An Unkindness of Ravens (30 page)

He went on, ‘The coming and going between the Williams homes led to a pooling of information. For instance, Sara had believed her father was a sales rep with Sevensmith Harding for the Ipswich area. Veronica thought he was a rep with a bathroom fittings company. They took steps to find out the truth and did. It’s over a year now since they found out what Rodney really did, what his position was, and discovered—via some research into marketing managers’ earnings on Sara’s part—what his actual salary was.

‘Sara also warned Veronica of their father’s—proclivities. That, of course, is how Wendy came to fear an incest attempt. Not because she witnessed anything herself or because Veronica put two and two together from a kiss and a cuddle but because Sara told Veronica what to expect and Veronica passed it on without disclosing her source. One way and another Sara made Veronica into a very frightened girl. A very bewildered and confused girl. Think of her situation. First she discovers her father has a legal wife and a grown-up family, next that he could never have in fact married her mother and she must be illegitimate. Necessarily, therefore, he’s deceitful and a liar. He doesn’t even have the job he says he has. Worst of all, he has raped his other daughter and will certainly have the same designs on her. No wonder she was frightened.

‘Telling Wendy her fears of a sexual attack had the effect only of causing trouble between her mother and father. Did Wendy accuse Rodney and Rodney hotly deny it? Almost certainly. The quarrel was at any rate bad enough to make Wendy believe Rodney would leave her but fear that if he didn’t Veronica would be in danger. So we see that the reason she didn’t want Veronica to stay in on the evening of April the fifteenth was that if Rodney did come back she would be alone with her father—and this would be the first time she would be alone with him after the disclosure was made.

‘But Veronica had another confidante and friend now, apart from her mother. She had Sara. And Sara absolutely justified the faith she put in her. Sara had a good idea for diverting Rodney’s attention from his daughter, diverting his attention from everything, in fact. Substitute sleeping pills for his blood-pressure tablets. It was something that could only be done once though and in an emergency.

‘Now on April the fifteenth, however much their mothers may have been in ignorance, Sara and Veronica knew that when Rodney left Alverbury Road he would drive straight to Liskeard Avenue. So Sara herself made the exchange of tablets, two only remaining in the container. Don’t forget we found an empty Mandaret container in Alverbury Road and a half-full one in Liskeard Avenue. Rodney took his two Mandaret as he thought, leaving the empty container in his bedroom, and drove to Pomfret. No doubt he began to feel drowsy on the way.’

‘But these were Phanodorm, supplied by Paulette Hanner?’ said the doctor.

‘I suppose they were supplied by her. It seems most likely. But Paulette didn’t die because she illicitly provided a sleeping drug. She died because the turn events were taking made her concentrate her mind on the evening of April the fifteenth, made her remember in fact what had really happened. What she remembered was her mother speaking to her aunt Joy on the phone that evening and making some remark about being glad Kevin had settled in back at college. And she was going to tell us because she knew from the papers and television and her parents’ conversation how strong was the suspicion against her aunt. She knew very well her aunt had been at home that evening, in at eight to receive Kevin’s phone call and still in at eight forty-five to receive her mother’s.’

 The girl should have been strewing flowers or rising from the waves in a cockleshell. The face was bland, innocent and somehow secretive. Even now there was a tiny self satisfied smile. Her hair was scraped back tight from that high forehead but wisps had come free and lay in gold tendrils on the white skin.

‘I got a phone call from Veronica. It was just to tell me he’d gone to sleep like I said he would. I said I’d come over.’

He had interrupted her to ask why.

‘I just thought I would. I wasn’t going to get a chance like that again, was I?’

He stopped himself asking her what she meant. Her eyes seemed to enlarge, her face grow blanker.

‘I saw him sleeping there and I thought, I’ve got him in my power. I thought of the power he had over me. I started to get angry, really angry.’

‘And Veronica?’

‘I didn’t think about Veronica. I suppose she was there. Well, I know she was. I said to her, “We could kill him and stop all of it.” I told her to get me a knife. I wasn’t serious then, it was fantasy. I was angry and I was excited —high like when you’ve had a drink.’

Folie a deux. Was Veronica excited too? He wouldn’t get much about another’s feelings out of this girl.

