Means Of Evil And Other Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  "She asked him to come at six, although they were not due at the Kingmans' till eight. She gave him coffee. A funny thing to drink at that hour, wasn't it, and before a meal? So what happens when he suggests calling in at a pub on the way? She doesn't say no or say it isn't a good idea to drink and drive. She takes so long getting ready that they don't have time.

  "She didn't want Hood to drink any alcohol, Mike, and she was determined to prevent it. She, of course, would take no alcohol and she knew Kingman never drank. But she also knew Hannah's habit of having her first drink of the day at about six.

  "Now look at her motive, far stronger than Kingman's. She strikes me as a violent, passionate and determined woman. Hannah had taken Kingman away from her. Kingman had rejected her. Why not revenge herself on both of them by killing Hannah and seeing to it that Kingman was convicted of the crime? If she simply killed Hannah, she had no way of ensuring that Kingman would come under suspicion. But if she made it look as if he had previously attempted her life, the case against him would become very strong indeed.

  "Where was she last Thursday afternoon? She could just as easily have gone up those stairs as Kingman could. Hannah would have admitted her to the flat. If she, known to be interested in gardening, had suggested that Hannah take her on to that balcony and show her the pot herbs, Hannah would willingly have done so. And then we have the mystery of the missing brandy bottle with some of its contents surely remaining. If Kingman had killed her, he would have left that there as it would greatly have strengthened the case for suicide. Imagine how he might have used it. 'Heavy drinking made my wife ill that night. She knew I had lost respect for her because of her drinking. She killed herself because her mind was unbalanced by drink.'

  "Corinne Last took that bottle away because she didn't want it known that Hannah drank, and she was banking on Hood's keeping it dark from us just as he had kept it from so many people in the past. And she didn't want it known because the fake murder attempt that she staged depended on her victim having alcohol present in her body."

  Burden sighed, poured the last dregs of coffee into Wexford's cup. "But we tried that out," he said. "Or I tried it out, and it doesn't work. You knew it wouldn't work from her book. True, she brought the shaggy caps from her own garden, but she couldn't have mixed up poisonous fungi with them because Axel Kingman would have realised at once. Or if he hadn't, they'd all have been ill, alcohol or no alcohol. She was never alone with Hannah before the meal, and while the stew was served she was out of the room."

  "I know. But we'll see her in the morning and ask her a few more questions." Wexford hesitated, then quoted softly, " 'Out of good still to find some means of evil.' "

  "What?"

  "That's what she did, isn't it? It was good for everyone but Hannah, you look as if it's done you a power of good, but it was evil for Hannah. I'm off now, Mike, it's been a long day. Don't forget to put your car away. You won't be making any emergency trips to hospital tonight."

  They were unable to puncture her self-possession. The languorous Klimt face was carefully painted this morning, and she was dressed as befitted the violinist or the actress or the author. She had been forewarned of their coming and the gardener image had been laid aside. Her long smooth hands looked as if they had never touched the earth or pulled up a weed.

  Where had she been on the afternoon of Hannah Kingman's death? Her thick shapely eyebrows went up. At home, indoors, painting. Alone?

  "Painters don't work with an audience," she said rather insolently, and she leaned back, dropping her eyelids in that way of hers. She lit a cigarette and flicked her fingers at Burden for an ashtray as if he were a waiter.

  Wexford said, "On Saturday, October 29th, Miss Last, I believe you had something wrong with your car?"

  She nodded lazily.

  In asking what was wrong with it, he thought he might catch her. He didn't.

  "The glass in the offside front headlight was broken while the car was parked," she said, and although he thought how easily she could have broken that glass herself, he could hardly say so. In the same smooth voice she added, "Would you like to see the bill I had from the garage for repairing it?"

  "That won't be necessary." She wouldn't have offered to show it to him if she hadn't possessed it. "You asked Mr. Hood to call for you here at six, I understand."

