An Unkindness of Ravens (20 page)

‘If this were seen,’ said Wexford, ‘the happiest youth, viewing his progress through, would shut the book and sit him down and die ... ‘

He went home to fetch Dora and the two of them went to see Sheila in Little Eyolfat the Olivier.

14

 Pomfret Office Equipment Ltd was open for business by 9.30 on the morning of 12 August. It was a shopfront with a big storage shed behind. The business was run by two men called Ovington, father and son. Edgar Ovington, the father, acknowledged at once that his firm serviced typewriters for the Haldon Finch Comprehensive School. The machines were usually attended to during the long summer holiday. His son had fetched the Haldon Finch machines the day before term ended, 26 July.

Wexford and Burden followed him into the shed at the back. It was full of typewriters, manuals, electric and electronic machines. They stretched away, rows of them ranked on slatted shelves, all labelled with tie-on luggage labels. Ovington pointed out the Haldon Finch typewriters, three on the lower shelf, two on the upper. The label on each said: H. Finch. Three portable Remington 315s, two Adler Gabrielle 5000s. Burden gave Ovington a condensed explanation of why they were looking for a particular typewriter and what made it particular. He asked for a sheet of paper. Ovington broke open a packet of 70-gramme white bond and peeled off two sheets from the top.

A flaw in the upper-case A, the ascender of the lowercase t and the head of the comma smudged. Burden slipped a sheet of paper into the roller of the first machine and typed a few lines from ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’, the only hymn he knew by heart. No flaws. No flaws in the second machine either.

‘You haven’t put a new typeface on any of these machines?’ Wexford asked.

‘I haven’t so much as touched them yet,’ said Ovington.

Burden tried the third Remington. It was perfect, a better face than the others had, its need of servicing apparent only in the tendency of one or two of the keys to stick.

‘These were the only typewriters fetched from the Haldon Finch Comprehensive School?’

‘That’s right. I label everything the minute it comes in to be on the safe side.’

‘Yes, I see. So there’s no possibility one of these machines could accidentally have been returned to a private customer?’

‘It wouldn’t go to a private customer if it was labelled Haldon Finch, would it?’ said Ovington truculently.

He was a dour, prickly, suspicious man, always on the lookout for slurs anyone might cast on his ability or efficiency. Burden’s request to try out any other Remington 315s there might be among the two hundred or so machines in the shed started him arguing and might have held them up but for the arrival, smiling and anxious to please, of the son, James Ovington. He was a tall, big-built young man with a toothy smile and a head as bald as an egg.

‘Help yourselves. Be my guest.’ The big white teeth glared as the lips stretched. ‘Would you like me to have a sample of typing done from every machine here?’ He meant it too, there was no sarcasm.

‘We’ll do it,’ said Burden. ‘And it’s only the 315s we’re interested in.’

Two more stood on the shelves besides the three he had tested. ‘Sufficient is Thine Arm alone,’ he typed, ‘And our defence is sure’. Nothing wrong with that one. ‘The busy tribes of flesh and blood With all their cares and fears, Are carried downward by the flood, And lost in following years.’ No flaws.

‘Thanks for your help,’ said Wexford.

James Ovington said it was his pleasure and smiled so widely that his dragon-seed teeth threatened to spill out. His father scowled.

‘It’s going to be in a ditch somewhere or a pond,’ said Burden.

‘Not in Green Pond, anyway. Or Milvey would have found it.’ Wexford was reminded again of the as yet unexplained coincidence. The connecting link between Milvey and Rodney Williams wasn’t Carol Milvey, for Carol Milvey had been ill with tonsillitis on the evening of Williams’s death. So what was it? Connecting link there must be. Wexford refused to believe that it was by pure chance that Milvey had discovered his neighbour’s overnight bag in Green Pond.

And coincidence became remarkable beyond any possible rational explanation, entering the realms of magic or fantasy, when a call came in from Milvey himself next day to say he had found not the typewriter but a long kitchen knife, a French cook’s knife, in a small ornamental pond on the Green Pond Hall estate.

 The three ponds in the old water garden, now a wilderness, had been silted up with soil and fine sand washed down by springs from Cheriton Forest. Wexford’s men had cleaned out those ponds during their search of the estate but since that time a further silting-up had taken place. The prospective trout farmer had called Mid-Sussex Waterways in once more to attempt to find a solution to \he problem of the clogged water course.