‘I took the knife out of her hands and took off the cardboard guard that was on it. I went up to my father who was lying on the settee and I started playing around, waving the knife over him, pretending to stick it in him. I could tell he was sound asleep. I was making Veronica laugh because I was doing all this stuff and he was just oblivious of it. I don’t remember what made me stop playing. I was so excited and high I don’t remember. But that’s how it was. One minute it was fantasy and the next it was for real.’

She looked down the table at Marion and then the other way at Martin. It was as if she were gathering the attention of her audience. Once more her eyes met Wexford’s in a steady gaze.

‘I raised the knife and stuck it in his neck, right in hard with both hands. I’d made him wake up then and make noises, so I stabbed him a few more times to stop the blood spraying like that. I’m going to be a doctor so I knew the blood would stop when he was dead ... ‘

It took Wexford, hardened as he was, a moment or two to collect words.

‘Did Veronica stab him?’

‘I gave her the knife and told her to have a go. I’d made a big wound in his neck and she stuck it in there and then she went off and was sick.’

 ‘Completely mad,’ said Burden. ‘Bonkers.’

‘Perhaps. I’m not sure. Let’s not get into defining psychosis.’

‘What happened next?’ said the doctor.

‘The room was covered for the most part in dustsheets. Rodney had come in half asleep, climbed the stairs and lain down on the settee which had a dustsheet over one end. The end, incidentally, where he laid his head. It was this sheet, the property of Leslie Kitman, which received most of the blood. Some went on an area of wall from which the paper had been stripped that day. Sara washed the wall and wrapped Rodney’s head up in the dustsheet. Veronica, recovered and very much under orders from— Sara, washed the knife and then had the idea of plastering it into the wall. This was the first weird too-clever thing the girls did. There were others. There were fissures in the walls needing to be filled in and in the garage was a packet of filler. Also in the garage was Rodney’s car, Greta the Granada, which Sara, though not Veronica, was able to drive. They rolled up the dustsheet and wrapped two of Wendy’s Marks and Spencer’s teacloths round Rodney’s neck. Having cleaned up the room, they carried Rodney down the spiral staircase, through the door from the hall into the garage and put him into the boot of the car. On their way out in the car they deposited the dustsheet in the dustbin. It was about seven-thirty.’

‘Then,’ said Burden, ‘how did Kevin manage to speak to his sister when he phoned Alverbury Road at eight o’clock?’

‘He didn’t. He spoke to his mother. And, of course, he and Joy were both well aware it was his mother he had spoken to. They lied to protect Sara. Oh, I know Joy hasn’t much affection for Sara but she was her daughter. Once she began to think about it she saw that Sara might have had something to do with Rodney’s disappearance. At first she genuinely thought he had left her and she got me in to advise her. But then things changed. I think I know why. On my advice, she phoned Sevensmith Harding and they told her she had spoken to them on Friday, April the sixteenth, to explain Rodney was ill. Now Joy no doubt at first thought this a mere mistake but they had been so sure it was her voice. Joy knew someone whose voice sounded very like hers—her own daughter.

‘Don’t forget that she knew how Sara felt towards her father on account of the incest. She also knew Sara had been out of the house for hours on the evening of April the fifteenth. So she told us and got Kevin to agree—no difficulty there, he distrusts the police and is close to his sister—that it was she who had gone out and Sara who had been at home to take the phone call. Was there collusion with Sara? I doubt it. There was no real communication between her and her mother. My guess is Joy said it might be wiser to arrange things this way and Sara agreed with just a nod and a “yes” probably.’

‘You’re painting a picture of a self-sacrificing maternal type,’ said the doctor, ‘which doesn’t at all accord with our concept of Joy Williams. Rather like the old story of the mother pelican tearing at its own breast to feed its young —and just as much of a myth.’

‘No. Joy quite rightly believed there was no real risk in it for her. She thought it impossible we could arrest the wrong person. Her trust must have been sorely put to the test these past few days.’

Always happier on circumstantial details, Burden said, ‘So the two girls took Williams’s body up to Cheriton Forest and dug a grave for him with his own snow shovel?’

‘A shallow grave because, having killed him, Sara didn’t want it to be too long before the body was discovered. She wanted a couple of weeks to pass only, rightly believing that this was the sort of time which would be just about right to blur the evidence. In fact, things didn’t go her way and it was two months before the body was found.

