An Unkindness of Ravens (7 page)

‘We’re going to have to start looking for him. I mean really looking. Search the grounds of Green Pond Hall for a start.’

Burden had been pacing the office. He had taken to doing this lately and his restless pacing had a stressful effect on anyone he happened to be with, though he himself hardly seemed aware of what was going on. Twice he had been to the window, twice back to the door, pausing once to perch briefly on the edge of the desk. Now he had reached the window again where he stopped, turned and stared at Wexford in irritable incredulity.

‘Search for him> Surely it’s plain he’s simply done a bunk to escape the consequences of whatever it is he’s done.’

‘All right, Mike. Maybe. But in that case what has he done? Nothing at Sevensmith Harding. He’s as clean as a whistle there. What else could he have done? It’s just possible he could be involved in some fraud that hasn’t yet come to light but there’s a strong case against that one. He got out. The only reason for that would be that discovery of the fraud was imminent. In that case why hasn’t that discovery been made?’

Burden shrugged. ‘Who knows? But it may just be a piece of luck for Williams that it hasn’t been.’

‘Why hasn’t he come back then? If the outcome of this fraud has blown over why doesn’t he come home? He hasn’t left the country unless he’s gone on a false passport. And why bother with a false passport when he’d got one of his own and no one started missing him till three days after he’d gone?’

‘Doesn’t it occur to you that leaving one’s clothes on the river bank is the oldest disappearing trick in the world?’

‘On the beach, I think you mean, not on the shores of a pond where the water’s so shallow that to commit suicide you’d have to lie on your face and hold your breath. Besides, that bag has been in the pond only a couple of days at most. If it had been there since Williams went it’d be rotting by now, it’d stink. We’ll send it over to the lab and see what they say but we can see what they’ll say with our own eyes and smell it with our own noses.

‘Williams is dead. This bag of his tells me he is. If he” had put it into the pond for the purpose of making us think he was dead he’d have done so immediately after he left. And the contents would have been different. More identification, for instance, no scent and powder blue knickers. And I don’t think the money would have been in it. He would have needed that money, he would have needed all the money he could lay hands on. There’s no reason to think he could easily spare fifty pounds—whatever he’s done he hasn’t robbed a bank.

‘He’s dead and, letter and phone call notwithstanding, he was dead within an hour or two of when his family last saw him.’

Next day the searching of Green Pond Hall grounds began.

The grounds comprised eight acres, part woodland, part decayed overgrown formal gardens, part stables and paddock. Sergeant Martin led the search with three men and Wexford himself went down there to have a look at the dragged pond and view the terrain. It was still raining. It had been raining yesterday and the day before and for part of every day for three weeks. The weather people were saying it would be the wettest May since records began. The track was a morass, the colour and texture of melted chocolate in which a giant fork had furrowed. There were other ways of getting down to the pond but only if you went on foot.

At three he had a date at Stowerton Royal Infirmary. Colin Budd had been placed in intensive care but only for the night. By morning he was sufficiently recovered to be transferred to a side room off the men’s surgical ward. The stab wounds he had received were more than superficial, one having penetrated to a depth of three inches, but by a miracle almost none of the five had endangered heart or lungs.

A thick white dressing covered his upper chest, over which a striped pyjama jacket had been loosely wrapped. The pyjama jacket was an extra large and Wexford estimated Budd’s chest measurement at thirty-four inches. He was a very thin, bony, almost cadaverous young man, white-faced and with black, longish hair. He seemed to know exactly what Wexford would want to know about him and quickly and nervously repeated his name and age, gave his occupation as motor mechanic and his address a Kingsmarkham one where he lived with his parents.

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘This girl stuck a knife in my chest.’

‘Now, Mr Budd, you know better than that. I want a detailed account, everything you can remember, starting with what you were doing waiting for a bus in the middle of nowhere.’

Budd had a querulous voice that always sounded mildly indignant. He was one of those who believes the world owes him elaborate consideration as well as a living.

‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ he said.

Til be the judge of that. I don’t suppose you were doing anything to be ashamed of. And if you were what you tell me will be between you and me.’

‘I don’t know what you’re getting at!’

