An Unkindness of Ravens (2 page)

His wife was sitting in an armchair placed in much the same position at the same angle to the fireplace as the chair Joy Williams had sat in, in a room of the same size and proportions to the one he had just left. But there the resemblance ended. A log fire was burning. It had been a cold winter and the spring was cold and protracted, frosts threatening nightly to nip that blossom. Dora was making patchwork, a bedspread in blues and reds, all shades of blues and reds in a multiplicity of patterns, and the finished part covered the long red velvet skirt of the housedress she had taken to wearing in the evenings because of the cold. Her hair was dark and plentiful. Wexford had told her she must be a gipsy to have hair still not grey at nearly sixty.

‘Did you see Mike today?’

She meant Detective Inspector Burden. Wexford said no, he had been at court in Myringham.

‘Jenny came in to tell me she’d had the results of the amniocentesis. The baby’s all right and it’s a girl.’

‘What’s amniocentesis?’

‘They stick something through the abdominal wall into the womb and take out a sample of amniotic fluid. The fluid’s got cells from the foetus in it and they grow them like a sort of culture, I think. Anyway, the cells divide and they can tell if Down’s Syndrome is present and spina bifida too. And of course they can tell the sex by whether the chromosomes come out XY or XX.’

‘What a lot you know! Where did you pick up all that?’

‘Jenny told me.’ She got up and transferred the patchwork to the seat of the chair. ‘They can’t do an amniocentesis till the sixteenth week of pregnancy and there’s always a risk of losing the baby.’

He followed her out into the kitchen. He was more than usually aware this evening of the warmth and light in his own house. It occurred to him that Joy Williams had offered him nothing, not even a cup of tea. Dora had opened the oven door and was looking critically at a steak and kidney pie that was almost ready on the top shelf.

‘Do you want a drink?’

‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Celebrate Jenny and Mike’s healthy baby.’

‘I’m surprised she took any risk,’ he said when she had her sherry and he his Bell’s and three parts water. ‘She’s very set on having this child. They’ve been trying for years.’

‘She’s forty-one, Reg. At that age there’s also a much higher risk of having a mongoloid baby. Anyway, all’s well.’

‘Don’t you want to hear about your Mrs Williams?’

‘Poor Joy,’ said Dora. ‘She was rather pretty when I first knew her. Of course, that was eighteen years ago. I suppose he’s gone off with some girl, has he?’

‘If you knew that I don’t know what you roped me in for.’

Dora laughed. She had a rich throaty giggle. Immediately she said she knew she shouldn’t laugh. ‘He’s such an awful man. You never met him, did you? There’s something so secretive and deceitful about him. I used to think no one could be so obviously like that if they really had something to hide.’

‘But now you’re not so sure.’

Til tell you something I was scared to tell you at the time. I thought you might do something violent.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been so wild and free with my fists. What are you on about?’

‘He made a pass at Sylvia.’

She said it defiantly. Standing there in the long red dress, holding the sherry glass, her eyes suddenly wide and wary, she looked astonishingly young.

‘So?’ His elder daughter was thirty, married twelve years, and the mother of two tall sons. ‘She’s an attractive woman. I daresay men do make passes at her and no doubt she can take care of herself.’

Dora gave him a sidelong look. ‘I said I was scared to tell you. She was fifteen at the time.’

The violent feelings she had predicted were there to hand. After all those years. His fifteen-year-old daughter! He resisted the temptation to bellow. Nor did he stamp. He took a sip of his drink and spoke coolly. ‘And, like a good little girl, she came to mother and told her?’

Dora said flippantly, ‘Sweet of her, wasn’t it? I was touched. I think the truth was, Reg, she was scared stiff.’

‘Did you do anything?’

‘Oh, yes. I went to him and told him what her father was. He didn’t know. I don’t think there was ever much communication between him and Joy. Anyway, it worked. He made himself very scarce and Sylvia didn’t baby-sit for them again. I didn’t tell Joy but I think she knew and was disillusioned. Anyway, she didn’t adore him any more the way she used to.’

‘I was adored once,’ Wexford quoted.

