The Copper Peacock

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I suppose she did,’ said Burden.

  ‘Well, then. And less than six months ago she was suicidal.’

  It was a fortnight before he saw Sophie’s mother again. Once more she was spending the evening with Jenny, Martin Stacey being away on a protracted business trip abroad.

  ‘He’s glad to get away from me, I expect. It’s been nothing but trouble ever since we got married. Of course he’s been angelic but how long can that go on? I’m always miserable, I cry every day, I’m always in a state, he can’t put up with that for ever. So I’ve decided what to do. You tell him, Jenny. Tell him what I’m doing.’

  Jenny said dryly, ‘It’s a case of if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Hilary’s idea is that the best thing for her to do is make friends with Ann Waterton.’

  ‘I’ve stopped arguing about it, I’ve stopped telling her she has to send Sophie home and I’ve stopped threatening her.’

  ‘Threatening her?’ said Burden, on the alert.

  ‘I only mean telling her I’d get an injunction to stop her seeing Sophie. I don’t suppose I ever would have. But now I’ve decided to like her. The way I see it, I don’t have a choice. And if it works – well, oh, it’s all in the air as yet, but I thought maybe we could all live together. If Sophie’s that crazy about old Ann the answer might be for us all to be together. Sell our houses and buy a big house for the lot of us.’

  Burden thought, but surely it’s not that Sophie is specially ‘crazy’ about Mrs Waterton but that she is specially un-crazy about her stepfather. He did not care to say this aloud. It occurred to him that Hilary Stacey, if not exactly unhinged by all this, was becoming rather strange.

  ‘So what’s happening?’ said Jenny. ‘You’re inviting her to tea, are you? Taking her out for drives?’

  ‘She can drive herself,’ Hilary said shortly. ‘This is deadly serious, Jenny, this is my life, my whole future existence we’re talking about. You could say I’ve lost my only child.’

  Jenny poured her another glass of wine.

  ‘I reason’, said Hilary, ‘that if my daughter likes someone that much I could like her too. After all, we used to be very close, Sophie and I, we used to like the same things, the same people, we had the same taste in clothes, we liked the same food. There’s got to be something about old Ann that I can like. And there is, there is. I can see there’s a lot more to her than I thought at first. I thought Sophie was flattered – you know, a sort of granny-substitute buttering her up and telling her how pretty and clever and mature she was, all that, but Ann’s a very bright woman, she’s very well-read. It’s just a matter of my meeting her more than half way.’

  ‘I wonder what that poor devil of a husband’s going to say,’ was Wexford’s comment when Burden retailed all this to him, ‘having a supererogatory mother-in-law shacking up with him.’

  ‘Hardly “shacking up”,’ Burden protested, ‘and it hasn’t come to that yet. Personally, I don’t think it ever will.’

  ‘Does her mother make her an allowance? Give her pocket money?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never asked.’

  ‘I was thinking of a scene from The Last Chronicle of Barset,’ said Wexford, who was rereading his Trollope. ‘The Archdeacon wants to know how to deal with a recalcitrant son. His daughter asks him if he allows her brother an income and when he replies, yes, says, “I should tell him that must depend upon his conduct.”’

  ‘Does it work?’ said Burden, interested in spite of himself.

  ‘No,’ said Wexford rather sadly. ‘No, it doesn’t. I shouldn’t expect it to, not with anyone of spirit, would you?’

  ***********

  An enquiry about an attack on a cyclist took Wexford and Sergeant Martin to Myland Castle. It was the fourth in a series of such assaults, each apparently motiveless, for the amount of money the cyclists carried was negligible. Three were men, one a woman. Two of the attacks happened by day, two after dark. The only pattern discernible seemed to be that the attacks increased in severity, the first, on the woman, consisting of not much more than pushing her off her bicycle and damaging the machine to make it temporarily unusable, but the fourth had put the victim into intensive care with broken bones and a ruptured spleen.

