by Ruth Rendell
Except for Williams’s driving license with the Alverbury Road address.
“He was taking a risk leaving that about,” said Burden.
“Taking risks was his life. He took them all the time. He enjoyed the high wire. Anyway, suspicious wives read letters, not driving licenses.”
There were bills in the drawer, the carbons from credit-card chits, an American Express monthly account. Which address had that gone to? Yes, this one. It fitted somehow. Visa and Access were the workaday cards, American Express more cosmopolitan, more for the playboy. No doubt it was Wendy who paid the services’ bills from the joint account. There was none in the drawer, only a rates demand, a television rental account book, an estimate from Godwin and Sculp, builders, of Pomfret, dated 30 March, for painting the living room, and an invoice from the same firm (stamped Paid) for renewal of a bathroom cistern. Under this lot lay Rodney’s joint-account checkbook, a paying-in book for the joint account, and a small glass bottle, half full of tablets, labeled “Mandaret.”
On this the top floor of the house were two more bedrooms and a bathroom. Veronica’s room was neat as a pin, white with a good deal of broderie anglaise about it and owing much to those magazine articles prevalent in Wendy’s own childhood on how to make a dream bedroom for your daughter. No doubt poor Wendy had never had a dream bedroom of her own, Wexford thought, and he sensed that her youth had been nearer to that of Sara. No posters here, no home-made mobiles, and no books either. It was designed for a girl who would do nothing in it but sit in the window seat looking pensive and wearing white socks.
The spiral staircase, a contraption of hideous discomfort and danger to all but the most agile, went through the middle of the house like a screw in a press. Down on the ground floor was a shower room, a separate lavatory, the third door on that side opening into the integral garage, and at the end of the passage a room the width of the house that opened through French windows onto patio and garden roughly the size of a large dining table. The room, which might have been for dining in or as a study for Rodney Williams if he had been allowed one, was plainly devoted to Wendy’s interests. She had a sewing machine in it and a knitting machine, an ironing board set up with two irons on it, one dry and one steam, and there were clothes everywhere, neatly hung or draped, sheathed in plastic bags.
Mother and daughter were still sitting upstairs at the glass-topped table. Wendy had taken up some sewing, a handkerchief or possibly a tray-cloth into which she was inserting tiny stitches, her little finger crooked in the way it used to be said was vulgar to hold a teacup. Veronica nibbled at dry-roasted peanuts out of a foil packet. The dry kind it would be, the other sort tending to leave grease spots. They were both as tense as compressed springs, waiting for the police to go and leave them alone.
“Have you heard of a society or club called ARRIA?” Wexford said to Veronica.
The spring didn’t leap free of its bonds. There was no shock. Veronica merely nodded. She didn’t screw up the empty peanut packet but flattened it and began folding it very carefully, first into halves, then quarters.
“At school?”
She looked up. “Some of the girls in the sixth and seventh years belong to it.”
“But you don’t?”
“You have to be over sixteen.”
“Why girls?” he said. “Haldon Finch is co-ed. Don’t any boys belong?”
She was a normal teenager really. Underneath the prissy looks, the shyness, the Mummy’s girl air, she was one of them. The look she gave him seethed with their scorn for the cretinous incomprehension evinced by adults.
“Well, it’s all women, isn’t it? It’s for women. They’re—what d’you call it?—feminists, militant feminists.”
“Then I hope you’ll keep clear of it, Veronica,” Wendy said very quickly and sharply for her. “I hope you’ll have nothing to do with it. If there’s anything I really hate it’s women’s lib. Liberation! I’m liberated and look where it’s got me. I just hope you’ll do better than I have when the time comes and find a man who’ll really support you and look after you, a nice good man who’ll—who’ll cherish you.” Her lips trembled with emotion. She laid down her sewing. “I wasn’t enough of a woman for Rodney,” she said as if the girl wasn’t there. “I wasn’t enough of a girl. I got too hard and independent and—and mature, I know I did.” A heroic effort was made to keep the tears in, the break out of the voice, and a victory was won. “You just remember that, Veronica, when your turn comes.”
