An Unkindness of Ravens (11 page)

She was waiting, watching him. He nodded. She brought a fluttery hand up to her chest, to her heart perhaps, froze for a moment in this tragic pose. Then her eyelids fell and she sagged sideways in the chair.

Afterwards he was to think of it as having been beautifully done but at the time he saw it only as a genuine faint. Burden held her shoulders, bringing her face down onto her knees. Picking up the phone, Wexford asked for a policewoman to come up, Polly Davies or Marion Bayliss, anyone who was around. And someone send a pot of strong tea and don’t forget the sugar basin.

Wendy Williams came out of her faint, sat up and pressed her face into her hands.

 ‘You are the wife of Rodney John Williams and you live in Liskeard Avenue, Pomfret?’

She drank the tea sugarless and very hot, at first with her eyes closed. When she opened her eyes and they met his he noticed they were the very clear pale blue of flax flowers. She nodded slowly.

‘How long have you been married, Mrs Williams?’

‘Sixteen years. We had our sixteenth wedding anniversary in March.’

He could hardly believe it. Her skin had the clear bloom of an adolescent’s, her hair was baby-soft and the curl in it looked natural. She saw his incredulity and in spite of her emotion was flattered, a little buoyed up. He could tell she was the sort of woman to whom compliments, even unspoken ones, were food and drink. They nourished her. A faint, tremulous smile appeared. He looked again at the photographs.

‘My daughter Veronica,’ she said. ‘I got married very young. I was only sixteen. That picture was taken three or four years back.’

A bigamist he had been, then. Not a common or garden wayward husband with a girlfriend living in the next town, not a married man with a sequence of pricey mistresses, but your good old-fashioned true blue bigamist. There was no doubt in Wexford’s mind that Wendy Williams had as good-looking a marriage certificate as Joy’s and if hers happened not to be valid she would be the last to know it.

That, then, was why he had taken no change of clothes with him. He had those things in his other home. And more than othat, much more. Wexford now saw the point of those bank accounts: one for his salary to be paid into and two joint accounts to be fed from it, one for each household, R. W. Williams and J. Williams; R. W. Williams and W. Williams. There had been no need to assume a different name on his second marriage—Williams was common enough to make that unnecessary. He had been like a Moslem who keeps strictly to Islamic law and maintains his wives in separate and distinct dwellings. The difference here was that the wives didn’t know of each other’s existence.

That Williams had had another wife, what one might call in fact a chief wife, was something this girl was going to have to be told. And Joy was going to have to be told about her.

‘Can you tell me when you last saw Mr Williams?’ Not calling him ‘y°ur husband’ any more was the beginning of breaking the news.

‘About two months ago. Just after Easter.’

This wasn’t the time to ask her to account for that eight week gap. He told her he would come and see her at home that evening. Polly Davies would look after her and see she got home safely.

Something had at last happened to distract Burden temporarily from his private troubles. His expression was as curious and as alerted as a little boy’s.

‘What did he do at Christmas?’ he said. ‘Easter? What about holidays?’

‘No doubt we shall find out. Other bigamists have handled it. He probably had a Bunbury as well.’

‘A what?

‘A nonexistent friend or relative to provide him with alibis. My guess is Williams’s Bunbury was an old mother.’

‘Did he have an old mother?’

‘God knows. Creating one from his imagination wouldn’t have been beyond his capacity, I’m sure. You know what they say, a mother is the invention of necessity.’

Burden winced. ‘That night he left Alverbury Road, d’you think he went to his other home?’

‘I think he set off meaning to go there. Whether he reached it is another matter.’

Fascinated by Williams’s family arrangements, Burden said, ‘While Joy thought he was travelling for Sevensmith Harding in Ipswich he was with Wendy and while he was with Joy Wendy thought he was where?’

‘I don’t suppose she knew he worked for Sevensmith Harding. He probably told her a total lie about what he did.’

‘You’d think he’d have got their names muddled—I mean called Wendy Joy and Joy Wendy.’

‘There speaks the innocent monogamist,’ said Wexford, casting up his eyes. ‘How do you think married men with girlfriends manage? Wife and all get called “darling”.’

Burden shook his head as if even speculating about it was too much for him. ‘Do you reckon it was one of them killed him?’

