An Unkindness of Ravens (26 page)

Was he going to have those women in again? One of them had killed the girl the night before last. To keep her from confirming their guilt in the matter of the Phanodorm. Only one of them or both? Joy could easily have known where she would be and that she left by the shortcut to the High Street where she would catch the Pomfret bus.

Burden was late. But then he too had been up and on the go since early yesterday morning, finally getting to bed even later than Wexford. To be up after midnight, thought Wexford, is to be up betimes. He had always liked that, only no one knew what ‘betimes’ meant any more, which rather spoiled the wit of it. Thinking of going to bed reminded him of Dora’s note and he was about to pick up the phone and get hold of Ovington when Burden walked in.

He didn’t look tired, just about ten years older and a stone thinner. He was wearing his stone-coloured suit with a shirt the same shade and a rust tie with narrow chocolate lines on it. Might be going to a wedding, thought Wexford, all he needed was a clove carnation.

‘Jenny’s started,’ he said. ‘I took her to the infirmary this morning at eight. There’s not going to be anything doing much yet awhile but they wanted her in promptly.’

‘You’d better start your leave as from now.’

‘Thanks. I thought you’d say that. I must say these babies do pick their moments. Couldn’t she have waited a week? She’s going to be Mary, by the way.’

‘After your grandmothers, no doubt.’

But the coincidence he had related to Wexford had slipped Burden’s memory. ‘Do you know that never crossed my mind? Perhaps Mary Brown Burden then?’

‘Forget it,’ said Wexford. ‘It sounds like an American revivalist preacher. Keep in touch, won’t you, Mike?’

Later in the day, with luck, the pathologist’s report on Paulette Harmer would come and also perhaps something from Forensics on the murder weapon. He had Martin go to a magistrate and swear out a warrant to search the Williams home in Liskeard Avenue, and he wasn’t anticipating any difficulties in getting it. In the meantime he had himself driven to the other Williams home. He didn’t feel up to walking, whatever Crocker might advise.

Sara was mowing the front grass with one of those small electric mowers that cut by means of a line wound on a spool and are principally intended for trimming edges. As he got out of the car the motor whined and stopped cutting and the girl, crimson with bad temper, up-ended the flimsy machine and began tugging furiously at the line. He heard a hissed repetition of the word Joy disliked so much that she had used of her father’s assault.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!’

‘If you do that with the current switched on,’ Wexford said, ‘one day you’re going to cut your hand off.’

She cooled as rapidly as she had become incensed.

‘I know. I’ve promised myself I’ll always switch it off before I fiddle with it. But these god-damned things never work for long.’ She pulled prongs out of socket to oblige him and smiled. An ARRIA tee-shirt today, identical to the one on dead Paulette. ‘This is the fourth of these spools we’ve had this summer. Do you want to see my mother?’

As yet she couldn’t know about Paulette. He remembered her thinly veiled boasting to her cousin on the phone and he didn’t think she would much care. Nor would she much care when her mother was arrested for the murder. But perhaps it was natural for victims of incest not to care much about anything. He felt a wrench of pity for her.

‘I want to talk to you first.’

The garage, now there was no car to occupy it, had become a toolshed and repository for rather battered garden furniture. Sara indicated a deckchair to Wexford. For her part she sat down on an upturned oil drum and set about struggling with the stubborn spool. This looked as if it might go the way of its fellows, three of which lay on a shelf next to a dozen half-used Sevenstar paint tins. He supposed she was busying herself so as not to have to look at him while he talked to her about her father.

At his first mention of incest, a tactful broaching of what her mother had told him, she didn’t flush but turned gradually white. Her skin, always pale, grew milk-like. And he noticed a phenomenon, perhaps peculiar to her. The fine gold down on her forearms erected itself.

He asked her gently when it had first happened. She kept her head bent, with her right hand attempting to rotate the spool while with her left forefinger and thumb she tugged at the slippery red line.

‘November,’ she said, confirming his own ideas. ‘November the fifth.’ She looked up and down again quickly. ‘There were only two times. I saw to that.’

‘You threatened him?’

She hesitated. ‘Only with the police.’

‘Why didn’t you tell your brother? Or did you? I have a feeling you and your brother are close.’