SERGEANT MARTIN WAS HANDLING THE COMPLAINT, though, as he told Wexford, he hadn’t much to go on. Nor had any harm been done—yet.
“A Ms. Caroline Peters, who’s a physical education instructor at the Haldon Finch Comprehensive,” Martin said. “Miz not Miss. She got very stroppy, sir, when I called her Miss. I called her an instructress too and had a job getting my tongue round it but that wasn’t right either. She says two men were hanging about watching the girls playing a tennis match. Acting in a suspicious manner, she says. Came in a car which was parked for the express purpose of them getting out to watch. Voyeurs she called them. Afterwards she asked the girls if any of them knew the men but they denied all knowledge.”
Thank you, Miss Freeborn, thought Wexford.
“Leave it, Martin. Forget it. We’ve better things to do.”
“Leave it altogether, sir?”
“I’ll handle it.” A note to the woman or a phone call explaining all, he supposed. She had a right to that. She was a good, conscientious teacher acting in a responsible manner. He mustn’t laugh—except later perhaps with Burden.
There had been much food for thought picked up on his visits to Liskeard Avenue. And there had been something to make him wonder, something that was neither a piece of information nor the germ of an idea but entirely negative.
Wasn’t it extraordinary that during those visits, those long talks, and during his initial interview with her, Wendy Williams had shown not the slightest interest in Rodney’s other family? She had asked not a single question about the wife she had supplanted but not replaced, nor about the children who were siblings by half-blood of her own Veronica. Because she was inhibited by intense jealousy? Or for some other reason more germane to this inquiry?
11
KEVIN WILLIAMS LOOKED MORE LIKE HIS mother than his father. He wouldn’t have been recognizable as Veronica’s half-brother. The genetic hand-down which was so distinctive a feature in Sara and Veronica had missed him, and his forehead was narrow, with the hair growing low on it. His manner was laconic, casual, indifferent.
Wexford, who had Martin with him, had interrupted what seemed to be a family conclave. For once the television was off, sight and sound. Joy Williams introduced no one but her son and this introduction she made proudly and with abnormal enthusiasm. Wexford was left to deduce that the woman and the girl who sat side by side on the yellow sofa must be Hope Harmer and her daughter Paulette.
Mrs. Harmer, though plumper, fairer, and better cared for than her sister, looked too much like her for her identity to be in doubt. She was a pretty woman and even in the present crisis she looked pleased with life. But the girl—to use an expression favored by Wexford’s grandsons—was “something else again.” She was beautiful with a beauty that made Sara and Veronica merely pretty young girls. She reminded Wexford of a picture he had once seen, Rossetti’s portrait of Mrs. William Morris. This girl was dark and her face had the same dark glow as the face in the picture, her features the same symmetry and her large dark eyes the same otherworldly soulfulness. When he asked her if she was who he thought she was she raised those dark gray dreaming eyes and nodded, then returned to what she had been looking at, a magazine that seemed entirely devoted to hairstyles.
Kevin’s term had ended the day before and he had come straight home. Not to stay, though, he made clear to Wexford when they were alone in the stark dining room. He owed it to his mother to stay a few days, but next week he intended to stick to the plan he had made months before
of going down to Cornwall to stay with a friend, and later he would be camping in France. He seemed astonished when Wexford asked him for the address of the Cornish friend.
“We’d rather you didn’t leave the country at present.”
“You can’t keep me here. My father’s death has nothing to do with me.”
“Tell me what you did on the evening of Thursday, April the fifteenth.”
“Was that when he died?” The casual manner had grown sullen. He was his mother in truculent mood all over again.
“I’ll ask the questions, Kevin.”
