A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  7

  WITH THE SPECIALIST’S CONTEMPT for the layman’s ignorance, Rufus read accounts of the inquest in two newspapers. More prominence was given to the evidence of Alec Chipstead than to that of the Home Office pathologist, Dr. Aubrey Helier. The stuff Rufus wanted to know would be beyond the average reader’s comprehension. He should really have gone to that inquest. That could be remedied; he could acquire a transcript of the proceedings or simply a copy of the pathologist’s findings, but he did not dare, he was not prepared to show his hand to that extent.

  Instead, he tried to guess what might have been said. He put himself into the pathologist’s shoes and stood in the witness box. He spoke of how he had established the sex of the larger skeleton. A fragment of the uterus remaining perhaps? It was this soft part that often persisted longest.

  “Having established that the larger skeleton was that of a female, I set about making an estimate of the subject’s age at the time of her death. It should be explained that between the ages of twelve and thirty the union of the epiphyses of most of the long bones with the shafts takes place and by the age of twenty-four most of the epiphyses have united. In the case of the subject I shall henceforward designate as Subject A, I found that the medial end of the clavicle had not yet fused, though fusion had taken place at the acromion and vertical border scapula. The bones of the arm had for the most part fused but fusion had not yet taken place between the radius and ulna, which would be expected to have occurred by the age of twenty-one. The heads of the metatarsals were fused, which one would expect to be accomplished by nineteen years, but fusion had not taken place in the secondary pelvic centers. The sutures of the skull remained open on their inner aspects… .”

  Something like that it must have been. He would not have been able to put a precise age on the skeleton. Between seventeen and twenty-one, say. And the cause of death? Rufus had another look at the paper. The pathologist had said it was at this stage impossible to give an opinion but the report also said the police were treating the case as murder. There was nothing about how the pathologist had reached the conclusion death had taken place some time between 1974 and 1977. Rufus guessed again.

  “Certain highly technical factors, intelligible only to the expert and with which I will not take up the time of this inquest, have led me to conclude that Subject A had been dead for more than nine years and less than twelve. Suffice it to say that I reached this estimate on the basis of the preservation of a vestige of the uterus and as a result of obtaining a chemical reaction for blood from periosteum. I should not have expected to obtain such a reaction if more than twelve years had elapsed since death.”

  It was only conjecture about that bit of uterus. Rufus wondered if he might have invented that part because he had so much to do with wombs in the course of his own daily life. He knew very little about tests done on blood from bones, only that they could be carried out. Identification of “Subject A” would be a more difficult matter altogether. There was no mention of hair, though Rufus knew hair could persist intact for far more years than those bones had been in the grave, and there was nothing about clothing. Would ten years in the earth have destroyed that cotton shroud? He imagined a policeman with nothing more to go on than a tiny, once brightly embroidered label, a square inch of bloodstained, earth-stained, half-rotted cloth, hawking it around boutiques in Kilburn and West Hendon, narrowing the field, finally coming to an importers’ warehouse down below the Westway… .

  But no, she hadn’t been wearing that dress, of course she hadn’t. He asked himself how accurate his memory in fact was, how much time and a desire to repudiate the past had blocked off. He ought to try to remember; he must. There were ways of bringing memories to the surface and he must use them to protect himself. It was imperative, too, to keep cool and not allow things to get out of proportion. Most likely they would proceed no further than they had with the identification of “Subject A,” especially since there was no one (apart from themselves) to miss her and she had never been missed. In the case of a person missing ten years before but who had never been reported missing, what hope was there now of establishing identity?

  It might be somewhat different with regard to the other occupant of the grave. Rufus became the pathologist again.

  “Now to the remains of the infant I shall call Subject B. Examination of the pelvis usually allows sex to be determined with great confidence in very young children and even in the fetus. I found in Subject B the greater sciatic notch to be wide and shallow and the ischial tuberosities to be everted, the ilia inclined to the vertical and the brim of the pelvis almost circular in outline. The subpubic angle was rounded and somewhat of the order of ninety degrees. I can therefore state with total confidence that Subject B was of the female sex.

