Means Of Evil And Other Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  Praise for Ruth Rendell:

  'One of the foremost of our writers of crime fiction’ PD James

  'The most brilliant mystery novelist of our time’ Patricia Cornwell

  'Through the quality of her writing she’s raised the game of the crime novel in this country’ Peter James

  'Probably the greatest living crime writer in the world’ Ian Rankin

  'She can make a scene between two women sitting in a café as violent as anything you’ve seen between a couple of guys with baseball bats’ Mark Billingham

  'Ruth Rendell, like all the great creators of crime fiction, keeps her pact with the reader. There’s a murder mystery, there are clues, there is a solution. It’s a very satisfying read’ Giles Brandreth

  'As a page-turner there are few who can match Ruth’ Colin Dexter

  'She deals quite seamlessly with social issues. She’s got a real grip on what makes people do things’ Val McDermid

  'She gets into the mind not only of the hero; she gets into the mind of the villain’ Jeffrey Deaver

  'Very good at recording social and political change . . . she’s bang up to the minute’ Andrew Thomas

  'Rendell is a great storyteller who knows how to make sure that the reader has to turn the pages out of a desperate need to find out what is going to happen next’ John Mortimer, Sunday Times

  'Plenty of style and many a wry reflection on the human condition . . .’ Frances Fyfield, Express

  'The inspiration never seems to flag and the quality of the craftsmanship remains as high as ever’ Sunday Telegraph

  'Ruth Rendell’s mesmerising capacity to shock, chill and disturb is unmatched’ The Times

  'Ms Rendell exercises a grip as relentless as an anaconda’s’ Guardian

  'Ruth Rendell has quite simply transformed the genre of crime writing. She displays her peerless skill in blending the mundane, commonplace aspects of life with the potent murky impulses of desire and greed, obsession and fear’ Sunday Times

  'A brilliant piece of exhumation’ Observer

  'Cleverly plotted and conspicuously well written’ Daily Telegraph

  'Wonderful at exploring the dark corners of the human mind, and the way private fantasies can clash and explode into terrifying violence’ Daily Mail

  'Superb plotting and psychological insight make this another Rendell gripper’ Woman & Home

  'An unusual detective story . . . intelligent, well-written, with a surprising twist at the end’ Times Literary Supplement

  'England’s premier detective-thriller writer’ Spectator

  'Intricate and ingenious’ Yorkshire Post

  'Unguessable and brilliant’ Listener

  'The best mystery writer anywhere in the English-speaking world’ Boston Globe

  About the Author

  Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for 1976’s best crime novel with A Demon in My View; a second Edgar in 1984 from the Mystery Writers of America for the best short story, 'The New Girl Friend’; and a Gold Dagger award for Live Flesh in 1986. She was also the winner of the 1990 Sunday Times Literary award, as well as the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE and in 1997 became a Life Peer.

  The new Chief Inspector Wexford novel, Monster in the Box, is out in hardback.

  Reissued by Arrow Books in 2010

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Means of Evil (The Case of the Shaggy Caps) © Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd 1977;

  Achilles Heel (Inspector Wexford on Holiday) © Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd 1978;

  Old Wives' Tales, When the Wedding Was Over and Ginger and the Kingsmarkham Chalk Circle © Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd 1979

  Ruth Rendell has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  To Jane Bakerman

  Author's Note

  Of these five stories, four appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine previous to this collection being published in 1979. Only Ginger and the Kingsmarkham Chalk Circle was specially 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.

  Contents

  Means of Evil

  Old Wives' Tales

  Ginger and the Kingsmarkham Chalk Circle

  Achilles Heel

  When the Wedding Was Over

  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 they 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 ho 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."

  "It would look then," Wexford put in, "as if Kingman split up with her because all this was more than he could take. And hence he took up with the dull little school-meals lady. No competition from her, I fancy."

  "I daresay you're right. As a matter of fact, that theory has already been put to me."

  "By whom?" said Wexford. "Just where did you get all this information, Mike?"

