by Ruth Rendell
“Porter and Lamb on the estate,” said Ovington gruffly. He meant the industrial estate at Stowerton.
“And TML?”
“Tube Manipulators Limited.”
“And you know absolutely what those initials—I might say codes—mean when you’re returning machines? You know that ‘P and L’ stands for Porter and Lamb and not, for instance, for Payne and Lovell, the hardware people in the High Street here?”
“We don’t do any work for Payne and Lovell.” Ovington looked astonished.
“I think you understand me though. With this system of labeling mistakes could be made. I’ll come to the point. ‘H. Finch’ is rather a rough and ready way of indicating the Haldon Finch Comprehensive School.”
“It serves its purpose.”
“Suppose you had a customer called Henry Finch. What would stop his machine getting mixed up with the Haldon Finch ones?”
“We don’t have a customer called Henry Finch, that’s what.”
Burden said sharply, “D’you have any customers called Finch?”
“We might have.”
It was the curious reply, or a version of it, Wexford had so often heard witnesses give in court when they did not want to commit themselves to a positive “yes.” “I might have,” “I may have done.” Ovington, in his greasy old suit, open-necked shirt, his chin pulled back into his neck and his lips thrust forward, looked shifty, guilty, suspected and suspicious, truculent for the mere sake of truculence.
“I’d like you to check, please.”
“Not Henry,” said Ovington. “Definitely not. A lady. Not an H at all.”
“You’re wasting my time, Mr. Ovington.”
He was enjoying it, with sly malice. “We did some repairs on a Remington for her a while back. Not a 315 though.” At last, scratching his head, “I could look in the book.”
“This could be it,” Wexford said when he and Burden were alone for a moment. “They could have got mixed up and sent the wrong one back.”
“Wouldn’t she have noticed?”
“She might not be a regular typist. She might not have used the machine since its return.”
He began looking at labels on all the typewriters on the lower shelf on the left-hand side. P and L, E. Ten (what could that mean?), TML, HBSS, H. Finch, J. St G, M. Br … Ovington came back with a ledger.
“Miss J. Finch, 22 Bodmin Road, Pomfret. She collected the machine herself on July the twenty-sixth.” He slammed the book shut as if he had just proved or disproved something to his triumphant satisfaction.
July 26. The day the Haldon Finch machines were collected and brought here, Wexford thought. Did all this mean anything or nothing? Were the girlfriend and the girlfriend’s typewriter after all sitting pretty somewhere in London or Brighton?
Neither he nor Burden knew where Bodmin Road was.
“You know something?” Burden said. “Wendy Williams lives in Liskeard Avenue and Liskeard’s a place in Cornwall. Bodmin’s the county town in Cornwall. It may be just round the corner.”
“We’ll look it up as soon as we get back.”
It was just round the comer. Liskeard Avenue, Falmouth Road, Truro Road, with Bodmin Road running crossways to connect them all.
“She was practically a neighbor of his,” Burden said, sounding almost excited. “An ARRIA member, I bet you. Here she is on the Electoral Register. Finch, Joan B.”
“Wait a minute, Mike. Are we saying—are we assuming rather—that a Haldon Finch typewriter was collected by her in error or that it’s her own typewriter she has, that this is the machine we’re looking for, and we’ve stumbled upon her not by deduction but by pure luck?”
“What does that matter?” Burden said simply.
Twenty-two Bodmin Road was a small purpose-built block of four flats. According to the doorbells, J. B. Finch lived on the first floor. However, she was not at home either in the afternoon or at their two further calls at seven and eight in the evening. Wexford had been home an hour when a call came through to him to say a fourth man had been stabbed, this time in the upper arm, not a serious wound, though there had been considerable loss of blood.
The difference was that this time his cries were heard by two policemen sitting in a patrol car in a lay-by on the Kingsmarkham bypass. It was after sunset, the beginning of dusk. They had found the victim of the attack lying half across a public footpath, bleeding from a wound near his shoulder. While they were bending over him a girl came out from among the trees of the woodland on the north side of the path, announced her name as Edwina Klein, and handed them a penknife from which she had wiped most of the blood.
