An Unkindness of Ravens

by Ruth Rendell

  “The meeting was upstairs.” Eve was chilly and unbending, but she had spoken. “We didn’t see people out. They went downstairs and let themselves out. Paulette left with Edwina and her aunt.”

  “They may have left together,” said Amy, “but they didn’t go off together. I looked out of the window and saw Edwina and her aunt getting into the aunt’s car and Paulette wasn’t with them.”

  “What’s out there?” Wexford said abruptly. He pointed at the long windows beyond which was visible only a mass of foliage.

  “The conservatory.”

  Amy opened the doors, swung them open, and put her hand to a switch. Unconventional the Freeborn family might be; they were not feckless. The old domed conservatory, its upper panes of stained glass, claret and green in an Art Nouveau design of tulips, was full of dark green leafy plants, some of which looked subtropical, all demanding ample water and getting it. It must cost a fortune to heat in winter, Wexford thought, coming closer, entering the conservatory, and spotting an orchid or two, the velvety mauve trumpet of a Brunfelsia.

  Eve, without being asked, flooded the garden beyond with light. Touching another switch brought on arc lamps, one on the conservatory roof, another in the branches of an enormous ilex. The garden, so called, hardly deserved floodlighting. It was a wilderness of unmown grass, wild roses, brambles, the occasional hundred-year-old tree. And it was huge, the kind of garden whose owners might justly say they were never overlooked. Shrubs that appeared dense black at this hour made an encircling irregular wall round its perimeter.

  “We don’t any of us go in it much,” said Amy. “Except as a shortcut to the High Street. And when it’s muddy or whatever …” Another sentence was left hanging. She went on vaguely, “Dad’s keen on the conservatory. It’s him that grows the plants.”

  The Cannabis sativa, thought Wexford, but hardly in here. You needed infra-red light for that and plenty of it. He opened the door into the garden, a glass door of slender green and white panels. The cold, damp air breathed water in suspension at him. He noticed a path among the grass, pieces of crazy paving let into what had once been turf, was now wet hay. The girls weren’t coming with him. Eve wound her arms round her body, hugging herself against the cold. Amy breathed on the glass and with her fingertip began drawing a raven with a woman’s face. Wexford went down the path. The arc lamps reached no further than thirty feet or so. He took his torch out of his pocket and switched it on.

  The path led to the gate in the far fence, he thought. That was what Amy meant by a shortcut to the High Street. First it wound through a copse of dark shrubs, laurels, rhododendrons, all glistening and dripping with water. He was curiously reminded of walking in a cemetery. Cemeteries were like this, untended often, places of ornamental shrubs, funereal trees, like this without flowers, unlike this with gravestones.

  He came upon the fence and the gate quite suddenly, almost bumping into the gate, which was in a break in the untrimmed hedge that followed the line of the close-boarding. From here the backs of other big houses could just be seen, two of them with yellow rectangles on black that were lights in their windows. The light didn’t reach here and no moon had appeared. The path curved its way all round the garden. He followed its ellipse, returning on the right-hand side. Bamboo here, half dead most of it, a mass of canes. Then something prickly that caught at his raincoat. He pulled and heard the tearing sound. Turn the torch on it to see what had happened …

  Turn the torch into the midst of this circle of briar roses, brambles with wicked thorns—onto an outflung arm, a buried face, a logo and acronym, red on white cotton—ARRIA and the raven-woman.

  It was more like a cemetery here than he had supposed …

  19

  THE SCENE-OF-CRIMES OFFICER. DR. CROCKER. Sir Hilary Tremlett fetched out of his bed and wearing a camel-hair coat over pajama top and gray slacks. Burden as neat and cool as at mid-morning. And the rain coming down in summer tempests. They had to rig a sort of tent up over the body.

  She had been strangled. With a piece of string or cord perhaps. Wexford himself could see that without reference to Dr. Crocker or Sir Hilary. The photographer’s flash going off made him blink. He didn’t want to look at her any more. It sickened him, though not with physical nausea, he was far beyond that. No pharmacology degree now, no marriage to Richard Cobb, no full flowering of that strange beauty that had been both sultry and remote.

