by Ruth Rendell
It was the nurse who had started it, coming to him three days before. Sergeant Martin brought her to him because what she alleged was so serious. Wexford knew her by sight, had seen her making her calls, and had sometimes wondered how district nurses could endure their jobs, the unremitting daily toil, the poor pay, the unsavoury tasks. Perhaps she felt the same about his. She was a fair, pretty woman, about thirty-five, overweight, with big red hands, who always looked tired. She looked tired now, though she hadn’t long been back from two weeks’ holiday. She was in her summer uniform, blue and white print dress, white apron, dark cardigan, small round hat and the stout shoes that served for summer and winter alike. Nurse Radcliffe. Judith Radcliffe.
‘Mr Wexford?’ she said. ‘Chief Inspector Wexford? Yes. I believe I used to look in on your daughter after she’d had a baby. I was doing my midwifery then. I can’t remember her name but the baby was Benjamin.’
Wexford smiled and told her his daughter’s name and wondered, looking at the bland faded blue eyes and the stolid set of the neck and shoulders, just how intelligent this woman was, how perceptive and how truthful. He pulled up one of the little yellow chairs for her. His office was cheerful and sunny-looking even when the sun wasn’t shining, not much like a police station.
‘Please sit down, Nurse Radcliffe,’ he said. ‘Sergeant Martin’s given me some idea what you’ve come about.’
‘I feel rather awful. You may think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill.’
‘I shouldn’t worry about that. If I do I’ll tell you so and we’ll forget it. No one else will know of it, it’ll be between us and these four walls.’
At that she gave a short laugh. ‘Oh, dear, I’m afraid it’s gone much further than that already. I’ve three patients in Castle Road and each one of them mentioned it to me. That’s what Castle Road gossip is at the moment, poor old Mrs Wrangton’s death. And I just thought – well, you can’t have that much smoke without fire, can you?’
Mountains and molehills, Wexford thought, smoke and fire. This promised to be a real volcano. He said firmly, ‘I think you’d better tell me all about it.’
She was rather pathetic. ‘It’s best you hear it from someone professional.’ She planted her feet rather wide apart in front of her and leant forward, her hands on her knees. ‘Mrs Wrangton was a very old woman. She was ninety-two. But allowing for her age, she was as fit as a fiddle, thin, strong, continent, her heart as sound as a bell. The day she died was the day I went away on holiday, but I was in there the day before to give her her bath – I did that once a week, she couldn’t get in and out of the bath on her own – and I remember thinking she was fitter than I’d seen her for months. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I came back from holiday and heard she’d had a stroke the next day.’
‘When did you come back, Nurse Radcliffe?’
‘Last Friday, Friday the 16th. Well, it’s Thursday now and I was back on my district on Monday and the first thing I heard was that Mrs Wrangton was dead and suggestions she’d been – well, helped on her way.’ She paused, worked something out on her fingers. ‘I went away June 2nd, that was the day she died, and the funeral was June 7th.’
‘Funeral?’
‘Well, cremation,’ said Nurse Radcliffe, glancing up as Wexford sighed. ‘Dr Moss attended Mrs Wrangton. She was really Dr Crocker’s patient, but he was on holiday too like me. Look, Mr Wexford, I don’t know the details of what happened that day, June 2nd, not first-hand, only what the Castle Road ladies say. D’you want to hear that?’
‘You haven’t yet told me what she died of.’
‘A stroke – according to Dr Moss.’
‘I’m not at all sure,’ said Wexford dryly, ‘how one sets about giving someone a stroke. Would you give them a bad fright or push an empty hypodermic into them or get them into a rage or what?’
‘I really don’t know.’ Nurse Radcliffe looked a little put out and as if she would like to say, had she dared, that to find this out was Wexford’s job, not hers. She veered away from the actual death. ‘Mrs Wrangton and her daughter – that’s Mrs Betts, Mrs Doreen Betts – they hated each other, they were cat and dog. And I don’t think Mr Betts had spoken to Mrs Wrangton for a year or more. Considering the house was Mrs Wrangton’s and every stick of furniture in it belonged to her, I used to think they were very ungrateful. I never liked the way Mrs Betts spoke about her mother, let alone the way she spoke to her, but I couldn’t say a word. Mr Betts is retired now but he only had a very ordinary sort of job in the Post Office and they lived rent-free in Mrs Wrangton’s home. It’s a nice house, you know, late Victorian, and they built to last in those days. I used to think it badly needed doing up and it was a pity Mr Betts couldn’t get down to a bit of painting, when Mrs Wrangton said to me she was having decorators in, having the whole house done up inside and out . . .’
