A New Lease of Death

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘You know what I mean. Now don’t take me up on everything. When they get married their husbands won’t be ashamed to have anybody for a meal.’

  ‘This is my managing director, darling,’ said Jill pertly. ‘Just cut a slice off him and put it under the grill, will you?’

  Kershaw roared with laughter. Then he took his wife’s hand. ‘You leave Mummy alone.’ All this jollity and family intimacy was making Archery nervous. He forced a smile and knew it looked forced.

  ‘What I really mean is, Mr Archery,’ said Mrs Kershaw earnestly, ‘is that even if your Charlie and my Tessie have their ups and downs at first, Tess hasn’t been brought up to be an idle wife. She’ll put a happy home before luxuries.’

  ‘I’m sure she will,’ Archery looked helplessly at the lunging girl, firmly entrenched in her chair and devouring strawberries and cream. It was now or never. ‘Mrs Kershaw, I don’t doubt Theresa’s suitability as a wife …’ No, that wasn’t right. That was just what he did doubt. He floundered. ‘I wanted to talk to you about …’ Surely Kershaw would help him? Jill’s brows drew together in a small frown and her grey eyes stared steadily at him. Desperately he said, ‘I wanted to speak to you alone.’

  Irene Kershaw seemed to shrink. She put down her cup, laid her knife delicately across her plate and, folding her hands in her lap, looked down at them. They were poor hands, stubby and worn, and she wore just one ring, her second wedding ring.

  ‘Haven’t you got any homework to do, Jill?’ she asked in a whisper. Kershaw got up, wiping his mouth.

  ‘I can do it in the train,’ said Jill.

  Archery had begun to dislike Kershaw, but he could not help admiring him. ‘Jill, you know all about Tess,’ Kershaw said, ‘What happened when she was little. Mummy has to discuss it with Mr Archery. Just by themselves. We have to go because, although we’re involved, it’s not quite our business. Not like it is theirs, O.K.?’

  ‘O.K.’ said Jill. Her father put his arm round her and took her into the garden.

  He had to begin, but he was hot and stiff with awkwardness. Outside the window Jill had found a tennis racquet and was practicing shots against the garage wall. Mrs Kershaw picked up a napkin and dabbed at the corners of her mouth. She looked at him, their eyes met, and she looked away. Archery felt suddenly that they were not alone, that their thoughts concentrated on the past, had summoned from its prison grave a presence of brute strength that stood behind their chairs, laying a bloody hand on their shoulders and listening for judgment.

  ‘Tess says you have something to tell me,’ he said quietly. ‘About your first husband.’ She was rolling the napkin now, squashing it, until it was like a golf-ball. ‘Mrs Kershaw, I think you ought to tell me.’

  The paper ball was tipped soundlessly on to an empty plate. She put her hand up to her pearls.

  ‘I never speak of him, Mr Archery. I prefer to let the past be the past.’

  ‘I know it’s painful – it must be. But if we could discuss it just once and get it over, I promise I’ll never raise the subject again.’ He realized that he was speaking as if they would meet again and often, as if they were already connected by marriage. He was also speaking as if he had confidence in her word. ‘I’ve been to Kingsmarkham today and …’

  She clutched at the straw. ‘I suppose they’ve built it all up and spoiled it.’

  ‘Not really,’ he said. Please God don’t let her digress!

  ‘I was born near there,’ she said. He tried to stifle a sigh. ‘A funny little sleepy place it was, my village. I reckon I thought I’d live and die there. You can’t tell what life will bring forth, can you?’

  ‘Tell me about Tess’s father.’

  She dropped her hands from fidgeting with the pearls and rested them in her respectable blue lap. When she turned to him her face was dignified, almost ridiculously prim and shuttered. She might have been a mayoress, taking the chair at some parochial function, clearing her throat preparatory to addressing the Townswomen’s Guild. ‘Madam chairman, ladies …’ she should have begun. Instead she said:

  ‘The past is the past, Mr Archery.’ He knew then that it was hopeless. ‘I appreciate your difficulty, but I really can’t speak of it. He was no murderer, you’ll have to take my word. He was a good kind man who wouldn’t have harmed a fly.’ It was curious, he thought, how she jumbled together old village phrases with platform jargon. He waited, then burst out:

  ‘But how do you know? How can you know? Mrs Kershaw, did you see something or hear something …’

  The pearls had gone up to her mouth and her teeth closed over the string. As it snapped pearls sprayed off in all directions, into her lap, across the tea things, on to the carpet. She gave a small refined laugh, petulant and apologetic. ‘Look what I’ve done now!’ In an instant she was on her knees, retrieving the scattered beads and dropping them into a saucer.