15
ARRIA EXPECTED A SHOW. ITS MEMBERS were in Kingsmarkham Magistrates’ Court in force. Wexford had never seen the small wood-walled area that passed for a public gallery so full. Caroline Peters was there and Sara Williams, red-haired Nicola Anerley, Jane Gardner and the Freeborn twins, Helen Blake and Donella the black girl, the tennis player who wore glasses and the tennis player who did not.
It was to be a test case, of course. Wexford had guessed all of it pretty well before he talked to Edwina Klein. She had not exactly been an agent provocateur. It was a terrible world we lived in if a woman who chose to walk alone along a field path at dusk could be called that. But the truth was that Edwina had set out to walk there, and to do so evening after evening since she came down from Oxford at the end of June, in the expectation of being attacked. She had been frank and open with him, hiding nothing, admitting, for instance, that it was she who while home for a weekend had been Wheatley’s assailant. For this reason he had decided not to oppose bail. She would talk freely to him again, she had promised, and, with a faith that would have set the Chief Constable’s hair standing on end, he believed her.
With Caroline Peters a founder member of ARRIA, she was a thin, straight girl of medium height, fiercely intelligent, a pioneer and martyr. She was dressed entirely in black, black trousers, black roll-neck sweater, her hair invisible under a tightly tied black scarf. A raven of a woman, the only color about her the tiny orange ARRIA badge pinned on near her left shoulder.
What did the girls in the public gallery expect? Something like the trial of Joan of Arc, Wexford supposed. All were ignorant of magistrates’ court procedure, all looked disbelieving when in five minutes it was all over and Edwina committed for trial to the crown court. The charge was unlawful wounding. She was released on bail in her own surety of a £1000 and for a similar sum in that of an elderly woman, her great-aunt, not old enough to have been a suffragette but looking as if she might regret having missed the chance.
The ARRIA contingent filed out, muttering indignantly to each other. Helen Blake and Amy Freeborn picked up the orange banner with a woman-raven on it that they had been obliged to leave outside. The others fell in behind them and what had been a group became a march. “We shall overcome,” they sang, “we shall overcome some day.” They marched behind the banner up to the police station forecourt and across it and out into the High Street.
JOAN FINCH WAS SIXTY-FIVE YEARS OLD, PERHAPS more. Wexford wasn’t surprised. There must be few women called Joan under fifty, and even fifty years ago Joan was becoming an old-fashioned name. It was Burden who had built so much on the chance of her being the girl they were looking for.
She took them into the poky little den, designed for surely no more than luggage storage, where she worked, and showed them the typewriter, a big manual Remington at least as old as herself. Fingers today would flinch at that iron forest of keys that took so much muscle power to fell it.
As Ovington had told them, she had collected it from Pomfret Office Equipment on 26 July. There was no doubt at all that it was hers. It had been her mother’s before her and seemed as much of a family heirloom as any clock or piece of china.
Of sole significance to Wexford and Burden was the fact that it wasn’t a Remington 315 portable machine. This was something Miss Finch seemed unable to grasp. She insisted on sitting down at th
e typewriter and producing for them a half page of men coming to the aid of the party and quick brown foxes. The Ovingtons had done a good job. There wasn’t a flaw or an irregularity to be seen.
They had lunch at the little bow-fronted wine bar two doors away. Pamela Gardner was at a corner table lunching with a woman friend. She looked through Wexford with a contemptuous stare. Her daughter had bounced along that morning, singing as heartily as anyone and a good deal more loudly, waving to him as if they were old friends. Edwina Klein was coming to the police station at 2:30 to talk to him. It was no part of the conditions of her bail that she should do this but he felt sure she wouldn’t fail him. Burden said, “Only three weeks to go now.” He was talking of the coming baby. “They say it’ll be on time. They don’t really know though.”
“There’s more they don’t know than they ever let on.”
Burden picked at his quiche. “She had the heartburn at the beginning and I’m getting it now.” He was pale, bilious-looking.
