by Ruth Rendell
Vetch studied Jacqueline’s notes, almost the only piece of concrete evidence he had.
24
Looking through the Wanted column in the East Anglian Daily Times, Norman Smith found an insertion from a man who was seeking a secondhand tape recorder. He didn’t hesitate for long before picking up the phone. Mrs. Barnstaple’s enquiries had not found the tape recorder’s owner, Joan still lay speechless, unable in any way to communicate, but it didn’t cross Norman’s mind to take the thing to police. Or, rather, it crossed his mind only to be dismissed as too trivial when the police were obviously occupied with matters of more moment. Besides, he might get fifty pounds for it, and this would be most welcome in his present penurious, carless state. Fifty pounds, added to the miserable sum for which the van had been insured, would just about buy him a replacement of much the same vintage as the wrecked one. He dialled the number. The advertiser was a free-lance journalist called John Plover who told Norman he would drive over to Greeving on the following day.
Which he did. Not only did he buy the tape recorder on the spot, but he also gave Norman a lift into Stantwich in time for the hospital visiting hour.
In the meantime, Vetch was extracting more information from the notes in the margin of the Radio Times. Check with M’s recording didn’t seem of much significance. He had already checked with two recordings—though not in pursuit of a spurious ascending seventh, whatever that might be—and nothing could shift that aria or put it ten minutes before the time it had actually occurred. Unless Jacqueline had made the note before she heard the aria on television, had been listening during the afternoon to a record of Melinda’s, and wanted to check with the televised opera. But what she had written was the very reverse of that. Moreover, he was unable to find any record of Don Giovanni or any part of it in Lowfield Hall.
“I don’t think my sister had any records of classical music,” said Peter Coverdale, and then, “but my father gave her a tape recorder for Christmas.”
Vetch stared at him. For the first time he realised that a recording need not necessarily mean a black disc. “There’s no tape recorder in the house.”
“I expect she took it back to university with her.”
The possibility which this opened to Vetch was beyond any realistic policeman’s dreams—that Melinda Coverdale had actually been recording when the killers came into the house, that the time might thus be precisely fixed, and the intruders’ voices preserved. He refused to allow himself to speculate about that aspect of it. The first thing the killers would have done was remove the tapes and destroy them, then rid themselves of the recorder itself. The invaluable Eunice, the star witness, was called in.
She said, “I remember her dad giving it to her at Christmas. It was in her room in a leather case, and I used to dust it. She took it to college when she went back in January and she never brought it home after that.” Eunice was speaking the truth. She hadn’t seen the tape recorder since the morning she had listened in to Melinda’s phone conversation. Joan had carried it out from the Hall, Joan who in her madness was a thousand times more sophisticated than Eunice would ever be, and Eunice had not even noticed she had anything in her hand.
While Vetch’s men were scouring Galwich for that tape recorder, interrogating everyone Melinda had known, Eunice marched the two miles to Gallows Corner and caught the bus for Stantwich. In a side room off the Blanche Tomlin ward she found Norman Smith sitting by his wife’s bedside. She hadn’t bothered to tell him she was coming. She had come for the same reason that he came, because it was the thing to do. Just as you went to the weddings and the funerals of people you knew, so you went to the hospital to see them when they were ill. Joan was very ill. She lay on her back with her eyes closed, and but for the rise and fall of the bedclothes, you would have thought she was dead. Eunice looked at her face. She was interested to see what that stretched canvas looked like without paint on it. Stretched canvas was what it looked like, yellow-brown, striated. She didn’t speak to it.
“Keep it nice, don’t they?” she said to Norman after she had made sure there was no dust under the bed. Perhaps he thought she was speaking of his wife, who was also “kept nice,” anchored to her drip feed, tucked up under a clean sheet, for he made no reply. They were both hoping, for different reasons, that Joan would go on like that forever and, going home together on the bus, each expressed the pious wish that such a vegetable existence would not be prolonged.
In forlorn hope, Vetch ordered a search of Lowfield Hall, including the long-disused cellar, and when that brought nothing to light, they began digging up the frostbound flower beds.