  "Yes. He's not my idea of the best company in the world, but I'd promised him some apples for his mother and we had to pick them before it got dark."

  "You gave him coffee but had no alcohol. You had no drinks on the way to Mr. and Mrs. Kingman's flat. Weren't you a little disconcerted at the idea of going out to dinner at a place where there wouldn't even be a glass of wine?"

  "I was used to Mr. Kingman's ways." But not so used, thought Wexford, that you can tell me whether it was normal or abnormal for him to have rinsed those plates. Her mouth curled, betraying her a little. "It didn't bother me, I'm not a slave to liquor."

  "I should like to return to these shaggy caps. You picked them from here on October 28th and took them to Mr. Kingman that evening. I think you said that?"

  "I did. I picked them from this garden."

  She enunciated the words precisely, her eyes wide open and gazing sincerely at him. The words, or perhaps her unusual straightforwardness, stirred in him the glimmer of an idea. But if she had said nothing more, that idea might have died as quickly as it had been born.

  "If you want to have them analysed or examined or whatever, you're getting a bit late. Their season's practically over." She looked at Burden and gave him a gracious smile. "But you took the last of them yesterday, didn't you? So that's all right."

  Wexford, of course, said nothing about Burden's experiment. "We'll have a look in your garden, if you don't mind."

  She didn't seem to mind, but she had been wrong. Most of the fungi had grown into black-gilled pagodas in the twenty-four hours that had elapsed. Two new ones, however, had thrust their white oval caps up through the wet grass. Wexford picked them, and still she didn't seem to mind. Why, then, had she appeared to want their season to be over? He thanked her and she went back into the cottage. The door closed. Wexford and Burden walked out into the road.

  The fungus season was far from over. From the abundant array by the roadside it looked as if the season would last weeks longer. Shaggy caps were everywhere, some of them smaller and greyer than the clump that grew out of Corinne Last's well-fed lawn. There were green and purple agarics, horn-shaped toadstools, and tiny mushrooms growing in fairy rings.

  "She doesn't exactly mind our having them analysed," Wexford said thoughtfully, "but it seems she'd prefer the analysis to be done on the ones you picked yesterday than on those I picked today. Can that be so or am I just imagining it?"

  "If you're imagining it, I'm imagining it too. But it's no good, that line of reasoning. We know they're not potentiated——or whatever the word is——by alcohol."

  "I shall pick some more all the same," said Wexford. "Haven't got a paper bag, have you?"

  "I've got a clean handkerchief. Will that do?"

  "Have to," said Wexford who never had a clean one. He picked a dozen more young shaggy caps, big and small, white and grey, immature and fully grown. They got back into the car and Wexford told the driver to stop at the public library. He went in and emerged a few minutes later with three books under his arm.

  "When we get back," he said to Burden, "I want you to get oh to the university and see what they can offer us in the way of an expert in fungilogy."

  He closeted himself in his office with the three books and a pot of coffee. When it was nearly lunchtime, Burden knocked on the door.

  "Come in," said Wexford. "How did you get on?"

  "It's not fungologist or fungilogist," said Burden with triumphant severity. "It's mycologist and they don't have one. But there's a man on the faculty who's a toxicologist and who's just published one of those popular science books. This one's about poisoning by wild plants and fungi."

&n
bsp; Wexford grinned. "What's it called? Killing for Nothing? He sounds as if he'd do fine."

  "I said we'd see him at six. Let's hope something will come of it."

  "No doubt it will." Wexford slammed shut the thickest of his books. "We need confirmation," he said, "but I've found the answer."

  "For God's sake! Why didn't you say?"

  "You didn't ask. Sit down." Wexford motioned him to the chair on the other side of the desk. "I said you'd done your homework, Mike, and so you had, only your textbook wasn't quite comprehensive enough. It's got a section on edible fungi and a section on poisonous fungi——but nothing in between. What I mean by that is, there's nothing in your book about fungi which aren't wholesome yet don't cause death or intense suffering. There's nothing about the kind that can make people ill in certain circumstances."

