by Ruth Rendell
He saw her wince. A conviction for murder, he thought, carries a mandatory life sentence. Self-defense doesn’t always work, often doesn’t work. If a woman gives evidence of repeated abuse and it is known that on the final occasion she reacted by killing, a jury is going to want to know what was so special about the last time. Why kill then when in the past she had borne the abuse passively? Pick up a knife and kill an unarmed man? That’s murder. It’s just as much murder as if a stranger came up to him in the street and stabbed him. And murder carries a mandatory life sentence, there’s no choice about it, no second- and third-degree murder such as they have in the United States. Here murder is murder and the punishment is life.
"I am going to take you back with me now, Mrs. Devenish, and you will of course want a solicitor to be present."
"Are you arresting me?"
"Of course."
"This is what I’m going to say. Stephen always said I was—was mentally unstable and he was right. That morning he cut me and I went mad, I lost control, I don’t know what I did or why I did it. I must have just grabbed the knife and stabbed him in a frenzy. I don’t remember it, it’s all a blur, it was then. They say you see red. I did, I just saw red in front of my eyes. I lost my mind. I didn’t even see him when I struck out." She stared at Wexford as if she saw red now and her whole body shook. "I went mad."
He felt an inward sigh relax him. She might be lying, but he didn’t care. If she stuck to that story—and her solicitor, her counsel, would love it—she would be saved.
"Jane will look after my children," she said in the most tranquil tone he had ever heard her use. "I know I may not see them for a long time. They will be fine with Jane."
27
In the months that followed, the hunt went on for Ted Hennessy’s killer, but inquiries had reached a stalemate. It was thought that the petrol bomb had been thrown by John Keenan or Joe Hebden, but neither of them would give evidence against the other—and no one admitted possessing or handling any bombs.
In the middle of October, Brenda Bosworth took her three children out of school for a week and up to Clacton for a holiday in her mother’s caravan. As soon as she was out of the way, Miroslav Zlatic and Maria Michaels were married in the new Bridal Bower at the Cheriton Forest Hotel with the maximum of celebration and the minimum of secrecy. Heavily pregnant Lizzie Cromwell, along with her mother, attended the wedding and the buffet lunch afterward, not at all upset. For, as Lizzie told everyone over the Spanish champagne, Miroslav had only got married for the sake of British citizenship and Maria was years and years older than him.
Two weeks later Lizzie gave birth to a daughter in the maternity wing of the Princess Diana Memorial Clinic and named her Millennia. During the single day and night Lizzie was in there, Colin Crowne, who had been consoling Brenda for Miroslav’s defection, moved in with her. Debbie said there was no way she was going to live three doors away from that pair, but instead of 16 Oberon Road (now tenanted by cousins of the Meekses) Kingsmarkham Housing Department, delighted to repossess 45 Puck Road, allotted Debbie and Lizzie and Millennia a two-bedroom flat in Glebe Close.
Further reshuffling took place in the tower when John Keenan finally accumulated enough money to buy DNA-TESTING equipment, used it, and proved he was not the biological father of the redheaded Winona. He rented a room in the Mitchells’ house—which was strictly against Kingsmarkham housing rules—while determining his future. Shirley Mitchell, though his wife’s sister, was entirely on his side. Shirley’s husband was seriously wore ried about her since she had taken to grabbing and shaking any child she came upon dropping a chocolate bar wrapper or crisp packet in the street. Sooner or later she would hit one of them and get taken to the European Court of Human Rights.
Doing well at the University of Myringham and showing a particular aptitude for social sciences, Tasneem Fowler had also been rehoused. Kingsmarkham Housing eventually gave her a "studio" flat quite near where Debbie and Lizzie Cromwell lived. At their divorce hearing she and Terry were awarded joint custody of Kim and Lee, but Terry got care. The two boys, asked with whom they would prefer to live, opted for their father.
Tracy Miller made so much money working from morning till night that she set up her own house-cleaning business with ten employees, called it Tracy’s Treasures, and put down a deposit on a house for herself and her daughters in Eton Road.
One morning, leaving a house in Titania Road that the occupants had been using as the headquarters of a cocaine-dealing syndicate, Wexford saw a man come out of the tower wearing a Burberry. It was a fawn-colored raincoat with a heart-shaped stain at the hem on the left-hand side. It took him a few seconds to identify the man as Peter McGregor, partner of Sue Ridley, once the Crownes’ neighbor in Puck Road. What he had been doing in the tower Wexford didn’t know, and seeing the general goings-on, perhaps it was just as well he didn’t. McGregor gave him a calm, innocent stare before looking away. Wexford knew he couldn’t prove anything. Besides, he had the new one now, no longer new, really, but becoming comfortably battered and even slightly stained.