‘And still are, darling. You know we all adore you. You haven’t forfeited our respect, running after little girls. Can I have some more sherry?’

‘You’ll have to get it yourself,’ said Wexford, opening the oven and taking out the pie. ‘All this drinking and gossiping. I want my dinner.’

2

 The firm of Sevensmith Harding had been founded in 1875 by Septimus Sevensmith who called himself a colourman. He sold artists’ materials in a shop in the High Street in Myringham. Paints for exterior—and interior-decorating use came along later. After the First World War in fact, when Septimus’s granddaughter married a Major John Harding who left a leg behind him at Passchendaele.

The first great house-building boom of the eighties and nineties was past and gone, the next due to begin. Major Harding got in on it. He began manufacturing in huge quantities the browns and greens dear to the hearts of builders creating the terraces and semidetacheds which were growing in branches and tentacles out of South London. And towards the end of the decade he brought out a daring shade of cream.

Already the company had been renamed Sevensmith Harding. It kept its offices in Myringham High Street, though the factory behind was soon to be moved to sites on distant industrial complexes. With the disappearance of its retail trade the shop as such also disappeared.

The world’s paint industry enjoyed a steady growth during the 1960s and early 1970s. It is estimated that close on five hundred companies make paint in the United Kingdom but the bulk of the sales volume is handled by a few large manufacturers. Four of these manufacturers dominate the British Isles and one of them is Sevensmith Harding.

Today their paints, Sevenstar vinyl silk and Sevenstar vinyl matt emulsion, Sevenshine gloss and satin finish, are manufactured at Harlow in Essex, and their wallpapers, borders and coordinating tiles at Crawley in Sussex. The head offices in Myringham, in the centre of the High Street opposite the Old Flag Hotel, have more a look of solicitors’ chambers or the establishment of a very refined antique dealer than the seat of paint makers. Indeed, there is scarcely anything to show that they are paint makers. The bow windows with their occasional pane of distorted glass that flank the front door contain, instead of cans of paint and display stands of delighted housewives with brushes in their hands, afamille noire vase of dried grasses on one side and a Hepplewhite chair on the other. But over the door, Georgian in style and of polished mahogany, are royal armorial bearings and the legend: ‘By appointment to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Colourists and Makers of Fine Pigments’.

The company chairman, Jeremy Harding-Grey, divided his time between his house in Monte Carlo and his house in Nassau, and the managing director, George Delahaye, though he lived in Sussex, was seldom seen in the vicinity of Myringham. But the deputy managing director was a humbler person and altogether more on the level of ordinary men. Wexford knew him. They had met at the home of Sylvia’s father-in-law, an architect, and since then the Gardners had once been guests at a drinks party at the Wexfords’ and the Wexfords guests at the Gardners’. But for all that Wexford would not have considered himself on the kind of terms with Miles Gardner to warrant dropping in at Sevensmith Harding when he found himself in Myringham at lunchtime to ask Miles out for a drink and a sandwich.

A fortnight had passed since his talk with Joy Williams and he had virtually forgotten about it. He had dismissed it from his mind before he went to bed that same night. And if he had thought about it at all since then it had only been to tell himself that by now Mrs Williams and her solicitor would be settling things to her satisfaction or that Williams had returned home, having found like many a man before him that domesticity is the better part of economics.

But even if Williams were still missing there was nothing to justify Wexford’s making inquiries about him at Sevensmith Harding. Let Joy Williams do that. He wouldn’t be missing as far as his employers were concerned. No matter how complex a man’s love life he still has to go to work and earn his bread. Williams earned it on too humble a level though, Wexford reflected, for it to be likely Miles Gardner had ever heard of him.

He and Burden had both been at Myringham Crown Court, witnesses in two separate cases, and the court had adjourned for lunch. Burden would have to go back to watch his case—a rather ticklish matter concerning the receiving of stolen goods—through to the bitter end, but Wexford’s day, at least as far as appearing in court went, was over. As they walked towards the hotel Burden was silent and morose. He had been like this since they came out of court. If it had been anyone else Wexford would have supposed his mood due to the dressing down, indeed the scathing tongue-lashing, meted out to him by the alleged receiver’s counsel. But Burden was impervious to such things. He had taken that sort of stick too many times to care. This was something else, something closer to home, Wexford thought. And now he came to think of it, this, whatever it was, had been growing on Burden for days now, weeks even, a morose surly misery that didn’t seem to affect his work but militated badly against his relations with other people.