Had the knife been placed there since the police search? Or had it been washed down from a hiding place upstream? It was a large knife, the handle of ivory-coloured plastic six inches long, the blade nine inches, a right-angled triangle with the hypotenuse the cutting edge. It had a sharp and vicious-looking point. There were traces of grey mud in the rivet sockets of the handle but not a streak or pinpoint of rust anywhere. Wexford had the knife sent to Forensics at Stowerton. The Milvey link was still a mystery to him. He confronted Milvey across his desk, at a loss for what to ask him next. The wild thought entered his head that Milvey and Joy Williams might have been lovers. It was too wild—not fat dull Milvey and draggle-tailed Joy. And if Milvey were involved in Williams’s death, why should he produce the weapon?

He found himself reduced to saying, ‘You do see, don’t you, Mr Milvey, that this situation and your position in it is a very mystifying one. The man who lives next door but one to you is murdered. You find first the bag he had with him when he disappeared, then a knife that in all probability is the murder weapon.’

‘Somebody,’ said Milvey who didn’t seem to see the point, ‘had to find them sooner or later.’

‘The population of Kingsmarkham is somewhere in the area of seventy-eight thousand souls.’

Milvey stared at him with bull-headed stupidity. At last he said with truculence, ‘Next time I find something I reckon will help the police with their inquiries I’ll keep quiet about it.’

While Forensics were testing the knife against Williams’s wound measurements Sergeant Martin with Bennett and Archbold made inquiries as to its provenance. They listed thirty-nine shops and stores in the area where similar knives were sold. Only Jickie’s, however, stocked that particular brand of French cook’s knife.

‘Wendy Williams may work there,’ Wexford said, ‘but everyone shops there. We do. You do. Martin’s asking the staff in the hardware department if they can remember anyone recently buying a French cook’s knife. You know how far that’ll get us. Besides, they’ve stocked the things for the past five years. There’s no reason to believe the knife was bought specifically to kill Williams. In fact, the chances are it wasn’t.’

‘Yes, we’re still at square one,’ Burden said.

‘You’re being faint-hearted. Come and spend an afternoon among the typewriters. I’ve a hunch I want to put to the test.’

Ovington senior was on his own. He tried at first to fob them off with pleas of pressure of work. Wexford suggested gently that this might be construed as obstructing the police in the course of their inquiries. Ovington, grumbling under his breath, led them once more into the shed at the back of the shop.

Walking between the rows, Wexford examined the labels tied to the machines.

‘You always use this method of labelling?’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it. I don’t think it’s very clear, that’s all. For instance, what does “P and L” stand for?’ He pointed to the labels on a pair of Smith Corona SX 440s.

‘Porter and Lamb on the estate,’ said Ovington gruffly. He meant the industrial estate at Stowerton.

‘And TML?’

‘Tube Manipulators Limited.’

‘And you know absolutely what those initials—I might say codes—mean when you’re returning machines? You know that “P and L” stands for Porter and Lamb and not, for instance, for Payne and Lovell, the hardware people hv the High Street here?’

‘We don’t do any work for Payne and Lovell.’ Ovington looked astonished.

‘I think you understand me though. With this system of labelling mistakes could be made. I’ll come to the point. “H. Finch” is rather a rough and ready way of indicating the Haldon Finch Comprehensive School.’

‘It serves its purpose.’

‘Suppose you had a customer called Henry Finch. What would stop his machine getting mixed up with the Haldon Finch ones?’

‘We don’t have a customer called Henry Finch, that’s what.’

Burden said sharply, ‘D’you have any customers called Finch?’

‘We might have.’

It was the curious reply, or a version of it, Wexford had so often heard witnesses give in court when they did not want to commit themselves to a positive ‘yes’. ‘I might have’, ‘I may have done’. Ovington, in his greasy old suit, open-necked shirt, his chin pulled back into his neck and his lips thrust forward, looked shifty, guilty, suspected and suspicious, truculent for the mere sake of truculence.

‘I’d like you to check, please.’

‘Not Henry,’ said Ovington. ‘Definitely not. A lady. Not an H at all.’

‘You’re wasting my time, Mr Ovington.’

He was enjoying it, with sly malice. ‘We did some repairs on a Remington for her a while back. Not a 315 though.’ At last, scratching his head, ‘I could look in the book.’