  “The age of Subject B I estimate to have been more than four weeks and less than twelve. The skeleton in toto measured twenty-two and a half inches. The anterior fontanelle was open. There was no appearance of ossification in the humeral head, though the cuboid was ossified… .”

  Rufus was getting into unknown terrain here. He had very little idea of how the baby’s age could have been estimated. By the fusion of joints, certainly, it need hardly matter to him which ones. How old had the baby been anyway? Very young, without teeth. “A primary deciduous dentition had not yet commenced” was no doubt how the pathologist would have put it. But what of Subject A’s teeth?

  That was primarily how dead bodies were identified, by their teeth. On the other hand, if the particular person had never been missed or reported missing, their existence scarcely recorded in the great reference log of National Insurance and medical cards, passports and driver’s licenses, if the chance of their even being named seemed thin, what obscure dentist was going to rise up suddenly producing the relevant chart?

  A certain assumption might of course be made.

  “There is considerable danger here of drawing the conclusion that because the two sets of bones were found in conjunction and on the same date, they must have met their deaths at the same time. Although this is probably so, I am able to offer no evidence in proof of it. Nor have I come upon any factor to prove the truth of another assumption which may be made: to wit, that Subject A was the mother of Subject B. Experience and probability point to this being so but that is all.

  “I am unable to state with any certainty the length of time which has elapsed since the death of Subject B or offer any suggestion as to the cause of death.”

  That was something which could never be established after this lapse of time. Unfortunate in a way, Rufus thought. It would be an ironical stroke if investigations into the affair resulted not in the discovery of those happenings in which they had been guilty but only of those where they had been blameless.

  The inquest had been adjourned. No doubt they were still digging up the little graveyard. Rufus was not squeamish, he had not been one of those medical students who became nauseated at his first sight of surgery, but, curiously enough, he did not much like to think of all those odd little bones, so alien to him, so unidentifiable, being dug up and sorted out and sifted through in case there should be a human fibula among them or a vertebra. Rufus did not even know if animal bones shared the same names as those of humans. Did dogs have fibulas? He was surprised to find himself shuddering.

  If there was no shot in or among the human remains, in the cavities of the skull for instance, would it be possible to find it in the soil, among the sand and gravel and pine needles? Bird shot it would have been or somewhat larger. Rufus had seen it only while eating partridge which had been winged instead of shot in the head, and had nearly broken one of his teeth on the tiny ball of lead. He imagined gravel being sifted, all the particles, the minute stones, being picked over by some policeman whose job it was to do that, the tiny flints laid in one tray, the wood fragments in another, and then, in a third, the shot.

  He could remember so much, he had clear pictures of whole days spent at Ecalpemos, whole conversations recor
ded that could be rerun in his head. Why was it then that he couldn’t remember where she had been shot? In the heart or the head or the spine? His mind blanked over that, and there was a complete loss of recall. When he tried and saw the sky covered with rushing clouds, the lawn that had become a hayfield, the cedar’s wheeling branches, the gun leveled, there would come an explosion in his memory like the firing of that shotgun, a redness in front of his eyes with splintered edges, then blackout.

  The gun he could remember, both guns. And the gun room and the first time he went in there with Adam. They had eaten their lunch down by the lake. Two pork pies and a can of Coke each but not the apples which were imported Granny Smiths and bruised, and anyway they had strawberries. They must have each eaten about a pound of strawberries, for they kept going back to the fruit cage for more. Sometime during the afternoon they decided not to go back but to stay there overnight. That meant there was no hurry, they could have lain out there in the sun till the pubs opened. But Adam had this idea of phoning his mother to tell her he wouldn’t be back that night. Rufus wouldn’t have bothered, he came and went as he pleased, and anyway didn’t believe parents should be pandered to in this way. Of course it wasn’t quite pandering with Adam. He didn’t want to get on worse terms with his mother, whom he hoped to get a loan from for his holiday in Greece, nor did he want the kind of thing that might have happened, his mother phoning hospitals or getting the police because they could have had an accident in Goblander.