It wasn’t said roughly, but nevertheless the boy looked as if no one had spoken like that to him before. His low forehead creased and his mouth pouted.
“I only asked. He was my father.”
In his tone, that of contrived, badly acted sentiment, Wexford suddenly understood that no one in this household had cared a damn for Rodney Williams. And they hadn’t in the other household either. People didn’t care for him for long. In this area he had, at any rate, got his deserts.
“What happened that evening? What did you do?”
“Phoned home, I suppose,” he said, careless again. “I always do on Thursdays or my mother goes bananas.”
“You phone from college?”
“No, the phones are always out of order or it’s a hassle finding one that’s free.” Kevin seemed to have decided he might as well give in to Wexford’s questioning, if not with a good grace. “I go out to phone. Well, two or three of us do. To a pub. I phone home and transfer the charge.”
“You’ll remember that Thursday if I tell you it was the first Thursday after you got back to college from the Easter vacation.”
The boy thought about it, seeming to concentrate. Wexford had no doubt he had known perfectly well all along.
“Yeah, I do remember. I phoned home around eight, eight-thirty—I don’t reckon you want to know to the minute, do you? My mother was out. I talked to Sara.”
“That must have surprised you, your mother being out when you phoned.”
“Yeah, it was unusual. She thinks the sun shines out of my arse, as you’ve maybe noticed.” He jerked his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “Unusual,” he said, “but not unknown.”
More indignation came when Wexford asked for the names of Kevin’s companions on the trip to the pub where the phone was. But it was hot air, pointless obstructiveness. The names were forthcoming after some expostulation.
“How did you get on with your father?”
“There was no communication. We didn’t talk. The usual sort of situation, right?”
“And your father and Sara?”
The reply came sharply. It was incredible. It was exactly the reply a boy of Kevin’s age might have made a hundred years before—or, according to literature, might have made.
“You can leave my sister out of this!”
Wexford tried not to laugh. “I will for now.”
He found Joy and her sister questioning Martin in depth about Wendy Williams. The girls, the two cousins, had gone. Martin was answering in monosyllables and he looked relieved when Wexford came in. Joy broke off at once and, having seen he was alone, said, “Where’s my son?” as if Wexford might have arrested him and already stowed him away in a police car.
THIS WOULD BE HIS FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH Miles Gardner since the discovery of Rodney Williams’s body. He and Burden waited for him in the managing director’s office. The paneled room was dim and shadowy in spite of the bright day outside. A copper pot filled with Russell lupins stood on the windowsill. Wexford picked up the desk photograph of Gardner’s family and looked at it dubiously.
“I suppose I’m sensitized to adolescent girls,” he said. “I see them everywhere.”
“Just remember what the games mistress said.”
“I don’t think I’m in danger, though they’re a very pretty lot we’re in contact with. One can almost see Williams’s point of view.”
“He was just a dirty old lecher,” said Burden, apparently forgetting Williams had been a mere three years his senior.
“The primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.”
Gardner came in, apologizing for having kept them waiting. He began on some insincere-sounding expressions of sorrow at Williams’s demise which Wexford listened to patiently and then cut short.
“If you’re free for lunch we might all go over to the Old Flag.”
But this was something Gardner, regretfully, couldn’t manage. “I’ve promised to give my daughter lunch, my youngest one, Jane. She’s got the day off school to go for an interview at the university here. A bit of an ordeal, she’s a nervous kid, so I bribed her with the offer of a slap-up lunch.”
The University of the South was situated at Myringham. Another eighteen-year-old then …
“She should get a place,” Gardner said, and with a kind of rueful pride, “There go our holidays abroad for the next three years.”
