Collected Short Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘It’s wicked the way they gossip. You can’t understand how people can be so evil-minded. You’ll notice how none of them are able to say how Doreen gave Ivy a stroke when she wasn’t even there.’ Mrs Parrish gave a dry satirical laugh. ‘Perhaps they think she bribed that poor young man, the painter, to give Ivy a fright. I remember my mother saying that fright could give you a stroke – an apoplexy, she called it – or too much excitement or drinking too much or over-eating even.’

  To his surprise, because this isn’t what old ladies of elegant appearance usually do or perhaps should do, she opened her handbag, took out a packet of cigarettes and put one between her lips. He shook his head when the packet was offered to him, watched her light the cigarette with a match from a matchbook with a black shiny cover. She puffed delicately. He didn’t think he had ever before seen someone smoke a cigarette while wearing white gloves. He said:

  ‘Why didn’t you go round and sit with Mrs Wrangton, that afternoon, Mrs Parrish?’

  ‘The day she died, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’ Wexford had the impression she didn’t want to answer, she didn’t want to infer anything against Doreen Betts. She spoke with care.

  ‘It’s quite true I’m getting rather deaf.’ He hadn’t noticed it. She had heard everything he said, in the open noisy street, and he hadn’t raised his voice. ‘I don’t always hear the bell. Doreen must have rung and I didn’t hear. That’s the only explanation.’

  Was it?

  ‘I thought she and Harry had changed their minds about going out.’ Elsie Parrish put the cigarette to her lips between thumb and forefinger. ‘I’d give a lot,’ she said, ‘to be able to go back in time. I wouldn’t hesitate this time, I’d go round and check on Ivy whether Doreen had asked me or not.’

  ‘Probably your presence would have made no difference,’ he said, and then, ‘Mrs Betts had told the builders not to do any work upstairs . . .’

  She interrupted him. ‘Maybe it didn’t need it. I’ve never been upstairs in Ivy’s house, so I couldn’t say. Besides, when she’d sold it the new people might have had their own ideas, mightn’t they? They might have wanted to do their own decorating.’

  They were standing still now on the street corner, he about to go in one direction, she in the other. She dropped the cigarette end, stamped it out over-thoroughly with a high heel. From her handbag she took a small lacy handkerchief and dabbed her nostrils with it. The impression was that the tears, though near, would be restrained. ‘She left me two thousand pounds. Dear Ivy, she was so kind and generous. I knew I was to have something, I didn’t dream as much as that.’ Elsie Parrish smiled, a watery, girlish, rueful smile, but still he was totally unprepared for what she said next. ‘I’m going to buy a car.’

  His eyebrows went up.

  ‘I’ve kept my licence going. I haven’t driven since my husband died and that’s twenty-two years ago. I had to sell our car and I’ve always longed and longed for another.’ She really looked as if she had, a yearning expression crumpling the roses still further. ‘I’m going to have my own dear little car!’ She was on the verge of executing a dance on the pavement. ‘And dear Ivy made that possible!’ Anxiously: ‘You don’t think I’m too old to drive?’

  Wexford did, but he only said that this kind of judgement wasn’t really within his province. She nodded, smiled again, whisked off surprisingly fast into the corner supermarket. Wexford moved more slowly and thoughtfully away, his eyes down. It was because he was looking down that he saw the matchbook, and then he remembered fancying he had seen her drop something when she got out that handkerchief.

  She wasn’t in the shop. She must have left by the other exit into the High Street and now she was nowhere to be seen. Deciding that matchbooks were in the category of objects which no one much minds losing, Wexford dropped it into his pocket and forgot it.

  ‘You want Roy?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Wexford.

  The foreman, storekeeper, proprietor, whatever he was, didn’t ask why. ‘You’ll find him,’ he said, ‘doing the Snowcem on them flats up the Sewingbury Road.’

  Wexford drove up there. Roy was a gigantic youth, broad-shouldered, heavily muscled, with an aureole of thick curly fair hair. He came down the ladder and said he’d just been about to knock off for his tea break, anyway. There was a carmen’s café conveniently near. Roy lit a cigarette, put his elbows on the table.

  ‘I never knew a thing about it till I turned up there the next day.’

  ‘But surely when Mrs Betts came in the afternoon before she asked you how her mother had been?’

  ‘Sure she did. And I said the truth, that the old lady’d got a headache and asked for something for it and I’d given it her, and then she’d felt tired and gone in for a lay-down. But there was no sign she was dying. My God, that’d never have crossed my mind.’

  A headache, Wexford reflected, was often one of the premonitory signs of a cerebral haemorrhage. Roy seemed to read his thoughts, for he said quickly:

  ‘She’d had a good many headaches while I was in the place working. Them non-drip plastic-based paints have got a bit of a smell to them, used to turn me up at first. I mean, you don’t want to get thinking there was anything out of the way in her having an aspirin and laying down, guv. That’d happened two or three times while I was there. And she’d shovel them aspirins down, swallow four as soon as look at you.’

  Wexford said, ‘Tell me about that afternoon. Did anyone come into the house between the time Mr and Mrs Betts went out and the time they got back?’

  Roy shook his head. ‘Definitely not, and I’d have known. I was working on the hall, see? The front door was wide open on account of the smell. Nobody could have come in there without my seeing, could they? The other old girl – Mrs Betts, that is – she locked the back door before she went out and I hadn’t no call to unlock it. What else d’you want to know, guv?’

  ‘Exactly what happened, what you and Mrs Wrangton talked about, the lot.’

