by Ruth Rendell
“Why not? We don’t know—yet. Maybe he didn’t know how or where. Maybe by the time he’d decided on a place and a means days had gone by. The weather was still very hot, if you remember. The body had begun to smell. Decay had started. Perhaps he simply couldn’t face touching it to get it out of there and reasoned that in time the smell would fade, only he and Ross and Colin Fry would be working in there and Megan’s remains could be moved by Ross himself.
“We can all have a break for coffee now and I’ll resume in a quarter of an hour.”
Wexford phoned the Assistant Chief Constable’s office and asked for an appointment to see him. That day if possible. A date was fixed for four in the afternoon. He drank his coffee on his own and in silence, thinking about things, speculating what might have happened if Rick had removed and buried Megan’s body. It might easily not yet have been found. In that case they would never have connected the two girls, the surrogacy scam might never have come to light or Norman Arlen’s deception been exposed.
For a moment he let his thoughts dwell on Sylvia and her new baby. Mary Fairfax would be her name. It had a fine ring to it. Dora was already allowing herself to hope once more that Sylvia and Mary’s father might get together again. And of course a baby should have a father living with her, though so many didn’t these days. Wexford caught himself up. His first priority was this case and explaining it satisfactorily to his team, then to the Assistant Chief Constable, to review the babies incidental to this whole sorry business, motherless African babies—what would become of them?—Megan’s adopted baby, the baby Megan never carried to term, the babies longed for by the two German couples and Gwenda Brooks, the baby Brand himself. He went back into his office and the waiting team. A hand went up before he had even begun.
“Who’s the third killer, sir?” This was Barry Vine.
“It will soon emerge,” said Wexford. “I want to go back now to Amber Marshalson,” he continued. “Poor little Amber was a classic example of what may happen when you give an only child everything she wants. Everything she asks for, call her a princess and tell her she’s the most marvelous thing to happen since the wheel.”
“Excuse me, sir.” This was Barry again. “But shouldn’t that be ‘sliced bread’?”
“We’re a non-cliché shop here, I hope, Barry. Back again to Amber. Those of you who have no children but will have, take warning. George Marshalson gave his daughter everything she wanted, everything he thought she wanted, including another mother. Diana had no children of her own, though she was still young enough to have them, but George, of course, wanted no more. He had one and that one was perfect, never to be matched. Probably, Diana tried to be what a parent should be and George had never been: a mentor as well as a mother, an exemplar and teacher, or perhaps, worse, a big sister. Nothing worked. Amber hated Diana.
“Amber’s pregnancy must have shaken George’s slavish admiration for her, if not his love. But perhaps not. In his eyes Daniel Hilland would have been entirely to blame. He told himself this was the result of near-rape, certainly seduction. I don’t think giving birth to Brand was particularly traumatic for Amber. In her circle, having a baby in your teens is looked upon as rather dashing. Cool, I dare say, or wicked.”
“Hard-core,” said Damon.
“Yes, thank you, DC Coleman. Amber didn’t even have to leave school. The hated Diana, barely spoken to in former days, was handy as babysitter and full-time nanny. Why didn’t Diana go? Why didn’t she just leave? She no longer loved George and she had never loved Amber. She had money of her own, plenty of it, even without working. But she didn’t go. She stayed and looked after Brand. And it seemed as if Amber and Brand would be there forever. Well, Brand would because Amber would very likely go off to university and after university would come a job. Brand would stay and Amber might possibly go to London or America or somewhere in Europe—or even marry a man who didn’t want her child.
“Then the Hillands offered Amber their flat in a London suburb. Not that offer but her acceptance of it accomplished what you would call, Barry, ‘signing her own death warrant.’ If she had said no she’d be alive today. But she said yes.”
He looked at the perplexed faces confronting him and at one that wasn’t puzzled, one on which light was dawning, causing her to wince. “Oh, my God,” Hannah said softly.
“Ross Samphire was having a love affair. His much-vaunted happy family life was so much image making. We saw Ross driving away from Mill Lane and then we saw Lydia Burton at her gate. Knowing Lydia Burton ‘had someone,’ as they say, we assumed, or we assumed for a while, she was Ross’s girlfriend. But if this were so it would have meant Ross had actually been in Mill Lane at half past midnight on the eleventh of August, somewhere he would never have dreamt of being when his brother was due there an hour or so later to do murder. Besides, why would Ross and Lydia have used Colin Fry’s flat for their assignations when Lydia was a single woman with a house of her own?
“No, Ross’s girlfriend lived in Mill Lane, but she wasn’t Lydia Burton. She was a rich woman and a married woman who had no wish for her affair to be discovered and she perhaps divorced. Diana Marshalson wanted her affair with Ross to continue, but there was something else she wanted far more. Enough to kill for and pay someone to kill for.”
