An Unkindness of Ravens (14 page)

‘Veronica had no need to wait in for Rodney. I’ve told you, we never really thought he’d come at all.’

‘ “We”, Mrs Williams?’

‘Well, I don’t really know what Veronica thought. I hadn’t said anything to her then about the possibility of our splitting up. I was waiting to see what would happen. But the point is Veronica had no need to wait in for him and I wouldn’t have .. . well, she’s got her own life to lead.’

What had she been going to say when she broke off and made that extraordinary statement about this little creature’s obviously nonexistent independence?

‘You went out then?’

‘I went to my friend’s. I didn’t stop there long. We played records. I wanted her to come out for a coffee but she couldn’t, she was baby-sitting with her brother. She’s got a brother who’s only two. That was why she couldn’t come over to me.’

‘So you went back home. What time?’

‘I didn’t go straight home. I had a coffee on my own at Castor’s. I got home about nine and Mummy came in ten minutes after.’

‘You must have been disappointed your father wasn’t there.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think about it,’ and surprisingly, for this wasn’t really at issue, ‘I don’t mind being alone. I like it.’

‘Well, my goodness,’ said Wendy, not letting that one pass, ‘you’re never left alone if I can help it. You needn’t talk as if you’d been neglected.’

Wexford asked the name of the friend and was told it was Nicola Tennyson and given an address that was between here and the town centre. No objection was put up by Wendy to their examining such of his personal property as Rodney Williams had in this house. It left Wexford with the feeling that this was because she rather wanted them to see over her house, its cleanliness, its elegant appointments and the evidence of her skill as housekeeper.

Here, at any rate, was the rest of Williams’s wardrobe. It was interesting to observe how he had kept his more stylish and ‘in’ clothes for this household. Jeans hung in the gilt-decorated white built-in cupboard, Westerner shirts, a denim suit and another in a fashionably crumpled stone coloured linen mixture. There were two pairs of half-boots and a pair of beige kid moccasins. And the underwear was designed for a younger man than the part-time occupant of 31 Alverbury Road.

‘He was two different men,’ Wexford said.

‘Perhaps three.’

‘We shall see. At any rate he was two, one middle-aged, set in his ways, bored maybe, taking his family for granted, the other young still, even swinging—take a look at these underpants—making the grade with a young wife, living up to this little bandbox.’

Wexford looked around him at the room, thinking of Alverbury Road. There were duvets on the beds here, blinds at the windows, a white cane chair suspended from the ceiling, its seat piled with green, blue and white silk cushions. And the bed was a six-foot-wide king-size.

‘He probably called it the playpen,’ said Burden pulling a face.

‘Once,’ said Wexford.

In this house Williams had had no desk, only a drawer in the gilt-handled white melamine chest of drawers. This had been Wendy’s house, no doubt about it, the sanctum where Wendy held sway. Girlish, fragile, soft-voiced though she might be, she had made this place her own, feminine and exclusive—exclusive in a way of Rodney Williams. He had been there on sufferance, Wexford sensed, his presence depending on his good behaviour. And yet his behaviour had not been very good even from the first. There had always been the travelling, the Bunbury of a mother, the long absences. So Wendy had made a home full of flowers and colours and silk cushions in which he was allotted small corners as if—unconsciously, he was sure it was unconsciously—she knew the day would come when it would be for herself and her daughter alone. Wexford looked inside the drawer but it told him little. It was full of the kind of papers he would have expected.

Except for Williams’s driving licence with the Alverbury Road address.

‘He was taking a risk leaving that about,’ said Burden.

‘Taking risks was his life. He took them all the time. He enjoyed the high wire. Anyway, suspicious wives read letters not driving licences.’

There were bills in the drawer, the counterfoils from credit-card chits, an American Express monthly account. Which address had that gone to? Yes, this one. It fitted somehow. Visa and Access were the workaday cards, American Express more cosmopolitan, more for the playboy. No doubt it was Wendy who paid the services’ bills from the joint account. There was none in the drawer, only a rates demand, a television rental account book, an estimate from Godwin and Sculp, builders, of Pomfret, dated 30 March, for painting the living room, and an invoice from the same firm (stamped Paid) for renewal of a bathroom cistern.