‘Yes, we are. In spite of everything.’ She didn’t say in spite of what but he thought he knew. ‘I couldn’t tell him.’ Like a different girl speaking, her face turned away, ‘I was ashamed.’

And she hates her mother, so it was a pleasure to tell her? She gave a final tug and the line came through, far too much of it, yards of loosely-coiled scarlet flex.

Kevin was indoors, having unexpectedly arrived that morning by means of some comfortless and inefficient transport. He was lying spent, exhausted, dirty and unkempt, on the yellow sofa, his booted feet up on one of its arms. Joy had answered Wexford’s knock with refreshments for Kevin in her hands, a trayful of sandwiches, coffee, something in a carton that was ice cream or yogurt. Wexford shut the door on him, hustled Joy into the kitchen. She was dressed exactly as she had been the day before, even to the headscarf—had she tied it on to run to the shops for Kevin-provender?—and gave the impression of having never taken her clothes off, of sleeping in them. He told her, quite baldly, about Paulette, but she knew. John Harmer had phoned her while Sara was in the garden. Or that was the explanation she gave Wexford for knowing. He said he would want her later at the police station, she and Wendy. He would send a car for her.

‘What’s my son going to do about his evening meal?’

‘Give me a tin opener,’ said Wexford, ‘and I’ll teach him how to use it.’

She didn’t observe the irony. She said she supposed he could have something out of a tin for once. At least she didn’t suggest his sister might cook for him, which was an improvement (if that was the way you looked at things) on twenty years ago.

The next stop was Liskeard Avenue, Pomfret. Martin had got his warrant and was there with Archbold and two uniformed men, PC Palmer and PC Allison, Kingsmark ham’s only black policeman. A tearful Wendy was trying to persuade them it wouldn’t be necessary to strip the paper off her living-room walls.

At the glass table sat Veronica. Evidently she had been at work on the hem of a white garment that lay in front of her but had laid down her needle when the policemen arrived. Wexford thought of the girl in the nursery rhyme who sat on a cushion and sewed a fine seam, feeding on strawberries, sugar and cream. It must have been her dress which suggested it to him with its pattern of small wild strawberries and green leaves on a creamy ground. Tights again, dark blue this time, white pumps. Another thing that made those girls look alike was the way neither of their faces showed their feelings. They were the faintly melancholy, faintly smug, nearly always impassive faces of madonnas in Florentine paintings.

Wexford’s daughter Sylvia had a cat which uttered soundless mews, going through the mouth-stretching motion of mewing only. Veronica’s ‘hello’ reminded him of that cat, a greeting for a lip-reader, not even as audible as a whisper. Wendy renewed her appeals as he came in, now making them to him only.

‘I’m sorry, Wendy. I understand your feelings. We’ll have the room redecorated for you.’ Or for someone, he thought but didn’t say aloud. ‘And there’ll be as little mess as possible.’

And it really was Sevensmith Harding’s Sevenstarker they intended to use for the job, four large cans of it, each labelled in red italic script that this was the slick, sheer, clean way to strip your walls. Wexford found himself hoping this wasn’t too gross an exaggeration.

‘But what for?’ Wendy kept saying, at the same time, curiously enough, picking up ornaments and pushing them into a wall cupboard, loading a tray.

That I’m not at liberty to say,’ said Wexford, falling back on one of the stock answers of officialese. ‘But there’s plenty of time. Please clear the room yourself if you want to.’

In silence Veronica picked up her sewing. She threaded her needle, using a small device manufactured for that purpose, and slipped a pink thimble onto her forefinger.

‘She’s doing the hem of her tennis dress. She’s playing in the women’s singles final at the club this afternoon.’ Wendy spoke in tragic tones, only slightly modified by a faint proud stress on the word ‘club’.

Kingsmarkham Tennis Club, presumably, or even Mid Sussex. ‘We shan’t stop her,’ Wexford said.

‘You’ll upset her.’ She drew him into the kitchen, through the already open doorway. ‘You’re not going to say anything to her about you-know-what? I mean you’re not going to go into it?’

‘I’m not a social worker,’ he said.

‘Nothing actually happened anyway. I saw to it nothing happened.’

Impossible, though, not to see Rodney Williams, hitherto no more than liar and con-man, as some sort of monster. To make a sexual assault on one daughter was heinous enough, but almost immediately to have designs on her younger half-sister?