Wexford paused, looking from one startled face to another, all but Hannah’s. He went on, “All the way through this case we’ve been looking for the reason why. Why? What was the motive for killing Amber? Amber was leaving, she was going to take away the child George and Diana found such a burden, take him to London, and maybe they’d scarcely see him again. So why take the appalling step of killing her? Maybe Diana didn’t think of it. It could have been Ross. But Diana handed over the money to be passed on to Ross’s poor brother, so dogged by ill luck as he was.
“Why? Diana put up a very good show of finding Brand a nuisance, a bit of a pain to have around. No one would have guessed how she really felt, that though she had had no children with her first husband, the blame for that she thought was his. George didn’t want children. She was growing older, by now she was too old to have a baby. But Amber had one and by chance it was she who was destined to look after him, to bring him up. Diana may have found caring for Brand a chore at first. Not for long. She soon came to love him. She loved him, she adored him, as if he were her own. No wonder she didn’t want to keep a nanny. And Brand was virtually hers. She was becoming first in his life. His mother wasn’t indifferent to him but she was very young and she was careless. Without Diana, where would he have been? She worshipped him—much as her husband had worshipped Amber.
“But Amber was going. She was going to London and taking the beloved child with her. It was a curious situation, wasn’t it? There was George wanting Amber and Brand to stay because he wanted Amber, and Diana wanting Amber and Brand to stay because she wanted Brand. And Amber wanting to go because a flat in London meant freedom and life and excitement.
“So Diana paid Ross to pay Rick to kill Amber so that she could keep Brand, whom she loved,” said Wexford. He walked behind his desk and sat down, resisted the temptation to put his head in his hands, spoke the final words of his explanation. “Love doesn’t excuse everything. It doesn’t excuse anything. This was the worst and the wickedest motive—and I mean wicked in its old true sense, Damon—for murder I have ever known. This was what evil is. Look no further.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Since her first novel, From Doon with Death, published in 1964, Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for 1976’s best crime novel for A Demon in My View, and the Arts Council National Book Award, genre fiction, for The Lake of Darkness in 1980.
In 1985, Ruth Rendell received the Silver Dagger for The Tree of Hands, and in 1987, writing as Barbara Vine, won her third Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for A Dark-Adapted Eye.
She won the Gold Dagger for Live Flesh in 1986 and, as Barbara Vine, for A Fatal Inversion in
1987 and for King Solomon’s Carpet in 1991.
Ruth Rendell won the Sunday Times Literary Award in 1990, and in 1991 she was awarded the Crime Writers’ Assocation Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding contribution to the genre. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 was made a Life Peer.
Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages.
Ruth Rendell has a son and two grandsons, and lives in London.
Also by Ruth Rendell
* * *
CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS
From Doon with Death
Sins of the Father
Wolf to the Slaughter
The Best Man to Die
A Guilty Thing Surprised
No More Dying Then
Murder Being Once Done
Some Lie and Some Die
Shake Hands Forever
A Sleeping Life
Death Notes
The Speaker of Mandarin
An Unkindness of Ravens
The Veiled One
Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter
Simisola
Road Rage
Harm Done
The Babes in the Woods
NOVELS
To Fear a Painted Devil
Vanity Dies Hard
The Secret House of Death
One Across, Two Down
The Face of Trespass
A Demon in My View
A Judgement in Stone
Make Death Love Me
The Lake of Darkness
Master of the Moor
The Killing Doll
The Tree of Hands
Live Flesh
Talking to Strange Men
The Bridesmaid
Going Wrong
The Crocodile Bird
The Keys to the Street
A Sight for Sore Eyes
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
The Rottweiler
Thirteen Steps Down
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
The Fallen Curtain
Means of Evil
The Fever Tree
The New Girl Friend
The Copper Peacock
Blood Lines
Piranha to Scurfy
NOVELLA
Heartstones
NONFICTION
Ruth Rendell’s Suffolk
The Reason Why
BY RUTH RENDELL WRITING AS BARBARA VINE
A Dark-Adapted Eye
A Fatal Inversion
The House of Stairs
Gallowglass
King Solomon’s Carpet
Anna’s Book
No Night Is Too Long
The Brimstone Wedding
The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy
Grasshopper
The Blood Doctor
The Minotaur
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2007
Copyright © 2005 by Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.anchorbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rendell, Ruth.
End in tears: a Wexford novel / Ruth Rendell. 1. Wexford, Inspector (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Teenage girls—Crimes against—Fiction. 3. Police—England—Sussex—Fiction. 4. Sussex (England)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6068.E63E53 2005
823’.914—dc22 2005026619
eISBN: 978-0-307-38636-6
v3.0