  The girls worried him. Eve and Amy, alone in that house with a young girl, a contemporary, dead in the garden. Marion Bayliss had tried to reach their parents but they were at none of the phone numbers the twins could produce. Neighbors shunned the Freeborns. With the families immediately next door they weren’t even on speaking terms. Eve thought of Caroline Peters and it was she who came to the house in Down Road and stayed for the rest of the night. Wexford crawled into bed at around three. There was a note for him from Dora which he read but did not mark or inwardly digest: “A man called Ovington keeps phoning for you.” She was deeply asleep and in sleep she looked young. He lay down beside her and the last thing he remembered before sleeping himself was laying his hand on her still-slender waist.

  “SHE’D BEEN DEAD ABOUT TWENTY-FOUR hours,” said Crocker, “which is about what you thought, isn’t it?”

  When you don’t get enough sleep, Wexford thought, it’s not so much tired that you feel as weak. Though perhaps they were the same thing. “Strangled with what?” he asked. “Wire? Cord? String? Electric cable?”

  “Because it’s easily obtainable and pretty well impossible to break I’d guess the kind of nylon cord you use for hanging pictures. And where were your suspects—” Crocker looked at his watch “—thirty-six hours ago?”

  “At home with their daughters, they say.”

  Wexford began going through the statement

  Burden had taken from Leslie Kitman, the painter. A description of the missing dust sheet was gone into in some detail. Useless now, of course. It was four months since that dust sheet, concealed in a plastic bag, had been removed by the council’s refuse collectors. And the knife as likely as not with it. Somehow he couldn’t believe in Milvey’s knife, he couldn’t take two Milvey coincidences …

  The walls had been stained and pitted, Kitman said. He couldn’t remember if the stains had looked any different on the morning of 16 April from the afternoon of 15 April. Some of the holes, he thought, might have been filled in by someone else. He had made good some of the cracks and holes with filler, which, when it dried, left white patches. On 16 April and the morning of the 17th he had lined the walls with wood-chip paper and on the Monday following begun painting over the paper.

  Was he going to have those women in again? One of them had killed the girl the night before last. To keep her from confirming their guilt in the matter of the Phanodorm. Only one of them or both? Joy could easily have known where she would be and that she left by the shortcut to the High Street, where she would catch the Pomfret bus.

  Burden was late. But then he too had been up and on the go since early yesterday morning, finally getting to bed even later than Wexford. To be up after midnight, thought Wexford, is to be up betimes. He had always liked that, only no one knew what “betimes” meant any more, which rather spoiled the wit of it. Thinking of going to bed reminded him of Dora’s note, and he was about to pick up the phone and get hold of Ovington when Burden walked in.

  He didn’t look tired, just about ten years older and a stone thinner. He was wearing his stone-colored suit with a shirt the same shade and a rust tie with narrow chocolate lines on it. Might be going to a wedding, thought Wexford, all he needed was a clove carnation.

  “Jenny’s started,” he said. “I took her to the infirmary this morning at eight. There’s not going to be anything doing much yet awhile but they wanted her in promptly.”

  “You’d better start your leave as from now.”

  “Thanks. I thought you’d say that. I must say these babies do pick their moments. Couldn’t she have w
aited a week? She’s going to be Mary, by the way.”

  “After your grandmothers, no doubt.”

  But the coincidence he had related to Wexford had slipped Burden’s memory. “Do you know that never crossed my mind? Perhaps Mary Brown Burden then?”

  “Forget it,” said Wexford. “It sounds like an American revivalist preacher. Keep in touch, won’t you, Mike?”

  Later in the day, with luck, the pathologist’s report on Paulette Harmer would come and also perhaps something from Forensics on the murder weapon. He had Martin go to a magistrate and swear out a warrant to search the Williams home in Liskeard Avenue, and he wasn’t anticipating any difficulties in getting it. In the meantime he had himself driven to the other Williams home. He didn’t feel up to walking, whatever Crocker might advise.

