Collected Short Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  Marjorie didn’t want to hear about coincidences.

  ‘Is he going to marry her?’

  ‘I reckon,’ said Brian, ‘going from the way Nanna talks about what he says.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, Auntie Pauline went off to get us coffee and while she was outside Nanna said he’s always telling her how lovely her daughter is and what a fine mind and how she’s wasted and all that.’

  ‘Nanna must have changed. She’s never had a good word to say for your auntie.’

  ‘She is changed,’ said George. ‘She’s all for Pauline going off and leading her own life and her coming here to live with us. Dr Whatsit’s told her it would be a good idea, you see. And I must say, Marje, it might be the best thing in the long run. If Nanna sold her house and let us have some of the money and we had an extension built on . . .’

  ‘And I’ll be off to university in the autumn,’ put in Brian.

  ‘I never did think it quite fair,’ said George, ‘poor old Pauline having to bear the whole burden of Nanna on her own. It’s not as if they ever really got on and . . .’

  ‘Nanna’s an old love with people she gets on with,’ said Brian.

  ‘I won’t do it, I won’t!’ Marjorie screamed. ‘And no one’s going to make me!’

  For a little while no one attempted to. Marjorie prolonged her illness, augmenting it with back pains and vague menopausal symptoms, for as long as she could. Mother never used the telephone, and Marjorie could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of times Pauline had phoned her in the past two years. Now there was no communication between the two houses. Marjorie began to go out again but she avoided going near Mother’s, and her own family, George and Brian and Susan, wishing perhaps to prevent a further outburst of hysterics, kept off the subject of her mother. Until one day George said:

  ‘I had a call at work from that doctor friend of Pauline’s.’

  ‘I don’t want to know, George,’ said Marjorie. ‘It’s no business of his. I’ve told you I won’t have Mother here and I won’t.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ her husband admitted, ‘he’s phoned me a couple of times before, only I didn’t tell you, seeing how upset it makes you.’

  ‘Of course it upsets me. I’m ill.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ said George with unexpected firmness. ‘You’re as right as rain. A sick woman couldn’t eat a meal like the one you’ve just eaten. It’s Pauline who’s ill. Marje. She’s cracking up. He told me in the nicest possible way, he’s a very decent chap. But we have to do something about it.’

  ‘Any other man,’ said Marjorie tearfully, ‘would be thankful to have a wife who stopped her mother coming to live with them.’

  ‘Well, I’m not any other man. I don’t mind the upheaval and the extra expense. We’ll all do our bit, Brian and Sue too. Don’t you see, it’s our turn. Pauline’s had two years of it. The doctor says she’ll have another breakdown if we don’t, and God knows what might be the outcome.’

  ‘You’re all against me,’ Marjorie sobbed, and because he was her husband and she didn’t much care what she said in front of him. ‘Pauline’s got pills from her nursing days, morphine and I don’t know what. There ought to be – what’s it called? – euthanasia. There ought to be a way of putting people like Mother out of their misery.’

  He looked at her, his eyes narrowing. ‘There isn’t. Maybe dogs are luckier than people. There isn’t a geriatric hospital that’ll take her either. There’s no one but us, Marge, so you’d better turn off the waterworks and make up your mind to it.’

  She saw how it would be. It would take months for Mother to sell her house and get the money for an extension to theirs, a year perhaps before that extension was built. Even when it was built and Mother was installed, things would be bad enough. But before that . . . ! Her dining room turned into a bedroom, every evening spoiled by the business of getting Mother to bed, nights that would be even worse than when Brian and Susan were babies. And she wasn’t thirty any more. The television turned down to a murmur once Mother was in bed, her shopping times curtailed, her little afternoon visits to the cinema over for good. Marjorie wondered if she would have the courage to throw herself downstairs, break a leg, so that they would understand having Mother was out of the question. But she might break her neck . . .

  And all the while this was going on, Pauline would be living in the splendour of Campden Hill, Mrs Something Russian, with a new husband, an educated, important, rich man. Giving parties. Entertaining eminent surgeons and professors and whatnot. Going abroad. It was unbearable. She might lack the courage to throw herself downstairs, but she thought she could be brave enough to confront Pauline here and now and tell her No. No, I won’t. You took it on, you must go through with it. Crack up, break down, go crazy, die. Yes, die before I’ll ruin my life for you.