‘Just tell me where you’d been last evening, Mr Budd.’

‘I was at snooker,’ Budd said sullenly.

What a fool! He’d made it sound at least as if he was having it away with a friend’s wife in one of the isolated cottages on the hillside.

‘A snooker club?’

‘It’s on Tuesday evenings. In Pomfret, a room at the back of the White Horse. It’s over at ten and I reckoned on walking home.’ Budd shifted his body, wincing a bit, pulling himself up in the bed. ‘But the rain started coming down harder, I was getting soaked. I looked at my watch and saw the ten-forty bus’d be along in ten minutes and I was nearly at the stop by then.’

‘I’d have expected a motor mechanic to have his own transport.’

‘My car was in a crunch-up. It’s in dock having a new wing. I wasn’t doing no more than twenty-five when this woman come out of a side turning .. . ‘

Wexford cut that one short. ‘So you reached the bus stop, the bus shelter. What happened?’

Budd looked at him and away. ‘There was this girl already there, sitting on the seat. I sat down next to her.’

The bus shelter was well known to Wexford. It was about ten feet long, the seat or bench inside two feet shorter.

‘Next to her?’ he asked. ‘Or at the other end of the seat?’

‘Next to her. Does it matter?’

Wexford thought perhaps it did. In England at any rate, for good or ill, for the improving of social life or its worsening, a man of honourable intent who goes to sit on a public bench where a woman is already sitting will do so as far away from her as possible. A woman will probably do this too if a woman or man is already sitting there, and a man will do it if another man is there.

‘Did you know her? Had you ever seen her before?’

Budd shook his head.

‘You spoke to her?’

‘Only to say it was raining.’

She knew that already, Wexford thought. He looked hard at Budd. Budd said, ‘I said it was a pity we were having such a bad May, it made the winter longer, something like that. She pulled a knife out of her bag and lunged it at me.’

‘Just like that? You didn’t say anything else to her?’

‘I’ve told you what I said.’

‘She was mad, was she? A girl who stabs men because they tell her it’s raining?’

‘All I said was that normally at this time I’d have had my vehicle and I could have given her a lift.’

‘In other words, you were trying to pick her up?’

‘All right, what if I was? I didn’t touch her. I didn’t do anything to frighten her. That was all I said, that I could have given her a lift home. She pulled out this knife and stabbed at me four or five times and I cried out or screamed or something and she ran off.’

‘Would you know her again?’

‘You bet I would.’

‘Describe her to me.’

Budd made the mess of that Wexford thought he would. He didn’t know whether she was tall or short, plump or thin, because he only saw her sitting down and he thought she had a raincoat on. A thin raincoat that was a sort of pale colour. Her hair was fair, he did know that, though she had a hat on or a scarf. Bits of blonde hair showed under it. Her face was just an ordinary face, not what you’d call pretty. Wexford began to wonder what had attracted Budd to her in the first place. The mere facts that she was female and young? About twenty, said Budd. Well, maybe twenty-five or six. Pressed to be more precise, he said she could have been any age between eighteen and thirty, he wasn’t good on ages, she was quite young though.

‘Can you think of anything else about her?’

A nurse had come in and was hovering. Wexford knew what she was about to say, he could have written the script for her—’Now I think that’s quite enough. It’s time for Mr Budd to have his rest .. . ‘ She approached the bed, unhooked Budd’s chart and began reading it with the enthusiastic concentration of a scholar who has just found the key to Linear B or some such.

‘She had this sack with her. She grabbed it before she ran off.’

‘What sort of sack?’

‘The plastic kind they give you for your dustbin. A black one. She picked it up and stuck it over her shoulder and ran off.’

‘I think that’s quite enough for now,’ said the nurse, diverging slightly from Wexford’s text.

He got up. It was an extraordinary picture Budd’s story had created and one which appealed to his imagination. The dark wet night, the knife flashing purposefully, even frenziedly, the girl running off into the rain with a sack slung over her shoulder. It was like an illustration in a fairy book of Andrew Lang, elusive, sinister and otherworldly.

