An Unkindness of Ravens (21 page)

The ARRIA contingent filed out, muttering indignantly to each other. Helen Blake and Amy Freeborn picked up the orange banner with a woman-raven on it that they had been obliged to leave outside. The others fell in behind them and what had been a group became a march. ‘We shall overcome,’ they sang, ‘we shall overcome some day.’ They marched behind the banner up to the police station forecourt and across it and out into the High Street.

 Joan Finch was sixty-five years old, perhaps more. Wexford wasn’t surprised. There must be few women called Joan under fifty, and even fifty years ago Joan was becoming an old-fashioned name. It was Burden who had built so much on the chance of her being the girl they were looking for.

She took them into the poky little den, designed for surely no more than luggage storage, where she worked, and showed them the typewriter, a big manual Remington at least as old as herself. Fingers today would flinch at that iron forest of keys that took so much muscle power to fell it.

As Ovington had told them, she had collected it from Pomfret Office Equipment on 26 July. There was no doubt at all that it was hers. It had been her mother’s before her and seemed as much of a family heirloom as any clock or piece of china.

Of sole significance to Wexford and Burden was the fact that it wasn’t a Remington 315 portable machine. This was something Miss Finch seemed unable to grasp. She insisted on sitting down at the typewriter and producing for them a half page of men coming to the aid of the party and quick brown foxes. The Ovingtons had done a good job. There wasn’t a flaw or an irregularity to be seen.

They had lunch at the little bow-fronted wine bar two doors away. Pamela Gardner was at a corner table lunching with a woman friend. She looked through Wexford with a contemptuous stare. Her daughter had bounced along that morning, singing as heartily as anyone and a good deal more loudly, waving to him as if they were old friends. Edwina Klein was coming to the police station at 2.30 to talk to him. It was no part of the conditions of her bail that she should do this but he felt sure she wouldn’t fail him. Burden said, ‘Only three weeks to go now.’ He was talking of the coming baby. They say it’ll be on time. They don’t really know though.’

‘There’s more they don’t know than they ever let on.’

Burden picked at his quiche. ‘She had the heartburn at the beginning and I’m getting it now.’ He was pale, bilious looking.

‘We’ll see if the Harmers can supply you with an indigestion remedy.’

The Pre-Raphaelite head of Paulette could be seen through the window of the dispensary where she was evidently helping her father. It was Hope Harmer who served Burden. She seemed discomfited by their visit, unable perhaps to realize that policemen too have private lives and are as liable to bodily ills as anyone else.

‘Did you have a good holiday?’ Wexford asked her.

‘Oh yes, thank you, very nice. Very quiet,’ she added as people do when describing their Christmas celebrations as if to admit to liveliness and merriment were to deny respectability. ‘All good things come to an end though, don’t they? We could have stayed away another week only my daughter’s expecting her A-level results. They’re due any day.’

Sara Williams must also be on tenterhooks then ... ‘Another would-be doctor in the family?’

‘No, no. Paulette’s hoping to follow in her Daddy’s footsteps.’

She was all bright placatory smiles, accompanying them to the door when they left like an old-fashioned shopkeeper. Wexford walked into the police station just before 2.30. Edwina Klein was waiting for him, shown upstairs to his room, and he felt relief at the sight of her in spite of his confidence that she would keep her word. With her, seated in the other visitor’s chair, like a chaperone, was the aunt.

Wexford was surprised. He had seen Edwina as the very epitome of independence, of self-reliance.

‘I happen to be a solicitor as well as an aunt.’

‘Very well,’ said Wexford, ‘but this won’t be an interrogation, just a talk about various aspects of this case.’

‘That’s what they all say,’ said the aunt whose name was Pearl Kaufmann. In appearance she was rather like Virginia Woolf in her latter days, tallish, thin, long-faced, long nosed, with a full mouth. She wore a navy blue silk dress, mid-calf length, and clumpy white sandals that made her feet look large.

Edwina was still in the black she had worn in court but with the roll-necked sweater changed for a sleeveless black tee-shirt that was better suited to the heat of the day. The ARRIA badge had been transferred to this. Edwina had sunglasses on which turned her face into an expressionless mask.