  ‘I’m very keen on a white wedding.’ Her face bounced up from behind the tea trolley. Politeness demanded that he too should get on his knees and help in the hunt. ‘Get your wife to back me up, will you? Oh, thanks so much. Look, there’s another one, just by your left foot.’ He scrambled round after her on all fours. Her eyes met his under the overhanging cloth. ‘My Tess is quite capable of getting married in jeans if the fancy takes her. And would you mind if we had the reception here? It’s such a nice big room.’

  Archery got up and handed her three more pearls. When the tennis ball struck the window he jumped. The sound had been like a pistol shot.

  ‘Now, that’s quite enough, Jill,’ said Mrs Kershaw sharply. Still holding the saucer full of pearls, she opened the window. ‘If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you fifty times, I don’t want any more breakages.’

  Archery looked at her. She was annoyed, affronted, even slightly outraged. He wondered suddenly if this was how she had looked on that Sunday night long ago when the police had invaded her domain at the coach house. Was she capable of any emotion greater than this, of mere irritation at disturbance of her personal peace?

  ‘You just can’t settle to a quiet discussion with children about, can you?’ she said.

  Within an instant, as if at a cue, the whole family was upon them, Jill truculent and protesting, the boy he had encountered on the drive now demanding tea, and Kershaw himself, vibrant as ever, his little lined face showing a certain dry acuteness.

  ‘Now, you’re to come straight out and give me a hand with these dishes, Jill.’ The saucer was transferred to the mantelpiece and stuck between an Oxfam collecting box and a card inviting Mrs Kershaw to a coffee morning in aid of Cancer Relief. ‘I’ll say good-bye now, Mr Archery.’ She held out her hand. ‘You’ve such a long way to go, I know you’ll want to be on your way.’ It was almost rude, yet it was queenly. ‘If we don’t meet again before the great day – well, I’ll see you in church.’

  The door closed. Archery remained standing.

  ‘What am I to do?’ he said simply.

  ‘What did you expect?’ Kershaw countered. ‘Some sort of inconvertible evidence, an alibi that only she can prove?’

  ‘Do you believe her?’ Archery cared.

  ‘Ah, that’s another matter. I don’t care, you see. I don’t care one way or the other. It’s so easy not to ask, Mr Archery, just to do nothing and accept.’

  ‘But I care,’ said Archery. ‘If Charles goes ahead and marries your stepdaughter, I shall have to leave the church. I don’t think you realize the sort of place I live in, the sort of people …’

  ‘Aah!’ Kershaw wrinkled up his mouth and spread his hands angrily fanwise. ‘I’ve no patience with that sort of out-dated rubbish. Who’s to know? Everybody round here thinks she’s my kid.’

  ‘I shall know.’

  ‘Why the hell did she have to tell you? Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut?’

  ‘Are you condemning her for her honesty, Kershaw?’

  ‘Yes, by God I am!’ Archery winced at the oath and shut his eyes against the light. He saw a red haze
. It was only eyelid membrane, but to him it seemed like a lake of blood. ‘It’s discretion, not honesty, that’s the best policy. What are you worrying about, anyway? You know damn’ well she won’t marry him if you don’t want it.’

  Archery snapped back, ‘And what sort of a relationship should I have with my son after that?’ He controlled himself, softened his voice and his expression. ‘I shall have to try to find a way. Your wife is so sure?’

  ‘She’s never weakened.’

  ‘Then I shall go back to Kingsmarkham. It’s rather a forlorn hope, isn’t it?’ He added with an absurdity he realized after the words had come, ‘Thanks for trying to help and – and for an excellent tea.’

  6

  Yet, forasmuch as in all appearance the time of his dissolution draweth near, so fit and prepare him. … against the hour of death.