  "From an angry young man, the fourth member of the quartet, who happens to be Hannah's brother. His name is John Hood and I think he's got a lot more to tell. But it's time I left off describing the people and got on with the story.

  "No one saw Hannah fall from the balcony. It happened last Thursday afternoon at about four. According to her husband, he was in a sort of office behind the shop doing what he always did on early-closing day——stock-taking and sticking labels on various bottles and packets.

  "She fell onto a hard-top parking area at the back of the flats, and her body was found by a neighbour a couple of hours later between two parked cars. We were sent for, and Kingman seemed to be distraught. I asked him if he had had any idea that his wife might have wished to take her own life and he said she had never threatened to do so but had lately been very depressed and there had been quarrels, principally about money. Her doctor had put her on tranquillizers——of which, by the way, Kingman disapproved——and the doctor himself, old Dr. Castle, told me Mrs. Kingman had been to him for depression and because she felt her life wasn't worth living and she was a drag on her husband. He wasn't surprised that she had killed herself and neither, by that time, was I. We were all set for an inquest verdict of suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed when John Hood walked in here and told me Kingman had attempted to murder his wife on a previous occasion."

  "He told you just like that?"

  "Pretty well. It's plain he doesn't like Kingman, and no doubt he was fond of his sister. He also seems to like and admire Corinne Last. He told me that on a Saturday night at the end of October the four of them had a meal together in the Kingmans' flat. It was a lot of vegetarian stuff cooked by Kingman——he always did the cooking——and one of the dishes was made out of what I'm old-fashioned enough, or narrow-ponded enough, to call toadstools. They all ate it and they were all OK but for Hannah who got up from the table, vomited for hours, and apparently was quite seriously ill."

  Wexford's eyebrows went up. "Elucidate, please," he said.

  Burden sat back, put his elbows on the arms of the chair, and pressed the tips of his fingers together. "A few days before this meal was eaten, Kingman and Hood met at the squash club of which they are both members. Kingman told Hood that Corinne Last had promised to get him some edible fungi called shaggy caps from her own garden, the garden of the house which they had at one time shared. A crop of these things show themselves every autumn under a tree in this garden. I've seen them myself, but we'll come to that in a minute.

  "Kingman's got a thing about using weeds and whatnot for cooking, makes salads out of dandelion and sorrel, and he swears by this fungi rubbish, says they've got far more flavour than mushrooms. Give me something that comes in a plastic bag from the supermarket every time, but no doubt it takes all sorts to make a world. By the way, this cookbook of Corinne Last's is called Cooking for Nothing, and all the recipes are for making dishes out of stuff you pull up by the wayside or pluck from the hedgerow."

  "These warty blobs or spotted puffets or whatever, had he cooked them before?"

  "Shaggy caps," said
Burden, grinning, "or coprinus comatus. Oh, yes, every year, and every year he and Corinne had eaten the resulting stew. He told Hood he was going to cook them again this time, and Hood says he seemed very grateful to Corinne for being so——well, magnanimous."

  "Yes, I can see it would have been a wrench for her. Like hearing 'our tune' in the company of your ex-lover and your supplanter." Wexford put on a vibrant growl. " 'Can you bear the sight of me eating our toadstools with another?' "

  "As a matter of fact," said Burden seriously, "it could have been just like that. Anyway, the upshot of it was that Hood was invited round for the following Saturday to taste these delicacies and was told that Corinne would be there. Perhaps it was that fact which made him accept. Well, the day came. Hood looked in on his sister at lunchtime. She showed him the pot containing the stew which Kingman had already made and she said she had tasted it and it was delicious. She also showed Hood half a dozen specimens of shaggy caps which she said Kingman hadn't needed and which they would fry for their breakfast. This is what she showed him."

  Burden opened a drawer in the desk and produced one of those plastic bags which he had said so inspired him with confidence. But the contents of this one hadn't come from a supermarket. He removed the wire fastener and tipped out four whitish scaly objects. They were egg-shaped, or rather elongated ovals, each with a short fleshy stalk.