An Unkindness of Ravens (5 page)

She didn’t say, ‘Come in!’ She opened it herself. Wexford had often noted reactions to a knock at the door. They offered indications of character and motivation. The woman, for example, who calls out ‘Come in!’ is more open, relaxed and easy-going than she who opens the door herself. The latter will be cagey and reserved. In the thirty seconds or so before she opens the door, what has she put away in a drawer or hidden under a magazine?

He could see that Sara had created the room herself. What attractiveness it had had nothing to do with the furniture, carpet and curtains provided by her parents. It was the smallest bedroom. Wexford had had an extension built on to his house when the girls were little but this house remained as it had originally been. There would be a large front bedroom for the husband and wife, a slightly smaller back bedroom—in this case for the son—and a tiny boxroom no more than nine feet by seven for the daughter. She had put posters all over the walls, one of a red horse galloping in the snow from the Yugoslav Naive school of painting, another of a thin naked black man playing a guitar. Between them hung a tennis racket, a corn dolly and a montage of Tarot cards. Perhaps the most striking poster was the one that faced the door. A harpy like creature with the head and breasts of a woman and the body, wings and claws of a raven, clutched at an unfurling ribbon on which was painted the name—acronym?— ARRIA. Wexford remembered the tee-shirt Sara had been wearing when first they met. The raven woman had a face like Britannia or maybe Boadicea, one of those noble, handsome, courageous, fanatical faces, that made you feel like locking up the knives and reaching for the Valium.

Bookshelves that looked as if put up by Sara herself held a paperback Life of Freud, Phyllis Grosskurth’s Havelock Ellis, Fromm, Laing, Freud on the Wolf Man and Leonardo, Erin Pizzey and Jeff Shapiro on incest and child abuse, but not a single work of fiction. With her tiny radio providing background music, she had been sitting at a dressing table that doubled as a desk, swotting for an exam. It was evidently chemistry. The textbook lay open at a page of formulae.

‘We’re trying to find your father, Sara. I wouldn’t exactly say he’s disappeared but he’s making himself very hard to find.’

She had fixed him with her grave contained look. He noticed her skin, creamy and smooth like velvet, with a gold dusting of freckles on her small nose. When she opened the door to him she had been holding a green felt tipped pen in her hand. On the back of the other hand she had drawn a green snake. Teenagers had always drawn on their hands, they had done so when he was in his teens and when his daughters were in their teens, but now some sort of specific fashion for it had sprung up. To have black and red and green drawings on your hands and arms and body was the ‘in’ thing. Sara had drawn with her green pen a spotted snake, not curled round itself but stretched out and slightly undulant, its forked tongue extended.

‘Have you any thoughts about where he might be?’

She shook her head. She put the cap on the pen and laid it down.

‘Would you like to tell me about the last time you were with your father? Were you here when he left?’

She hesitated, then gave a nod. ‘It was the second day of term after the Easter holidays. I was late home because I went to the library. They’d got a book in for me, a new book I’d put my name down for and they’d sent me a card to say it was in.’ She lifted two books off the stack and handed him one from underneath. She was out to impress and the book was a learned work: Stern’s Principles of Human Genetics. He didn’t take much notice of that but he did look at the date stamp in the back. ‘I rang the library to renew it,’ she said defensively. ‘I couldn’t read it in three weeks. It’s very difficult.’ She smiled at last and became at once a beauty. ‘I’m not saying it’s too difficult for me but genetics is an abstruse subject. I’ve got my A levels and they have to take priority.’

‘You’re interested in this sort of thing?’

‘I’ve been offered a place in medical school, St Biddulph’s.’ Crocker had trained there, Wexford recalled. ‘I shall get it, of course, but in theory it depends on my A-level results.’ Her tone was such as to show she was in no real doubt that these would meet the standard. ‘I have to get at least three Bs but an A and two Bs would be better.’

She must be a bright girl. A year or two back statistics had been published showing an excess of medical students and that at this rate there would be a surplus of forty thousand doctors by the end of the century. Medical schools were being instructed to raise their standards and cut their intake. So if Sara Williams had been offered a place at the highly prestigious St Biddulph’s .. .