‘I turned over and over in my mind the complication of the Milvey coincidence. But now it has come out quite clearly. There is no coincidence. Sara and Veronica hid Rodney’s travelling bag—in the forest probably—hoping it would be found within, say, the next few days. But as it happened, no one found it. Then one day Mrs Milvey happened to say to Joy in Sara’s hearing that Milvey would be at Green Pond next day, dragging the pool. Sara retrieved the bag and dumped it in the pool in time for Milvey to find it next day.’

‘But why did she want the body found? What difference could it make to her?’

Til come to that later.’

‘I don’t see why go to all the trouble of phoning Sevensmith Harding and forging a letter to delay discovery, and then later try to accelerate it. Incidentally, I take it it was Sara who made the phone call? Her voice is very like Joy’s.’

‘She made the phone call and Veronica typed the letter. At her friend Nicola Tennyson’s house, on Nicola’s mother’s typewriter.

‘They buried the body, hid the travelling bag, and Sara drove Veronica back to Pomfret to be sure she got home before Wendy did. That was at about nine. Wendy, of course, didn’t get home until nine thirty, being out doing some mild courting with James Ovington. Sara drove to Myringham and dumped the car in Arnold Road where no more than half an hour later it was seen and indeed bumped into by Eve Freeborn. If Sara had been a bit later and Eve a bit earlier those two members of ARRIA would have encountered each other and made our task a lot easier. But by the time Eve came Sara was on the bus for home.

‘In the morning she shut herself in the living room and made the phone call before she went to school. Of necessity it was a very early call and she was lucky there was someone there to receive it. And that, I think, accounts for all the circumstances of the murder of Rodney Williams.’

Burden picked up the tray.

‘Does anyone want more coffee?’

Neither did. Wexford said it was nearly beer time, wasn’t it? The doctor frowned at him and he deliberately looked away, out into Burden’s bright, neat garden, the flower borders like chintzy dress material, the lawn a bit of green baize. The sunshine was making Jenny’s yellow chrysanthemums nearly too bright to look at. Burden opened the french windows.

‘The sad thing,’ said Crocker, ‘is that all this is going to make it next to impossible for Sara Williams to make a career in medicine.’

Burden looked at him. He said sarcastically, ‘Oh, surely St Biddulph’s will overlook a little matter like stabbing her father to death with a carving knife.’

‘You don’t think it justification then, and more than justification, for a girl to make a murderous assault on the father who has raped her and shows signs of meting out the same treatment to her younger half-sister? Don’t you think any judge or jury would see this as an extenuating circumstance?’

It was Wexford who answered him. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Right, then there’s not going to be any question of years of imprisonment, is there? She’ll never have the dubious distinction of being a GP like your humble servant here, but at least there won’t be punishment in the accepted sense.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that.’

‘On account of the planning and the covering of tracks, do you mean?’

‘She killed Paulette Harmer,’ Burden said.

‘She did indeed but that wasn’t what I meant. You see, Rodney Williams never committed incest with his elder daughter. He never showed signs of committing incest with his younger daughter. And I very much doubt if he ever sexually assaulted anyone, even in the broadest meaning of that term.’

23

 Crocker had caught on quickly. Wexford left it to him to explain. The doctor began outlining Freud’s ‘seduction theory’ as expressed in the famous paper of 1896.

Thirteen women patients of Freud claimed paternal seduction. Freud believed them, built on this evidence a theory, later abandoned it, realizing he had been too gullible. Instead, he concluded that little girls are prone to fantasize that their fathers have made love to them, from which developed his stress on childhood fantasy and ultimately his postulation of the Oedipus Complex.

‘You’re saying it was all fantasy on Sara’s part?’ Burden said. ‘She’s not exactly a little girl.’

‘Nor were Freud’s patients little girls by the time they came to him.’

Wexford said, ‘I think Sara had a daughter’s fantasy about her father. When she was older she read Freud. She read books on incest too—they’re all there in her bedroom. There’s a mention of father-daughter incest in the ARRIA constitution. Did she read that too or did she write it? At any rate, in her mind she was heavily involved with her father, far more involved with him than he was with her.’