Wexford said he would like to talk to Christine Lomond, and in the room that had been Williams’s if possible. Gardner took him there himself, up in the small, slow lift. There were two desks and two typewriters, a Sierra 3400 and an Olympia ES 100. But this place was “clean” as far as typewriters went. Martin had seen to that. The girl who came in was fresh-paint glossy in a suit of geranium-red linen, dark green cotton blouse, green glass rhomboid hanging on a chain, and on her left wrist a watch with a red and green strap. Her hair had been touched with what his daughter Sylvia assured him were called “low lights,” though Wexford couldn’t quite believe this and thought she must have been having him on. Christine Lomond’s fingernails were the brilliant carmine of the latest Sevenshine front-door shade, Pillarbox (“A rich true red without a hint of blue, a robust high gloss that stands up ideally to wind and weather”). They scuttled over the filing cabinet like so many red beetles.
Wexford had asked her to see what she could find him as samples of Williams’s own typing, any report, assessment, rough notes even, he might have brought to the office with him. She said she was sure anything of that sort would have been handwritten, and it was two or three handwritten sheets that she produced for him, and then several more which she told him had probably been typed on the Olympia machine but using a different daisywheel, thus altering the typeface. Wexford was particularly interested because there seemed to him to be a flaw in the apex of the capital A.
The experiment, however, showed nothing but his own ignorance of typewriters or at any rate of recent technological advances made in typewriters. The red-tipped white fingers whipped a sheet of paper into the machine, switched it on, switched it off, whipped out the daisywheel, inserted another, and rapidly produced a facsimile of the first four lines of Williams’s sales forecast for the first three months of the year.
“It’s getting a bit ragged,” Christine Lomond said. “We need a new wheel,” and she pulled the damaged one out and dropped it into the waste-paper basket.
“Where do you live, Miss Lomond?”
“Here. In Myringham. Why?” She had a rather abrupt manner, of the kind that is usually called “crisp.”
“Did you like Mr. Williams?”
She was silent. She seemed affronted, having anticipated perhaps nothing more than an investigation of papers and machines. How old was she? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? She could be a good deal less than that. The heavy makeup and elaborate hairstyle aged her.
“Well, Miss Lomond?”
“Yes, I liked him. Well, I liked him all right. I didn’t think about liking or disliking him.”
“Would you think back, please, and give me some idea of what you were doing on the evening of April the fifteenth?”
“I can’t possibly remember that far back!”
Her eyelids flapped. They were a gleaming laminated sea blue (“Delicate turquoise with a hint of silver, ideal for that special ceiling, alcove, or display cabinet”).
“Try and pinpoint it,” said Burden, “by thinking of what you were doing n
ext day. That was the morning someone phoned to say Mr. Williams was ill and wouldn’t be in. Does that help?”
“I expect I was at home on my own.”
She didn’t sound defensive, guilty, afraid. She sounded sullen, as if the clothes and the makeup, the “grooming,” had not been effective.
“Do you live on your own or with someone?”
Surely the most innocent of questions. She pounced on it as surely as if those red nails had seized and clutched.
“I certainly do not live with someone! I was at home on my own watching the TV.”
Another one. What had they done in the old days before the cathode conquest? He ought to be able to remember pre-television alibis but he couldn’t. I was reading, sewing, putting up shelves, fishing, listening to the radio, out for a walk, in the pub, at the pictures? Maybe.
Unwillingly, even grudgingly, she gave them her address. She admitted to possessing a typewriter, an old Smith Corona, though not a portable, and insisted it was in her parents’ house in Tonbridge and she had never had it with her in the Myringham bedsit.
Downstairs in the reception area they encountered a young girl undressing. Or so to Wexford’s astonished eyes it at first appeared. She was talking to the telephonist (Anna today) and in the act of pulling a cotton dress off over her head. Long slim legs in white tights, pale blue pumps with spike heels, and yes, a skirt which dropped to its former just-above-the-knee length when the garment, evidently a middy blouse, was off. Underneath it was a white tee-shirt. Her back was to Wexford. She kicked off the blue pumps, sending one flying across the room and leaving no doubt in the mind of an observer that this was a cathartic shedding of a hateful costume after an ordeal was over.