An Unkindness of Ravens (8 page)

‘What exactly did she say?’

‘ “My husband Mr Williams won’t be coming in today.” And then she sort of hesitated and said, “That’s Mr Rodney Williams, I mean, the marketing manager.” I said there was no one else in yet and she said that didn’t matter but to give Christine the message he’d got flu and wouldn’t be in.’

Whoever it was, it hadn’t been Joy. At that time Joy didn’t know her husband was Sevensmith Harding’s marketing manager. Wexford had thanked Michelle and was turning away, diverting his mind to the matter of the firm’s stock of typewriters, when he stopped.

‘What makes you so sure the woman you spoke to was Mrs Joy Williams?’

‘It just was. I know it was.’

‘No, let me correct that. You know it was a woman who said she was Mrs Joy Williams. She had never phoned here before, had she, so you couldn’t have recognized her voice?’

‘No, but she phoned here afterwards.’

‘What do you mean, afterwards?’

‘About three weeks later.’ The girl spoke with exaggerated patience now, as if to a very confused or simpleminded person. ‘Mrs Joy Williams phoned here three weeks after her husband left.’

Of course. Wexford remembered that call. It was he who had advised Joy to make it.

‘I put her through to Mr Gardner,’ Michelle said. ‘I was a bit embarrassed, to be perfectly honest. But I know it was the same voice, really I do. It was the same voice as the woman who phoned that Friday morning, it was Mrs Williams.’

 He picked up the girl at the roundabout where the second exit is the start of the Kingsmarkham bypass. She was standing on the grass verge at the side of the roundabout, holding up a piece of cardboard with ‘Myringham’ printed on it. Brian Wheatley pulled in to the first exit, the Kingsmarkham town-centre road, and the girl got into the passenger seat. Then, for some unclear reason, perhaps because he had already pulled out of the roundabout and it would not have been easy to get back into the traffic, Wheatley decided to continue through the town instead of on the bypass. This wasn’t such a bad idea anyway, the anomaly being that the bypass which had been built to ease the passage of traffic past the town was often more crowded than the old route.

Wheatley was driving home from London where he worked three days a week. It was about six in the evening and of course broad daylight. He had moved to Myringham only two weeks before and was still unfamiliar with the byways and back-doubles of the area. The girl didn’t speak a word. She had no baggage with her, only a handbag with a shoulder strap. Wheatley drove through Kingsmarkham, along the High Street, and became confused by the signposting. Instead of keeping straight on he began to think he should have taken a left-hand turn some half a mile back. He therefore—on what he admitted was a lonely and secluded stretch of road—pulled into a lay-by and consulted his road map.

His intention to do this, he said, he announced plainly to the girl. After he had stopped and switched off the engine he was obliged to reach obliquely across her in order to open the glove compartment where the map was. He was aware of the girl giving a gasp of fright or anger, and then of a sharp pain, more like a burn than a cut, in his right hand.

He never even saw the knife. The girl jumped out of the car, slamming the door behind her, and ran not along the road but onto a footpath that separated a field of wheat from a wood. Blood was flowing from a deep cut in the base of Wheatley’s thumb. He tied up his hand as best he could with his handkerchief but shock and a feeling of faintness made it impossible for him to continue his journey for some minutes. Eventually he looked at his map, found himself nearer home than he had thought, and was able to drive there in about a quarter of an hour. The general practitioner with whom he had registered the week before was still holding his surgery. Wheatley’s wife drove him there and the cut in his hand was stitched, Wheatley telling the doctor he had been carving meat and had inadvertently pressed his hand against the point of the carving knife.

Whether or not the doctor believed this was another matter. At any rate he had made no particular comment. Wheatley himself had wanted to tell him the truth, though this would have meant police involvement. It was his wife who had dissuaded him on the grounds that if the police were called the conclusion they would reach would be that Wheatley had first made some sort of assault on the girl.

This was the story Wheatley told Wexford three days later. His wife didn’t know he had changed his mind. He had come to the police, he said, because he felt more and more indignant that this girl, whom he hadn’t touched, whom he had scarcely spoken to except to say he was going to stop and look at his map, should make an unprovoked attack on him and get away with it.

‘Can you describe her?’