  Of course, she wouldn’t put it like that. She would be firm and kind. She would even offer to sit with Mother sometimes so that Pauline could go out. Anything, anything, except that permanency which would trap her as Pauline had been trapped.

  Things are never as we imagine they will be. No situation ever parallels our prevision of it. Marjorie, when she at last called, expected an irate resentful Pauline, perhaps even a Pauline harassed by wedding plans. She expected Mother to be bewildered by the proposed changes in her life. And both, she thought, would be bitter against her for her long absence. But Mother was just the same, pleased to see her, anxious to get her alone for those little whispered confidences, even more anxious to know if she was better. Her purblind eyes searched Marjorie’s face for signs of debility, held her hand, pressed her to wrap up warm.

  Anyone less like a potential bride than Pauline Marjorie couldn’t have imagined. She seemed thinner than ever, and her face, bruise-dark, patchily shadowed, lined like raisin skin, reminded her of pictures she had seen of Indian beggars. Marjorie followed her into the kitchen when she went to make tea and gathered up her courage.

  ‘How have you been keeping, Pauline?’

  ‘All right. Just the same.’ And although she hadn’t been asked, Pauline said, ‘Mother had me up four times in the night. She fell over in the passage and I had to drag her back to bed. The laundry didn’t come, so I did the sheets myself. It’s a job getting them dry when it’s raining like today.’

  ‘I was thinking, I could come in two evenings a week and sit with her so that you could go out. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t take some of the washing and do it in my machine. Come to that, I could take it all. Every week.’

  Pauline shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s all very well saying that,’ said Marjorie, working herself up to the required pitch, ‘but if you keep on complaining like this, what am I to say?’

  ‘I don’t complain.’

  ‘Maybe not. But everyone else does. You know very well who I mean. I can’t take all this outside interference and just pretend it’s not happening.’

  ‘I shouldn’t call a husband outside interference.’

  For a moment Marjorie thought she was referring to George. Realization of what she actually meant gave her the impetus she needed. ‘I may as well tell you straight out, Pauline, I’m not having Mother to live with us and that’s flat. I’ll do anything else in my power, but not that. No one can make me and I shan’t.’

  Pauline made no answer. They ate their tea in almost total silence. Marjorie couldn’t remember ever having felt so uncomfortable in the whole of her life. On the doorstep, as she was leaving, she said, ‘You’d better tell me which evenings you want me, and you can let me know when you want George to come round in the car for the washing.’

  ‘It makes no difference to me,’ said Pauline. ‘I’m always here.’

  Of course, she didn’t phone. Marjorie knew she wouldn’t. And what was the point of going round in the evening when Pauline didn’t want to go out, when she was snug at home with her doctor?

  ‘We’re not having Mo
ther,’ she said to George. ‘That’s definite. I’ve cleared it all up with Pauline. She’s quite capable of carrying on if I help out a bit.’

  ‘That’s not what I was told.’

  ‘It’s what I’m telling you.’ Marjorie hated the way he looked at her these days, with a kind of dull distasteful reproach. ‘She’s done the washing for this week, and next week the laundry’ll do the sheets and the heavy stuff. I thought we might go over on Friday and collect their bits and pieces, put them in my machine.’

  So on Thursday Marjorie phoned. She chose the morning just in case that man might answer. Doctors are never free to make social calls in the morning. Pauline answered.

  ‘OK. Tomorrow, if you like.’

  ‘It’s what you like, Pauline,’ said Marjorie, feeling that her sister might at least have said thank you.

  She added that they would be there at seven. But by seven George hadn’t yet got home, so Marjorie dialled her mother’s number. It didn’t matter if he answered. Show him she wasn’t the indifferent creature he took her for. He did. And he was quite polite. Mr and Mrs Crossley couldn’t get there till eight thirty? Never mind. He would still be there and would be delighted to meet them at last.