“We’ll see if the Harmers can supply you with an indigestion remedy.”
The Pre-Raphaelite head of Paulette could be seen through the window of the dispensary, where she was evidently helping her father. It was Hope Harmer who served Burden. She seemed discomfited by their visit, unable perhaps to realize that policemen too have private lives and are as liable to bodily ills as anyone else.
“Did you have a good holiday?” Wexford asked her.
“Oh yes, thank you, very nice. Very quiet,” she added as people do when describing their Christmas celebrations as if to admit to liveliness and merriment were to deny respectability. “All good things come to an end though, don’t they? We could have stayed away another week, only my daughter’s expecting her A-level results. They’re due any day.”
Sara Williams must also be on tenterhooks then … “Another would-be doctor in the family?”
“No, no. Paulette’s hoping to follow in her Daddy’s footsteps.”
She was all bright placatory smiles, accompanying them to the door when they left like an old-fashioned shopkeeper. Wexford walked into the police station just before 2:30. Edwina Klein was waiting for him, shown upstairs to his room, and he felt relief at the sight of her in spite of his confidence that she would keep her word. With her, seated in the other visitor’s chair, like a chaperone, was the aunt.
Wexford was surprised. He had seen Edwina as the very epitome of independence, of self-reliance.
“I happen to be a solicitor as well as an aunt.”
“Very well,” said Wexford, “but this won’t be an interrogation, just a talk about various aspects of this case.”
“That’s what they all say,” said the aunt, whose name was Pearl Kaufmann. In appearance she was rather like Virginia Woolf in her latter days, tallish, thin, long-faced, long-nosed, with a full mouth. She wore a navy blue silk dress, mid-calf length, and clumpy white sandals that made her feet look large.
Edwina was still in the black she had worn in court but with the roll-neck sweater changed for a sleeveless black tee-shirt that was better suited to the heat of the day. The ARRIA badge had been transferred to this. She had sunglasses on which turned her face into an expressionless mask.
“He treated me exactly as if I was a prostitute,” she had said to him of Wheatley at that earlier conversation. The black glasses hadn’t covered her eyes then. They had been bright with eagerness, with earnestness, with the zeal of youth. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being a prostitute. That’s OK, that’s fine if that’s where you’re at. It’s just the way men assume …”
“Only some men.”
“A lot. He didn’t even talk to me. I tried to talk to him. I asked him where he worked and where he lived. When I asked him where he lived he gave a strange sort of laugh as if I’d said something wrong.”
“Why did you ask him for a lift? To provoke exactly the sort of situation that arose?”
“No, I didn’t. Not that time. I admit I did last night but it was different with the man in the car. I’d had a lift from London to Kingsmarkham and the guy couldn’t take me any farther.” She seemed to consider. “It was because of what happened in the car that I decided to try walking in the forest and see.”
“You’d better tell me what happened in the car, hadn’t you?”
“He pulled into a lay-by. He did talk then. He said, ‘Come on, we’ll go in the wood.’ I didn’t know what he meant, I really didn’t. Do you know what he thought? He thought I wanted paying first. He said, ‘Will ten pounds do?’ And then he touched me.” Edwina Klein laid her right hand on her left breast. “He touched me like I’m doing now. Like it was a tap or a switch. He didn’t try to put his arms around me or kiss me or anything. It was just offering to pay and feeling the switch. I took out my knife and stuck it in his hand.”
There had been no aunt present when she talked to him then and no black circles to take the character from her face. Her manner now was more subdued, less indignant. Her experience of the court had perhaps chastened her. She waited almost meekly for him to begin questioning her. Miss Kaufmann sat looking at Wexford’s wall map with simulated interest.
“Have you stabbed any other men?” he said abruptly, knowing the remark would be objected to.
Edwina shook her head.
“We won’t mind about that, Mr. Wexford.” It seemed highly suitable to the aunt’s manner and appearance that she should use this obsolete Victorian phrase. She elucidated with something more contemporary. “We’ll forget you said that.”