  "But we know they ate shaggy caps," Burden protested. "And if by 'circumstances' you mean the intake of alcohol, we know shaggy caps aren't affected by alcohol."

  "Mike," said Wexford quietly, "do we know they ate shaggy caps?" He spread out on the desk the haul he had made from the roadside and from Corinne Last's garden. "Look closely at these, will you?"

  Quite bewildered now, Burden looked at and fingered the dozen or so specimens of fungi. "What am I to look for?"

  "Differences," said Wexford laconically.

  "Some of them are smaller than the others, and the smaller ones are greyish. Is that what you mean? But, look here, think of the differences between mushrooms. You get big flat ones and small button ones and . . ."

  "Nevertheless, in this case it is that small difference that makes all the difference." Wexford sorted the fungi into two groups. "All the small greyer ones," he said, "came from the roadside. Some of the larger whiter ones came from Corinne Last's garden and some from the roadside."

  He picked up between forefinger and thumb a specimen of the former. "This isn't a shaggy cap, it's an ink cap. Now listen." The thick book fell open where he had placed a marker. Slowly and clearly he read: "The ink cap, coprinus atramentarius, is not to be confused with the shaggy cap, coprinus comatus. It is smaller and greyer in colour, but otherwise the resemblance between them is strong. While coprinus atramentarius is usually harmless when cooked, it contains, however, a chemical similar to the active principle in Antabuse, a drug used in the treatment of alcoholics, and if eaten in conjunction with alcohol will cause nausea and vomiting."

  "We'll never prove it."

  "I don't know about that," said Wexford. "We can begin by concentrating on the one lie we know Corinne Last told when she said she picked the fungi she gave Axel Kingman from her own garden."

  Old Wives' Tales

  They looked shocked and affronted and somehow ashamed. Above all, they looked old. Wexford thought that in the nature of things a woman of seventy ought to be an orphan, ought to have been an orphan for twenty years. This one had been an orphan for scarcely twenty days. Her husband, sitting opposite her, pulling his wispy moustache, slowly and mechanically shaking his head, seemed older than she, perhaps not so many years the junior of his late mother-in-law. He wore a brown cardigan with a small neat darn at one elbow and sheepskin slippers, and when he spoke he snuffled. His wife kept saying she couldn't believe her ears, she couldn't believe it, why were people so wicked? Wexford didn't answer that. He couldn't, though he had often wondered himself.

  "My mother died of a stroke," Mrs. Betts said tremulously. "It was on the death certificate, Dr. Moss put it on the death certificate."

  Betts snuffled and wheezed. He reminded Wexford of an aged rabbit, a rabbit with myxomatosis perhaps. It was partly the effect of the brown woolly cardigan and the furry slippers, and partly the moustache and the unshaven bristly chin. "She was ninety-two," Betts said in his thick catarrhal voice. "Ninety-two. I reckon you lot must have got bats in the belfry."

  "I mean," said Mrs. Betts, "are you saying Dr. Moss was telling untruths? A doctor?"

  "Why don't you ask him? We're only ordinary people, the wife and me, we're not educated. Doctor said a cerebral haemorrhage," Betts stumbled a little over the words, "and in plain language that's a stroke. That's what he said. Are you saying me or the wife gave Mother a stroke? Are you saying that?"

  "I'm making no allegations, Mr. Betts." Wexford felt uncomfortable, wished himself anywhere but in this newly decorated, paint-smartened house. "I am merely making enquiries which information received obliges me to do."

  "Gossip," said Mrs. Betts bitterly. "This street's a hotbed of gossip. Pity they've nothing better to do. Oh, I know what they're saying. Half of them turn up their noses and look the other way when I pass them. All except Elsie Parrish, and that goes without saying."

