An Unkindness of Ravens (19 page)

The car filled with her perfume. Estee Lauder’s White Linen, decided Wexford, who was good on scent. He made up his mind to take her up to his office, not into one of the interview rooms.

‘You haven’t told me much about this girlfriend of your husband’s, Mrs Williams,’ he said when they were there.

‘I’ve told you all I know. I’ve told you it was a very young girl and that’s all I know.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘There’s more if you search your memory.’

A secretive look was closing up her face. Why? Why should she want to conceal this girl’s identity from him?

‘I wish I’d never mentioned any girl to you!’ Exasperated. The tone of a mother to a child who keeps nagging her about a treat she has promised him.

‘You had an anonymous letter, you said.’

She hesitated. She opened her mouth to begin an explanation. He cut her short.

‘You didn’t keep it though. You burned it.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Mrs Williams, let me tell you what I do know. First, it’s only in books that people burn anonymous letters. In real life they may not care much for them, they may even recoil from them in disgust, but they don’t burn them. Most people don’t have fires any more, for one thing. Where would you burn something?’

She didn’t say anything. A sullen crushed look made her almost ugly.

‘People who get anonymous letters may not like looking at them. Usually they put them away in a drawer in case or until we want to see them. Or there’s the dustbin. You read somewhere that the requisite thing to do with an anonymous letter was burn it, didn’t you? In a detective story probably. The truth is you never received one.’

‘All right, I didn’t.’

‘Hasn’t anyone ever told you you musn’t tell lies to the police?’

He hadn’t spoken harshly. His tone was almost bantering. It was mockery, even as mild as this, she couldn’t stand. She flushed and her mouth set mulishly.

‘I didn’t tell lies. There was a girl.’ Perhaps she could see he wasn’t going to say anything for a moment or two. ‘He was perverted about young girls, that’s what it amounted to and it ruined my life.’ Her voice rose, edgy and plaintive. ‘I thought he was in love with me when we first met. I thought he loved me but now I know he just fancied me because I was young. And when Veronica was coming he had to marry me. Well, marry. It’s easy to marry, isn’t it? You can do it over and over again.

‘I never had any life, I never had any youth. Do you know something? I’m thirty-two and I’ve never so much as been taken out to dinner in a decent restaurant by a man. I’ve never been abroad. I’ve never had a thing to wear that didn’t come discount from Jickie’s. I never even had an engagement ring!’

He asked her how she knew of the girl’s existence. Just at this point Marion came in with coffee on a tray, three unprepossessing cheese sandwiches and three custard cream biscuits. Wendy looked at the sandwiches and shook her head in a shuddery genteel sort of way.

He repeated the question.

‘Rodney confessed.’

‘Just like that? Out of the blue? You didn’t suspect anything but he confessed to you he had a young girlfriend?’

‘I told you.’

‘Why did he confess? Was he intending to leave you for her? As in fact you thought he had done?’

That made her laugh in the way someone does who has knowledge of a secret you will never guess. He persisted and she looked exasperated, answering that she had told him already. She ate nothing, he ate a sandwich, leaving the rest for Marion, who had a hearty appetite. Afterwards, he thought, Wendy Williams would probably tell people she was kept at the police station for hours and not given a thing to eat or drink.

He asked her once more about 15 April. The evening. What time had she left Jickie’s to drive home to Pomfret? All the staff at Jickie’s had been questioned by Martin and Bennett and Archbold. They had forgotten. Why should they remember that particular evening? One of the girls on the fashion-floor pay desk said that if Mrs Williams hadn’t actually left the building before nine, that would have been very late for her. On Thursdays she usually left as soon after eight as possible and had been known to leave at 7.30.

Wendy insisted she left at nine. She stuck to that. He left it. He said there was something he had to ask her. Seeing that her husband consistently neglected her and for two months she believed he had finally left her, had she formed a friendship with any other man?

‘It would be a natural and normal thing to you. You’re a very young woman still. You said yourself that you felt life and youth had been denied you.’

‘Are you suggesting I was having a—a relationship with someone?’

‘It would be very understandable.’