‘Your mother and father must be proud of you.’

The sweeping glance she gave him told him he had said something stupid or at least wide of the mark.

‘I can see you don’t know my parents.’

‘They’d prefer something else for you?’

‘I could be a shorthand typist, couldn’t I? I could be a nurse. I’d get paid while I was being those things, wouldn’t I?’ Her voice was full of scorn and anger. ‘I can’t be stopped, though. I’ll get a grant anyway. I don’t know what I’d have done in olden times.’

By ‘olden times’ he supposed she meant the days of his own youth when your parents paid for your education or you borrowed the money or worked your way. Things were different now. A father couldn’t put his foot down with the same effect. He could only persuade or dissuade.

‘The last time you saw your father,’ he reminded her.

Her anger had died. She was practical again, crisply reciting facts. But there was something derisive in the way she spoke of her father, as if he were a joke to her—or an organism under a microscope.

‘I came in and he was just leaving. I heard him talking to Mum about the route he was going to take. The A26 for Tonbridge, then the Dartford Tunnel on to the M25 and the M25 to the A12 which would take him to Ipswich.’

‘Why was he telling her the route? Would she be interested? I mean, wasn’t it the route he normally took?’

‘I said you didn’t know my father. I’d say for a start he wouldn’t be much concerned about the other person’s interest. Dad talks a lot about cars and driving, roads, that sort of thing. I’m not interested but he talks to me about it. The car’s a person to him, a woman, and she’s got a Christian name. He calls her Greta. Greta, the Granada, you see.’

‘So your father left and your mother went to Pomfret and you stayed here on your own studying?’

Was he imagining that hesitation, that brief wary flare in her eyes?

‘That’s right. I don’t go out in the evenings at the moment. I haven’t time.’ She smiled again, this time with great artificiality. ‘I heard they’d found his car.’

Tn the process of being dismembered for its wheels and its radio.’

‘Cannibalized,’ she said, and she laughed the way her mother did. ‘Poor old Greta.’

 Could he have a look round the rest of the house? Notably through Williams’s papers and clothes? Joy put up no objection. The television clack-clacked through the floor and the pop music thumped and droned through the wall. In the book of rules of human behaviour he kept in his head one of the first laws was the one about who got which bedroom. The British middle class mostly lived in three bedroorried houses, one big bedroom, one slightly smaller, one little. In a family of parents, son and daughter, the daughter invariably got the second bedroom and the son the tiny one, irrespective of seniority. It was one aspect of life (the women’s movement might have said if they’d noticed it) in which the female had the advantage over the male. Presumably it came about because girls from the first were conditioned into being more at home, more centred on home things and being confined within walls. In which case the women’s movement wouldn’t like it so much. But it was the girl in this household who had the smallest bedroom, even though her brother was now away most of the time. Of course, it might be that she had chosen this arrangement, but somehow he didn’t think so.

He opened the door of the second bedroom and looked inside. There was a newish pine bedroom suite, two bright Afghan rugs, a fringed bedcover that was recognizably one of Marks and Spencer’s designs. It looked as if someone with not much taste or money had done her best to make a ‘nice’ room of it and the sole personal touch its occupant had contributed was to hang a map of the world on the wall opposite the bed.

The main bedroom was like his own in size and proportions. The walls were even painted in the same colour as his own, Sevenstar emulsion Orange Blossom. There the resemblance ended. The Williamses slept in twin beds, each narrower than the standard three feet, he thought. He could tell hers was the one nearest the window by the nightdress case on it, quilted peach satin in the shape of a scallop shell. The rest of the furniture consisted of a wardrobe, dressing table, dressing-table stool, chest of drawers and two bedside tables all in some dark reddish wood with a matt finish and with rather bright gold chrome handles. There was also a built-in cupboard.

Wexford looked first in the drawer of the bedside cabinet between Williams’s bed and the door. He found a box that had once held cufflinks but was now empty, a comb, a tube of antiseptic skin cream, an unused toothbrush, a packet of tissues, a tube of throat pastilles, two safety pins, several plastic collar stiffeners, a half-full bottle of nasal drops and an empty pill bottle labelled ‘Mandaret. One to be taken twice daily. Rodney Williams’.