  "She's been a brick," said her husband. "A real brick is Elsie." He stared at Wexford with a kind of timid outrage. "Haven't you folk got nothing better to do than listen to a bunch of old hens? What about the real crime? What about the muggings and the breakins?"

  Wexford sighed. But he went on doggedly questioning, remembering what the nurse had said, what Dr. Moss had said, keeping in the forefront of his mind that motive which was so much more than merely wanting an aged parent out of the way. If he hadn't been a policeman with a profound respect for the law and for human life, he might have felt that these two, or one of them, had been provoked beyond bearing to do murder.

  One of them? Or both? Or neither? Ivy Wrangton had either died an unnatural death or else there had been a series of coincidences and unexplained contingencies which were nothing short of incredible.

  It was the nurse who had started it, coming to him three days before. Sergeant Martin brought her to him because what she alleged was so serious. Wexford knew her by sight, had seen her making her calls, and had sometimes wondered how district nurses could endure their jobs, the unremitting daily toil, the poor pay, the unsavoury tasks. Perhaps she felt the same about his. She was a fair, pretty woman, about thirty-five, overweight, with big red hands, who always looked tired. She looked tired now, though she hadn't long been back from two weeks' holiday. She was in her summer uniform, blue and white print dress, white apron, dark cardigan, small round hat and the stout shoes that served for summer and winter alike. Nurse Radcliffe. Judith Radcliffe.

  "Mr. Wexford?" she said. "Chief Inspector Wexford? Yes. I believe I used to look in on your daughter after she'd had a baby. I was doing my midwifery then. I can't remember her name but the baby was Benjamin."

  Wexford smiled and told her his daughter's name and wondered, looking at the bland faded blue eyes and the stolid set of the neck and shoulders, just how intelligent this woman was, how perceptive and how truthful. He pulled up one of the yellow chairs for her. His office was cheerful and sunny-looking even when the sun wasn't shining, not much like a police station.

  "Please sit down, Nurse Radcliffe," he said. "Sergeant Martin's given me some idea what you've come about."

  "I feel rather awful. You may think I'm making a mountain out of a molehill."

  "I shouldn't worry about that. If I do I'll tell you so and we'll forget it. No one else will know of it, it'll be between us and these four walls."

  At that she gave a short laugh. "Oh, dear, I'm afraid it's gone much further than that already. I've three patients in Castle Road and each one of them mentioned it to me. That's what Castle Road gossip is at the moment, poor old Mrs. Wrangton's death. And I just thought——well, you can't have that much smoke without fire, can you?"

  Mountains and molehills, Wexford thought, smoke and fire. This promised to be a real volcano. He said firmly, "I think you'd better tell me all about it."

  She was rather pathetic. "It's best you hear it from someone professional." She planted her feet rather wide apart in front of her and leant forward, her hands on her knees. "Mrs. Wrangton was a very old woman. She was ninety-two. But allowing for her age, she was as fit as a fiddle, thin, strong, continent, her heart as sound as a bell. The day she died was the day I went away on holiday, but I was in there the day before to give her
her bath—did that once a week, she couldn't get in and out of the bath on her own——and I remember thinking she was fitter than I'd seen her for months. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I came back from holiday and heard she'd had a stroke the next day."

  "When did you come back, Nurse Radcliffe?"

  "Last Friday, Friday the 16th. Well, it's Thursday now and I was back on my district on Monday and the first thing I heard was that Mrs. Wrangton was dead and suggestions she'd been——well, helped on her way." She paused, worked something out on her fingers. "I went away June 2nd, that was the day she died, and the funeral was June 7th."

  "Funeral?"

  "Well, cremation," said Nurse Radcliffe, glancing up as Wexford sighed. "Dr. Moss attended Mrs. Wrangton. She was really Dr. Crocker's patient, but he was on holiday too, like me. Look, Mr. Wexford, I don't know the details of what happened that day, June 2nd, not first-hand, only what the Castle Road ladies say. D'you want to hear that?"