What do you mean, his sister-in-law?’ She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Look, I ... I don’t know how to say this. I’ve been so ... I’ve been nearly out of my mind.’ Mounting hysteria made her voice ragged. ‘I saw in the paper ... a little bit in the paper and ... Is that, that person they found .. . ? Is that my husband?’

9

 It was seldom he could give people reassuring news. He was tempted to say no, of course not. The body has been identified. She was holding on to the arms of the chair, rubbing her fingers up and down the wood.

‘What is your husband’s name, Mrs Williams?’

‘Rodney John Williams. He’s forty-eight.’ She spoke in short jerky phrases, not waiting for the questions. ‘Six feet tall. He’s fair going grey. He’s a salesman. It said in the paper a salesman.’

Burden stared, then looked down. She swallowed, made an effort against panic, an effort that concentrated on tensing her muscles.

‘Could you .. . please, I have a photo here.’

Her hands, unlocked from the chair, refused to obey her when first she tried to open her bag. The photograph she handed to Wexford fluttered, she was shaking so. He looked at it, unbelieving.

It was Rodney Williams all right, high domed forehead, crack of a mouth parted in a broad smile. It was a more recent picture than the one Joy had and showed Williams in swimming trunks (flabby hairless chest, spindleshanks, a bit knock-kneed) with this girl in a black bikini and another girl, also bikini’d but no more than twelve years old. Wexford’s eyes returned to the unmistakable face of Williams, to the head you somehow wanted to slap a fringed wig on and so transform it.