by Ruth Rendell
‘Half an hour later Joanna was lying dead at the bottom of the stairs. She had been pushed down or thrown down, and by someone who saw himself as opposing the Great Dragon, the Antichrist. His mission accomplished, he left Giles to clear up the mess and, presumably, face the music. This, Giles thinks, wise after the event, was intended as his punishment, for with these people confession and absolution are not enough. There must be atonement. Besides, Giles had sinned again since he confessed at Congregation. He had repeated his sin, the same sin. Only after he had left the house did Sophie come out of her room and saw what had happened.’
‘The first thing they did was phone their grandmother. They were in a blind panic and she had said she would always be there for them. She was. She was a rock and a sanctuary The children calmed down. She saw their difficulty, she understood Giles’s terror of his father, of the law, of the discovery of his behaviour with Joanna - but she thought he had killed Joanna. She didn’t believe in the intervention of a third person and nor did Sophie. They were liars, you see, and liars think the rest of the world lies like they do. Of course, a sensible woman would have advised them to phone us at once, waste no more time, but Matilda Carrish wasn’t very sensible. Clever, even brilliant, talented, but neither sensible nor wise. Bring your Irish passport, she told Giles. Leave Joanna where she is and leave her car and come here as soon as you can get here.’
‘They obeyed her to a certain extent. They would go, but why not go in Joanna’s car and take her body with them? Sophie didn’t believe Giles’s story so the police wouldn’t. If Joanna’s body was here and they weren’t, wouldn’t the police assume them guilty? But if there was no body. . . Giles was only fifteen and he had been enormously afraid but I think some spirit of adventure came into it now. He could drive and he wanted to drive. Freedom was what was in Sophie’s mind. Get away from here, get away from those parents. Make it look, they both thought, as if Joanna is still alive and has abducted us. . .’
Wexford’s phone was ringing. Dora’s voice said, ‘Have you been trying to get me? I’m at Sylvia’s with her and Johnny.’ Johnny? Things had been moving fast. ‘Where are you, anyway?’
‘In a pub.’
‘I see. If you’ve been worrying about the rain, there’s no water lying anywhere near our garden but we’ve still got the sandbags and if there’s any sort of threat Johnny says he’ll come and put them up against the wall. See you later.’
‘Do you know what Plus ça change plus c’est La même chose means?’
‘No,’ said Burden.
‘It’s pretty well the only bit of French I do know,’ Wexford said. He went on unfairly, ‘It’s just that Sylvia’s new chap sounds just the same as the last one.’
Burden said in a nasty tone, his upper lip curled, ‘You are a master of suspense, aren’t you? You love it. You even get better at it. I reckon you’ve been working on it.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Wexford.
‘Who killed Joanna Troy, is what I mean.’
‘I’m coming to that. Let’s go back a few hours to the evening paper delivery.’
‘The what?’
‘Wait. It’s important. We all have the same Queen Street newsagent round my neighbourhood and Lyndhurst Drive is my neighbourhood. As you know, Antrim is only a few streets away from me. The round begins, not in Queen Street itself, nor does it touch Godstone Road. Therefore it also fits to take in most of Lyndhurst Drive, but starts in Chesham Road, follows my road, Caversham Avenue, Martindale Gardens, the north side of Kingston Drive, back along the south side and ends on the corner of Lyndhurst Drive and Kingston Drive. The last house in Lyndhurst is covered by the round and is always the last house at which a paper is delivered. That house, as you know, is Antrim. The person who delivers the Kingsmarkham Evening Courier is usually but not invariably a girl much the same age as Giles Dade and Scott Holloway, Dorcas Winter. On Saturday the twenty-fifth of November she didn’t deliver those papers. She seldom did on a Saturday, because she had a violin lesson. Her father took over.’
‘He delivered the papers on foot and got very wet in the process. When he came to the last house, which was of course Antrim, he didn’t have to ring the doorbell because Giles heard the paper fall on to the mat and went to the door. But even if Joanna had heard it and gone to the door it wouldn’t have worried him. He had his excuse ready. Seeing that he knew Giles, they were both members of the same church and, more than that, he was Giles’s mentor, assigned to him and teacher and guide. Could he come in and dry himself before returning home?’
‘Members of the Good Gospellers, you mean?’
‘The newsagent’, said Wexford, ‘is Kenneth, alias Hobab, Winter.’
Chapter 29
‘He has already appeared in court, as you know,’ Wexford said, ‘on a murder charge and been committed. Charging Giles with concealing a death can’t be avoided, though I hope to drop a wasting police time charge. The good things that have come out of it are that he’s turned his back on the Good Gospellers and they seem to be in the process of disbanding, he’s learned another language which he’s going to take along with other GCSEs in a couple of months’ time and he seems to be on slightly better terms with his father. Sophie won’t be charged with anything. Frankly, I think any court would take her word against police and expert witness evidence. We’d be wasting our time.’
‘Get back to Hobab Winter,’ said Burden.
‘You’ll remember that during the afternoon Giles bad appeared before Jashub Wright and an emergency session of the elders. Hobab, of course, was present. Something we’re working on now is whether they all knew what Hobab planned to do, whether they all planned it, or if he did it off his own bat. Giles doesn’t know. They dismissed him with those cryptic words that he would “get help”. He thought it likely help would come from his mentor and, as you can imagine, he half wanted it and half wanted anything but. When the paper came he saw he had guessed right.'
