An Unkindness of Ravens (31 page)

‘How do you know the seduction didn’t really take place? Men do commit incest with their daughters. I mean, how could Freud have known one of those thirteen wasn’t fantasizing but telling the truth?’

‘I can’t answer that,’ Wexford said, ‘but I can tell you it never happened to Sara. She isn’t the kind of girl to whom it happens. She isn’t ignorant or obtuse or cowed or dependent. This seduction, or apparent seduction, followed a classic pattern as laid down in the books. The girl doesn’t struggle or fight or scream. She doesn’t want to make a disturbance. At the first opportunity she tells her mother and mother reacts with rage, reproaches, accusations of the girl’s provocative behaviour. Now Joy, as we might expect, fitted beautifully into the classic pattern. But Sara? If it had really happened wouldn’t Sara, a leading member of ARRIA, a militant feminist, have fought and screamed? She was very handy with a knife, wasn’t she? And she’s the last person to care about making a disturbance in a household, either emotional or physical. As for telling her mother—Sara tell her mother? There’s been no real communication between them for years. She despises her mother. If she’d told anyone it would have been her brother Kevin. No, there was no seduction, for if there had been she would have kept the experience secret to use against her father, not come running with it to Joy.

‘It was Sara who stabbed Colin Budd, of course. It happened, if you remember, the night before Milvey started dragging Green Pond. Sara retrieved the bag after dark, went up to the forest to do it and put the bag inside a plastic sack. When Budd came along she was waiting to catch the bus that would take her to the other end of Kingsmarkham, near enough to the Forby road and Green Pond Hall. The last thing she wanted was Budd taking an interest in her. Besides, she had indoctrinated herself to be always on the watch for sexist approaches. What was she doing but going about her private business? And this man has to treat her as if her primary function in this world was to be an object for his diversion and entertainment. No doubt she also lost her nerve. She stabbed him with a penknife.’

 ‘If it was all fantasy,’ said Burden, reverting to the analysis of Sara Williams’s character, ‘why did she warn Veronica? Why warn her of something that would never happen?’

‘You’re supposing fantasy is something “made up”, so therefore something the fantasizer herself doesn’t believe in?’

‘Well, does she? Did Sara convince herself?’

‘Yes and no. She’s admitted to me nothing ever happened. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow she says it did and believes it herself. Having this secret to communicate, this awful and horrifying secret, must have much increased her ascendancy over Veronica. It enhanced her power. Veronica was very frightened of her, you see, full of admiration, awe almost, but even before the killing of Rodney becoming unnerved by the whole setup.’

Wendy had been sent for and for once had been calm, sensible, steady. He had considered the atmosphere of his office more relaxing than one of those stark interview rooms. Marion and Polly were seated side by side and Veronica a little apart from everyone until Wexford came in. Little Miss Muffet and the great spider who sat down beside her. Only there was no frightening her away. It would be a long time now before Veronica Williams could get away.

She was very pale. Her hair, he noticed, was a couple of inches longer than when he had first seen her, six inches longer than the crop of the beach photograph. Had she been growing it in imitation of her idol and model Sara? He had asked her when she first met her half-sister.

‘It was September.’ Her voice was so soft he had to ask her to repeat it. ‘September—a year ago,’ she said.

‘And you met how often after that? Once a week? More?’

Very quietly, ‘More.’

He extracted from her the information that they constantly spoke on the phone. It was like a game sometimes, Sara phoning and saying she would be in Liskeard Avenue in five minutes, she phoning Sara to say if Sara was careful not to be seen she could come and watch Rodney and Wendy watching her play tennis.

‘It stopped being a game, though, didn’t it? On April the fifteenth it stopped?’

She nodded and her body convulsed in an involuntary shiver. Wendy said, ‘Why did you always do everything she said? Why did you tell her everything?’

How could she answer that?

‘You told her you were coming here to confess your part in it, didn’t you, Veronica?’ Wexford spoke very gently.

Her eyes went to Wendy. ‘I thought the police would arrest my mother.’

A small spark of triumph on Wendy’s doleful face. In these unbelievable circumstances her years of devotion were rewarded ...