  As it turned out he didn’t make the phone call until the evening and they found a phone booth outside a pub in one of the villages, for Great-Uncle Hilbert’s phone had been disconnected. But once they were indoors again they resumed exploring, found a genuine butler’s pantry with a lot of silver in it packed away in canteens and boxes and green baize, and opening the next door, came into the gun room.

  Adam, as a child, had been strictly forbidden ever to go in there. Anyway, the door was usually kept locked. Presumably, in pre-Hilbert days, during Bereland squirearchy, it had contained an armory of weapons, for all four walls were hung with gun racks. However, only two types of firearms remained, both shotguns. There was a row of hooks for hanging up jackets and waterproofs.

  A glass case on the windowsill contained a fat stuffed trout, another, on the circular table, a turtle—this certainly not of English provenance. The front half of a fox, paws and all, its rear end replaced by a shield-shaped slab of polished wood, appeared to be leaping out of the wall just below the picture rail, in the manner of a circus dog emerging from a paper hoop.

  “Those aren’t the sort of things you shoot, though, are they?” Rufus had asked.

  “You most definitely don’t shoot foxes.”

  Adam said this in such a snooty lord-of-the-manor way that Rufus yelled with laughter. He took one of the guns, the twelve-bore, from the wall and Adam had another go at him, this time for pointing it in his direction.

  “It’s not loaded, for God’s sake.”

  “Never mind. You don’t point guns at people.” It appeared then that Adam had actually been out shooting the last time he was there. He had been only fifteen and had been given the four-ten, the so-called lady’s gun.

  Since then he had often recalled what Adam said next, had taken the gun from him and remarked that it was a pump action shotgun.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You don’t have to keep re-loading. It’s got a repeating action. You don’t have to put a cartridge in each time before you fire.”

  And Rufus, who didn’t mind appearing ingenuous in this area, said, “I thought all firearms worked like that.”

  One of the drawers in the pine cabinet was stacked with cartridges, red ones and blue ones which Adam said indicated the size of the shot they contained.

  “That’s amazing, me inheriting a couple of guns as well. We might even get some shooting.”

  “Not in June, squire. Even I know that.”

  Was that the first hint, no more than a joke really, that they might stay at Wyvis Hall, that they might live there? And Adam had said: “I didn’t mean now.”

  “I thought you were going to sell the place.”

  Adam didn’t say any more. They went back down the garden and after that out to a couple of pubs, where they drank a lot and Rufus had to drive back to Wyvis Hall with one eye closed on account of getting double vision. They slept it off, not getting up till around eleven next morning, Rufus in the principal guest room, Adam at the other end of the house in what he christened the Pincushion Room because it had a picture on the wall of St. Sebastian stuck full of arrows. Rufus looked out the window and saw a man trimming the grass around one of the rosebeds with a pair of long-handled shears.

  He was elderly, bald, very thin, wearing a striped shirt of the kind that have detachable collars. It was the sound of his clipping that had woken Rufus up. The sun was blazing down and there wasn’t a spot of shade anywhere till you came to the wood below the lake. Rufus, who hadn’t much appreciation of nature usually, nevertheless found himself gazing in something like wonderment at all the roses, yellow and pink and apricot and dark red, a hedge of white ones, a cascade of peach-red that covered a pergola. The man with the shears laid them down on the grass, took a handkerchief from his pocket, made a knot in each of its four corners, and placed this improvised sun hat on his head.

  Rufus had never seen anyone do that before, though he had seen it in pictures on seaside postcards. He was entranced. He put on his shorts and his sandals and went down. By the time he got outside, Adam was already there, telling the man in the handkerchief hat that he didn’t want him to come anymore, he was going to sell the house.