‘Carried his body and stuck it in that grave? Williams weighed a good fifteen stone or two hundred and ten pounds or ninety something kilos or whatever we’re supposed to say these days.’

‘It might have been Wendy made that phone call.’

‘You reckon her voice sounds like Joy’s?’

Burden was obliged to admit that it didn’t. Joy’s was monotonous, accent-free, uninflected; Wendy’s girlish, rather fluting, with a faint lisp. Wexford was talking about voices, about the rather unattractive but nevertheless memorable quality of Joy’s voice when his phone rang again.

‘Another young lady to see me,’ he said to Burden, putting the receiver back.

‘Bluebeard’s third wife?’ It was the first attempt at a joke he had made in two months.

Wexford appreciated that. ‘Let’s say a fan, rather. Someone who saw me on the telly.’

‘Look, why don’t I take Martin and get on over to Wheatley? Then I’ll be able to come to Wendy’s with you tonight.’

‘OK, and we’ll take Polly along.’

The girl walked into his room in a breeze of confidence. She was seventeen or eighteen and her name was Eve Freeborn. Apposite names of the Lady DedlockErnest Pontifex-Obadiah Slope kind that Victorian novelists used are in real life less uncommon than is generally supposed. That Eve Freeborn was aptly named Wexford came quickly to understand. She might have been dressed and cast for the role of Spirit of Freedom in a pageant. Her hair was cropped short and dyed purple in parts. She wore stretch jeans, a check shirt and thongs.

The story she told Wexford, sitting with legs wide apart, hands linked, forearms making a bridge from the chair arms to rest her chin on, was delivered in a brisk and articulate way. Eve was still at school, had come there straight from school. President of the debating society no doubt, he thought. As she turned her hands outwards, thumbs on her jaw, he noticed the felt-tipped pen drawing on her wrist, a raven with a woman’s head, and then as she moved her arm the shirtsleeve covered it.

‘I realized it was my duty as a citizen to come to you. I delayed just long enough to discuss the matter with my boyfriend. He’s at the same school as me—Haldon Finch. In a way he’s involved, you see. We have the sort of relationship where we believe in total openness.’

Wexford gave her an encouraging smile.

‘My boyfriend lives in Arnold Road, Myringham. It’s a single-storey house, number forty-three.’ Opposite Graham Gee who had reported the presence of poor old Greta, Wexford thought. ‘His mother and father live there too,’ said Eve in a tone that implied enormous condescension and generosity on the part of the boyfriend in allowing his parents to live in their own house. ‘The point is—and you may not believe this but it’s the honest truth, I promise you—they don’t like him having me to stay the night with him. I mean, not me personally, you could understand that if they didn’t like me, but any girl. So what we do is I come round after he’s gone to bed and get in the window.’

Wexford didn’t gape at her. He merely felt like doing this. He couldn’t resist asking, ‘Why doesn’t he come to you?’

‘I share a room with my sister. Anyway, I was telling you. I went round to his place around ten that Thursday night. There wasn’t all that much space to park and when I was reversing I went into the car behind. I just bashed the wing of it a bit, not much, it wouldn’t have had to have a new wing or anything, but I did think it was my duty to take responsibility and not just leave it, so I .. . ‘

‘Just a moment. This was the night of April the fifteenth?’

‘Right. It was my boyfriend’s birthday.’

And a charming present he must have had, Wexford thought.

‘What was this car you went into?’

‘A dark blue Ford Granada. It was the car you asked about on TV. I wrote a note and put it on the windscreen, under a wiper. Just with my name and address on and phone number. But it blew away or got lost or something because the car was still there a long while after that and the driver never got in touch with me.’

At ten that night. Greta the Granada had been there at ten but how long had it been there?

‘Just as a matter of curiosity, whose car were you driving?’

‘My own,’ she said, surprised.

‘I don’t believe it!’

She stared at Wexford, her mouth open in an appalled sort of way, her eyelids moving. She brought her hands up and scrabbled at her neck.

‘I don’t believe it!’ Now there was defiance in her tone. Then, by changing one word, she showed him she accepted, she understood that what he had told her was true. ‘I won’t believe it!’

Polly Davies was with him, sitting there like a good chaperone, silent but attentive. She glanced at Wexford, got a nod from him.

‘I’m afraid it’s true, Mrs Williams.’