  Sara was mowing the front grass with one of those small electric mowers that cut by means of a line wound on a spool and are principally intended for trimming edges. As he got out of the car the motor whined and stopped cutting, and the girl, crimson with bad temper, up-ended the flimsy machine and began tugging furiously at the line. He heard a hissed repetition of the word Joy disliked so much that she had used of her father’s assault.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  “If you do that with the current switched on,” Wexford said, “one day you’re going to cut your hand off.”

  She cooled as rapidly as she had become incensed.

  “I know. I’ve promised myself I’ll always switch it off before I fiddle with it. But these goddamned things never work for long.” She pulled the prongs out of the socket to oblige him and smiled. An ARRIA tee-shirt today, identical to the one on dead Paulette. “This is the fourth of these spools we’ve had this summer. Do you want to see my mother?”

  As yet she couldn’t know about Paulette. He remembered her thinly veiled boasting to her cousin on the phone and he didn’t think she would much care. Nor would she much care when her mother was arrested for the murder. But perhaps it was natural for victims of incest not to care much about anything. He felt a wrench of pity for her.

  “I want to talk to you first.”

  The garage, now there was no car to occupy it, had become a tool shed and repository for rather battered garden furniture. Sara indicated a deck chair to Wexford. For her part she sat down on an upturned oil drum and set about struggling with the stubborn spool. This looked as if it might go the way of its fellows, three of which lay on a shelf next to a dozen half-used Sevenstar paint cans. He supposed she was busying herself so as not to have to look at him while he talked to her about her father.

  At his first mention of incest, a tactful broaching of what her mother had told him, she didn’t flush but turned gradually white. Her skin, always pale, grew milk-like. And he noticed a phenomenon, perhaps peculiar to her. The fine gold down on her forearms erected itself.

  He asked her gently when it had first happened. She kept her head bent, with her right hand attempting to rotate the spool while with her left forefinger and thumb she tugged at the slippery red line.

  “November,” she said, confirming his own ideas. “November the fifth.” She looked up and down again quickly. “There were only two times. I saw to that.”

  “You threatened him?”

  She hesitated. “Only with the police.”

  “Why didn’t you tell your brother? Or did you? I have a feeling you and your brother are close.”

  “Yes, we are. In spite of everything.” She didn’t say in spite of what but he thought he knew. “I couldn’t tell him.” Like a different girl speaking, her face turned away, “I was ashamed.”

  And she hates her mother, so it was a pleasure to tell her? She gave a final tug and the line came through, far too much of it, yards of loosely coiled scarlet flex.

  Kevin was indoors, having unexpectedly arrived that morning by means of some comfortless and inefficient transport. He was lying spent, exhausted, dirty, and unkempt, on the yellow sofa, his booted feet up on one of its arms. Joy had answered Wexford’s knock with refreshments for Kevin in her hands, a trayful of sandwiches, coffee, something in a carton that was ice cream or yogurt. Wexford shut the door on him, hustled Joy into the kitchen. She was dressed exactly as she had been the day before, even to the head-scarf—had she tied it on to run to the shops for Kevin-provender?—and gave the impression of having never taken her clothes off, of sleeping in them. He told her, quite baldly, about Paulette, but she knew. John Harmer had phoned her while Sara was in the garden. Or that was the explanation she gave Wexford for knowing. He said he would want her later at the police station, she and Wendy. He would send a car for her.

  “What’s my son going to do about his evening meal?”

  “Give me a tin opener,” said Wexford, “and I’ll teach him how to use it.”

  She didn’t observe the irony. She said she supposed he could have something out of a tin for once. At least she didn’t suggest his sister might cook for him, which was an improvement (if that was the way you looked at things) on twenty years ago.

  The next stop was Liskeard Avenue, Pomfret. Martin had got his warrant and was there with Archbold and two uniformed men, PC Palmer and PC Allison, Kingsmarkham’s only black policeman. A tearful Wendy was trying to persuade them it wouldn’t be necessary to strip the paper off her living-room walls.