Eunice didn’t know what they were looking for, and she was very little concerned. She made cups of tea and carried it out to them, the policemen’s friend. Of much more moment to her were her wages or, rather, the lack of them. George Coverdale had always paid her her month’s money on the last Friday in the month. That last Friday, February 26, would be tomorrow, but so far Peter Coverdale had given no sign that he intended to honour this obligation inherited from his father, which seemed to Eunice very remiss of him. She wasn’t going to use the phone. She walked over to Cattingham and enquired for him at the Angel. But Peter was out. Peter, though Eunice didn’t know this, was driving his sister back to London, to her husband and her children.
Vetch appeared at the Hall on the following morning, and Eunice resolved that he should be her go-between. And this Scotland Yard chief superintendent, Vetch of the Murder Squad, was only too happy to oblige. Of course he would get in touch with Peter Coverdale during the day, with pleasure he would apprise him of Miss Parchman’s dilemma.
“I’ve baked a chocolate cake,” said Eunice. “I’ll bring you a bit with your tea, shall I?”
“Most kind of you, Miss Parchman.”
As it happened, it wasn’t a bit but the whole cake which Eunice was forced to sacrifice, for Vetch had chosen eleven o’clock to hold a conference in the morning room with three high-ranking officers of the Suffolk Constabulary. She left him with a quiet “Thank you, sir,” and returned to the kitchen to think about getting her own lunch. And she was eating it at noon sharp, eating it off the counter in the absence of the table, when Vetch’s sergeant walked in through the gun room with a young man Eunice had never seen before in tow.
The sergeant was carrying a large brown envelope with something bulky inside it. He gave Eunice a pleasant smile and asked her if Mr. Vetch was about.
“In the morning room,” said Eunice, knowing full well whom you ‘sir’-ed and whom you didn’t. “He’s got a lot of folks with him.”
“Thanks. We’ll find our own way.” The sergeant made for the door to the hall, but the young man stopped and stared at Eunice. All the colour had gone out of his face. His eyes went wide and he flinched as if she’d sworn at him instead of speaking perfectly normally. He reminded her of Melinda in this same kitchen three weeks back, and she was quite relieved when the sergeant said, “This way, Mr. Plover,” and hustled him out.
Eunice washed the dishes by hand and ate up her last bar of chocolate. Her last bar, indeed. She wondered if Vetch had yet done anything about Peter Coverdale and her wages. Outside they were still digging up the garden, in the east wind, under occasional flurries of snow. Her favourite serial tonight, Lieutenant Steve in Hollywood or maybe Malibu Beach, but she would enjoy it far more if she could be sure her money was forthcoming. She went out into the hall and heard music.
Music was coming from behind the morning-room door. That meant they couldn’t be doing anything very important in there, nothing that wouldn’t bear a polite interruption. The music was familiar, she had heard it before. Sung by her father? On the television? Someone was singing. Foreign words, so it couldn’t have been one of Dad’s.
Eunice raised her fist to knock on the door, let it fall again as a voice from within the room shouted above the music:
“Oh, Christ!”
She couldn’t identify that voice, but she knew the one tha
t came next, a voice silenced now by massive brain injury.
“Get back in there. We’ve got guns.”
And the others. And her own. All blending with the music, vying with it, drowning it in frenzy and fear.
“Where’s my husband?”
“He’s in the kitchen. He’s dead.”
“You’re mad, you’re crazy! I want my husband, let me go to my husband. Giles, the phone …! No, no … Giles!”
Eunice spoke to Eunice, across the days. “You’d better sit down. You’ve got it coming to you.”
A cackle from Joan. “I am the instrument of One Above,” and a shot. Another. Through the music and the screams, the sound of something heavy falling. “Please, please!” from the girl, and the reloaded guns fired for the last time. Music, music. Silence.
Eunice thought she would go upstairs and repack her things before retribution came from whatever it was in there that acted out, in some way beyond her understanding, the deaths of the Coverdales. But a numbness stunned her mind, and she was less than ever capable of reasoning. She began to walk towards the stairs, relying on that strong body that had always done so well by her. And then that body, which was all she had, failed her. At the foot of the stairs, on the very spot where she had first stood on entering the Hall ten months before, where wonderingly she had seen herself reflected in a long mirror, her legs gave way and Eunice Parchman fainted.