‘This could be it,’ Wexford said when he and Burden were alone for a moment. ‘They could have got mixed up and sent the wrong one back.’

‘Wouldn’t she have noticed?’

‘She might not be a regular typist. She might not have used the machine since its return.’

He began looking at labels on all the typewriters on the lower shelf on the left-hand side. P and L, E. Ten (what could that mean?), TML, HBSS, H. Finch, J. St G, M. Br ... Ovington came back with a ledger.

‘Miss J. Finch, 22 Bodmin Road, Pomfret. She collected the machine herself on July the twenty-sixth.’ He slammed the book shut as if he had just proved or disproved something to his triumphant satisfaction.

July 26. The day the Haldon Finch machines were collected and brought here, Wexford thought. Did all this mean anything or nothing? Were the girlfriend and the girlfriend’s typewriter after all sitting pretty somewhere in London or Brighton?

Neither he nor Burden knew where Bodmin Road was.

‘You know something?’ Burden said. ‘Wendy Williams lives in Liskeard Avenue and Liskeard’s a place in Cornwall. Bodmin’s the county town of Cornwall. It may be just round the corner.’

‘We’ll look it up as soon as we get back.’

It was just round the corner. Liskeard Avenue, Falmouth Road, Truro Road, with Bodmin Road running crossways to connect them all.

‘She was practically a neighbour of his,’ Burden said, sounding almost excited. ‘An ARRIA member, I bet you. Here she is on the Electoral Register. Finch, Joan B.’

‘Wait a minute, Mike. Are we saying—are we assuming rather—that a Haldon Finch typewriter was collected by her in error or that it’s her own typewriter she has, that this is the machine we’re looking for, and we’ve stumbled upon her not by deduction but by pure luck?’

‘What does that matter?’ Burden said simply.

Twenty-two Bodmin Road was a small purpose-built block of four flats. According to the doorbells, J. B. Finch lived on the first floor. However, she was not at home either in the afternoon or at their two further calls at seven and eight in the evening. Wexford had been home an hour when a call came through to him to say a fourth man had been stabbed, this time in the upper arm, not a serious wound, though there had been considerable loss of blood.

The difference was that this time his cries were heard by two policemen sitting in a patrol car in a lay-by on the Kingsmarkham bypass. It was after sunset, the beginning of dusk. They had found the victim of the attack lying half across a public footpath, bleeding from a wound near his shoulder. While they were bending over him a girl came out from among the trees of the woodland on the north side of the path, announced her name as Edwina Klein and handed them a penknife from which she had wiped most of the blood.

15

 ARRIA expected a show. Its members were in Kingsmark ham Magistrates’ Court in force. Wexford had never seen the small wood-walled area that passed for a public gallery so full. Caroline Peters was there and Sara Williams, redhaired Nicola Anerley, Jane Gardner and the Freeborn twins, Helen Blake and Donella the black girl, the tennis player who wore glasses and the tennis player who did not.

It was to be a test case, of course. Wexford had guessed all of it pretty well before he talked to Edwina Klein. She had not exactly been an agent provocateur. It was a terrible world we lived in if a woman who chose to walk alone along a field path at dusk could be called that. But the truth was that Edwina had set out to walk there, and to do so evening after evening since she came down from Oxford at the end of June, in the expectation of being attacked. She had been frank and open with him, hiding nothing, admitting, for instance, that it was she who while home for a weekend had been Wheatley’s assailant. For this reason he had decided not to oppose bail. She would talk freely to him again, she had promised and, with a faith that would have set the Chief Constable’s hair standing on end, he believed her.

With Caroline Peters a founder member of ARRIA, she was a thin straight girl of medium height, fiercely intelligent, a pioneer and martyr. She was dressed entirely in black, black trousers, black roll-neck sweater, her hair invisible under a tightly tied black scarf. A raven of a woman, the only colour about her the tiny orange ARRIA badge pinned on near her left shoulder.

What did the girls in the public gallery expect? Something like the trial of Joan of Arc, Wexford supposed. All were ignorant of magistrates’ court procedure, all looked disbelieving when in five minutes it was all over and Edwina committed for trial to the crown court. The charge was unlawful wounding. She was released on bail in her own surety of 1000 pounds and for a similar sum in that of an elderly woman, her great-aunt, not old enough to have been a suffragette but looking as if she might regret having missed the chance.