  At the glass table sat Veronica. Evidently she had been at work on the hem of a white garment that lay in front of her but had laid down her needle when the policemen arrived. Wexford thought of the girl in the nursery rhyme who sat on a cushion and sewed a fine seam, feeding on strawberries, sugar, and cream. It must have been her dress which suggested it to him, with its pattern of small wild strawberries and green leaves on a creamy ground. Tights again, dark blue this time, white pumps. Another thing that made those girls look alike was the way neither of their faces showed their feelings. They were the faintly melancholy, faintly smug, nearly always impassive faces of madonnas in Florentine paintings.

  Wexford’s daughter Sylvia had a cat which uttered soundless mews, going through the mouth-stretching motion of mewing only. Veronica’s “hello” reminded him of that cat, a greeting for a lip-reader, not even as audible as a whisper. Wendy renewed her appeals as he came in, now making them to him only.

  “I’m sorry, Wendy. I understand your feelings. We’ll have the room redecorated for you.” Or for someone, he thought but didn’t say aloud. “And there’ll be as little mess as possible.”

  And it really was Sevensmith Harding’s Sevenstarker they intended to use for the job, four large cans of it, each labeled in red italic script that this was the slick, sheer, clean way to strip your walls. Wexford found himself hoping this wasn’t too gross an exaggeration.

  “But what for?” Wendy kept saying, at the same time, curiously enough, picking up ornaments and pushing them into a wall cupboard, loading a tray.

  “That I’m not at liberty to say,” said Wexford, falling back on one of the stock answers of officialese. “But there’s plenty of time. Please clear the room yourself if you want to.”

  In silence Veronica picked up her sewing. She threaded her needle, using a small device manufactured for that purpose, and slipped a pink thimble onto her forefinger.

  “She’s doing the hem of her tennis dress. She’s playing in the women’s singles final at the club this afternoon.” Wendy spoke in tragic tones, only slightly modified by a faint proud stress on the word “club.”

  Kingsmarkham Tennis Club, presumably, or even Mid-Sussex. “We shan’t stop her,” Wexford said.

  “You’ll upset her.” She drew him into the kitchen, through the already open doorway.

  “You’re not going to say anything to her about you-know-what? I mean you’re not going to go into it?”

  “I’m not a social worker,” he said.

  “Nothing actually happened anyway. I saw to it nothing happened.”

  Impossible, though, not to see Rodney Williams, hitherto no more than liar and c
onman, as some sort of monster. To make a sexual assault on one daughter was heinous enough, but almost immediately to have designs on her younger half-sister?

  “Of course, you wouldn’t have suspected anything might happen if Joy hadn’t warned you.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you I never saw the woman till you—introduced us?”

  “Something you haven’t told me is how you knew Rodney made sexual advances to Veronica. He didn’t tell you but you knew. Veronica was the young girl living at home with her family you led us a wild goose chase about, wasn’t she?” He closed the door between the rooms and leaned against it.

  Wendy nodded, not looking at him.

  “How did you know, Wendy? Did you see something? Did you notice something in his behavior when he thought you weren’t looking? Was that after or before Joy warned you?”

  She mumbled, “I didn’t see anything. Veronica told me.”

  “Veronica? That innocent child in there who’s more like twelve than sixteen? That child you’ve very obviously sheltered from every exposure to life? She interpreted her father’s affectionate kisses, his arm round her, his compliments, as sexual advances?”

  A nod. Then a series of vehement nods.

  “And yet you say ‘nothing actually happened.’ By that I take it you mean there was no more than a kiss and a touch and a compliment. But she—she—saw this as an incestuous approach?”

  Wendy’s response was characteristic. She burst into tears. Wexford pushed up a stool for her to sit on and found a box of tissues, never a difficult task in that house. He returned to the living room, where the carpet was now covered with sheets and from which Veronica had disappeared. Allison was daubing the walls with Sevenstarker, Palmer already at work with a metal stripping tool. The hunch he had about what was under that paper was probably crazy, but besides that it was just possible an analysis of old plaster might show traces of Rodney’s blood. And might not. Anyway, it was work for Leslie Kitman. He could come in next week and put it all back again at the expense of the Mid-Sussex Constabulary.