An Unkindness of Ravens (29 page)

Wexford laughed. ‘Better not, thanks all the same.’

‘Suit yourself.’ She came over and stood beside him and watched.

Three games all. It looked as if it would go on and on and then quite quickly it was all over, Veronica having won her own two service games and broken her opponent’s.

‘She’s a little cracker, that kid,’ said Priscilla. ‘Strong as a horse. She’s got arms like whipcord.’

It was twenty to seven and the edge of dusk. Veronica won the first two games but the other girl was fighting back for all she was worth. Perhaps she had never played against Veronica before. At any rate, it had taken her all this time to find her weakness but she had found it at last. Veronica couldn’t handle long swift diagonal drives to her forehand, though backhand presented her with no problems. It was half a dozen of those forehand drives that won her opponent the next game and the next and the next two until she was leading 4-2. The light had grown bluish but the white lines on the court were still clearly visible, seeming to glow with twilight luminosity.

And then it was as if Veronica mastered the craft of dealing with those hard cross-court strokes. Or, curiously, as if some inspiration came to her from an external source. Certainly it was not that she had spotted him or had recognized Loring, whom she had never previously seen. But a charge of power came to her, a gift of virtuosity she had not known before. She had never before played like this, Wexford was sure of it. For a brief quarter of an hour she played as if she were on the centre court at Wimbledon and was there not by a fluke but by a hard-won right.

Her opponent couldn’t withstand it. In that quarter hour she gained only four points. Veronica won the set by 6 games to 4 and thus secured the match. She threw her racket into the air, caught it neatly, ran to the net and shook hands with her opponent. Wexford said good night to Priscilla and left the way he had come, having watched the players go into the pavilion where the changing rooms were. Loring was still sitting on the bench.

Allison he spotted as soon as the footpath entered the field. He was lying very still in the long grass by the hedge and mostly covered by it. But Wexford saw him without giving any sign that he had done so. He was pretty sure Veronica wouldn’t. The path wound on parallel to the hedge, then began to skirt the copse.

The false dusk hung still, suspended between light and dark. If it had been much darker no prudent young girl would have dared walk this way. Veronica Williams, of course, in spite of the impression she gave, was not a prudent young girl.

The air was still and damp and the grass moist underfoot. Wexford made his way along the path, under the high hedge, certain as he had been all along that Veronica’s assailant would wait for her in the copse. Archbold had been there since 5.30 to be on the safe side. It was too late now for Wexford to join him without taking the risk of being seen. As it was, by staying to watch the match, he was taking a chance of spoiling the whole plan. Ahead of him a maple tree in the hedge spread its branches in a cone shape, the lowest ones almost touching the ground. He lifted them, stood against its trunk and waited.

By now it was 7.30 and he had begun to wonder if she would come after all. Though members had been thin on the ground there might have been some plan to fete her in the clubhouse. Hardly with drinks though. And she would have got out of it, she needed to see him as much as he her. Then he remembered she was her mother’s daughter; it would take her longer than most girls to change her clothes, do her hair. She might even have a shower. Wendy was the sort of woman who would get a dying person out of bed to change the sheets before the doctor comes.

He stood under his tree in the silent dusk which was growing misty. Occasionally it was possible to hear in the distance a heavy vehicle on the Kingsmarkham to Pomfret road. Nothing else. No birds sang at this season and this hour. He could see the path about ten yards behind only and perhaps fifty yards ahead and it seemed to him then the emptiest footway he had ever contemplated. Allison would get rheumatism lying there on the damp ground, the cold seeping into his bones. Archbold, wrapped in his padded jacket., had probably fallen asleep ...

She appeared quite suddenly. But how else could she have come but noiselessly and walking quite fast? She didn’t look afraid though. Wexford saw her face quite clearly for a moment. Her expression was—yes, innocent. Innocent and trusting. She had no knowledge that there was anything to fear. If Sara, her half-sister, was a Floren tine madonna, she was a Medici page, her small face grave and wistful in its gold-brown frame of bobbed hair and fringe. She wore her pink cotton jeans, beautifully pressed by Mother, her pink and white running shoes, a powder blue and white striped anorak that hung open over a white fluffy pullover, and she was carrying her tennis racket in a blue case. Wexford took all this in as she passed him, walking quickly.