  ‘We’re going to get a look at him at last,’ said Marjorie to George as he came in at the door. ‘Now don’t you forget, I expect you to back me up if we have any more nonsense about us having Mother and all that. United we stand, divided we fall.’

  Mother’s house was in darkness and the hall light didn’t come on when Marjorie rang the bell. She rang it again, and then George rang it.

  ‘Have you got a key?’ said George.

  ‘In my bag. Oh, George, you don’t think . . . ? I mean . . . ?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I? Let’s get this door open.’

  No one in the hall or in any of the downstairs rooms. Marjorie, who had turned on lights, began to climb the stairs with George behind her. Half-way up, she heard a man’s voice, speaking soothingly but with authority. It came from Mother’s room, the door of which was ajar.

  ‘It was the best thing, Pauline. I gave her two hundred milligrammes crushed in her milk drink. She didn’t suffer. She just fell asleep, Pauline.’

  Marjorie gave a little gasping whimper. She clutched George, clawing at his shoulder. As he pushed past her, she heard the voice come again, the same words repeated in the same lulling hypnotic tone.

  ‘I gave her two hundred milligrammes crushed in her milk drink. She didn’t suffer. It was the only thing. I did it for you, Pauline, for us . . .’

  George threw open the bedroom door. Mother lay on her back, her face waxen and slack in death, her now totally sightless eyes wide open. There was no one else in the room but Pauline.

  Pauline got up as they entered, and giving them a nod of quiet dignity, she placed her fingers on Mother’s eyes, closing the lids. Marjorie stared in frozen, paralysed terror, like one in the presence of the supernatural. And then Pauline turned from the bed, came forward with her right hand outstretched.

  In a deep, cultured and authoritative voice, a voice whose hectoring manner on the telephone was softened now by sympathy for the bereaved, she said:

  ‘How do you do? I am Dr Pavlov. It’s unfortunate we should meet under such sad circumstances but . . .’

  Marjorie began to scream.

  Means of Evil

  For Jane Bakerman

  Author’s Note

  Of these five stories four have already appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Only Ginger and the Kingsmarkham Chalk Circle is new and was especially written for this collection.

  Each story is a case for Chief Inspector Wexford and each is intended as part of the chronicles of Kingsmarkham. The events related in the personal lives of Wexford and Burden and their families are as ‘true’ as any circumstances in the Wexford novels. The stories should be read as if each was a little novel in the series.

  Means of Evil

  ‘Blewits,’ said Inspector Burden, ‘parasols, horns of plenty, morels and boletus. Mean anything to you?’

  Chief Inspector Wexford shrugged. ‘Sounds like one of those magazine quizzes. What have these in common? I’ll make a guess and say they’re crustacea. Or sea anemones. How about that?’

  ‘They are edible fungi,’ said Burden.

  ‘Are they now? And what have edible fungi to do with Mrs Hannah Kingman throwing herself off, or being pushed off, a balcony?’

  The two men were sitting in Wexford’s office at the police station, Kingsmarkham, in the County of Sussex. The month was November, but Wexford had only just returned from his holiday. And while he had been away, enjoying in Cornwall an end of October that had been more summery than the summer, Hannah Kingman had committed suicide. Or so Burden had thought at first. Now he was in a dilemma, and as soon as Wexford had walked in that Monday morning, Burden had begun to tell the whole story to his chief.

  Wexford, getting on for sixty, was a tall, ungainly, rather ugly man who had once been fat to the point of obesity but had slimmed to gauntness for reasons of health. Nearly twenty years his junior, Burden had the slenderness of a man who has always been thin. His face was ascetic, handsome in a frosty way. The older man, who had a good wife who looked after him devotedly, nevertheless always looked as if his clothes came off the peg from the War on Want Shop, while the younger, a widower, was sartorially immaculate. A tramp and a Beau Brummell, they seemed to be, but the dandy relied on the tramp, trusted him, understood his powers and his perception. In secret he almost worshipped him.