‘He treated me exactly as if I was a prostitute,’ she had said to him of Wheatley at that earlier conversation. The black glasses hadn’t covered her eyes then. They had been bright with eagerness, with earnestness, with the zeal of youth. ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with being a prostitute. That’s OK, that’s fine if that’s where you’re at. It’s just the way men assume ... ‘

‘Only some men.’

‘A lot. He didn’t even talk to me. I tried to talk to him. I asked him where he worked and where he lived. When I asked him where he lived he gave a strange sort of laugh as if I’d said something wrong.’

‘Why did you ask him for a lift? To provoke exactly the sort of situation that arose?’

‘No, I didn’t. Not that time. I admit I did last night but it was different with the man in the car. I’d had a lift from London to Kingsmarkham and the guy couldn’t take me any farther.’ She seemed to consider. ‘It was because of what happened in the car that I decided to try walking in the forest and see.’

‘You’d better tell me what happened in the car, hadn’t you?’

‘He pulled into a lay-by. He did talk then. He said, “Come on, we’ll go in the wood.” I didn’t know what he meant, I really didn’t. Do you know what he thought? He thought I wanted paying first. He said, “Will ten pounds do?” And then he touched me.’ Edwina Klein laid her right hand on her left breast. ‘He touched me like I’m doing now. Like it was a tap or a switch. He didn’t try to put his arms round me or kiss me or anything. It was just offering to pay and feeling the switch. I took out my knife and stuck it in his hand.’

There had been no aunt present when she talked to him then and no black circles to take the character from her face. Her manner now was more subdued, less indignant. Her experience of the court had perhaps chastened her. She waited almost meekly for him to begin questioning her. Miss Kaufmann sat looking at Wexford’s wall map with simulated interest.

‘Have you stabbed any other men?’ he said abruptly, knowing the remark would be objected to.

Edwina shook her head.

‘We won’t mind about that, Mr Wexford.’ It seemed highly suitable to the aunt’s manner and appearance that she should use this obsolete Victorian phrase. She elucidated with something more contemporary. ‘We’ll forget you said that.’

‘As you please,’ said Wexford. ‘When the police use agents provocateurs—as, for example, in the case of a policewoman sitting in a cinema where a member of the audience is suspected of assaulting women—the public, particularly the public of your sort of persuasion, gets up in arms. There’s an outcry when a young policeman deliberately uses a public lavatory frequented by homosexuals. In other words, it’s not all right for them to do this in the interests of justice but it’s all right for you to in the mere interest of a principle. There’s rather a crude name for what you did and were, isn’t there?’

He had been too mealy-mouthed, too gentlemanly, he quickly saw.

‘A pricktease,’ she said flatly. The aunt didn’t move an eyelid. ‘I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything but go for a walk in a wood. I wasn’t provocatively dressed.’ Scorn came into her voice now and she lifted up her head. ‘I wouldn’t be! I had jeans on and a jacket. I never wear make-up, not ever. The only thing I did to provoke anyone was be there and be a woman.’

‘I think my niece is saying,’ said Miss Kaufmann dryly, ‘that it isn’t possible to be a woman in certain places with impunity. She was out to prove this and she did prove it.’

He let it go. He left it. He felt the force of what the two women said and he knew it was true, and that this was an instance of a policeman knowing that the opposing argument is sounder than his own but of having to stick to his own just the same. That all women who intended to go about by themselves at night should learn self-defence techniques seemed to him the best answer. The alternative was that men’s natures should change and that was something which might slowly happen over centuries but not in years or even decades. He wrote busy nothings on the sheet of paper in front of him to fill thirty seconds of time and keep them temporarily silent. At last he lifted his head and looked at Edwina Klein. For some reason, perhaps because his eyes were naked, she took off her glasses. Immediately she looked earnest again and very young.

‘You know the Williams family, I think?’

She was prepared for this. Somehow she knew that this was what she was really there for. Her answer surprised him.

‘Which Williams family? There are two, aren’t there?’

‘There may be two hundred in this neighbourhood for all I know,’ he said sharply. ‘It’s a common name. I’m talking about the Williams family that live in Alverbury Road, Kingsmarkham. The girl is called Sara. She was in court this morning. I think you know her.’

She nodded. ‘We were at school together. She’s a year younger than I am.’