  The Visitation of the Sick

  THE MAN LAY on his back in the middle of the zebra crossing. Inspector Burden, getting out of the police car had no need to ask where he was or to be taken to the scene of the accident. It was all there before his eyes like a horrible still from a Ministry of Transport warning film, the kind of thing that makes women shudder and turn quickly to the other channel.

  An ambulance was waiting, but nobody was making any attempt to move the man. Inexorably and with a kind of indifference the twin yellow beacons went on winking rhythmically. Up-ended, with its blunt nose poking into the crushed head of a bollard, was a white Mini.

  ‘Can’t you get him away?’ asked Burden.

  The doctor was laconic. ‘He’s had it.’ He knelt down, felt the left wrist and got up again, wiping blood from his fingers. ‘I’d hazard a guess the spine’s gone and he’s ruptured his liver. The thing is he’s still more or less conscious and it’d be hell’s own agony to try to shift him.’

  ‘Poor devil. What happened? Did anybody see it?’

  His eye roved across the knot of middle-aged women in cotton dresses, late homegoing commuters and courting couples on their evening stroll. The last of the sun smiled gently on their faces and on the blood that gilded the black and white crossing. Burden knew that Mini. He knew the stupid sign in the rear window that showed a skull and the words: You have been Mini-ed. It had never been funny and now it was outrageous, cruel in the way it mocked the man in the road.

  A girl lay sprawled over the steering wheel. Her hair was short, black and spiky, and she had thrust her fingers through it in despair or remorse. The long red nails stuck out like bright feathers.

  ‘Don’t worry about her,’ said the doctor contemptuously. ‘She’s not hurt.’

  ‘You, madam …’ Burden picked out the calmest and least excited looking of the bystanders. ‘Did you happen to see the accident?’

  ‘Ooh, it was awful! Like a beast she was, the little bitch. Must have been doing a hundred miles an hour.’

  Picked a right one there, thought Burden. He turned to a white-faced man holding a Sealyham on a lead.

  ‘Perhaps you can help me, sir?’

  The lead was jerked and the Sealyham sat down at the kerb. ‘That gentleman …’ Blanching afresh, he pointed towards the crumpled thing laying on the stripes. ‘He looked right and left like you’re supposed to. But there was nothing coming. You can’t see all that well on account of the bridge.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I get the picture.’

  ‘Well, he started to cross to the island like, when that white car came up out of nowhere. Going like a mad thing she was. Well, not a hundred, but sixty, I reckon. Those Minis can go at a terrible lick when they’ve had their engines hotted up. He sort of hesitated and then he tried to go back. You know, it was all in a flash. I can’t rightly go into details.’

  ‘You’re doing very well.’

  ‘Then the car got him. Oh, the driver slammed on her brakes for all she was worth. I’ll never forget the noise to my dying day, what with the brakes screaming and him screaming too, and sort of throwing up his arms and going down like a ninepin.’

  Burden set a constable to take names and addresses, turned away and took a step in the direction of the white car. A woman touched his arm.

  ‘Here,’ she said, ‘he wants a priest or something. He kept on asking before you came. Get me Father Chiverton, he says, like he knew he was going.’

  ‘That right?’ said Burden sharply to Dr Crocker.

  Crocker nodded. The dying man was covered now, a folded mac under his head, two policeman’s jackets across his body. ‘Father Chiverton is what he said. Frankly, I was more concerned for his physical than his spiritual welfare.’

  ‘R.C. then, is he?’

  ‘God, no. Bunch of atheists, you cops are. Chiverton’s the new vicar here. Don’t you ever read the local rag?’

  ‘Father?’

  ‘He’s very high. Genuflecting and Sung Eucharist and all that jazz.’ The doctor coughed. ‘I’m a Congregationalist myself.’

  Burden walked over to the crossing. The man’s face was blanched a yellowish ivory, but his eyes were open and they stared back. With a little shock Burden realized he was young, perhaps no more than twenty.

  ‘Anything you want, old chap?’ He knew the doctor had given him a pain-killing injection. With his own bent body he shielded him from the watchers. ‘We’ll get you away from here in a minute,’ he lied. ‘Anything we can get you?”