‘Of course, you wouldn’t have suspected anything might happen if Joy hadn’t warned you.’

‘How many times do I have to tell you I never saw the woman till you—introduced us?’

‘Something you haven’t told me is how you knew Rodney made sexual advances to Veronica. He didn’t tell you but you knew. Veronica was the young girl living at home with her family you led us a wild goose chase about, wasn’t she?’ He closed the door between the rooms and leaned against it.

Wendy nodded, not looking at him.

‘How did you know, Wendy? Did you see something? Did you notice something in his behaviour when he thought you weren’t looking? Was that after or before Joy warned you?’

She mumbled, ‘I didn’t see anything. Veronica told me.’

‘Veronica? That innocent child in there who’s more like twelve than sixteen? That child you’ve very obviously sheltered from every exposure to life? She interpreted her father’s affectionate kisses, his arm round her, his compliments, as sexual advances?’

A nod. Then a series of vehement nods.

‘And yet you say “nothing actually happened”. By that I take it you mean there was no more than a kiss and a touch and a compliment. But she—she—saw this as an incestuous approach?’

Wendy’s response was characteristic. She burst into tears. Wexford pushed up a stool for her to sit on and found a box of tissues, never a difficult task in that house. He returned to the living room where the carpet was now covered with sheets and from which Veronica had disappeared. Allison was daubing the walls with Sevenstarker, Palmer already at work with a metal stripping tool. The hunch he had about what was under that paper was probably crazy, but besides that it was just possible an analysis of old plaster might show traces of Rodney’s blood. And might not. Anyway, it was work for Leslie Kitman. He could come in next week and put it all back again at the expense of the Mid-Sussex Constabulary.

 The rain had started again. That would put paid to Veronica’s match in the afternoon as neither the Kingsmarkham Tennis Club nor the Mid-Sussex County at Myringham had covered courts. Wexford, back in his office though it was Saturday, noted the time. Twelve-thirty. Getting on for three hours since Mike had been in and announced the imminence of his new daughter. Well, it was too soon yet to expect much, early days.

Something kept nagging at the back of his mind, something Wendy had said. About the tennis match, he thought it was. But she hadn’t said anything except that Veronica would be playing that afternoon. Why did he have this curious feeling then that in what she said lay the whole answer to this case? He often had feelings like that about some small thing when a case was about to break, and the small thing always turned out to be vital and his hunch seldom wrong. The difficulty was that he didn’t know what he had a hunch about.

All the available men he had were either at Wendy’s taking her room apart or else, the far greater number of them, conducting a house-to-house in Down Road and interrogating every girl who had been at the ARRIA meeting. A mood of loneliness and isolation enclosed him. Dora had gone to London and to stay the night with Sheila in Hampstead. His elder grandson Robin would be nine today, his birthday party due to begin three hours from now. Crocker played golf all day on Saturdays. Wexford would have liked to sleep but he found it hard to sleep in the daytime. What the hell was it Wendy had said? What was it? Tremlett was probably still at work on that poor girl’s body ... She had got Phanodorm for Joy and threatened to tell that she had. Well, not threatened, warned rather that she would have to, she would be scared not to. Joy had given Rodney the Phanodorm, substituting it for his blood-pressure pills, and it took just the time of a drive to Pomfret to act. Follow him by bus to Wendy’s. He’s asleep when you get there and you look at him and remember what he’s done to you by way of what he’s done to your daughter. Married another woman too, like a bloody sheikh. And the other wife goes along with you, though you hate her. It’s her daughter at risk now since you told her where his tastes lie. Why let him ever wake up again? If there’s a mess she says the room’s going to be decorated tomorrow. And if you hide the body for long enough ...

In the morning phone the office, say he’s ill, disguising your voice a bit. Shetl type Jais letter of resignation for you, she’s got access to a typewriter in a friend’s house that no one’s going to trace. You’re both in it equally, you and she, the two wives of Rodney Williams, for better for worse, till death parts you. She stabbed him too, though you gave him the sleeping pill. You and she together carried the body down that crackpot spiral staircase, through the doorway into the integral garage. Laid him in the car with his travelling bag. She drove because you never learned, but you did most of the grave digging. Soiling your hands never bothered you the way it did her. Two wives, in it together equally, and whom murder has joined let no man put asunder.