An Unkindness of Ravens (25 page)

In the chair he held out for her she sat down gingerly, treating herself as if she had become fragile. She had turned into a convalescent, tentatively putting out feelers to the world. Her shoulders she was keeping permanently lifted.

‘What did you want to say to me, Wendy?’ He had dropped the ‘Mrs Williams’ altogether now.

She whispered it, sustaining the invalid image, a broken woman, wan-faced, such as might fittingly inhabit the Castle of Petrella and be called Lucretia.

‘The same as what she said.’

‘I’m sorry, Wendy. You must make yourself plainer than that.’

‘It was the same for us. The same as what she said. Or —well, it would have been. I mean, he would have done but he went away and got himself killed.’

Light penetrated. ‘You mean Rodney also made advances to Veronica? Only, if I interpret what you’re saying correctly, it was merely advances?’

She nodded, tears splashing now, wads of tissues held to her eyes like swabs.

‘Before Joy warned you or afterwards?’

A shrugging, then a shaking, of the whole body. Makeup scrubbed off with that cheapest and most readily available cleanser, tears, Wendy presented to Wexford a youthful, naked, desperate face.

‘He had been a little more attentive to her, had he, than we in our society expect of a father to a teenage daughter? Did she tell you or did you see? Kissed her and said it was good to be alone with her and you out of the way?’

She jumped up. ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ she shouted.

‘So on April the fifteenth, although you didn’t think there was much chance of Rodney coming back, you encouraged your daughter to go out so as not to be alone with him? You told her not to run the risk of being alone with him but to stay out until you came home?’

Guilt was heavy on her face now, driving away indignation. He felt she was on the brink of a confession.

‘Or did you send her out so that you could be alone with Rodney—you and Joy?’

The air was sharply clear, the rain past, the sky two shades of blue, a dark clean azure and the smoky blue of massed cloud. Nine o’clock and growing dark. Water lay in glassy pools, reflecting the sky. There was an unaccustomed coolness, almost a nip in the temperature. Before morning there would be more rain. Wexford could see it in the clarity and smell it in the atmosphere. He walked from the police station and kept on walking, just to get away from the enclosing four walls, the stuffiness, the millions of uttered words, the weariness of lies.

People used to tell him when they needed an alibi—now they cited television—that they had been for a walk. They didn’t know where, just for a walk. He hadn’t believed them. Everyone knew where they had been on a walk. Now he thought he might not be able to say where he had been tonight. His progress was aimless, though not slow, a fairly brisk marching in the fresh cold air, a thinking walk to dwell on what had passed.

So inconclusively. So unsuccessfully. He had wrung those two women, turned the handle and ground them through the rollers. Joy had laughed and Wendy had wept. He had kept on repeating over and over to himself: Edwina Klein saw them together. Why should she lie? Why should she invent? He had to let them go at last. Wendy was near collapse—or feigning it beautifully.

It was clear, the whole case, Burden said. A motive had at last emerged. Joy killed out of bitterness and jealousy, Wendy out of fear Rodney would serve Veronica the same way as he had served Sara. An unfortunate verb in the circumstances, but perhaps not inept ... A conspiracy laid just after Christmas, brooded over through the early spring, hatched out in April. Murder in the room that would be decorated tomorrow. Staunch the blood with Kitman’s dustsheet, realize too late what you have used.

It must have happened that way, there was no other. Perhaps they hadn’t intended to kill, only confront him jointly, threaten and shock. But the French cook’s knife had been handy, lying on the table maybe. That didn’t explain drugging him with Phanodorm. The knife Milvey had found? Its blade matched the width and depth of the wounds. So would a thousand knives.

He was in Down Road, under the dripping lime trees. Perhaps, all along, he had known he was making his way here. The big old houses, houses that could justly be called ‘piles’, seemed sunken tonight in dark, still, sodden foliage. A dark green perfume arose from grass and leaf and rain bathed flowers. Somewhere nearby a spoilt dog, left alone for the evening, vented its complaints in little bitter whimpering wails. Wexford opened the gate to the Freeborns’ house. Lights were on, one upstairs and one down. The dustmen had been that morning, long before the rain started, and left the scattering of litter they didn’t bother to remove from places where the occupants failed to tip lavishly. A sodden sheet of paper, pasted by rain onto the gravel, bore the ARRIA logo and a lot of printing it was too dark to read.