‘I don’t—I don’t have a right to be called that, do I?’

‘Of course you do. Your name doesn’t depend on a marriage certificate.’ Wexford thought of Eve Freeborn. There was a world between her and Wendy Williams, though a mere fourteen years, less than a generation, separated them. Would Eve know such a thing as a marriage certificate existed?

‘Mrs Williams,’ said stalwart Polly, ‘why don’t you and I go and make some coffee? We’d all like coffee, I’m sure. Mr Wexford will want to ask you some questions but I know he’d like you to have time to get over the shock of this.’

She nodded and got up awkwardly as if her bones were stiff. A glazed look had come across her face. She walked like a sleepwalker and no one now would have mistaken her for a twenty-fiveyear-old.

Burden shrugged silently as the door closed behind them and subsided into one of his typical morose reveries. Wexford had a look round the room they were sitting in. The house was newer than the Williams home in Kings markham, a small ‘town house’ with an integral garage, built probably in the late 1960s. Wendy was a thorough, meticulous and perhaps fanatical housekeeper. This was a through room with a dining area and it had very recently been redecorated in gleaming white with an undertone of palest pink. One of the colours in the Sevensmith Harding ‘Ice Cream’ range? The carpet was deep strawberry pink, some of the furniture mahogany, some white canework, cushions in various shades of pink and red. It was tasteful, it was a far cry from the stereotyped shabbiness of Joy’s home, but somehow it was also uncomfortable, as if everything had been placed there—hanging baskets, little tables, red Venetian glass—for effect rather than for use.

He remembered that a young girl also lived here. There were no signs of her. But what sign did he expect or would he recognize if he saw it? She had been twelve in the picture .. .

‘My daughter is sixteen now,’ Wendy said when the coffee was brought. A slightly defiant note came into her voice as she added, ‘She was sixteen three weeks ago.’

Her gaze fell. He did some calculations, remembering what she had said about her wedding anniversary taking place in March. So Williams had ‘married’ her three months before the child was born. He had had to wait until she reached the legal age for marriage.

‘Where were you married, Mrs Williams?’

‘Myringham Registry Office. My mother wanted us to have a church wedding but—well, for obvious reasons .. .’

Wexford could imagine one very obvious reason if she had been six months pregnant. The nerve of Williams, a married man, ‘marrying’ this child, as she had been, a mere dozen miles from his home town! The wedding to Joy, Dora had told him, had been at St Peter’s, Kingsmarkham, the bride in white slipper satin .. .

Wendy was thrusting a paper at him. He saw it was her marriage certificate.

In the Registration District of Myringham, at the Registry Office. Rodney John Williams, aged thirty-two. In some respects, at any rate, he had been honest. Though he could hardly have distorted those facts. They had been on his birth certificate. A Bath address, his brother’s probably, his occupation sales representative. Wendy Ann Rees, aged sixteen, Pelham Street, Myringham, shop assistant. The witnesses had been Norman Rees and Brenda Rees, parents presumably, or brother and sister-in-law.

He handed it back to her. She looked at it herself and her tongue flicked out to moisten her lips. For a moment, from the way she was holding it, he thought she was going to tear the certificate across. But she replaced it in its envelope and laid the envelope on the low white melamine table that was close up against the arm of her chair.

She pressed her knees together and folded her hands in her lap. Her legs were very good with elongated slim ankles. To come to the police station she had worn a grey flannel suit with a white blouse. He had a feeling she was a woman who attached importance to being suitably dressed. The suit was changed now for a cotton dress. She was the type who would ‘save’ her clothes, not sit about in a straight skirt or risk a spot on white silk. In her sad wistful look youth had come back into her face.

‘Mrs Williams,’ he began, ‘I’m sure you won’t mind telling me how it was you weren’t alarmed when your husband was away for so long.’

She did mind. She was reluctant. Patience, simply waiting quietly, succeeded with her where pressing the point might not have.

‘Rodney and I .. . ‘ She paused. It was always ‘Rodney’ with her, Wexford noted, never ‘Rod’. ‘We—we quarrelled. Well, we had a very serious quarrel. That must have been a few days after Easter. Rodney spent Easter with his mother in Bath. He always spent Christmas and Easter with her. He was an only child, you see, and she’s been in an old people’s home for years and years.’