‘Did you know Rodney Williams, the dead man?’

She was very quick to reply. Miss Kaufmann looked up as if warningly. ‘Him and Mrs Williams, yes. Sara and I used to do ballet together.’ She smiled. ‘Believe it or not.’ Miss Kaufmann cast up her eyes as if she could hardly believe it. ‘They’d come for Sara or one of them would. I remember him because he was the only father who ever came. Sometimes he’d come and sit through the whole class.’

Watching pubescent girls in little tutus, thought Wexford, or more likely leotards these days.

‘You asked me which family I meant,’ he said.

‘I slightly know the other one.’ She lifted her shoulders. ‘Veronica Williams looks exactly like Sara.’

He felt a tightening of nerves. She might be a link between the two families. She was the only person he had yet talked to who knew—or admitted to knowing—both sets of Williamses.

‘You were aware that they were half-sisters then? You knew Williams was their father?’

‘No. Oh no. I suppose I thought—well, I didn’t think about it. I honestly don’t know, really. Perhaps that they might be cousins?’

‘When did you last see Rodney Williams?’

‘Years ago.’ She was becoming nervous, frightened. It meant nothing, it was evidence only of her realization that she had been brought here to face one sort of ordeal and, that over, was being subjected to another of an unexpected kind. ‘I haven’t seen him for years.’

‘Then how do you know Veronica?’

No dramatic crise de nerfs and no hesitation either. ‘I played tennis against her. When I was at school.’

‘She’s three years younger than you.’

‘OK. Sure. She was a sort of child prodigy. She was in Haldon Finch’s first six when she was under fourteen.’

It was all reasonable, more than plausible. She had been in Oxford the night Rodney Williams died, having gone up early, a week before her term began. She had told him so last evening and told him, in grave and careful detail, whom to check this with. Bennett was in Oxford checking now but Wexford had little doubt Edwina hadn’t lied to him.

‘You knew both families,’ he said now, ‘but you didn’t know, so to speak, they were one family? You didn’t know Rodney Williams was the father of Veronica as well as of Sara and Kevin?’

‘Kevin? I’ve never even heard of him before.’

‘Sara’s older brother.’ He decided to be entirely frank with her. Miss Kaufmann sat watching him, an acid twist to her mouth. ‘They didn’t know of the existence of the others,’ he said. ‘The Pomfret family didn’t know of the existence of the Kingsmarkham family and the Kingsmark ham family didn’t know of the existence of the Pomfret family until quite a while after Rodney Williams was dead. So if you knew, that must mean you also knew Rodney Williams was a bigamist or at least a married man maintaining two households. And if you knew that how did you know it?’

‘I didn’t.’

The cool negative disappointed him. He had felt on the brink of a breakthrough. But she qualified it.

‘I didn’t know. I said they looked alike, I’d noticed that, and I remember once saying to my aunt that they must be cousins.’ Edwina looked at Miss Kaufmann and Miss Kaufmann nodded in a rapid impatient way. ‘I didn’t know either of them well,’ Edwina said. ‘You’ve got to remember that. I’d never spoken more than a few words to Veronica. And Mrs Williams, that’s the real wife, I’ve seen her about but she’s forgotten who I am or something, and as far as the other one goes I was just a customer.’

He had nothing else to ask her. She had stabbed Brian Wheatley and Peter John Hyde, her assailant in the wood, but he was certain she hadn’t killed Williams. If a woman had done that she would have needed a second to help her.

‘That’s all then, thank you, Miss Klein.’

She got up and walked slowly and gracefully to the door, holding herself erect but with her head slightly bowed. They had the same figure, the same walk, this aunt and niece, though fifty years separated them. What would become of Edwina Klein now? It was inevitable she would be found guilty. Would her college have her back? Or was her whole future spoiled? Had she blown it for the sake of a lost cause? At the door, just before he opened it for her, she said, ‘There’s one thing. You said the Pomfret Williamses and the Kingsmarkham Williamses didn’t know about each other. For the sake of setting the record straight, that’s not right.’

The excitement was back, drying his throat. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What I say. They did know about each other.’

He took his hand from the door and leaned against it like someone barring egress. But Edwina Klein stood there willingly, looking a little puzzled, the aunt bored but patient.

‘How do you know that?’