Both twins came to the door. He approved their caution. Once more they were alone in the house, left to their own devices, the switched-on parents far away at some veteran hippies’ haunt. Both had pale blue hair tonight, pink stuff on their eyelids, otherwise the nearly identical faces were bare. And identical on both faces was dismay at the sight of him. Eve spoke.

‘Do you want to come in?’

‘Yes, please.’ The house no longer smelt of marijuana. That was one thing he had achieved, a dubious success. The girls seemed not to know where to take him. They stood in the hall. ‘There was a meeting of ARRIA last night,’ he said. ‘Where was it? Here?’

‘They’re mostly held here,’ said Amy.

‘And it was here last night?’

‘Yes.’

He pushed open a door and switched a light on. It was a huge living room, floor cushions making islands on parquet that hadn’t been polished for two decades, a divan with thrown over it something that might have had its origin in Peru, the only chair a wicker hemisphere hanging from the ceiling. French windows, uncurtained, gave onto what seemed an impenetrable wood.

He sat in the hanging chair, refusing to be alarmed by its immediate swinging motion.

‘Who was at the meeting?’

They exchanged glances, looked at him. ‘The usual crowd,’ said Amy, and conversationally, ‘It’s always the same lot that turn up, isn’t it?’

The names he ran through got a nod at every pause. ‘Caroline Peters? Nicola Anerley? Jane Gardner? Paulette Harmer?’ Eve nodded. She nodded in the same way as she had at the other names. ‘Edwina Klein?’

There must have been a note of doubt in his voice.

‘Yes, Edwina was here. Why not?’

‘Why not indeed. And why not Sara Williams, come to that?’

‘Sara didn’t come,’ said Amy. ‘She had to stay home with her mother.’

So John Harmer hadn’t been so far out when he suggested his daughter’s disappearance had something to do with this ‘women’s movement nonsense’.

‘What time did the meeting end?’

‘About ten,’ said Amy. ‘Just about ten.’ She had forgiven him if her sister never would. She had altogether put off that distant manner. ‘Someone told me today that Paulette didn’t go home all night and ... ‘ She left the sentence hovering.

‘You never told me,’ Eve said sharply.

‘I forgot.’ Amy turned her eyes back on Wexford. ‘She was a bit late. She didn’t say why. Edwina brought her aunt—not to join, just to see what went on, though she’s eligible of course, never having married. It was good seeing someone old who’d had principles and stuck to them.’

‘I have fought the good fight,’ said Wexford. ‘I have run a straight race. I have kept the faith.’

‘That’s right. That was exactly it. How did you know?’

He didn’t answer her. The Authorized Version was unknown to them, lost to their generation as to the one before, a dusty tome of theology, in every way a closed book.

‘Was Paulette alone when she left?’

‘The meeting was upstairs.’ Eve was chilly and unbending but she had spoken. ‘We didn’t see people out. They went downstairs and let themselves out. Paulette left with Edwina and her aunt.’

‘They may have left together,’ said Amy, ‘but they didn’t go off together. I looked out of the window and saw Edwina and her aunt getting into the aunt’s car and Paulette wasn’t with them.’

‘What’s out there?’ Wexford said abruptly. He pointed at the long windows beyond which was visible only a mass of foliage.

‘The conservatory.’

Amy opened the doors, swung them open and put her hand to a switch. Unconventional the Freeborn family might be; they were not feckless. The old domed conservatory, its upper panes of stained glass, claret and green in an Art Nouveau design of tulips, was full of dark green leafy plants, some of which looked subtropical, all demanding ample water and getting it. It must cost a fortune to heat in winter, Wexford thought, coming closer, entering the conservatory and spotting an orchid or two, the velvety mauve trumpet of a brunfelsia.

Eve, without being asked, flooded the garden beyond with light. Touching another switch brought on arc lamps, one on the conservatory roof, another in the branches of an enormous ilex. The garden, so-called, hardly deserved floodlighting. It was a wilderness of unmown grass, wild roses, brambles, the occasional hundred-year-old tree. And it was huge, the kind of garden whose owners might justly say they were never overlooked. Shrubs that appeared dense black at this hour made an encircling irregular wall round its perimeter.

‘We don’t any of us go in it much,’ said Amy. ‘Except as a shortcut to the High Street. And when it’s muddy or whatever ... ‘ Another sentence was left hanging. She went on vaguely, ‘Dad’s keen on the conservatory. It’s him that grows the plants.’