He didn’t dare come out. She might look back. Instead he dropped down into the field at the other side of the hedge. There had been a crop growing here, wheat or barley, but the grain had been cut and all that remained was a stubble that looked grey in this light. He ran along the hedge side, some few feet above the footpath. A long way ahead now he could just see the top of her head bobbing along. She had reached the corner of the copse.

There was a barbed-wire entanglement here that threatened to bar his passage, the spaces between the wires too narrow to squeeze through, the top wire too high to sling a leg over without terrible detriment to trousers. There was nothing for it but to retrace steps, pass through the hedge and clamber up the bank onto the footpath. She was too far away to see him even if she did look back. He jumped down, rounded the bend in the path, but now, though the copse was in full view, he couldn’t see her at all.

His heart was in his mouth then. If she had met her assailant and gone into the wood, if Archbold truly had gone,to sleep ... He left the path and plunged into the copse. It was dark and dry in there, a million needles underfoot from the firs and larches. He ran through the trees and met Archbold head on.

‘There’s no one here, sir. I haven’t seen a soul in three hours.’

‘Except her,’ said Wexford breathlessly.

‘She just walked past. She’s on her own, heading for the High Street.’

He came out of the wood on the Kingsmarkham side, Archbold behind him. She was nowhere to be seen, the hedges too high, the foliage on the trees too thick and masking. And then he forgot discretion and catching a murderer and ran along the path in pursuit of her, afraid for her and for himself. A moment before he had been praying Bennett wouldn’t appear, walking from the Kings markham end, and spoil it all. Now he hoped he would.

There was one more field and that low-lying, the path passing diagonally across it and then running beside a hedge at right angles to the road. No sign of Bennett. Because he had seen her? Or seen her attacker? Would he be capable of that in this fast-fading light? The meadow was grey and the hedges black and the air had the density of fallen cloud. Through the mist you could just see a light or two from cars on the Pomfret road, behind that an irregular cluster of pale lights that was probably the police station.

She was nowhere. The meadow was empty. There was a movement just discernible on the far side of it, where the path met the hedge. She had crossed the diagonal and come to the last hundred yards, her pale clothes catching what light there was so that she gleamed like a night moth. And like a night moth fluttered along against the dark foliage.

Wexford and Palmer didn’t take the diagonal. They dared not risk being seen. They kept to the boundary hedge, though there was no path here, and Palmer, who was thirty, outran Wexford who felt that he had never run so hard in his life. All the time he could see the pale fluttering moth moving down there, homing on the stile that would bring her to the wide grass verge of the Pomfret road.

She never reached it. The fluttering stopped and there was something else down there with her at the bottom of the field where the dead elms stood, their roots a mass of underbrush, of brambles and nettles and fuzzy wild clematis. The something or someone else had come out of that and barred her way. He thought he heard a cry but he couldn’t be sure. At any rate it was no scream but a thin shriek of—surprise perhaps. He cut the corner, running hell for leather, his heart pounding fit to burst, running the way no man of close on sixty should run.

And Archbold got there only just first. It was strange that the knife should catch a gleam on it even in this near darkness. Wexford saw the gleam and then saw it drop to the ground. Archbold was holding Veronica who had turned her face into his chest and was clinging to his coat. He went up to the other himself. She made no attempt to run. She clasped her hands and hung her head so that he couldn’t see her face.

In that moment Bennett materialized, so to speak. He came out of the dark, running. Sara Williams looked up then with an expression of faint dull surprise.

‘Take them both,’ said Wexford. ‘They’ll be charged with the wilful murder of Rodney Williams.’

22

 ‘It was they, not their mothers, who knew each other,’ Wexford said. ‘Edwina Klein told me but I misinterpreted what she said. “Those two women knew each other,” she said to me. “I saw them together.” I took her to mean Joy and Wendy. Joy and Wendy were women and Sara and Veronica were girls. Except that to a militant feminist founder member of ARRIA all females are women. Just as they are,’ he added, ‘to organizers of sports events. It’s the women’s singles even if both players are fifteen.’