He looked the same as ever. There was no sign of anxiety or care in his appearance. He was thin but he had always been thin. Wexford didn’t know if it was a new suit he was wearing or last year’s cleaned and the trousers nightly pressed in the electric press his wife had given him for Christmas. (‘Like those things you get in swish hotels,’ Burden had said proudly.) It was a happy marriage, Burden’s second, as happy as his first. But almost any marriage Burden made would be happy, he had a gift for marriage. He was uxorious without making himself ridiculous. There couldn’t be anything in his marriage that was bugging him. His wife was pregnant with a longed-for child—longed for by her at any rate. Burden had a grownup son and daughter by his first marriage. Wexford considered an idea that came to him and then dismissed it as absurd and out of character. Burden was the last man to dread the coming child just because he was now in his mid-forties. That he would take in his stride.

‘What’s wrong, Mike?’ he asked as the silence became oppressive.

‘Nothing.’

The classic answer. One of the cases in which a statement means the precise opposite of what it says, as when a man in doubt says he’s absolutely certain.

Wexford didn’t press it. He walked along, looking about him at the old market town which had changed so much since he had first known it. A huge shopping complex had been built, and since then an arts centre, incorporating theatre, cinema and concert hall. The university term was three weeks old and the place was thronged with blue jeaned students. But up at this end of the town, where preservation orders proliferated and buildings were listed, things were much the same. Things were even rather better since the local authority had woken up to the fact that Myringham was beautiful and worth conserving and had therefore cleaned and tidied and painted and planted.

He looked into the bow windows of Sevensmith Harding, first at the Hepplewhite chair, then at the vase. Beyond the dried grasses he could see a young girl receptionist talking on the phone. Wexford and Burden crossed the road and went into the Old Flag.

Wexford had been there once or twice before. It was not a place ever to be crowded in the middle of the day. The busy lunch trade went to the cheaper brighter pubs and the wine bars. In the smaller of the lounge bars where food was being served several vacant tables remained. Wexford was making for one of them when he caught sight of Miles Gardner sitting alone.

‘Won’t you join me?’

‘You look as if you’re waiting for someone,’ Wexford said.

‘Any congenial company that offers itself.’ He had a gracious warm manner of speaking that was in no way affected. Wexford recalled that this was what he had always liked about him. ‘They do a nice prawn salad,’ Miles Gardner said. ‘And if you can get here before one they’ll send up to the butcher for a fillet steak.’

‘What happens at one?’

‘The butcher closes. He opens at two and then the pub closes. There’s Myringham for you.’

Wexford laughed. Burden didn’t laugh but sat wearing the sort of stiff polite expression that indicates to even the most insensitive that one would be happier—or less miserable —on one’s own. Wexford made up his mind to ignore him. Gardner seemed delighted with their company and, having bought a round of drinks, began to talk in the easy rather elegant way he had about the new house he had just moved into which Sylvia’s father-in-law had designed. It was a valuable gift, Wexford thought, to be able to talk to people, one whom you had only just met and the other a mere acquaintance, as if they were old friends whom you conversed with regularly.

Gardner was a small, undistinguished-looking man. His style was in his voice and manner. He had a much taller wife and two or three rather noisy daughters, Wexford remembered. From the new house and the time it had taken to get itself built, Gardner had moved on to talk of work, lack of work and unemployment, eliciting mild sparks of interest from Burden, at least to the extent of extracting monosyllables from him. Sevensmith Harding had battled against laying off workers at their Harlow

‘Rod Williams?’

‘Yes. He lives in the next street to me.’

Gardner said in a patient tone, ‘Rod Williams is our former marketing manager, the one I was telling you resigned.’

‘Williams?’

‘Yes, I thought I explained. Perhaps I didn’t say the name.’

‘Somebody,’ said Wexford, ‘is getting hold of the wrong end of the stick here.’