Wexford cut short the flow of what seemed like irrelevancies. ‘Why were the Bettses and Mrs Wrangton on such bad terms?’
The look he got implied that seldom had Nurse Radcliffe come across such depths of naivety. ‘It’s a sad fact, Mr Wexford, that people can outstay their welcome in this world. To put it bluntly, Mr and Mrs Betts couldn’t wait for something to happen to Mrs Wrangton.’ Her voice lingered over the euphemism. ‘They hadn’t been married all that long, you know,’ she said surprisingly. ‘Only five or six years. Mrs Betts was just a spinster before that, living at home with Mother. Mr Betts was a widower that she met at the Over-Sixties Club. Mrs Wrangton used to say she could have done better for herself – seems funny to say that about a woman of her age, doesn’t it? – and that Mr Betts was only after the house and her money.’
‘You mean she said it to you?’
‘Well, not just to me, to anybody,’ said Nurse Radcliffe, unconsciously blackening the dead woman to whom she showed such conscious bias. ‘She really felt it. I think she bitterly resented having him in the house.’
Wexford moved a little impatiently in his chair. ‘If we were to investigate every death just because the victim happened to be on bad terms with his or her relations . . .’
‘Oh, no, no, it’s not just that, not at all. Mrs Betts sent for Dr Moss on May 23rd, just four days after Dr Crocker went away. Why did she? There wasn’t anything wrong with Mrs Wrangton. I was getting her dressed after her bath and I was amazed to see Dr Moss. Mrs Wrangton said, I don’t know what you’re doing here, I never asked my daughter to send for you. Just because I overslept a bit this morning, she said. She was so proud of her good health, poor dear, never had an illness in her long life but the once and that was more an allergy than an illness. I can tell you why he was sent for, Mr Wexford. So that when Mrs Wrangton died he’d be within his rights signing the death certificate. He wasn’t her doctor, you see, but it’d be all right if he’d attended her within the past two weeks, that’s the law. They’re all saying Mrs Betts waited for Dr Crocker to go away, she knew he’d never have just accepted her mother’s death like that. He’d have asked for a post-mortem and then the fat would have been in the fire.’ Nurse Radcliffe didn’t specify how, and Wexford thought better of interrupting her again. ‘The last time I saw Mrs Wrangton,’ she went on, ‘was on June 1st. I had a word with the painter as I was going out. There were two of them but this was a young boy, about twenty. I asked him when they expected to finish, and he said, sooner than they thought, next week, because Mrs Betts had told them just to finish the kitchen and the outside and then to leave it. I thought it was funny at the time, Mrs Wrangton hadn’t said a word to me about it. In fact, what she’d said was, wouldn’t it be nice when the bathroom walls were all tiled and I wouldn’t have to worry about splashing when I bathed her.
‘Mr Wexford, it’s possible Mrs Betts stopped that work because she knew her mother was going to die the next day. She personally didn’t want the whole house re-decorated and she didn’t want to have to pay for it out of the money her mother left her.’
‘Was there much money?’
Wexford asked.
‘I’d guess a few thousands in the bank, maybe three or four, and there was the house, wasn’t there? I know she’d made a will, I witnessed it. I and Dr Crocker. In the presence,’ said Nurse Radcliffe sententiously, ‘of the legatee and of each other, which is the law. But naturally I didn’t see what its provisions were. Mrs Wrangton did tell me the house was to go to Mrs Betts and there was a little something for her friend Elsie Parrish. Beyond that, I couldn’t tell you. Mind you, Mrs Parrish won’t have it that there could have been foul play. I met her in Castle Road and she said, wasn’t it wicked the things people were saying?’
‘Who is Elsie Parrish?’
‘A very nice old friend of Mrs Wrangton’s. Nearly eighty but as spry as a cricket. And that brings me to the worst thing. June 2nd, that Friday afternoon, Mr and Mrs Betts went off to a whist drive. Mrs Parrish knew they were going. Mrs Betts had promised to knock on her door before they went so that she could come round and sit with Mrs Wrangton. She sometimes did that. It wasn’t right to leave her alone, not at her age. Well, Mrs Parrish waited in and Mrs Betts never came, so naturally she thought the Bettses had changed their minds and hadn’t gone out. But they had. They deliberately didn’t call to fetch Mrs Parrish. They left Mrs Wrangton all alone but for that young boy painter, and they’d never done such a thing before, not once.’