‘Hobab came into the living room and was introduced to Joanna and Sophie. He was even given a cup of tea. I know. You may well laugh. Something like that was a possibility we’d thought of and dismissed as ludicrous. His raincoat was hung up in the hail over a radiator, his shoes dried in the kitchen and the woollen gloves he was wearing also put on a radiator to dry. His other clothes weren’t wet apart from his trouser bottoms and these he left to dry on him.’
‘Hobab intended to kill Joanna, of that I’m sure. If he had left her injured but alive she would hold him, and therefore the Good Gospellers, responsible. Marks were found on her, you’ll remember, indicative of her having been beaten about the face and head. Also he took another step to conceal the fact that he’d been in the house. Unknown to Joanna and Sophie, he remained there. ‘When his gloves were dry - this is important - and his shoes wearable, Giles took him upstairs to his own bedroom. As far as Sophie and Joanna knew, this hadn’t happened. According to Giles, they thought he had taken his raincoat from the hall and left the house. In Giles’s bedroom, with Giles’s Bible to read, he sat in a chair and waited. He intended, Giles says, to wait all night if necessary, to prevent further sin being committed.’
‘Joanna, presumably made confident by Giles’s succumbing to her the night before, repeated the process downstairs. Giles says he didn’t encourage her and of course he must have been mindful all the time of the presence of Hobab Winter upstairs. However, after he had gone into his bedroom for the night Joanna came to the door and once again she didn’t knock. Perhaps if she had she might have saved her life, if she had been a little more tentative and a little less presumptuous.’
‘As it was, Hobab leapt from his chair and man handled her from the room. Beat her with his fists and banged her head against the wall. No doubt he used all sorts of imprecations to her, calling her the Scarlet Woman and the Great Dragon, whatever. She screamed - it must have come as a great shock to her - and from the very top of the staircase, Hobab threw her down, more than satisfied to see her stri
ke her head against a corner of that cupboard.’
‘Ah,’ said Burden. ‘I see. And he just left the house? He left two children to deal with it.’
‘I think he barely noticed Sophie’s presence down stairs. After all, she was a girl, maybe growing up into another Joanna. His own daughter he probably thinks of as the only female worth saving. Besides, Sophie didn’t come out of her room until he had left. She’s a sound sleeper. Yes, he left Giles to it and walked the short distance to his home through the driving rain, very likely congratulating himself on a successful mission.’
‘Did he really think he could get away with it? He didn’t know Giles and Sophie would leave and take the body with them.’
‘And would anyone have believed Giles if he said the man delivering the evening paper had pushed Joanna down the stairs? A man who left no traces behind him? Someone Joanna had never even met? Someone Sophie knew had gone home hours before? Remember that Sophie too thought Giles guilty. Any of the elders of the Good Gospel Church would have alibi’d Hobab. His wife had done so, as all their wives had alibi’d them Look how the elders behaved after the disappearance of the three was known. They - Jashub Wright certainly - acted not only innocent, but indifferent. Unchastity is the most heinous of all sins to them. Violent death didn’t matter much, especially if in a good cause, and lying in court would have been a mere peccadillo easily excused.’
‘So this respectable newsagent, this pillar of his church, having led a blameless life, suddenly ups and kills a young woman with savage violence. A bit way out, isn’t it?’
‘It would be if what you’ve said were true.’
‘What do you mean?’
Wexford said thoughtfully, ‘You know I don’t talk about these things at home. No more than you do. Dora picked up something about this case, she was bound to, managing the Internet for me, but Sylvia knew nothing till she saw the very brief bit about Hobab appearing in the magistrates’ court. Saw it in the Evening Courier, by the way, which pretty well justifies its existence for me. She came round - with that Johnny, of course - and told me something that happened one night when she was on the helpline at that women’s refuge of hers.’
‘It was a couple of years ago. The woman who phoned in wouldn’t give her name. Not at first. She said her husband had beaten her up and she was afraid to be in the house when he came back from his prayer meeting. Sylvia thought that bizarre enough for a start but she told the woman to take a taxi and come to The Hide. As you’ve guessed it was Priscilla Winter, Mrs Hobab Winter. Her nose was broken, she two black eyes, and bruises all over her.’
‘And an elder of the Good Gospel Church had done that?’
‘Oh, yes, and not for the first time. Though the first - for a long while. He regularly knocked her about, once knocked her downstairs, when their daughter was little, but this was the first time for a couple of years. The reason for it was that he’d come home and found her having a cup of tea with a male neighbour. The pity was that she only stayed at The Hide two nights and then she went back home. She couldn’t leave Dorcas, she said.’
‘She’ll be free of Hobab now,’ said Burden. He took his raincoat from the dusty old wooden coat rack and helped Wexford into his. They went out into the High Street. The rain had lessened to a thin drizzle. ‘But I still don’t see how you can be sure it was murder. A savage attack, yes, a tragic accident, even manslaughter. But murder?’
‘Oh, didn’t I say?’ Wexford put up the umbrella he was carrying. ‘After he’d dried his gloves, Winter kept them on all the time. Not for warmth. It was a mild night and the heating was on. He meant to kill her and he kept his gloves on to avoid leaving fingerprints in Giles’s room and on Giles’s Bible. If it doesn’t sound too psychodiagnostic, I’d say he was killing his wife at the same time and maybe a lot of other women too.’
‘And I’, said Burden, forgetting all about his psychology course, ‘would say he was a total villain.’
‘Do you know,’ said Wexford, ‘I’ve taken someone else’s umbrella, one of the coach party and they’ve gone now. I think that’s the first time in my life I’ve ever stolen anything.’