The sound of her falling reached Vetch, who was nerving himself to play the tape once more to an audience of policemen, white-faced now and rigid in their chairs. He came out and found her where she lay, but he could not bring himself to lift her up or even touch her with his hands.
25
Joan Smith still lies speechless and immobile in Stantwich General Hospital. She is in a machine which keeps her heart and lungs functioning, and the medical powers that be are at present deciding whether it might not be a mercy to switch that machine off. Her husband is a clerk in a post office in Wales, and he still keeps the name of Smith. There are, after all, a lot of them about.
Peter Coverdale still lectures on political economy in the Potteries. His sister Paula has never recovered from the deaths of her father and Melinda, and she has had three sessions of electroconvulsive therapy in the past two years. Jeffrey Mont is drinking heavily and almost qualifies for the destination in which Joan Smith placed him at her second meeting with Eunice Parchman. These three are engaged in continuous litigation, for it has never been established whether Jacqueline predeceased her son or he her. If she died first, Giles briefly inherited Lowfield Hall, and thus it must now be his father’s, the property of his next of kin. But if he died before his mother, the Hall should pass to George’s natural heirs. Bleak House.
Jonathan Dexter, tipped for a First Class Honours degree, got a Third. But that was in the early days. He teaches French at a comprehensive school in Essex, has nearly forgotten Melinda, and is going steady with a member of the Science Department.
Barbara Baalham gave birth to a daughter whom they called Anne because Melinda, which was Geoff’s original choice, seemed a bit morbid. Eva cleans for Mrs. Jameson-Kerr and gets seventy-five pence an hour. They still talk about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Greeving, especially in the Blue Boar on summer evenings when the tourists come.
Eunice Parchman was tried at the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court, because they could not find an unbiased jury for the Assizes at Bury St. Edmund’s. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, but in practice may not serve more than fifteen years. Some said it was an absurdly inadequate punishment. But Eunice was punished. The crushing blow came before verdict or sentence. It came when her counsel told the world, the judge, the prosecution, the policemen, the public gallery, the reporters scribbling away in the press box, that she could not read or write.
“Illiterate?” said Mr. Justice Manaton. “You cannot read?”
She answered when he pressed her. She answered, crimson-faced and shaking, and saw those who were not freaks or disabled as she was, write it down.
They have tried to reform Eunice by encouraging her to remedy her basic defect. Steadfastly, she refuses to have anything to do with it. It is too late. Too late to change her or avert what she did and what she caused.
Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon and Spinach.
Three Inspector Wexford Mysteries
BY RUTH RENDELL
“Mystery writing of the highest order … durable, complex, and affectingly human.”
—The New York Times Book Review
MURDER BEING ONCE DONE
The ailing Wexford is in London for a rest cure—one that deprives him of alcohol, rich food, and, above all, police work—when a young girl is found murdered in a gloomy nearby cemetery. The authorities, commanded by Wexford’s nephew, can’t find out who the victim was: the dead girl has no possessions, no past, and a name that seems patently false. And so Wexford defies doctors orders and the big-city condescension of the London police to take a look for himself.
Crime Fiction/0–375–70488–4
NO MORE DYING THEN
Years as a policeman in the placid village of Kingsmarkham have taught Inspector Wexford that the most unlikely people are capable of the most appalling crimes. But what kind of person would steal—and possibly murder—two children? Wexford’s search is complicated when his colleague falls in love with the mother of one of the missing youngsters.
Crime Fiction/0–375–70489–2
SOME LIE AND SOME DIE
In spite of the dire predictions, the rock festival at Sundays seems to be going off without a hitch. Then a hideously disfigured body is discovered in a nearby quarry, and Inspector Wexford must ask how an event devoted to peace and idealism could become the setting for a murder. The victim is a distinctly unglamourous local girl who lied about her friendships with celebrities. But she had a very real connection with the festival’s charismatic star, a singer who inspires an unwholesome devotion in his followers.
Crime Fiction/0–375–70490–6
VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1–800–793–2665 (credit cards only).