Wexford digested all this in silence, not liking it but not really seeing it as a possible murder case. Nurse Radcliffe seemed to have dried up. She slackened back in the chair with a sigh.
‘You mentioned an allergy . . . ?’
‘Oh, my goodness, that was about fifty years ago! Only some kind of hay fever, I think. There’s asthma in the family. Mrs Betts’s brother had asthma all his life, and Mrs Betts gets urticaria – nettle rash, that is. They’re all connected, you know.’
He nodded. He had the impression she had a bombshell yet to explode, or that the volcano was about to erupt. ‘If they weren’t there,’ he said, ‘how could either of them possibly have hastened Mrs Wrangton’s end?’
‘They’d been back two hours before she died. When they came back she was in a coma, and they waited one hour and twenty minutes before they phoned Dr Moss.’
‘Would you have signed that death certificate, Len?’ said Wexford to Dr Crocker. They were in the purpose-built bungalow that housed two consulting rooms and a waiting room. Dr Crocker’s evening surgery was over, the last patient packed off with reassurance and a prescription. Crocker gave Wexford rather a defiant look.
‘Of course I would. Why not? Mrs Wrangton was ninety-two. It’s ridiculous of Radcliffe to say she didn’t expect her to die. You expect everyone of ninety-two to die and pretty soon. I hope nobody’s casting any aspersions on my extremely able partner.’
‘I’m not,’ said Wexford. ‘There’s nothing I’d like more than for this to turn out a lot of hot air. But I do have to ask you, don’t I? I do have to ask Jim Moss.’
Dr Crocker looked a little mollified. He and the chief inspector were lifelong friends, they had been at school together, had lived most of their lives in Kingsmarkham where Crocker had his practice and Wexford was head of the CID. But for a medical practitioner, no amount of friendship will excuse hints that he or one of his fellows have been negligent. And he prickled up again when Wexford said:
‘How could he know it was a stroke without a post-mortem?’
‘God give me patience! He saw her before she was dead, didn’t he? He got there about half an hour before she died. There are unmistakable signs of stroke, Reg. An experienced medical man couldn’t fail to recognize them. The patient is unconscious, the face flushed, the pulse slow, the breathing stertorous with a puffing of the cheeks during expiration. The only possible confusion is with alcoholic poisoning, but in alcoholic poisoning the pupils of the eyes are widely dilated whereas in apoplexy or stroke they’re contracted. Does that satisfy you?’
‘Well, OK, it was a stroke, but aren’t I right in thinking a stroke can be the consequence of something else, of an operation, for instance, or in the case of a young woman, of childbirth, or in an old person even of bedsores?’
‘Old Ivy Wrangton didn’t have bedsores and she hadn’t had a baby for seventy years. She had a stroke because she was ninety-two and her arteries were worn out. “The days of our age”,’ quoted the doctor solemnly, ‘“are threescore years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow.” She’d reached fourscore years and twelve and she was worn out.’ He had been pacing up and down, getting heated, but now came to sit on the edge of his desk, a favourite perch of his. ‘A damn good thing she was cremated,’ he said. ‘That puts out of court all the ghastliness of exhumation and cutting her up. She was a remarkable old woman, you know, Reg. Tough as old boots. She told me once about having her first baby. She was eighteen, out scrubbing the doorstep when she had a labour pain. Indoors she went, called her mother to fetch the midwife and lay down on her bed. The baby was born after two more pains, and the daughter came even easier.’
‘Yes, I heard there’d been another child.’ Wexford saw the absurdity of referring to someone who must necessarily be in his seventies as a child. ‘Mrs Betts has a brother?’ he corrected himself.
‘Had. He died last winter. He was an old man, Reg, and he’d been bronchial all his life. Seventy-four is old till you start comparing it with Mrs Wrangton’s age. She was so proud of her good health, boasted about never being ill. I used to drop in every three months or so as a matter of routine, and when I’d ask her how she was she’d say, I’m fine, Doctor, I’m in the pink.’
‘But I understand she’d had some illness connected with an allergy?’ Wexford was clutching at straws. ‘Nurse Radcliffe told me about it. I’ve been wondering if anything to do with that could have contributed to . . . ?’
