An Unkindness of Ravens (15 page)

More indignation came when Wexford asked for the names of Kevin’s companions on the trip to the pub where the phone was. But it was hot air, pointless obstructiveness. The names were forthcoming after some expostulation.

‘How did you get on with your father?’

‘There was no communication. We didn’t talk. The usual sort of situation, right?’

‘And your father and Sara?’

The reply came sharply. It was incredible. It was exactly the reply a boy of Kevin’s age might have made a hundred years before—or, according to literature, might have made.

‘You can leave my sister out of this!’

Wexford tried not to laugh. ‘I will for now.’

He found Joy and her sister questioning Martin in depth about Wendy Williams. The girls, the two cousins, had gone. Martin was answering in monosyllables and he looked relieved when Wexford came in. Joy broke off at once and, having seen he was alone, said, ‘Where’s my son?’ as if Wexford might have arrested him and already stowed him away in a police car.

This would be his first encounter with Miles Gardner since the discovery of Rodney Williams’s body. He and Burden waited for him in the managing director’s office. The panelled room was dim and shadowy in spite of the bright day outside. A copper pot filled with Russell lupins stood on the windowsill. Wexford picked up the desk photograph of Gardner’s family and looked at it dubiously.

‘I suppose I’m sensitized to adolescent girls,’ he said. ‘I see them everywhere.’

‘Just remember what the games mistress said.’

‘I don’t think I’m in danger, though they’re a very pretty lot we’re in contact with. One can almost see Williams’s point of view.’

‘He was just a dirty old lecher,’ said Burden, apparently forgetting Williams had been a mere three years his senior.

‘The primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.’

Gardner came in, apologizing for having kept them waiting. He began on some insincere-sounding expressions of sorrow at Williams’s demise which Wexford listened to patiently and then cut short.

‘If you’re free for lunch we might all go over to the Old Flag.’

But this was something Gardner, regretfully, couldn’t manage. ‘I’ve promised to give my daughter lunch, my youngest one, Jane. She’s got the day off school to go for an interview at the university here. A bit of an ordeal, she’s a nervous kid, so I bribed her with the offer of a slap-up lunch.’

The University of the South was situated at Myringham. Another eighteen-year-old then .. . ‘She should get a place,’ Gardner said, and with a kind of rueful pride, ‘There go our holidays abroad for the next three years.’

Wexford said he would like to talk to Christine Lomond, and in the room that had been Williams’s if possible. Gardner took him there himself, up in the small slow lift. There were two desks and two typewriters, a Sierra 3400 and an Olympia ES 100. But this place was ‘clean’ as far as typewriters went. Martin had seen to that. The girl who came in was fresh-paint glossy in a suit of geranium-red linen, dark green cotton blouse, green glass rhomboid hanging on a chain and on her left wrist a watch with a red and green strap. Her hair had been touched with what his daughter Sylvia assured him were called ‘low lights’, though Wexford couldn’t quite believe this and thought she must have been having him on. Christine Lomond’s fingernails were the brilliant carmine of the latest Seven shine front-door shade Pillarbox (‘A rich true red without a hint of blue, a robust high gloss that stands up ideally to wind and weather’). They scuttled over the filing cabinet like so many red beetles.

Wexford had asked her to see what she could find him as samples of Williams’s own typing, any report, assessment, rough notes even, he might have brought to the office with him. She said she was sure anything of that sort would have been handwritten, and it was two or three handwritten sheets that she produced for him, and then several more which she told him had probably been typed on the Olympia machine but using a different daisywheel, thus altering the typeface. Wexford was particularly interested because there seemed to him to be a flaw in the apex of the capital A.

The experiment, however, showed nothing but his own ignorance of typewriters or at any rate of recent technological advances made in typewriters. The red-tipped white ringers whipped a sheet of paper into the machine, switched it on, switched it off, whipped out the daisywheel, inserted another, and rapidly produced a facsimile of the first four lines of Williams’s sales forecast for the first three months of the year.

‘It’s getting a bit ragged,’ Christine Lomond said. ‘We need a new wheel,’ and she pulled the damaged one out and dropped it into the wastepaper basket.

‘Where do you live, Miss Lomond?’

‘Here. In Myringham. Why?’ She had a rather abrupt manner, of the kind that is usually called ‘crisp’.

‘Did you like Mr Williams?’