  Without his chief he had felt a little at sea in this case. Everything had pointed at first to Hannah Kingman’s having killed herself. She had been a manic-depressive, with a strong sense of her own inadequacy; apparently her marriage, though not of long duration, had been unhappy, and her previous marriage had failed. Even in the absence of a suicide note or suicide threats, Burden would have taken her death for self-destruction – if her brother hadn’t come along and told him about the edible fungi. And Wexford hadn’t been there to do what he always could do, sort out sheep from goats and wheat from chaff.

  ‘The thing is,’ Burden said across the desk, ‘we’re not looking for proof of murder so much as proof of attempted murder. Axel Kingman could have pushed his wife off that balcony – he has no alibi for the time in question – but I had no reason to think he had done so until I was told of an attempt to murder her some two weeks before.’

  ‘Which attempt has something to do with edible fungi?’

  Burden nodded. ‘Say with administering to her some noxious substance in a stew made from edible fungi. Though if he did it, God knows how he did it, because three other people, including himself, ate the stew without ill effects. I think I’d better tell you about it from the beginning.’

  ‘I think you had,’ said Wexford.

  ‘The facts,’ Burden began, very like a Prosecuting Counsel, ‘are as follows. Axel Kingman is thirty-five years old and he keeps a health-food shop here in the High Street called Harvest Home. Know it?’ When Wexford signified by a nod that he did, Burden went on, ‘He used to be a teacher in Myringham, and for about seven years before he came here he’d been living with a woman named Corinne Last. He left her, gave up his job, put all the capital he had into this shop, and married a Mrs Hannah Nicholson.’

  ‘He’s some sort of food freak, I take it,’ said Wexford.

  Burden wrinkled his nose. ‘Lot of affected nonsense,’ he said. ‘Have you ever noticed what thin pale weeds these health-food people are? While the folks who live on roast beef and suet and whisky and plum cake are full of beans and rarin’ to go.’

  ‘Is Kingman a thin pale weed?’

  ‘A feeble – what’s the word? – aesthete, if you ask me. Anyway, he and Hannah opened this shop and took a flat in the high-rise tower our planning geniuses have been pleased to raise over the top of it. The fifth floor. Corinne Last, according to her and according to Kingman, accepted the situation after a while and th
ey all remained friends.’

  ‘Tell me about them,’ Wexford said. ‘Leave the facts for a bit and tell me about them.’

  Burden never found this easy. He was inclined to describe people as ‘just ordinary’ or ‘just like anyone else’, a negative attitude which exasperated Wexford. So he made an effort. ‘Kingman looks the sort who wouldn’t hurt a fly. The fact is, I’d apply the word gentle to him if I wasn’t coming round to thinking he’s a cold-blooded wife-killer. He’s a total abstainer with a bee in his bonnet about drink. His father went bankrupt and finally died of alcoholism, and our Kingman is an anti-booze fanatic.

  ‘The dead woman was twenty-nine. Her first husband left her after six months of marriage and went off with some girl friend of hers. Hannah went back to live with her parents and had a part-time job helping with the meals at the school where Kingman was a teacher. That was where they met.’

  ‘And the other woman?’ said Wexford.

  Burden’s face took on a repressive expression. Sex outside marriage, however sanctioned by custom and general approval, was always distasteful to him. That, in the course of his work, he almost daily came across illicit sex had done nothing to mitigate his disapproval. As Wexford sometimes derisively put it, you would think that in Burden’s eyes all the suffering in the world, and certainly all the crime, somehow derived from men and women going to bed together outside the bonds of wedlock. ‘God knows why he didn’t marry her,’ Burden now said. ‘Personally I think things were a lot better in the days when education authorities put their foot down about immorality among teachers.’

  ‘Let’s not have your views on that now, Mike,’ said Wexford. ‘Presumably Hannah Kingman didn’t die because her husband didn’t come to her a pure virgin.’

  Burden flushed slightly. ‘I’ll tell you about this Corinne Last. She’s very good-looking, if you like the dark sort of intense type. Her father left her some money and the house where she and Kingman lived, and she still lives in it. She’s one of those women who seem to be good at everything they put their hands to. She paints and sells her paintings. She makes her own clothes, she’s more or less the star in the local dramatic society, she’s a violinist and plays in some string trio. Also she writes for health magazines and she’s the author of a cookery book.’