Wexford waited resignedly for the kind of useless description furnished by Colin Budd. He was surprised. In many ways Wheatley did not seem to know his way around but he was observant and perceptive.

‘She was tall for a woman, about five feet eight or nine. Young, eighteen or nineteen. Brown hair or lightish hair, shoulder-length, sunglasses though it wasn’t sunny, fair skin—I noticed she had very white hands. Jeans and a blouse, I think, and a cardigan. The bag was some dark colour, black or navy blue.’

‘Did she give you the impression she lived in Myringham? That she was going home?’

‘She didn’t give me any sort of impression. When she got into the car she said thanks—just the one word “thanks”, otherwise she didn’t speak. I said to her that I thought I’d drive through the town instead of the bypass and she didn’t answer. Later on I said I’d stop and look at the map and she didn’t answer that either, but when I reached across her—I didn’t touch her, I could swear to that—she gave a sort of gasp. Those were the only sounds she made, “thanks” and a gasp.’

The same girl as attacked Budd, one would suppose. But if Wheatley were to be believed, while there was some very slight justification for the attack on Budd, there was none for this second stabbing. Could the girl possibly have thought that the hand which reached across to open the glove compartment intended instead to take hold of her by the left shoulder? Or lower itself onto her knee? There was something ridiculous about these assaults, and yet two meant that they were not ridiculous at all but serious. Next time there could be a fatality. Or had there been one already?

 The manager of the Pomfret branch of the AnglianVictoria Bank bore an extraordinary resemblance to Adolf Hitler. This was not only in the small square moustache and the lock of dark hair half covering Mr Skinner’s forehead. The face was the same face, rather handsome, with large chin and heavy nose and small thick-lidded eyes. But all that would have passed unnoticed without the moustache and the lock of hair, so that it was impossible to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion that Mr Skinner was doing it on purpose. He knew whom he looked like and he enhanced the resemblance. Wexford could only attribute one motive to a bank manager who wants to look like Hitler—a desire to intimidate his clients.

His manner, however, was warm, friendly and charming. All those, and implacable too. He could not consider either letting Wexford look into Rodney Williams’s bank accounts or disclose any information about their contents.

‘Did you say accounts plural?’ said Wexford.

‘Yes. Mr Williams has two current accounts here—and now I’ve probably said more than I should.’

‘Two current accounts in the name of Rodney Williams?’

Skinner was standing up with his head slightly on one side, looking like Hitler waiting for Franco’s train at Hendaye. ‘I said two current accounts, Chief Inspector. We’ll let it go at that, shall we?’

One for his salary to be paid into, Wexford thought as he was driven away, and the other for what? His Kings markham household expenses were drawn from the Kings markham account which he fed with 500 pounds a month from Pomfret account A. Then what of account B? His wife didn’t know of the existence of account A anyway. It alone was sufficient to keep his resources secret from her. Why did he need a third current bank account?

They were searching for him now on the open land, partly wooded, that lay between Kingsmarkham and Forby. But so far, since the discovery of the bag in Green Pond, nothing further had come to light. He’s dead, Wexford thought, he must be.

Burden had been at Pomfret, talking to the Harmer family, Joy Williams’s sister, brother-in-law and “niece. John Harmer was a pharmacist with a chemist’s shop in the High Street.

‘They say Joy was with them that evening,’ Burden said, ‘but I wouldn’t put that much credence on what they say. Not that they’re intentionally lying—they can’t remember. It was seven weeks ago. Besides, Joy often goes over there in the evenings. More or less to sit in front of their television instead of her own, I gather. But I suppose she’s lonely, she wants company. Mrs Harmer says she was definitely there that evening, Harmer says it must be if his wife says so and the girl doesn’t know. You can’t expect a teenage girl to take much notice of when her aunt comes.’

Wexford told him what he had learned from the telephonist at Sevensmith Harding. ‘Of course, the girl may be mistaken about the voices or she may have persuaded herself they were the same voice in order to get more drama out of the situation. But it’s more than possible that the woman who phoned Sevensmith Harding the day after Williams left to say he was ill and the woman who phoned three weeks later to inquire as to his whereabouts are one and the same. And we know the second time was Joy. Now Joy w.as very keen to have me look for her husband when he first disappeared, but later on much less so—indeed, she was obstructive. That first time I talked to her she said nothing about having gone out herself that evening. That was only mentioned the second time. Joy is devoted to her son Kevin. Her daughter is nothing to her, her son everything .. . What on earth’s the matter?’