In the cupboard part of the cabinet were two paperback novels of espionage, an unused writing pad, a current British passport in the name of Mr R. J. Williams, a clean handkerchief initialled ‘R’ and two electric shavers.

The wardrobe contained Joy’s clothes, a collection that had an unwashed, uncleaned smell about it with a whiff of camphor and some kind of disinfectant. Rodney Williams’s

      clothes were in the cupboard. An overcoat, a sheepskin jacket, a plastic mac, two hip-length showerproof jackets, a shabby sports jacket and a new one, four suits, two pairs of slacks. All the clothes were good, all of much better quality than Joy’s. Not a large wardrobe, Wexford thought, looking into the linings of coats and feeling in pockets. In the side compartments were underwear, pyjamas, on the floor three pairs of shoes and a pair of sandals. Whatever Rodney Williams had spent his surplus money on it wasn’t clothes. Unless he had taken more with him than Joy or Sara knew. Maybe he had secreted a couple of bulging suitcases in Greta’s boot during the course of the day.

The dining room, you could see, they hardly ever used. A light-coloured polished table stood in the dead centre of it with four light-coloured wood chairs with moquette seats around it. A sideboard with an empty Capo da Monte bowl on it nearly filled one wall and opposite this was a mahogany roll-top desk, perhaps a hand-down from a parent and certainly the nicest piece of furniture in the house. French windows, at which hung curtains of mustard-coloured rep —a favourite shade with Joy Williams—gave onto the back garden, a quarter acre of grass surrounded by close-board fencing and relieved by two small apple trees on which the blossom glimmered palely in the dusk. It didn’t look as if the grass, several inches long now,                         had been mown since Williams did it five weeks before.

The desk wasn’t locked. Wexford rolled back the top. There wasn’t much inside. Writing paper, not the headed kind, envelopes, a bottle of ink in a cardboard box from which it had never been removed and never would be, a box of drawing pins, a glass jar of gum, a roll of Scotch tape. In one of the drawers was nothing but old Christmas cards, in the other a receipted electricity bill, a pocket calculator and a broken ballpoint pen.

If Williams had meant to go away for good wouldn’t he have taken his passport?

He looked through the pigeonholes but found no cheque books, used or in use. Joy probably kept hers in her handbag. He went back to her. She was still watching television and now the programme was the everlasting serial Runway in which his daughter Sheila played the stewardess heroine. Had, in fact, played her for the last time the previous week. But this was a secret known to no one but her own family as yet. No newspaper had so far got hold of the story that a major air disaster would in the autumn end the career of Stewardess Charlotte Riley for ever.

Joy Williams didn’t know it. If she knew Sheila was his daughter—and surely she must—she gave no sign. He had the curious experience of standing beside her while they both watched his daughter attempting to placate an ill tempered passenger. Then he did what Crocker recommended—or nearly so. If he didn’t go so far as to pull out the plug he did switch off the set. She blinked at him.

‘Does your husband possess a typewriter, Mrs Williams?’

‘A typewriter? No.’

‘Is he still taking Mandaret?’

She nodded, looking at the blank screen as if she expected it spontaneously and without benefit of electricity to spring into cinematic life.

‘It’s a form of methyldopa, isn’t it? A drug for high blood pressure?’

‘He’s had blood pressure for two or three years.’

‘I found an empty Mandaret container in his bedside cupboard. I suppose he took a supply with him?’

‘He wouldn’t forget them. He didn’t like to miss a day on them. He always took one when he got up and one with his tea.’

‘I take it he had a bag with him? A suitcase? Something to put his clothes in?’

Again she simply nodded.

‘What was he dressed in?’

‘Pardon?’

‘What clothes was he wearing when he left here to drive to Ipswich?’

It was plain she couldn’t remember. She looked blank and she looked bored. Wexford understood in that moment that she didn’t love Rodney Williams, hadn’t perhaps loved him for years. His presence or absence as a life companion were matters of indifference to her but his financial support and the status he gave her were not. Or were her feelings more subtle and diffuse than that? Of course they were. Feelings always are. There is never a simple clear analysis of a woman’s reaction to her husband or his to her.

He pressed the point he had made.