She was silent. She seemed affronted, having anticipated perhaps nothing more than an investigation of papers and machines. How old was she? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? She could be a good deal less than that. The heavy makeup and elaborate hairstyle aged her.

‘Well, Miss Lomond?’

‘Yes, I liked him. Well, I liked him all right. I didn’t think about liking or disliking him.’

‘Would you think back, please, and give me some idea of what you were doing on the evening of April the fifteenth?’

‘I can’t possibly remember that far back!’

Her eyelids flapped. They were a gleaming laminated sea blue (‘Delicate turquoise with a hint of silver, ideal for that special ceiling, alcove or display cabinet’).

‘Try and pinpoint it,’ said Burden, ‘by thinking of what you were doing next day. That was the morning someone phoned to say Mr Williams was ill and wouldn’t be in. Does that help?’

‘I expect I was at home on my own.’

She didn’t sound defensive, guilty, afraid. She sounded sullen, as if the clothes and the make-up, the ‘grooming’ had not been effective.

‘Do you live on your own or with someone?’

Surely the most innocent of questions. She pounced on it as surely as if those red nails had seized and clutched.

‘I certainly do not live with someone! I was at home on my own watching the TV.’

Another one. What had they done in the old days before the cathode conquest? He ought to be able to remember pre-television alibis but he couldn’t. I was reading, sewing, putting up shelves, fishing, listening to the radio, out for a walk, in the pub, at the pictures? Maybe.

Unwillingly, even grudgingly, she gave them her address. She admitted to possessing a typewriter, an old Smith Corona, though not a portable, and insisted it was in her parents’ house in Tonbridge and she had never had it with her in the Myringham bedsit.

Downstairs in the reception area they encountered a young girl undressing. Or so to Wexford’s astonished eyes it at first appeared. She was talking to the telephonist (Anna today) and in the act of pulling a cotton dress off over her head. Long slim legs in white tights, pale blue pumps with curly heels, and yes, a skirt which dropped to its former just-above-the-knee length when the garment, evidently a middy blouse, was off. Underneath it was a white tee-shirt. Her back was to Wexford. She kicked off the blue pumps, sending one flying across the room and leaving no doubt in the mind of an observer that this was a cathartic shedding of a hateful costume after an ordeal was over.

‘Jane,’ said Anna in a warning tone, ‘there are some .. .’ She spun round. On the front of the tee-shirt were printed the letters ARRIA.

 The first thing that struck Wexford about the house in Down Road, Kingsmarkham, was that there was no question of any of its occupants being obliged to share a bedroom. It was a very large, castellated, turreted, balconied Edwardian pile. Most houses like it had been converted into flats but not this one. A single family inhabited it and its (at least) eight bedrooms. Yet Eve Freeborn had given him the reason for going to her boyfriend in Myringham instead of his coming to her that she shared a bedroom with her sister. Perhaps she hadn’t a sister either. He would soon see.

At first he thought the girl who opened the front door to him was Eve. After all, the fact that this one had green hair meant nothing. They changed their hair colour these days as fast as they used to change their lipstick. A second look told him they weren’t even identical twins. Twins, yes, fraternal twins with the same build of body and the same eyes. That was all. God knew what colour their hair really was. They had probably forgotten themselves.

The house smelt faintly of marijuana. An unmistakable smell that was like woodsmoke blended with sweet cologne.

‘Eve?’ Eve’s sister said with incredulity. ‘You want to see Eve?’

‘Is that so difficult?’

‘I don’t know really .. . ‘

He had shown her his warrant card. After all, she was a young girl and it was evening. She shouldn’t admit unidentified men into the house. But she was looking at it as if it were a warrant for her arrest. He felt impatient.

‘Perhaps I should fill in a form or produce a sponsor.’

‘Oh, no, come in. I’m sorry. It’s just that .. . ‘

She had an irritating way of leaving her sentences unfinished. He followed her into the hall, darkly panelled like the offices of Sevensmith Harding, and up a big elegant winding staircase with a gallery at the top. The marijuana smell was fainter but it was still there. What astonished him about the house was the aura of the sixties that pervaded it. On the wall here was a poster (albeit a glazed and framed poster) of John Lennon seated at a white grand piano. A vase stood on a side table filled with dried grasses and shabby peacock’s tail feathers. And hanging up as an ornament, not because it had been left there by chance, was an antique red silk dress embroidered with gold, its red and its gold tattered and shredded by time and moths. He said, ‘Are your parents at home?’