Burden and the doctor said nothing. They were all sitting in Burden’s grass widower’s house, drinking Burden’s grass widower’s instant coffee. It was over. A special court for one and a special juvenile court for the other and the two girls had been committed for trial. Afterwards the press had caught Wexford, a camera crew springing out of their van with the agility of the SAS, and once again he would be on television. Looking a hundred years old, he thought, after being up half the night talking to Sara Williams. People would phone in suggesting it was time he retired.

‘They met at a tennis match, of course. The second time I met Sara I noticed she had a tennis racket up on her bedroom wall. She wasn’t anywhere near Veronica’s standard, not in the high school’s first or second six. She just scraped into their reserve. Still, one day she was called on to play and she met Veronica as her opponent. What happened then? I don’t know and she hasn’t told me. I’d guess that one of the other girls there commented that they looked alike and seeing they had the same surname, were they cousins? It was up to one of them to probe further and one of them did. Sara, probably. After that it wouldn’t have been hard to find out, would it? “Look, I’ve got a photo, this is my mum and dad ... “ ‘

‘Something of a shattering experience, wouldn’t you say?’ said the doctor.

‘Also I think an exciting one.’

‘That’s a superficial way of looking at it,’ said Burden. ‘I’d almost say unfeeling. Both those girls were lonely, Veronica sheltered and smothered, Sara neglected, no one’s favourite. Wouldn’t it have been both shattering and immensely comforting to find a sister?’

The sensitivity which had developed in Burden late in life always brought Wexford a kind of affectionate amusement. It was so often misdirected. It resembled in a way those good intentions with which hell is paved.

He picked his words carefully. They were strong words but his tone was hesitant.

‘Sara Williams doesn’t have normal feelings of affection, need for love, loneliness. I think she would be labelled a psychopath. She wants attention and she wants to impress. Also she wants her own way. I imagine that what she got from her half-sister was principally admiration. Sara has an excellent brain. Intellectually, she’s streets ahead of Veronica. She’s a strong, powerful, amoral, unfeeling solipsist with an appalling temper.’

Crocker’s eyebrows went up. ‘You’re talking about an eighteen-year-old who was raped by her own father.’

Wexford didn’t respond. He was thinking about what the girl had said to him, presiding at the table in the interview room with Marion Bayliss at one end, himself opposite and Martin facing Marion. But Sara Williams had presided, holding her head high, describing her feelings and actions without a notion of defending herself.

‘My sister looks just like me. I used to feel she was another aspect of me, the weaker, pretty, feminine part, if you like. I wanted ultimately to be rid of that part.’

Solipsism, according to the Oxford dictionary, is the view or theory that self is the only object of real knowledge or the only real thing existent.

‘Why didn’t you tell your parents you and Veronica had met?’

‘Why should I?’

Her cool answers took the breath away.

‘It would have been the natural thing to confront your father with what you had found out.’

She was honest in her way. ‘I liked having the secret. I enjoyed knowing what he thought I didn’t know.’

‘So that you could hold it over him?’

‘Perhaps,’ she said indifferently, bored when the discussion was not totally centred on herself.

Was that what she had had to threaten him with in the matter of the incest? Was that how she had stopped it?

‘You prevented Veronica from telling her mother?’

‘She did what I told her.’

It was uttered the way a trainer speaks of an obedient dog. The trainer takes the obedience for granted, so effective are his personality and technique, so unthinkable would an alternative reaction be. Wexford thought Crocker and Burden would have had to hear and see Sara to appreciate all this. He couldn’t even attempt to put it across to them. ‘The two girls met quite often,’ he went on. ‘Sara” even went to Veronica’s home when Wendy was at work. Veronica came to admire her extravagantly. She followed her, she would have obeyed her in anything.’

‘Would have?’

‘Did. Psychiatrists call what overtook them folie a deux, a kind of madness that overtakes two people only when they are together and through the influence of each on the other. But in all such cases you’ll always find one party who is easily led and one who is dominant.’ Wexford digressed a little before returning to the point. ‘Looking back, I don’t think Sara Williams has ever addressed a sentence to me that didn’t begin with “I” or wasn’t about herself.’