  All these seemingly pointless acts of violence had taken place in the Myfleet-Myland neighbourhood, this last on the cycle path which led from the Myfleet Road to Myland village and passed on the outer side of the castle moat. Wexford had already questioned staff at the castle. The purpose of this return visit was to reexamine one of the guides. Two members of staff, those manning the south gate and the turnstile, claimed to have seen the victim, a frequent cyclist on the path, but only the guide admitted to the possibility of having seen the perpetrator. Just before the castle closed to the public at four, he had been standing in the gathering dusk on the curtain wall between the two south towers.

  It was a fine day, a sunny island of a day in a week of fog and rain, and the number of visitors to Myland Castle was nearer a midsummer than a December average. While Martin talked to the woman at the turnstile, Wexford went across the great hall in search of the guide. The two o’clock tour had five more minutes to run. Wexford could see the group of about ten people standing on the battlements, the guide pointing across the meadows towards Myland church where the tombs of the castle builders were.

  While he waited Wexford made his way to the remains of a chapel and hall, embedded in the inner court. This had been a town rather than a dwelling house, with gatehouses and barracks, almshouses and courts. From the passage along which he was walking, a flight of stone stairs led up on to the curtain wall and these he took, emerging into the fresh air but also to deep shadow. It was possible to walk round the battlements on this walkway, occasionally passing up and down steps inside the turrets. The wall on the inner side was high enough, it came up to his waist, but rather lower on the outer, and crenellated. However, the path was wide, the wall was more than small-child height, and even a venturesome older person would have had to lean over and lose balance in order to fall.

  Falling would be an atrocious thing, Wexford thought. The battlements here were like cliffs but with no merciful sea at their base. Their height was increased by the moat, a fifteen-foot deep ditch, whose northern side at this point continued downwards the sheer slope of the castle wall. He walked along slowly, keeping in sight the guide, Peter Ratcliffe, and his group, now standing under the great bulwark of the gatehouse flanking tower.

  He was not alone on the walkway. He could hear a party with children mounting the staircase behind him and in front, some twenty or thirty feet ahead, saw two women appear from the steps inside the first of the south turrets. It was probably his fancy that when she saw him – and saw also those behind him – the younger of the women whispered something to her companion and they turned back the way they had come. Most likely they had meant to turn back anyway and retrace their steps along the sunny side. An area of deep cold shade lay between them and Wexford.

  He walked along and through it more quickly. Beyond the turret the sun began, and it was warm and benign on his face. The two women were still ahead of him and as he observed them, talking together, sometimes pointing across the fields or studying the guide book the older one carried, he knew who they were. That was putting it rather too strongly perhaps. He guessed who they might be, he thought he knew. The bright fair hair of one of them told him and her rather protuberant blue eyes, extraordinarily blue and clear just as Burden had described them. As if she sensed his watchfulness, she turned round and those eyes cast their blue beam on him.

  The other woman was small and slight, very upright, perhaps sixty-five, with short grey hair. Hilary Stacey and Ann Waterton. He was so sure that he wouldn’t have hesitated to address them by their names. Inside the gatehouse tower the main exit staircase went down. He saw them enter the arch to the tower and by the time he had reached it they had begun the descent. Ratcliffe’s party immediately appeared, heading in their turn for the e
xit staircase. Wexford pressed himself against the wall to allow their passage and when the last of them was through, Ratcliffe came sauntering up, all smiles and helpfulness.

  ‘Brain-picking time?’ he said. ‘They tell me I’m needed to help you with your enquiries.’

  It was uttered in a facetious way, quotation marks very evident round the last words. Wexford said quietly, ‘Perhaps we can go a few yards along the walkway, Mr Ratcliffe, to the place from which you saw the attacker.’

  *************

  A neighbour called the police. It was nine o’clock on a Friday. He went out into his front garden and heard a car engine running. The only car nearby was shut up in Ann Waterton’s garage. He opened the garage doors and the first thing he saw was the length of hose to the exhaust, passing through the driver’s window.

  He switched off the engine and pulled Ann Waterton out. Giving the kiss of life, what he, an elderly man, called ‘artificial respiration’, had no effect. She was dead. When the police came they found the house unlocked but empty. On the table in the dining room, in a sealed envelope marked ‘Tothe Coroner’, was what they concluded was a suicide note.