‘They’ve got a flat in London. They’re there half the time.’

Impossible to tell if she minded or was glad. Those parents need not be more than forty themselves, he thought, and Mother might be less. Eve’s twin said, ‘Perhaps you’d better wait here. I’ll just see if .. .’

All the bedroom doors were open. Only they weren’t bedrooms, not exactly. Each one, as far as he could see, had the look rather of a bedsit, with chairs and tables and floor cushions and a couch or divan with an Indian bedspread flung artlessly over it, posters on the walls and postcards pinned up higgledy-piggledy. He sat down to wait in a rocking chair that had its rockers painted red, black and white and a dirty lace veil draped over its back, and wondered how to explain this mysterious house.

Then he understood. It wasn’t the girls who were living in the past, who were twenty years out of date, or purposely living in an anachronism. Those parents had been young in the sixties, had revelled probably in that new inspiring freedom, and now the spirit of the sixties, the flavour, the mores would never leave them. Not the girls but the parents were the marijuana users. He would have to do something about that .. .

How long was she going to keep him waiting?

He got up and went out into the passage. There was no one about. But from somewhere he could hear the sound of female voices—a sound that was not in the least like the twittering of birds, strong earnest talk rather than a murmuration. A staircase led to the attic floor but it wasn’t from up there that the voices came.

There was a burst of laughter, some sporadic clapping. He walked down the passage towards the sound, came out into another smaller, squarer landing, a map of the heavens painted on its ceiling by a trained but unsure hand. An amateur astrologer who had been to art school, he thought, which brought the sixties once more to mind. As he stood there, doubtful of the wisdom of bursting into a room full of women, the door opened and two girls came out. They stopped in the doorway, looking at him in astonishment. One was unknown to him, the other was Caroline Peters, physical training instructor.

Before anyone spoke Eve Freeborn came out of the room, shouldering her way past the two who blocked the doorway. She was once more in the pelvis-crusher jeans but this time with a purple satin blouse to match her hair. Caroline Peters, on the other hand, was dressed exactly like a boy

—or like boys used to dress before punk apparel came to stay: blue jeans, brown leather jacket, half-boots; no makeup, hair cropped in a crewcut.

‘Sorry,’ Eve said. ‘Have you been waiting long?’

‘They kept us waiting,’ said Caroline Peters with the maximum venom, ‘for four thousand years.’

She had recognized him and wasn’t pleased. Or had he been recognized for what he was in addition to being a policeman—a man? Wexford had never before personally encountered the kind of militant feminist who advocates total separatism. Enlightenment broke upon him.

‘Have I by any chance interrupted a meeting of ARRIA?’

‘It’s over,’ said Eve. ‘It’s just over.’

‘We wouldn’t have permitted interruption.’

Wexford looked at Caroline Peters. ‘Don’t go yet, please. I’d like to talk to you too.’

She lifted her shoulders, went back into the room. Eve waved a hand at the other girl, a pretty, sharp-faced redhead.

‘This is Nicky.’

Inside the room, another, larger, bedsit hung with striped bedspreads on ceilings and walls like a Bedouin tent, half a dozen more girls were standing about or preparing to leave. Sara Williams was there and her cousin Paulette, the two of them talking to Jane Gardner, and all of them wearing ARRIA tee-shirts. A black girl, thin and elegant as a model, sat crosslegged on a floor cushion.

Eve said to the company, ‘I don’t remember what he’s called,’ as if it hardly mattered, ‘but he’s a policeman.’ She pointed at one girl after another: ‘Jane, Sara, Paulette, Donella, Helen, Elaine, and Amy, my sister, you’ve met.’

Caroline Peters pushed her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket.

‘What is it you want?’

‘I’d like to know more about ARRIA for a start.’

Tor a start it was started by me and a like-minded woman, a classical scholar now at Oxford.’ She paused. ‘Arria Paeta,’ she said, ‘was a Roman matron, the wife of Caecina Paetus. Of course she was obliged to take his name.’ Wexford could tell she was one of those fanatics who never miss a trick. ‘Ancient Rome was known for its gross oppression and exploitation of women.’ Teacher-like, she waited for his comments.