  “This old garden’ll go to rack and ruin then. I been coming down here watering most nights.”

  “That’s not my problem,” said Adam. “The people who buy it will have to handle that.”

  “It do seem a wicked shame.” The gardener opened his shears and wiped the grass clipping off the blades with his forefinger. “But it’s not my place to argue. Mr. Verne-Smith paid me up till the end of April, so that’s seven weeks you owe me—let’s say six and a half to be fair.”

  Adam looked rather shattered. “I didn’t actually ask you to come.”

  “True, but I come, didn’t I? I done the work and I’ll want paying. Fair’s fair. Look at the place. You can’t deny I done the work.”

  Adam couldn’t. He didn’t try. In the cagey, suspicious way he sometimes spoke he said: “How much in fact would it be?”

  “I come twice a week at a pound a time, so that’s thirteen, say, and then there’s all the times I’ve come with me cans. Fifteen I reckon would cover it.”

  It was ludicrously less than Rufus had expected. For all that labor it was ridiculous. But this was the country, this was horticulture, and they ordered things differently there. He and Adam went into the house, where they managed to scrounge up fifteen quid between the two of them, leaving them with just enough to cover the petrol for Goblander to get home on.

  Adam paid the man and he went off on a bicycle, still wearing the knotted handkerchief on his head. It was only after he had gone that they realized they had never asked his name or where he lived.

  “You could have kept him on for two quid a week. It’s nothing.”

  “I haven’t got two quid a week. I’m skint.”

  And it was lack of money that stopped them going away. He, Rufus, could have gotten just about enough together for the gasoline en route and maybe his own food. If Adam had had an equal amount they would have managed. In another year, at almost any other time, Adam would have touched his father or more probably his mother for a loan, but in June 1976 his father was barely speaking to him, and his mother would have been scared to go against her husband. Of course if Adam had invited his parents to make themselves at home at Wyvis Hall, use it as a hotel while he was away, they would have lent him any amount, but that was the last thing Adam would have done. He did ask his sister for money. Bridget had b
een one of those teenagers who work all through their school vacations in restaurants or shops, or cleaning houses, and she always had cash. But she would not lend him any. She was saving up to go skiing the next January, and she knew there wasn’t much chance of Adam repaying a loan by then.

  It was ironical that Adam, who was the owner of that big house and all that land and the contents of the house, nevertheless went down to Nunes the second time with less than a fiver in his pocket. And that was everything he had. Instead of Greece they went to Wyvis Hall because Adam was broke and Mary was close to broke and because that first time it had been so beautiful and peaceful and private there that you could hardly see what advantages Greece would have had over it. They had intended to stay a week. Rufus had suggested to Adam that he sell something out of the house, a piece of china or some silver. There were almost more antique and second-hand shops in some of those villages than there were houses. He had counted six in the place where they had gone to the pub. They talked about it on the way down in Goblander.

  It was funny how good Adam had been at naming things, the rooms in the house, the house itself even, or at naming the idea of it, the concept, Ecalpemos. Goblander was not just an anagram on “old banger,” it really expressed the way that decrepit old van had of gobbling up petrol as it chugged through the countryside making awful noises because it needed a new silencer.

  “You’ll never even get near Greece in this,” said Mary. “It’ll just collapse and give up the ghost somewhere in France. I’m warning you.”

  Her father was a life peer who had held some sort of office under a Labour government. It must have been the boarding school she had been to that determined her voice—affected, sharp, shrill. She found fault a lot. The car was wrong, his clothes were wrong or funny or somehow unsuitable, he smoked too much, he was too fond of wine, and his whole lifestyle left much to be desired. She started on Rufus for making that shameful suggestion about selling what she called the family silver. How dreadful! What a desecration! He ought to have a feeling of reverence for the beautiful things his great-uncle had entrusted to him.