Burden’s face had set and he had gone rather pale. He had taken a hard grip on the arms of his chair. ‘Nothing. Go on.’

‘Well, then—her son always phones on Thursday evenings and that particular Thursday was the first one he had been back at college. Wouldn’t a devoted mother have wanted to know all those things mothers worry about in such circumstances? Did he have a good journey? Was his room all right? Had he settled in? But this devoted mother doesn’t wait in for his call. She goes out—not to some important engagement, some function booked months ahead, but to watch television at her sister’s. What does all this suggest to you?’

Having struggled successfully to overcome whatever it was that had upset him, Burden forced a laugh. ‘You sound like Sherlock Holmes talking to Watson.’ Since his second marriage he occasionally read books, a change in him Wexford couldn’t get used to.

‘No,’ he said, ‘more “a man of the solid Sussex breed a breed which covers much good sense under a heavy silent exterior”.’

‘I wouldn’t say “silent”. Was that from Sherlock Holmes?’

Wexford nodded. ‘So what do you make of it?’ he said more colloquially.

‘That Joy is somehow in cahoots with her husband. There’s a conspiracy going on. What for and why I wouldn’t pretend to know but it’s got something to do with giving everyone the impression Williams is dead. He left that evening and she went out later to meet him away from the house. Whatever they were planning was done away from the house because it had to be concealed from the daughter Sara as much as from anyone else. Next morning Joy rang Sevensmith Harding to say her husband was ill. Of course, it’s nonsense to say she didn’t know that he was their marketing manager and the extent of his income. Next he or she typed that letter on a hired typewriter. She probably did that, not knowing what he called Gardner and making the mistake of addressing him as ‘Mr Gardner’. The abandoned car, the dumped bag of clothes were all part of a plan to make us think him dead. But the increased police attention frightened Joy, she wanted things to go more at her pace. Hence the obstructiveness. I said I didn’t know why but it could be an insurance fiddle, couldn’t it?’

‘Without a body, Mike? With no more proof of death than a dumped travelling bag? And if you wanted people to think you were dead, aren’t there half a dozen simpler and more convincing ways of doing it?’

‘You feel the same as me then? You don’t think he’s dead?’

‘I know he’s dead,’ said Wexford.

Next day he was proved right.

 It looked like a grave. It was in the shape of a grave, as clearly demarcated as if a slab of stone lay upon it, though Edwin Fitzgerald did not at first see this. In spite of its shape he would have passed it by as a mere curiosity, a whim of nature. It was the dog Shep who drew his attention to it.

Edwin Fitzgerald was a retired policeman who had been a dog handler. He lived in Pomfret and had a job as a part time security guard at a factory complex on Stowerton’s industrial estate. The dog Shep was not a trained dog in the sense of being police-trained—as a ‘sniffer’, for instance. Fitzgerald had bought him after his last dog died—a wonderful dog that one, more intelligent than any human being, a dog that understood every word he said. Shep could only follow humbly in that dog’s footsteps and was often the subject of unfavourable comparisons. He didn’t understand every word Fitzgerald said, or at any rate behaved as if he didn’t.

On this particular morning in June, a dry one, the first really fine morning of the summer, Shep disregarded all Fitzgerald’s words, ignored the repeated ‘Leave it, sir’ and ‘Do as you’re told’ and continued his frenetic digging in the corner of what his master saw as a patch of weeds. He dug like a dog possessed. Indeed, Fitzgerald informed him that he was a devil, that he didn’t know what had got into him. He shouted (which a good dog handler should never do) and he shook his fist until he saw what Shep had unearthed and then he stopped.

The dog had dug up a foot.

 Fitzgerald had been a policeman, which had the double advantage of having taught him not to be sickened by such a discovery and not to disturb anything in its vicinity. He attached Shep’s lead to his collar and pulled the dog away. This took some doing as Shep was a big young German Shepherd intent on worrying at the protruding thing for some hours if possible.