‘I think that’s disgusting! That’s really immoral. I’ve got my daughter to think of, haven’t I? I’ve got Veronica to set an example to. Just because Rodney behaved in that horrible way, that’s no reason for me to do the same. Let me tell you, I’ve always been absolutely faithful. I’ve never looked at another man, it would never have entered my head.’

He was beginning to know her and her protests. He said not another word on that one but thought the more. It was afternoon now and Burden would be setting in motion their prearranged plan. It might not work, of course—and if it did what would it show or prove? He didn’t even know if he expected it to work.

In the meantime he questioned her about her life, her feelings, her reactions. Still she hadn’t said a word about the other Williams family. She was prepared to acknowledge Rodney Williams had married her bigamously while ignoring the existence of his first or true wife. You would have expected her natural curiosity to get the better of her. Was she rising above such human failings? That was a possible explanation.

‘Mrs Joy Williams,’ he said deliberately, ‘has a son and daughter. Her daughter and Veronica are very much alike. Do you have any feelings about these people?’ He was aware he sounded like a psychotherapist, though any interrogating policeman was one of those. But nevertheless he made a slight correction. ‘Aren’t you interested in knowing something about them?’

‘No.’ Once more she had flushed. She looked mulish. ‘Why should I be? They’re nothing to me. Rodney can’t have cared much for them.’

‘Why do you say that?’

She made a little gesture with her hands to indicate that the answer was obvious. Wexford said that was enough for today and he’d organize a car to take her home. They went down in the lift, timing it perfectly, for as the lift came to a stop and the doors opened Burden came walking across the black and white checkerboard floor towards it with Joy Williams beside him. Wexford spoke to Burden for the sake of stopping and saying something. The two women stood there, Joy staring at Wendy, Wendy contemplating the wall ahead of her as if it were the most fascinating example of interior decor since the cave paintings of Trois Freres.

They presented a contrast, pathetic and grotesque. It was almost too marked to be quite real. They were like a cartoon for an old-fashioned advertisement, the wife who doesn’t use the face cream, floor polish, deodorant, stock cubes, and the wife who does. Joy had a cardigan on over a cotton dress with half its hem coming down. All her shoes had a curious way of looking like carpet slippers though they weren’t. Wendy swayed a little on her high heels, craning her neck and putting on a winsome look. Wexford smelt a gush of White Linen from her, perhaps because she was sweating. The irony was that both these women had been rejected.

Burden and Joy went into the lift. The doors closed.

‘Do you know who that woman was?’

‘What woman?’ said Wendy.

‘I’m not talking about Detective Bayliss. The woman who has just gone up in the lift with Inspector Burden.’

She raised her eyebrows, moved her shoulders.

That was Mrs Joy Williams.’

‘His wife?’

‘Yes,’ said Wexford.

‘She looked about sixty.’

Upstairs Burden was asking Joy about the phone call, the letter of resignation. Why had she gone out on the evening of 15 April instead of remaining at home to await her son’s phone call?

‘I can’t be always at his beck and call,’ she said, her voice full of bitterness. ‘It’s all one to him whether I’m there or not. He’s his father all over again—indifferent. I’ve done everything for him, worshipped the ground he walked on. Might as well not have bothered. Do you know where he is now? In Cornwall. On holiday. That’s all it means to him that his mother’s a widow.’

It could just be true. It could just be that she had at last seen the results of spoiling a son. A quarrel, Burden thought, the day before Kevin returned to university. He could hear the things that would have been said—all right, just wait till next time you want something; you phone, my lad, but don’t count on me being here ... Yet there had been no sign since then of adoration flagging.

‘Do you know who that woman was with Chief Inspector Wexford?’

‘I can guess.’ The harsh clattering laugh. ‘Cheap little tart. I don’t admire his taste.’

He asked her if Sara had a boyfriend. Incredibly, she said she didn’t know. It was plain she didn’t care. Hatred came into her eyes when her daughter’s name was mentioned.

‘And after all I’ve done for her,’ said Joy as if their discussion had been on the subject of the host of services . she had performed for Sara and the girl’s ingratitude. Burden had her driven home. He felt as if he had been brought up against a wall, the solid brick an inch from his face.