‘Of course not,’ the doctor cut in. ‘How could it? That was when she was middle-aged and the so-called illness was an asthmatic attack with some swelling of the eyes and a bit of gastric trouble. I fancy she used to exaggerate it the way healthy people do when they’re talking about the one little bit of illness they’ve ever had . . . Oh, here’s Jim. I thought I’d heard his last patient leave.’
Dr Moss, small, dark and trim, came in from the corridor between the consulting rooms. He gave Wexford the very wide smile that showed thirty-two large white teeth which the chief inspector had never been able to precisely define as false, as crowns or simply as his own. The teeth were rather too big for Dr Moss’s face which was small and smooth and lightly tanned. His small black eyes didn’t smile at all.
‘Enter the villainous medico,’ he said, ‘who is notoriously in cahoots with greedy legatees and paranoid Post Office clerks. What evidence can I show you? The number of my Swiss bank account? Or shall I produce the hammer, a crafty tap from which ensured an immediate subarachnoid haemorrhage?’
It is very difficult to counter this kind of facetiousness. Wexford knew he would only get more fatuous pleasantries, heavy irony, outrageous confessions, if he attempted to rebut any of it or if he were to assure Moss that this wasn’t what he had meant at all. He smiled stiffly, tapping his feet against the leg of Crocker’s desk, while Dr Moss elaborated on his fantasy of himself as corrupt, a kind of latter-day William Palmer, poison-bottle-happy and ever-ready with his hypodermic to gratify the impatient next-of-kin. At length, unable to bear any more of it, Wexford cut across the seemingly interminable harangue and said to Crocker:
‘You witnessed her will, I understand?’
‘I and that busybody Radcliffe, that’s right. If you want to know what’s in it, the house and three thousand pounds go to Doreen Betts, and the residue to another patient of mine, a Mrs Parrish. Residue would have been about fifteen hundred at that time, Mrs Wrangton told me, but considering her money was in a building society and she managed to save out of her pension and her annuity, I imagine it’ll be a good deal more by now.’
&nb
sp; Wexford nodded. By now Dr Moss had dried up, having run out, presumably, of subject matter and witticisms. His teeth irradiated his face like lamps, and when his mouth was closed he looked rather ill-tempered and sinister. Wexford decided to try the direct and simple approach. He apologized.
‘I’d no intention of suggesting you’d been negligent, Dr Moss. But put yourself in my position . . .’
‘Impossible!’
‘Very well. Let me put it this way. Try to understand that in my position I had no choice but to make enquiries.’
‘Mrs Betts might try an action for slander. She can count on my support. The Bettses had neither the opportunity nor the motive to do violence to Mrs Wrangton, but a bunch of tongue-clacking old witches are allowed to take their characters away just the same.’
‘Motive,’ said Wexford gently, ‘I’m afraid they did have, the straightforward one of getting rid of Mrs Wrangton who had become an encumbrance to them, and of inheriting her house.’
‘Nonsense.’ Momentarily the teeth showed in a white blaze. ‘They were going to get rid of her in any case. They would have had the house to themselves in any case. Mrs Wrangton was going into a nursing home.’ He paused, enjoying the effect of what he had said. ‘For the rest of her days,’ he added with a touch of drama.
Crocker shifted off the edge of the desk. ‘I never knew that.’
‘No? Well, it was you who told her about a new nursing home opening in Stowerton, or so she said. She told me all about it that day Mrs Betts called me when you’d gone away. Sometime at the end of May it was. She was having the house decorated for her daughter and son-in-law prior to her leaving.’
‘Did she tell you that too?’ asked Wexford.
‘No, but it was obvious. I can tell you exactly what happened during that visit if it makes you happy. That interfering harpy, Radcliffe, had just been bathing her, and when she’d dressed her she left. Thank God. I’d never met Mrs Wrangton before. There was nothing wrong with her, bar extreme old age and her blood pressure up a bit, and I was rather narked that Mrs Betts had called me out. Mrs Wrangton said her daughter got nervous when she slept late in the mornings as she’d done that day and the day before. Wasn’t to be wondered at, she said, considering she’d been sitting up in bed watching the World Cup on television till all hours. Only Mrs Betts and her husband didn’t know that and I wasn’t to tell them. Well, we had a conspiratorial laugh over that, I liked her, she was a game old dear, and then she started talking about the nursing home – what’s it called? Springfield? Sunnyside?’