The Cannabis saliva, thought Wexford, but hardly in here. You needed infra-red light for that and plenty of it. He opened the door into the garden, a glass door of slender green and white panels. The cold damp air breathed water in suspension at him. He noticed a path among the grass, pieces of crazy paving let into what had once been turf, was now wet hay. The girls weren’t coming with him. Eve wound her arms round her body, hugging herself against the cold. Amy breathed on the glass and with her fingertip began drawing a raven with a woman’s face. Wexford went down the path. The arc lamps reached no further than thirty feet or so. He took his torch out of his pocket and switched it on.

The path led to the gate in the far fence, he thought. That was what Amy meant by a shortcut to the High Street. First it wound through a copse of dark shrubs, laurels, rhododendrons, all glistening and dripping with water. He was curiously reminded of walking in a cemetery. Cemeteries were like this, untended often, places of ornamental shrubs, funereal trees, like this without flowers, unlike this with gravestones.

He came upon the fence and the gate quite suddenly, almost bumping into the gate which was in a break in the untrimmed hedge that followed the line of the close boarding. From here the backs of other big houses could just be seen, two of them with yellow rectangles on black that were lights in their windows. The light didn’t reach here and no moon had appeared. The path curved its way all round the garden. He followed its ellipse, returning on the right-hand side. Bamboo here, half dead most of it, a mass of canes. Then something prickly that caught at his raincoat. He pulled and heard the tearing sound. Turn the torch on it to see what had happened ...

Turn the torch into the midst of this circle of briar roses, brambles with wicked thorns—onto an outflung arm, a buried face, a logo and acronym, red on white cotton— ARRIA and the raven-woman.

It was more like a cemetery here than he had supposed ...

19

 The scene-of-crimes officer. Dr Crocker. Sir Hilary Tremlett fetched out of his bed and wearing a camelhair coat over pyjama top and grey slacks. Burden as neat and cool as at mid-morning. And the rain coming down in summer tempests. They had to rig a sort of tent up over the body.

She had been strangled. With a piece of string or cord perhaps. Wexford himself could see that without reference to Dr Crocker or Sir Hilary. The photographer’s flash going off made him blink. He didn’t want to look at her any more. It sickened him, though not with physical nausea, he was far beyond that. No pharmacology degree now, no marriage to Richard Cobb, no full flowering of that strange beauty that had been both sultry and remote.

The girls worried him, Eve and Amy, alone in that house with a young girl, a contemporary, dead in the garden. Marion Bayliss had tried to reach their parents but they were at none of the phone numbers the twins could produce. Neighbours shunned the Freeborns. With the families immediately next door they weren’t even on speaking terms. Eve thought of Caroline Peters and it was she who came to the house in Down Road and stayed for the rest of the night. Wexford crawled into bed at around three. There was a note for him from Dora which he read but did not mark or inwardly digest: ‘A man called Ovington keeps phoning for you.’ She was deeply asleep and in sleep she looked young. He lay down beside her and the last thing he remembered before sleeping himself was laying his hand on her still-slender waist.

‘She’d been dead about twenty-four hours,’ said Crocker, ‘which is about what you thought, isn’t it?’

When you don’t get enough sleep, Wexford thought, it’s not so much tired that you feel as weak. Though perhaps they were the same thing. ‘Strangled with what?’ he asked. ‘Wire? Cord? String? Electric cable?’

‘Because it’s easily obtainable and pretty well impossible to break I’d guess the kind of nylon cord you use for hanging pictures. And where were your suspects—’ Crocker looked at his watch ‘—thirty-six hours ago?’

‘At home with their daughters, they say.’

Wexford began going through the statement Burden had taken from Leslie Kitman, the painter. A description of the missing dustsheet was gone into in some detail. Useless now, of course. It was four months since that dustsheet, concealed in a plastic bag, had been removed by the council’s refuse collectors. And the knife as likely as not with it. Somehow he couldn’t believe in Milvey’s knife, he couldn’t take two Milvey coincidences ...

The walls had been stained and pitted, Kitman said. He couldn’t remember if the stains had looked any different on the morning of 16 April from the afternoon of 15 April. Some of the holes, he thought, might have been filled in by someone else. He had made good some of the cracks and holes with filler which, when it dried, left white patches. On 16 April and the morning of the 17th he had lined the walls with wood-chip paper and on the Monday following begun painting over the paper.