He had another call to make, this time in Harrow Avenue. Donaldson drove him there but Wexford was early, so he walked up the hill and saw, with some undefined satisfaction, that the estate agent had put a sold sign up at the gate of Woodland Lodge. Good. It was hers, in her name. If it had been in Stephen Devenish’s, God knew if she would ever have got the money, seeing that no one may benefit from his or her crime.
Now, nine months after Stephen Devenish’s death, she was living in Brighton, she and her children, in a house she had bought next door but one to Jane Andrews. She would still live with and carry through her life the stigma of a conviction for manslaughter. Her plea of diminished responsibility, that she had gone mad and scarcely knew what she was doing, had saved her, and she had received no more than probation.
Sentencing her, the judge said, "We are taught that we should not speak ill of the dead. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. ’Of the dead nothing but good.’ There must be exceptions to that axiom. Stephen Devenish was a hard worker, a good provider, and, I believe, an honest man. He was also, in other respects, a monster. This woman lived a life of unimaginable suffering, abuse, and torture at the hands of a miscreant who used her as a punching bag for his sadistic impulses."
Louise Sharpe had remarried. Her husband was the man who had rescued her when she attempted suicide by walking into the sea. Six months pregnant, she expected the birth of her baby at the end of July.
Revengeful as ever, Rochelle Keenan went to the police with the film she had made of the Kingsmarkham riot, claiming that it showed beyond a doubt that it was her husband, John, who had thrown the petrol bomb that killed Detective Sergeant Hennessy. Burden, who confronted her, was a little taken aback. He thought he had seen everything, become hardened to everything, and that nothing remained to astonish him. But a wife endeavoring to secure for her husband life imprisonment merely because he resented a cuckoo in his nest, that shook him. He put the film on his video transmitter—what else could he do? He was almost glad when the picture that appeared wasn’t much of an improvement on a store’s closed-circuit television, grainy, gray images of barely recognizable people. He certainly saw someone throw a bottle with a rag stuffed into its neck—he saw three men throwing bottles and a woman throwing a brick—but whose hands these missiles came from he had no idea at all.
Still, he would keep trying to find Hennessy’s killer. He would never give up, he said.
"When you’re dead," said Wexford, "and they open you up, they’ll find Get Hennessy’s Killer written on your heart."
"I hope they’ll find He Did written underneath."
"We all hope that, Mike."
These days Wexford often found himself in somber mood. Sylvia and Neil had at last decided to divorce. Strangely, they got on better since they had come to this decision than they had for years, and sometimes Wexford hoped that this new accord might lead to reunion. They were still living in the sa
me house, if on different floors of it, the old rectory being quite large enough to accommodate this arrangement. The children knew but showed no signs of minding while both parents were under the same roof. It would be a different story, Wexford thought, when Neil moved out.
Or when there was someone else for Neil or for Sylvia? "An intervener," as Stephen Devenish had called it, in another context. Dora took the attitude that while they were still together, nothing was decided, nothing was definite. But he, when he considered it quietly to himself, asked how he would feel about this pair if they were not his own daughter and son-in-law, the parents of his grandsons. If they were strangers, wouldn’t he perhaps think the best course for everyone’s ultimate happiness was an absolute separation?
Sylvia was in the house when he got home that evening. He never mentioned the imminent divorce unless she did. She usually did, particularly when she could take advantage of the children’s being out with their father to list Neil’s manifold faults and sometimes, to do her justice, her own. But this evening she gave him an especially loving kiss when he came in and said she had something to tell him, she had a confession to make.
Wexford’s heart sank a little. If her mother had been in the room, this couldn’t have happened. Neither daughter cared to shock their mother, knowing her tongue could be rough and her opinions strong. But they told their father anything. He was unshockable, or so they believed, and now he was afraid she was going to tell him she had a lover. Or had met someone who would soon be her lover. Or Neil had a girlfriend. Things of that sort—what else could a confession be?
Something quite different.
"Dad," she said, "do you remember once saying to me that you couldn’t imagine me breaking the law?"
"I think so," he said guardedly.
"Well, I don’t know if have broken the law, but I may have covered up a crime." She looked at him warily. "I can’t remember if I ever told you how, when I was first working for The Hide helpline, a woman calling herself Anne phoned. Her husband was out in the garden with the baby, she said, and then she saw him coming in and she was afraid of being found talking to me."
"Maybe you did. Very discreetly, I’m sure."
"Yes, well, that must have been last April. She was terrified of her husband, but like so many of them she wouldn’t leave. Her name wasn’t Anne at all, of course it wasn’t, they do give false names. Well, she phoned again but what she had to say was quite different. He wasn’t abusing her anymore, all that had stopped, she didn’t say why. She said she wanted to ask me about the law relating to—well, to abused women who kill their husbands."
"Go on."