Wexford surfaced from his reverie to see Burden depositing three beer cans in front of them from a tray laden with the kind of junk food he lived on while Jenny was away.

‘Wake up!’

‘Sorry.’

‘Look, if there was no incest and therefore no renewed assault from Rodney to be feared, if there was no threat to Veronica, what was the motive for killing him? All through this case we could never come up with any sort of solid motive. Or are you saying a psychopath doesn’t need a motive—at any rate not a motive understood by normal people?’

Wexford said slowly, ‘I’ve suggested to you that there was a good deal of calculation in Sara’s behaviour, some of it of an apparently incomprehensible kind. Her original concealment of the body, for instance, and later her anxiety for it to be found. I’ve also made it clear—rather to your joint disapproval, I think—that I don’t feel much sympathy towards Sara. And this is because I feel she had no justification for what she did.

‘She had a motive all right, and as calculated and coldblooded a motive as any poisoner polishing off an old relation for his money.’

‘But Rodney didn’t have any money to leave, did he?’ Burden objected.

‘Not so’s you’d notice, though the manager of the Anglian-Victoria has shown me how a nice little bit was accumulating in the account from which the two joint accounts were fed. Enough, anyway, for him to recommend that Rodney put it into investments. Still, it wasn’t for a possible inheritance that Sara killed him, though money was her motive.’

‘Not a cash gain though, I think,’ said the doctor.

Wexford turned to Burden. ‘You raised this very subject not long ago, Mike. That was when you thought you were going to have a daughter—and that’s relevant too. You talked about her going to university and applying for government grants. Do you remember?’

‘I suppose so. I don’t see where the relevance comes in.’

‘Sara wants to be a doctor,’ said Wexford. ‘Well, wanted to be, I should say. It was a driving ambition with her. And increasingly hard though this is becoming, she knew she had the ability to get into medical school. Her parents, however, discouraged her. And it must have looked to her at that stage as if this was a classic case of opposition to daughter’s ambitions simply because she was a daughter and not a son, because in fact she was a woman. On Joy’s part it probably was. Very likely she wouldn’t have cared for Sara to achieve greater success and have a more prestigious profession than Kevin.

‘At first this parental opposition didn’t much worry Sara. I’m speaking, of course, about this time last year. Sara remembered her brother getting a place at Keele and the form of application for a grant coming from Sussex County Council Education Committee to her father. At the time she didn’t take much notice. Certainly she didn’t see the completed form. But she knew that the greater the parental income the smaller the grant would be and that with the form there came a form of certificate of parental employment the parent’s employer had to complete detailing his gross salary, overtime, bonus or commissions and his taxable emoluments. Now, Mike, you’ll recall that certificate in your own case and sending it to the Mid-Sussex Constabulary when you applied for grants for John and Pat?’

Burden nodded. ‘I’m beginning to see the light here.’ ‘Twelve months ago Sara met Veronica. Gradually, when the shock of that encounter began to recede, when it provided the solution to certain unexplained anomalies, shall we say, Sara saw the cold reality for what it was. Her father might talk about not wanting his daughter to be a doctor for aesthetic reasons, for reasons of suitability, she would get married and her education be wasted, et cetera. He might talk that way but the reason behind the talk was very different. Finding that he had lied both to her mother and Veronica’s about what his position and his earnings were, she had taken steps to discover what he did and what he earned. Now she understood. If he filled in the grant application form for her he would have to declare to the Sussex County Council that his income was not 10,000 pounds a year but two and a half times that, and there would be no way he could deceive the authority as he had deceived her mother because his employers, Sevensmith Harding, would have to complete the certificate of parental income from employment.

‘Now according to the grants department’s contribution scales, a parent earning 10,000 pounds per annum would have to contribute to medical school costs only something in the region of 470 pounds but a parent earning 25,000 pounds a sum of nearly 2000 pounds penceRodney had two homes and two families, he was already paying out this sort of sum for Kevin at Keele remember he had to tell the grants department the truth, whatever he told his wives—and Sara could see the way the wind was blowing. She could see there was no way he would part with 2000 pounds a year for her benefit. And when she asked him point blank if he would fill in the form when it came he told her he wouldn’t—she would never make a doctor and he was doing her a kindness in not encouraging her.’