*

Under this lot lay Rodney’s joint account cheque book, a paying-in book for the joint account, and a small glass bottle, half full of tablets, labelled ‘Mandaret’.

On this the top floor of the house were two more bedrooms and a bathroom. Veronica’s room was neat as a pin, white with a good deal of broderie anglaise about it and owing much to those magazine articles prevalent in Wendy’s own childhood on how to make a dream bedroom for your daughter. No doubt poor Wendy had never had a dream bedroom of her own, Wexford thought, and he sensed that her youth had been nearer to that of Sara. No posters here, no home-made mobiles and no books either. It was designed for a girl who would do nothing in it but sit in the window seat looking pensive and wearing white socks.

The spiral staircase, a contraption of hideous discomfort and danger to all but the most agile, went through the middle of the house like a screw in a press. Down on the ground floor was a shower room, a separate lavatory, the third door on that side opening into the integral garage, and at the end of the passage a room the width of the house that opened through french windows onto patio and garden roughly the size of a large dining table. The room, that might have been for dining in or a study for Rodney Williams if he had been allowed one, was plainly devoted to Wendy’s interests. She had a sewing machine in it and a knitting machine, an ironing board set up with two irons on it, one dry and one steam, and there were clothes everywhere, neatly hung or draped, sheathed in plastic bags.

Mother and daughter were still sitting upstairs at the glass-topped table. Wendy had taken up some sewing, a handkerchief or possibly a traycloth into which she was inserting tiny stitches, her little finger crooked in the way it used to be said was vulgar to hold a teacup. Veronica nibbled at dry roasted peanuts out of a foil packet. The dry kind it would be, the other sort tending to leave grease spots. They were both as tense as compressed springs, waiting for the police to go and leave them alone.

‘Have you heard of a society or club called ARRIA?’ Wexford said to Veronica.

The spring didn’t leap free of its bonds. There was no shock. Veronica merely nodded. She didn’t screw up the empty peanut packet but flattened it and began folding it very carefully, first into halves, then quarters.

‘At school?’

She looked up. ‘Some of the girls in the sixth and seventh years belong to it.’

‘But you don’t?’

‘You have to be over sixteen.’

‘Why girls?’ he said. ‘Haldon Finch is co-ed. Don’t any boys belong?’

She was a normal teenager really. Underneath the prissy looks, the shyness, the Mummy’s girl air, she was one of them. The look she gave him seethed with their scorn for the cretinous incomprehension evinced by adults.

‘Well, it’s all women, isn’t it? It’s for women. They’re —what d’you call it?—feminists, militant feminists.’

‘Then I hope you’ll keep clear of it, Veronica,’ Wendy said very quickly and sharply for her. ‘I hope you’ll have nothing to do with it. If there’s anything I really hate it’s women’s lib. Liberation! I’m liberated arid look where it’s got me. I just hope you’ll do better than I have when the time comes and find a man who’ll really support you and look after you, a nice good man who’ll—who’ll cherish you.’ Her lips trembled with emotion. She laid down her sewing. ‘I wasn’t enough of a woman for Rodney,’ she said as if the girl wasn’t there. ‘I wasn’t enough of a girl. I got too hard and independent and—and mature, I know I did.’ A heroic effort was made to keep the tears in, the break out of the voice, and a victory was won. ‘You just remember that, Veronica, when your turn comes.’

Sergeant Martin was handling the complaint though, as he told Wexford, he hadn’t much to go on. Nor had any harm been done—yet.

‘A Ms Caroline Peters who’s a physical education instructor at the Haldon Finch Comprehensive,’ Martin said. ‘Miz not Miss. She got very stroppy, sir, when I called her Miss. I called her an instructress too and had a job getting my tongue round it but that wasn’t right either. She says two men were hanging about watching the girls playing a tennis match. Acting in a suspicious manner, she says. Came in a car which was parked for the express purpose of them getting out to watch. Voyeurs she called them. Afterwards she asked the girls if any of them knew the men but they denied all knowledge.’

Thank you Miss Freeborn, thought Wexford.

‘Leave it, Martin. Forget it. We’ve better things to do.’

‘Leave it altogether, sir?’