 Carol Milvey was not a member of ARRIA but she was eighteen years old and lived next door but one to Joy Williams. And it was her father, the boss of Mid-Sussex Waterways, who had found Rodney Williams’s travelling bag in Green Pond, a coincidence which had never been explained. Sergeant Martin saw her. The interview was a brief one, for Carol Milvey had been ill in bed with tonsillitis on 15 April and had taken two days off school.

A further ten members of ARRIA were cleared, both for 15 April and the evening on which Brian Wheatley had been stabbed in the hand. It was August now and people were beginning to go away on holiday, ARRIA members surely included. The Anerley family and their daughter, the redheaded Nicola, had been in France since the end of the school term and were not expected back until 12 August. On this date too Pomfret Office Equipment Ltd were due to reopen after two weeks’ holiday closure, a southern version of North Country wakes weeks, as Wexford remarked. If the typewriters missing from Haldon Finch were serviced in the neighbourhood it was with Pomfret Office Equipment they had to be. No other firm of typewriter engineers admitted to knowledge of their whereabouts.

The commerce department at Sewingbury Sixth Form College had been checked out. They had microcomputers, ACT Apricots, as well as four dedicated word processors, and their typewriters were ten highly sophisticated Brother machines. Kingsmarkham High School had one typewriter only in the building and that in the school secretary’s office.

Kevin Williams came back from Cornwall and left again with six like-minded students to camp in the Channel Islands. The Harmers with Paulette’s boyfriend went to North Wales for a week, leaving an Indian pharmacist and his wife, both highly qualified but jobless, in charge of shop and dispensary. Sara went nowhere. Sara stayed at home, awaiting no doubt the A-level results due the second or third week of the month, after the degree results and before the O-levels.

‘I can’t help wondering if there’ll still be A-levels when this new baby of ours grows up,’ said Burden. Nowadays he talked gingerly and awkwardly about the coming child but as if its birth were a certainty and its future more or less assured. Til be an old man by the time she wants to go to university. Well, I’ll be in my sixties. I’ll be retired. Do you remember filling in those grant forms? Getting one’s employer to vouch for one’s earnings and all that? Still, by then they’ll do it all on a computer, I suppose, a kind of twenty-first-century Apricot.’

‘Or an Apple,’ said Wexford. ‘Why do computer makers call their wares after fruit? There must be some unexpected Freudian explanation.’ A glazed look of boredom blanked Burden’s face. ‘Talking of unexpected explanations,’ Wexford said quickly, ‘do you realize there’s one aspect of this case we’ve given no thought to? Motive. Motive has scarcely been mentioned.’

Burden looked as if he were going to say that the police need not concern themselves with motive, that perpetrators in any case often stated motives that seemed thin or incredible. But he didn’t say that. He said hesitantly, ‘Aren’t we concluding Williams was killed in what ARRIA would call self-defence?’

‘Surely the difficulty there is that if we assume—which we are doing—that the woman or girl who made the phone call and wrote the letter was Williams’s girlfriend, why should she need to defend herself against him? Budd and Wheatley were attacked because they made sexual advances. But this girl, being his girlfriend, presumably welcomed his sexual advances.’

Burden said in his prudish way, ‘That might depend on their nature.’

‘You mean they were sadistic or he wanted to wear one of her nightdresses? We’ve no evidence Williams was funny in that way. And aren’t you forgetting something? It looks as if this murder was somewhat premeditated. Williams was given a sleeping drug before he was stabbed. I don’t see my way to accepting a theory that one day Williams suggested to his girlfriend that they have sex in this new naughty way, whereupon she substitutes a sedative for his blood-pressure pill and when he’s asleep stabs him eight times with a French cook’s knife.’

‘Then what motive do you suggest?’

‘I don’t. I can’t see a girlfriend killing him to be rid of him because surely all she had to do was give him the out, tell him to go back to his wife or wives. And although a girl could have killed him on her own, she couldn’t have disposed of his body on her own. A girl with a jealous husband or boyfriend? ARRIA members don’t have husbands. ARRIA members aren’t supposed to get sufficiently involved with men for a triangular jealousy situation to arise. But is she an ARRIA member? Does she exist?’

‘If one could only read the book of fate,’ said Burden, unaware that he was quoting and no longer thinking about the Williams case anyway.