  ‘Where was the girl?’ Wexford asked when told about it the next day.

  ‘Gone on a school trip to London,’ said Burden. ‘A theatre visit apparently. Shakespeare, something they were studying. They went in a coach, which didn’t get back to Kingsmarkham until eleven-thirty.’

  ‘And Sophie, finding what had happened, at last went home to mother?’

  ‘It would seem so.’

  At the inquest a verdict was returned on Ann Waterton of suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed. The suicide note, written in the firm round characterless hand of the primary school teacher, was read aloud. I cannot go on. Life has become a meaningless farce. I am totally alone now with no prospect of things ever changing. I am unwanted, an unnecessary woman, a useless drag on society. It is better for everyone this way, and much better for myself. Ann Waterton.

  ‘Totally alone?’ Burden said to Jenny. ‘She had Sophie, didn’t she.’

  ‘Sophie was going home.’

  ‘What, you mean, before all this happened, Sophie meant to leave her? To go home? She’d given in at last?’

  ‘Hilary said so in evidence at the inquest. The coroner asked her about her daughter living with Ann and she told him how Sophie was returning home. She told me privately, between outselves, that she and Sophie had had some talks. They had a talk with Ann there and some talks on their own and the upshot was that Sophie said, all right, she’d come home by Christmas and she made a few conditions, but the crux of it was she’d come home.’

  ‘Conditions?’ Burden took his little boy on his knee. He was wondering, not for the first time, how he would feel in ten years time if this child, this apple of his eye, upped and packed his bags and went to live in someone else’s house. ‘What conditions?’

  ‘Oh, they were to turn the attics into a sort of flat for her. It’s quite a big house. She was to have her own kitchen and bathroom, live separately. Hilary must have agreed. She’d have agreed to almost anything to get Sophie back.’

  ‘And Ann Waterton knew this?’ Mark was thrusting a book under his father’s nose, demanding to be read to. ‘Yes, just a minute, I will, I promise I will.’ He said to his wife, ‘She knew it and that’s what she meant by being “totally alone”, and being “an unnecessary woman”?’

  ‘I suppose so. It’s rather awful, but it’s nobody’s fault. You have to think of it that if the girl hadn’t gone there in the first place Ann Waterton would be dead anyway. She’d just have died six months sooner. She was determined to kill herself.’

  Burden nodded. Mark had opened the book and was pointing rather sternly at the first word of the first line. His father began reading the latest adventure of Postman Pat.

  *************

  ‘Anthony Trollope’, said Wexford, ‘wrote about fifty books. It’s a lot, isn’t it? One of them, a not very well-known one, is called Cousin Henry. I’ve just finished reading it.’ He took note of the expression of Burden’s face. ‘I know this bores you. I wouldn’t be telling you about it if I didn’t think it was important.’

  ‘Important?’

  ‘Well, perhaps not important. Interesting. Significant. It gave me something to think about. Trollope wasn’t what one would normally think of as a psychologist.’

  ‘Too long ago for that, wasn’t it?’ Burden said vaguely. ‘I mean, surely psychology wasn’t invented till this century.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. Psychology is one of those things that was always with us, before anyone gave it a name, that is. Like, well, linguistics, for instance. And “invented” isn’t quite the word. Discovered.’

  It was the end of the day. They were at a table in the saloon bar of the Olive and Dove. Earlier, Wexford had made an arrest, that of Peter Ratcliffe, the Myland Castle guide. His attacks on the cyclists he was unable adequately to account for, though he had fully confessed to all of them. The explanation he gave Wexford was a strange one, it almost pointed to a disturbance of the man’s mind. His daily presence in the castle, year after year, day after day, had brought him to a curious identification with its former defenders. It impelled him to attack those he saw as intruders. Perhaps it would only have been a matter of time before the paying visitors appeared to him in the same light and he injured one of them.

  Wexford didn’t know whether he believed this or not. No court would. Burden had stared in incredulous disgust when Wexford repeated Ratcliffe’s words. That was why – partly why – he had changed the subject to Cousin Henry.