Til handle it.’ A note to the woman or a phone call explaining all, he supposed. She had a right to that. She was a good conscientious teacher acting in a responsible manner. He mustn’t laugh—except later perhaps with Burden.

There had been much food for thought picked up on his visits to Liskeard Avenue. And there had been something to make him wonder, something that was neither a piece of information nor the germ of an idea but entirely negative.

Wasn’t it extraordinary that during those visits, those long talks, and during his initial interview with her, Wendy Williams had shown not the slightest interest in Rodney’s other family? She had asked not a single question about the wife she had supplanted but not replaced, nor about the children who were siblings by half-blood of her own Veronica. Because she was inhibited by intense jealousy? Or for some other reason more germane to this inquiry?

11

 Kevin Williams looked more like his mother than his father. He wouldn’t have been recognizable as Veronica’s half-brother. The genetic hand-down which was so distinctive a feature in Sara and Veronica had missed him and his forehead was narrow with the hair growing low on it. His manner was laconic, casual, indifferent.

Wexford, who had Martin with him, had interrupted what seemed to be a family conclave. For once the television was off, sight and sound. Joy Williams introduced no one but her son and this introduction she made proudly and with abnormal enthusiasm. Wexford was left to deduce that the woman and the girl who sat side by side on the yellow sofa must be Hope Harmer and her daughter Paulette.

Mrs Harmer, though plumper, fairer and better cared for than her sister, looked too much like her for her identity to be in doubt. She was a pretty woman and even in the present crisis she looked pleased with life. But the girl to use an expression favoured by Wexford’s grandsons was ‘something else again’. She was beautiful with a beauty that made Sara and Veronica merely pretty young girls. She reminded Wexford of a picture he had once seen, Rossetti’s portrait of Mrs William Morris. This girl was dark and her face had the same dark glow as the face in the picture, her features the same symmetry and her large dark eyes the same other-worldly soulfulness. When he asked her if she was who he thought she was she raised those dark grey dreaming eyes and nodded, then returned to what she had been looking at, a magazine that seemed entirely devoted to hairstyles.

Kevin’s term had ended the day before and he had come straight home. Not to stay, though, he made clear to Wexford when they were alone in the stark dining room. He owed it to his mother to stay a few days, but next week he intended to stick to the plan he had made months before of going down to Cornwall to stay with a friend and later he would be camping in France. He seemed astonished when Wexford asked him for the address of the Cornish friend.

‘We’d rather you didn’t leave the country at present.’

‘You can’t keep me here. My father’s death has nothing to do with me.’

‘Tell me what you did on the evening of Thursday, April the fifteenth.’

‘Was that when he died?’ The casual manner had grown sullen. He was his mother in truculent mood all over again.

Til ask the questions, Kevin.’

It wasn’t said roughly, but nevertheless the boy looked as if no one had spoken like that to him before. His low forehead creased and his mouth pouted.

‘I only asked. He was my father.’

In his tone, that of contrived, badly acted sentiment, Wexford suddenly understood that no one in this household had cared a damn for Rodney Williams. And they hadn’t in the other household either. People didn’t care for him for long. In this area he had, at any rate, got his deserts.

‘What happened that evening? What did you do?’

‘Phoned home, I suppose,’ he said, careless again. ‘I always do on Thursdays or my mother goes bananas.’

‘You phone from college?’

‘No, the phones are always out of order or it’s a hassle finding one that’s free.’ Kevin seemed to have decided he might as well give in to Wexford’s questioning if not with a good grace. ‘I go out to phone. Well, two or three of us do. To a pub. I phone home and transfer the charge.’

‘You’ll remember that Thursday if I tell you it was the first Thursday after you got back to college from the Easter vacation.’

The boy thought about it, seeming to concentrate. Wexford had no doubt he had known perfectly well all along.

‘Yeah, I do remember. I phoned home around eight, eight-thirty—I don’t reckon you want to know to the minute, do you? My mother was out. I talked to Sara.’

‘That must have surprised you, your mother being out when you phoned.’

‘Yeah, it was unusual. She thinks the sun shines out of my arse, as you’ve maybe noticed.’ He jerked his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. ‘Unusual,’ he said, ‘but not unknown.’