‘What a bastard,’ said Crocker.

Wexford shrugged. ‘The mistake is ours when we deceive ourselves about parent-child relationships. When we keep up the belief that all parents love their children and want what’s best for them.’

‘Surely, though, if Sara had talked about this at school or discussed it with some sympathetic officer at the grants department, a way could have been found for her to get a grant, bypassing Rodney? There must be many cases where a parent withholds consent and won’t complete a grant application.’

‘Probably. But Sara is only eighteen. And remember that to have done what you suggest she would have to reveal that her father was a liar and a cheat, that he deceived her mother, that he was a bigamist. And how long would all this take? Would it mean her waiting a year? And what of her place at St Biddulph’s, a teaching hospital where places are like gold dust and where they keep a reserve list bursting with applicants dying to be accepted? What she decided on instead was, first, persuasion and if that failed, blackmail.’

‘She told him that if he didn’t consent to fill in the form she’d tell Joy about Wendy and get Veronica to tell Wendy about Joy?’

‘She was going to tell him that. She had a bit of time though. She hadn’t even sat her A-levels. The grant form wouldn’t come till July. And she also had the incest. Of course, it had never taken place but Joy thought it had, Veronica was scared stiff it had. If all else failed she might be able to use it as another weapon in the blackmail stockpile. That was why she was pleased to see how effective her warnings had been in Veronica’s case. Veronica was beginning to be afraid of the affectionate attention Rodney paid her. Veronica didn’t want to be alone with him and if she had to be she wanted him disarmed and immobilized.

Sara saw to that with the Phanodorm, and increased Veronica’s fear by the seriousness of taking such a step.

‘But how much simpler, after all, to kill him! And there he was, lying asleep, the potential destroyer of her future. Kill him now, in this room which will soon be made pure and immaculate, cleansed of all signs of violent death. Rid the world of him, seize your opportunity. And perhaps it would also be a heroic act. Hadn’t there almost been a clause in the ARRIA constitution demanding a man’s death as qualification for entry? Veronica will help because Veronica also hates him now and is mortally afraid of him ...

‘But suppose they never find the body? Suppose the weeks go by and July comes and August and with them the grant application and you can’t fill in the section that says “Father, if deceased the fact should be stated ...” because only you and Veronica know he is deceased? You have finished your A-levels and the time is going by—the moment has come to take steps for that body to be found without more delay.’

‘You might say,’ said Crocker, ‘that the murder was both coolly premeditated and carried out on an impulse.’

‘You might. Because of what Sara is, a highly complex personality, this was all kinds of a murder. A ritualistic killing —remember that Veronica was required to stab him too. A revenge killing—Sara had more than half-convinced herself and wholly convinced Veronica of the reality of the incest. When she stabbed Rodney she was a woman out of classical myth, she was Beatrice Cenci. It was an experimental killing, a kind of vivisection, carried out by Sara the scientist, to see if it would work, to see if it could be done. It was murder from disgust, from disillusionment. Rodney, whom she had once worshipped, was just a squalid bigamist with another daughter, a copy of herself, he loved as much as or more than he had ever loved her. But above all, in spite of all those other factors, it was murder for gain, carried out so that she might satisfy her ambition at all costs. All in all, I don’t think that’s the sort of person I’d care to have as my family physician, still less performing surgery on me and mine. So perhaps Rodney was right when he told Sara she was an unsuitable candidate for medical school. Who knows? Perhaps it wasn’t simply meanness with him, he wasn’t quite the bastard you make out. Perhaps he sensed in that daughter of his, without ever examining his conclusions, traits in her character that were abnormal, that were destructive, and it was to these he referred when he said she would never make a doctor.’

Wexford got up.

‘I shall call it a day,’ he said. ‘I shall go to the wife of my bosom the same as I ought to go.’

Burden began tidying the room, putting things on a tray. ‘And tomorrow the wife of my bosom comes home to me.’ He looked pleased, satisfied, hopeful, as if there had been no five months’ long disruption of his happiness. ‘One of her old pupils at Haldon Finch went in to see her and the baby. An ARRIA member. She told Jenny the raven bit means they’re cleaning up the carrion men have left behind in the world. We did wonder.’