“As you please,” said Wexford. “When the police use agents provocateurs—as, for example, in the case of a policewoman sitting in a cinema where a member of the audience is suspected of assaulting women—the public, particularly the public of your sort of persuasion, gets up in arms. There’s an outcry when a young policeman deliberately uses a public lavatory frequented by homosexuals. In other words, it’s not all right for them to do this in the interests of justice but it’s all right for you to in the mere interest of a principle. There’s rather a crude name for what you did and were, isn’t there?”
He had been too mealy-mouthed, too gentlemanly, he quickly saw.
“A pricktease,” she said flatly. The aunt didn’t move an eyelid. “I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything but go for a walk in a wood. I wasn’t provocatively dressed.” Scorn came into her voice now and she lifted up her head. “I wouldn’t be! I had jeans on and a jacket. I never wear makeup, not ever. The only thing I did to provoke anyone was be there and be a woman.”
“I think my niece is saying,” said Miss Kaufmann dryly, “that it isn’t possible to be a woman in certain places with impunity. She was out to prove this and she did prove it.”
He let it go. He left it. He felt the force of what the two women said and he knew it was true, and that this was an instance of a policeman knowing that the opposing argument is sounder than his own but of having to stick to his own just the same. That all women who intended to go about by themselves at night should learn self-defense techniques seemed to him the best answer. The alternative was that men’s natures should change, and that was something which might slowly happen over centuries but not in years or even decades. He wrote busy nothings on the sheet of paper in front of him to fill thirty seconds of time and keep them temporarily silent. At last he lifted his head and looked at Edwina Klein. For some reason, perhaps because his eyes were naked, she took off her glasses. Immediately she looked earnest again and very young.
“You know the Williams family, I think?”
She was prepared for this. Somehow she knew that this was what she was really there for. Her answer surprised him.
“Which Williams family? There are two, aren’t there?”
“There may be two hundred in this neighborhood for all I know,” he said sharply. “It’s a common name. I’m talking about the Williams family that live in Alverbury Road, Kingsmarkham. The girl is called Sara. She was in court this morning. I think you know her.�
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She nodded. “We were at school together. She’s a year younger than I am.”
“Did you know Rodney Williams, the dead man?”
She was very quick to reply. Miss Kaufmann looked up as if warningly. “He and Mrs. Williams, yes. Sara and I used to do ballet together.” She smiled. “Believe it or not.” Miss Kaufmann cast up her eyes as if she could hardly believe it. “They’d come for Sara or one of them would. I remember him because he was the only father who ever came. Sometimes he’d come and sit through the whole class.”
Watching pubescent girls in little tutus, thought Wexford, or more likely leotards these days.
“You asked me which family I meant,” he said.
“I slightly know the other one.” She lifted her shoulders. “Veronica Williams looks exactly like Sara.”
He felt a tightening of nerves. She might be a link between the two families. She was the only person he had yet talked to who knew—or admitted to knowing—both sets of Williamses.
“You were aware that they were half-sisters then? You knew Williams was their father?”
“No. Oh no. I suppose I thought—well, I didn’t think about it. I honestly don’t know, really. Perhaps that they might be cousins.”
“When did you last see Rodney Williams?”
“Years ago.” She was becoming nervous, frightened. It meant nothing, it was evidence only of her realization that she had been brought here to face one sort of ordeal and, that over, was being subjected to another of an unexpected kind. “I haven’t seen him for years.”
“Then how do you know Veronica?”
No dramatic crise de nerfs and no hesitation either. “I played tennis against her. When I was at school.”
“She’s three years younger than you.”
“OK. Sure. She was a sort of child prodigy. She was in Haldon Finch’s first six when she was under fourteen.”
It was all reasonable, more than plausible. She had been in Oxford the night Rodney Williams died, having gone up early, a week before her term began. She had told him so last evening and told him, in grave and careful detail, whom to check this with. Bennett was in Oxford checking now, but Wexford had little doubt Edwina hadn’t lied to him.