6

 What had Burden meant when he said this amniocentesis had discovered something to worry Jenny? Wexford found himself brooding on that. Once or twice he had woken in the night and the question had come into his mind. Sitting in the car, being driven to Myringham, he saw a woman on the pavement with a Down’s Syndrome child and the question was back, presenting itself again.

He hadn’t liked to pursue it with Burden. This wasn’t the sort of thing you asked a prospective father about. What small defect was there a father wouldn’t mind about but a mother would? It was grotesque, ridiculous, there was nothing. Any defect would be a tragedy. His mind ranged over partial deafness, a heart murmur, palate or lip deformities—the test couldn’t have shown those anyway. An extra chromosome? This was an area where he found himself floundering in ignorance. He thought of his own children, perfect, always healthy, giving him no trouble really, and his heart warmed towards his girls.

This reminded him that he had the National Theatre’s programme brochure for the summer season in his pocket. Sheila was with the company and this would be the first season she had top lead roles. Hence the disengagement from further work on Runway. He got out the programme and looked at it. Dora had asked him to decide which days they should go to London and see the three productions Sheila was in. For obvious reasons it always had to be he who made those kind of decisions.

The new Stoppard, Ibsen’s Little Eyolf, Shelley’s The Cenci. Wexford had heard of Little Eyolf but he had never seen it or read it, and as for The Cenci, he had to confess to himself that he hadn’t known Shelley had written any plays. But there it was: ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’ and the piece described as a tragedy in five acts. Wexford was making tentative marks on the programme for a Friday in July and two Saturdays in August when Donaldson, his driver, drew into the kerb outside Sevensmith Harding.

Miles Gardner had been watching for him and came rushing out with an umbrella. It made Wexford feel like royalty. They splashed across the pavement to the mahogany doors.

Kenneth Risby, the chief accountant, told him Rodney Williams’s salary had been paid into the account Williams had with the Pomfret branch of the Anglian-Victoria Bank. From that account then, it would seem, Williams had each month transferred 500 pounds into the joint account he had with Joy. Risby had been with the company for fifteen years and said he could recall no other arrangement being made for Williams, either recently or in the days when he was a sales rep. His salary had always gone to the Pomfret bank, never to Kingsmarkham.

‘We’ve heard nothing,’ Miles Gardner said. ‘Whatever he meant by the PS to that letter he hasn’t been in touch.’

‘Williams didn’t write that letter,’ Wexford reminded him.

Gardner nodded unhappily.

‘The first time we talked about this business,’ Wexford said, ‘you told me someone phoned here saying she was Mrs Williams and that her husband was ill and wouldn’t be coming in. Would that have been on Friday, April the sixteenth?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose it would.’

‘Who took the call?’

‘It must have been one of our telephonists. They’re part timers. I can’t remember whether it was Anna or Michelle. The phone call came before I got in, you see. That is, before nine-thirty.’

‘Williams had a secretary, I suppose?’

‘Christine Lomond. He shared her with our assistant sales director. Would you like to talk to her?’

‘Not yet. Maybe not today. It’s Anna or Michelle I want. But which one do I want?’

‘Michelle, I expect,’ said Gardner. ‘They tend to swop shifts a bit but it’s usually Michelle on mornings.’

It had been, that Friday, and it was today. Michelle was a very young, very pretty girl with a vividly made-up face. The room where the switchboard was, not much more than a cupboard, was stamped with her personality (or perhaps Anna’s) and there was a blue cineraria in a pot, a stack of magazines, a pile of knitting that had reached the bulky stage, and on the table in front of her, hurriedly placed face downwards, the latest diet paperback.

It was clear that Michelle had already discussed that phone call exhaustively. Perhaps with Anna or with Christine Lomond. Williams’s disappearance would have been the talk of the office.

‘I get in at nine,’ she said. ‘That’s when the phone calls really start. But the funny thing was there weren’t any that morning till Mrs Williams phoned at about twenty past.’

‘You mean till someone phoned who called herself Mrs Williams.’

The girl looked at him. She shook her head quite vehemently. ‘It was Mrs Williams. She said, “This is Joy Williams.” ‘

Wexford let it go for the time being.