An Unkindness of Ravens
Page 26
“But suppose they never find the body? Suppose the weeks go by and July comes and August and with them the grant application and you can’t fill in the section that says ‘Father, if deceased the fact should be stated …’ because only you and Veronica know he is deceased? You have finished your A-levels and the time is going by—the moment has come to take steps for that body to be found without more delay.”
“You might say,” said Crocker, “that the murder was both coolly premeditated and carried out on an impulse.”
“You might. Because of what Sara is, a highly complex personality, this was all kinds of a murder. A ritualistic killing—remember that Veronica was required to stab him too. A revenge killing—Sara had more than half-convinced herself and wholly convinced Veronica of the reality of the incest. When she stabbed Rodney she was a woman out of classical myth, she was Beatrice Cenci. It was an experimental killing, a kind of vivisection, carried out by Sara the scientist, to see if it would work, to see if it could be done. It was murder from disgust, from disillusionment. Rodney, whom she had once worshipped, was just a squalid bigamist with another daughter, a copy of herself, he loved as much as or more than he had ever loved her. But above all, in spite of all those other factors, it was murder for gain, carried out so that she might satisfy her ambition at all costs. All in all, I don’t think that’s the sort of person I’d care to have as my family physician, still less performing surgery on me and mine. So perhaps Rodney was right when he told Sara she was an unsuitable candidate for medical school. Who knows? Perhaps it wasn’t simply meanness with him, he wasn’t quite the bastard you make out. Perhaps he sensed in that daughter of his, without ever examining his conclusions, traits in her character that were abnormal, that were destructive, and it was to these he referred when he said she would never make a doctor.”
Wexford got up.
“I shall call it a day,” he said. “I shall go to the wife of my bosom the same as I ought to go.”
Burden began tidying the room, putting things on to a tray. “And tomorrow the wife of my bosom comes home to me.” He looked pleased, satisfied, hopeful, as if there had been no five months’ long disruption of his happiness. “One of her old pupils at Haldon Finch went in to see her and the baby. An ARRIA member. She told Jenny the raven bit means they’re cleaning up the carrion men have left behind in the world. We did wonder.”
“Ah,” Wexford paused in the doorway. “Something I nearly forgot to tell you. About Williams’s young girlfriend …”
They looked at him. “Williams didn’t have a young girlfriend,” Burden said.
“Of course he did. She had nothing to do with his death, nothing to do with this case, so she hardly concerned us. But a man like Williams—it was in his nature, inevitable. Both his wives knew it, they sensed it. Probably he’d always had a young girlfriend, a succession of them.”
“This one—hers were the other set of prints on the car. No wonder she said her dad didn’t want me to take them. They met at Sevensmith Harding, of course. In the office.”
“Jane Gardner …”
“That’s who he had his date with on April the fifteenth in Myringham. Join her for her babysitting, then spend the night together at the Cheriton Forest Hotel. Why else did he have a bag with him with a single change of underwear and a toothbrush and toothpaste? But the sleeping pills overcame him as he was driving through Pomfret, and instead of going on to meet Jane he was just able to make it to his own house. What she thought was that he’d stood her up. Then, when he disappeared, that he’d gone off with another woman. I had a word with her this morning and she admitted it—no more need to conceal it now we’d made an arrest.”
“What put you on to her?”
“I don’t know. Guesswork. She was the only person I ever spoke to who had a good word for Rodney Williams.”
Wexford let himself out, closing Burden’s blue front door behind him.
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copyright © 1985 by Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd.
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ISBN: 978-1-4532-1075-8
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