  ‘Bear with me,’ he said, ‘while I give you a brief outline of the plot.’ Burden didn’t exactly demur, not quite. His face was a sigh incarnate. Wexford said, ‘I promise you it’s relevant.’ He added, ‘It even gets exciting.’

  Burden nodded. He looked reflectively into his beer.

  ‘The old squire dies’, Wexford began, ‘and leaves all his property to his nephew Henry. Or that’s how it appears, that’s what everyone thinks, and Henry comes into his inheritance. Then he finds a later will which leaves everything to his cousin Isabel. Henry’s best bet is to destroy this will but he doesn’t. He daren’t. He hides it in a place where he thinks it will never be found, in fact in a book in the library, a book that is so boring no one would ever want to take it down and open it. Why doesn’t he destroy it? He’s afraid. It’s an official document, an almost sacred thing, it exercises an awesome power over him, it’s almost as if he’s afraid of some unnamed retribution. Yet if he destroys it – a simple thing to do, though Henry, in his mind, discovers terrible difficulties in the way of doing this – if he does, all will be secure for ever and he the undisputed man in possession. But he can’t destroy it, he daren’t. Good psychology, don’t you think? People behave like that, inexplicably, absurdly, but that’s how they behave.’

  ‘I suppose so. Thousands would. Have destroyed it, I mean. Most would.’

  ‘Not the law-abiding. Not the conventional. Someone like you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have nicked it in the first place. What’s the point of all this? You said there was a point.’

  ‘Oh, yes. The Stacey-Grant-Waterton affair, that’s the point.’

  ‘Burden looked up at him, surprised. ‘No wills involved in that, so far as I know.’

  ‘No wills,’ said Wexford, ‘but another sort of document, a sacred sort of document. A suicide note.’

  ***********

  Wexford was silent for a moment, enjoying the look on Burden’s face that was a mixture of incredulity and sheer alarm. ‘Let me give you a scenario,’ he said. ‘Let me give you an alternative to what actually happened, a lonely unhappy woman at last succeeding at taking her own life.’

  ‘Why have an alternative to the facts?’

  ‘Just listen to a theory then. Ann Waterton didn’t commit suicide. She had no reason to commit suicide. She was happy, she was happier than
she had been since her husband died. She had found an affectionate, charming granddaughter, who wanted more than anything in the world to live with her.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Burden. ‘Sophie may have been living with her, but she wasn’t going to go on doing that. She was going home. She was going back to her mother and her stepfather.’

  ‘Was she? Do we have anyone’s word for that but Hilary Stacey’s?’

  ‘She told the coroner under oath.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Wexford. ‘D’you want another drink?’

  ‘I don’t think I do. I want to hear the rest of what you’ve got to say.’

  ‘All right. The fact is that we have no evidence that Sophie intended to go home but Hilary Stacey’s word.’

  ‘Sophie herself. Sophie could presumably confirm it?’

  Wexford smiled rather enigmatically. ‘Hilary Stacey’s her mother. She may have been at odds with her but I don’t think she’d shop her own mother.’

  ‘Shop her?’

  ‘Suppose Hilary Stacey murdered Ann Waterton? I saw them at Myland Castle about ten days ago. I recognised them from your description. If I hadn’t been there, if so many visitors hadn’t been there, an exceptional number for December but it was an exceptionally nice day, I think Hilary – Oh, yes, it’s hindsight – was going to push Ann off that wall. It would have been, would have looked, like an accident. It was made impossible by the circumstances.

  ‘Three days afterwards Sophie went on a school trip to a London theatre. Hilary was often at the house in Coulson Gardens, it would have been nothing out of the way for her to drop in during the evening. The next step was to give Ann a heavy dose of sleeping pills. She would have made them both a drink, given her the pills in that. Ann was a small slight woman, it looked to me as if she weighed no more than seven stone. Hilary Stacey, on the other hand, is tall and strong and no more than – what? Thirty-seven? Thirty-eight? She carried Ann out to the garage, by way of the communicating door from the house, sat her in the driving seat and fixed up that business with the hosepipe and the exhaust.