  ‘Father Chiverton …’ it was a toneless whisper, as detached and inhuman as a puff of wind. ‘Father Chiverton …’ A spasm crossed the waning face. ‘Confess … atone … spare Thou them which are penitent.’

  ‘Bloody religion,’ said the doctor. ‘Can’t even let a man die in peace.’

  ‘You must be an asset to the Congregationalists,’ Burden snapped. He got up, sighing. ‘He obviously wants to confess. I suppose they do have confession in the Church of England?’

  ‘You can have it if you want but you needn’t if you don’t fancy it. That’s the beauty of the C of E.’ When Burden looked murderous, he added. ‘Don’t get in a tiz with me. We’ve been on to Chiverton, but he and his curate are off at some conference.’

  ‘Constable Gates!’ Burden beckoned impatiently to the man noting down addresses. ‘Nip into Stowerton and fetch me a – a vicar.’

  ‘We’ve tried Stowerton, sir.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Burden quietly.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, but there’s a clergyman got an appointment with the Chief Inspector now. I could get on to the station and …’

  Burden raised his eyebrows. Kingsmarkham police station had apparently become the battleground of the Church Militant.

  ‘You do that, and quick …’

  He murmured something useless to the boy, and moved towards the girl who had begun to sob.

  She was not crying because of what she had done, but because of what she had seen two hours before. It was two or three years now since she had what she called a waking nightmare – though at one time they were more real than reality – and she was crying because the nightmares were going to begin again and the remedy she had tried had not erased the picture from her mind.

  She had seen it in the estate agent’s window when she was coming home from work. It was a photograph of a house, but not as it was now, dirty and weathered, set in a tangled wilderness. The estate agents deceived you, they meant you to think it was like it had once been long ago … You? As soon as she found she was addressing herself as ‘You’ she knew it was beginning again, the re-telling of the nightmare. So she had got into the Mini and driven to Flagford, away from associations and memories and the hateful You voice, to drink and drink and try to send it away.

  But it would not go away and you were back in the big house, listening to the voices that went on coaxing, cajoling, arguing until you were bored, so bored until you went out into the garden and met the little girl.

  You went up to her and you said, ‘Do you like my dress?’

  ‘It’s pretty,’ she said, and she didn’t seem to mind that it was much nicer than her own.

/>   She was playing with a heap of sand, making pies in an old cup without a handle. You stayed and played and after that you came to the sand every day, down there out of sight of the big windows. The sand was warm and nice and you could understand it. You could understand the little girl too, even though she was the only little girl you had ever known. You knew a lot of grown ups, but you could not understand them, nor the ugly words and the funny wheedling way the talk was always about money, so that you seemed to see coins dropping out of wriggling lips and sliding dirtily through twitching fingers.

  The little girl had some magic about her, for she lived in a tree. Of course it was not really a tree but a house inside a kind of bush all shivering with leaves.

  The sand was not dry like the desert you lived in now, but warm and moist, like beach sand washed by a tepid sea. It was dirty too and you were afraid of what would happen if you got it on your dress …

  You cried and stamped your foot, but you never cried as you were crying now as the good-looking inspector came up to the car, his eyes full of anger.

  Did he seriously imagine he was going to find anything new after so long? Archery considered Wexford’s question. It was, he decided, more a matter of faith than of any real belief in Painter’s innocence. But faith in what? Not, surely, in Mrs Kershaw. Perhaps it was just a childlike certainty that such things could not happen to anyone connected with him, Archery. The child of a murderer could not be as Tess was, Kershaw would not have loved her, Charles would not want to marry her.

  ‘It can’t do any harm to see Alice Flower,’ he said. He felt he was pleading, and pleading weakly. ‘I’d like to talk to the Primero grandchildren, particularly the grandson.’

  For a moment Wexford said nothing. He had heard of faith moving mountains, but this was simply absurd. To him it was almost as ridiculous as if some crank had come to him with the suggestion that Dr Crippen was the innocent victim of circumstances. From bitter experience he knew how difficult it was to hunt a killer when only a week had elapsed between a murder and the beginning of an investigation. Archery was proposing to open an enquiry a decade and a half too late and Archery had no experience at all.