"First of all I said I wasn’t a lawyer, I couldn’t help her. I said The Hide had the services of a solicitor—we have, she does it for free—who would advise her if she’d like to ring this number. And I was going to give her the number when she said she wouldn’t do that, she didn’t want that, all she wanted was to know what was the best excuse a woman could use if she killed her husband. Could she plead self-defense?"
A gentle chill, not unpleasurable, ran through Wexford’s body. "So what’s this confession?"
Sylvia looked at him speculatively. "I told her—what I knew. What I’d learnt, that is, when I had my couple of days’ training for working there. I said that if a woman used a knife or a gun to kill an unarmed man or a sleeping man, she couldn’t use self-defense. And that was because no matter what he’d threatened to do to her in the future or what had happened in the past, the ’criterion of immediacy’ for manslaughter—I remembered that phrase—wouldn’t be there. A jury might be understanding, but they couldn’t acquit her and she’d get life imprisonment because that’s the sentence that’s mandatory for murder."
"And?"
"She said, but what about being provoked to it beyond bearing. I said to forget all that. The only thing was to plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. In other words, a woman goes mad, picks up the gun or whatever, and loses control. You’ll always be stamped a criminal, I said, but you probably won’t go to prison.
"And then, a few months later, that woman I recognized as abused in the photo came up in court and pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and it all came back to me what I’d said. I knew then, I just knew Fay Devenish was Anne and I’d told her how to avoid a life sentence for murder. And my own father was the investigating officer in the case.
"I’ve wanted to tell you for ages, but I’ve only just plucked up the courage."
Wexford drew a deep breath. So much depended on when this phone call had been made. Stephen Devenish had died on the morning of July 29. "When was this, Sylvia?"
"When was it? Let’s see. It was ten at night, I do remember that. The end of July, I think. The children’s school had broken up."
"When did they break up?"
"I don’t remember. ’Anne’ probably phoned on a Wednesday or a Friday, because those are the nights I usually work. I mean, there are exceptions, but there weren’t that week. I’ve checked. Dad, tell me, have I done something dreadful?"
Seriously perturbed now, Wexford went to find last year’s calendar. He always kept calendars for a year or two. If "Anne" had made that phone call before July 29, it meant Fay Devenish’s attack on her husband had not been a reaction to his cutting her—perhaps he hadn’t cut her, perhaps she had cut herself—but premeditated murder, planned possibly for a long time. Wexford closed his eyes, opened them, found the calendar in his desk pigeonhole, and took it with him, reading it on the way, nearly falling down the bottom four stairs.
"Tell me, Dad," Sylvia said. "Don’t keep me in suspense."
"The twenty-ninth, when Stephen Devenish died, was a Tuesday. That was the day school broke up. Your punctilious mother has written it on the calendar. It must have been a Wednesday or a Friday when Fay Devenish phoned you, so it was either Wednesday the thirtieth or Friday, August the first." He gave her a half smile. "You’re off the hook."
"Thank God," she said, "but I did tell her how to get herself off the hook."
"I know. But by then he was already dead. Sylvia ..." He went over to her and took her hand. "There’s no harm done."
Also by Ruth Rendell
A Sight for Sore Eyes
Francine has been scolded and sent to her room. When she peeks downstairs, she witnesses the brutal murder of her mother. But nine months later, when Francine emerges from her near-catatonic state, she is unable to identify the killer.
Harriet, a fading beauty, searches the local classifieds for a handyman who can perform odd jobs around the house and alleviate the sexual boredom of her marriage to a wealthy older man.
Teddy, a handsome young man from a deeply troubled home, never questions the ease with which he has learned to kill to get what he wants.
The lives of these three collide for surprising, harrowing-and unforgettable—effect. A Sight for Sore Eyes is an extraordinary achievement from a writer, who, after forty-five books, dozens of awards, and decades of international acclaim, continues to expand the boundaries of her craft.
Seal Books / ISBN 0-7704-2845-2
Also by Ruth Rendell
Road Rage
The woods outside Kingsmarkham were lovely, dark, and deep. And they were about to vanish forever when the new highway cut through them. Chief Inspector Wexford hiked there for the last time, he believed, to say a quiet farewell to this special place. But that achingly beautiful walk would signal instead a chilling change in his life, when a policeman’s detached perspective changed into the terrifying fears of a victim....
While Wexford privately despaired about the highway project, local residents and outsiders were organizing a massive protest. Some of them were desperate enough to kidnap five hostages and threaten to kill them. One hostage was Wexford’s wife, Dora. Now, combining high technology with a cop’s gut instincts, Wexford and his team race to find the kidnappers’ whereabouts. Because someone has crossed from politi
cal belief to fanaticism, and as the first body is found, good intentions may become Wexford’s personal path to hell.
Seal Books / ISBN: 0-7704-2784-7
Also by Ruth Rendell
CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS
BY RUTH RENDELL WRITING
AS BARBARA VINE
Copyright © 1999 by Kingsmarkham Enterprises
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