  Roy swigged his tea, lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the last. ‘I got on OK with her, you know. I reckon she reminded me of my gran. It’s a funny thing, but everyone got on OK with her bar her own daughter and the old man. Funny old git, isn’t he? Gave me the creeps. Well, to what you’re asking, I don’t know that we talked much. I was painting, you see, and the door to the front room was shut. I looked in a couple of times. She was sitting there knitting, watching cricket on the TV. I do remember she said I was making a nice job of the house and it was a pity she wouldn’t be there to enjoy it. Well, I thought she meant she’d be dead, you know the way they talk, and I said, Now come on, Mrs Wrangton, you mustn’t talk like that. That made her laugh. She said, I don’t mean that, you naughty boy, I mean I’m going into a nursing home and I’ve got to sell the place, didn’t you know? No, I said, I didn’t, but I reckoned it’d fetch a packet, big old house like that, twenty thousand at least, I said, and she said she hoped so.’

  Wexford nodded. So Mrs Wrangton had intended to go ahead with her plans, and Doreen Betts’s denial had either been purposeful lying to demolish her motive or a post-mortem white-washing of her mother’s character. For it had certainly been black-hearted enough, he thought, quite an act it had been, that of deliberately turning your own daughter and her husband out of their home. He looked back to Roy.

  ‘You offered to make her tea?’

  ‘Yeah, well, the daughter, Mrs Betts, said to make myself and her a cup of tea if she wanted, but she didn’t want. She asked me to turn off the TV and then she said she’d got a headache and would I go to the bathroom cupboard and get her aspirins? Well, I’d seen Mrs Betts do it often enough, though I’d never actually . . .’

  ‘You’re sure she said aspirins?’ Quite suddenly Wexford knew what it was that had seemed incongruous to him in Mrs Betts’s description of her mother’s last afternoon of life. Doreen Betts had specified paracetamol instead of the common household remedy. ‘You’re sure she used that word?’ he sai
d.

  Roy pursed his mouth. ‘Well, now you mention it, I’m not sure. I reckon what she said was, my tablets or the tablets for my head, something like that. You just do say aspirins, don’t you, like naturally? I mean, that’s what everybody takes. Anyway, I brought them down, the bottle and gave them to her with a glass of water, and she says she’s going to have a bit of shut-eye in her chair. But the next thing I knew she was coming out, leaning on that walking frame the welfare people give her. I took four, Roy, she says, but my head’s that bad, I reckon it’s worse, and I’m ever so giddy. Well, I didn’t think much of that, they’re all giddy at that age, aren’t they? I remember my gran. She says she’s got ringing in her ears, so I said, I’ll help you into your room, shall I? And I sort of give her my arm and helped her in and she lay down on the bed with all her things on and shut her eyes. The light was glaring so I pulled the curtains over and then I went back to my painting. I never heard another thing till Mrs Betts and the old boy come in at half five . . .’

  Wexford closed Practical Forensic Medicine by Francis E. Camps and J. M. Cameron and made his way back to Castle Road. He had decided to discuss the matter no further with Mrs Betts. The presence of her husband, shuffling about almost silently in his furry slippers, his feet like the paws of an old hibernating animal, rather unnerved him. She made no demur at his proposal to remove from the bathroom cabinet the prescription bottle of pain-killing tablets, labelled: Mrs I. Wrangton, Paracetamol.

  Evening surgery had only just begun. Wexford went home for his dinner, having sent two items away for fingerprint analysis. By eight-thirty he was back in the surgery building and again Dr Crocker had finished first. He groaned when he saw Wexford.

  ‘What is it now, Reg?’

  ‘Why did you prescribe paracetamol for Mrs Wrangton?’

  ‘Because I thought it suitable for her, of course. She was allergic to aspirin.’

  Wexford looked despairingly at his friend. ‘Now he tells me. I’d rather gathered it. I mean, today I caught on, but you might have told me.’

  ‘For God’s sake! You knew. You said to me, Nurse Radcliffe told me all about it. Those were your words. You said . . .’

  ‘I thought it was asthma.’

  Crocker sat on the edge of his desk. ‘Look, Reg, we’ve both been barking up the wrong trees. There was asthma in Mrs Wrangton’s family. Mrs Betts has nettle rash, her brother was a chronic asthmatic. People with asthma or a family history of asthma are sometimes allergic to acetylsalicylic acid or aspirin. In fact, about ten per cent of such people are thought to have the allergy. One of the reactions of the hypersensitive person to aspirin is an asthmatic attack. That’s what Mrs Wrangton had when she was in her forties, that and haematemesis. Which means,’ he added kindly for the layman, ‘bringing up blood from an internal haemorrhage.’

  ‘OK, I’m not bone ignorant,’ Wexford snapped, ‘and I’ve been reading up hypersensitivity to acetylsalicylic acid . . .’

  ‘Mrs Wrangton couldn’t have had aspirin poisoning,’ said the doctor quickly. ‘There were never any aspirins in the house. Mrs Betts was strict about that.’

  They were interrupted by the arrival of smiling Dr Moss. Wexford wheeled round on him.

  ‘What would you expect to be the result of – let me see – one point two grammes of acetylsalicylic acid on a woman of ninety-two who was hypersensitive to the drug?’

  Moss looked at him warily. ‘I take it this is academic?’ Wexford didn’t answer. ‘Well, it’d depend on the degree of hypersensitivity. Nausea, maybe, diarrhoea, dizziness, tinnitus – that’s ringing in the ears – breathing difficulties, gastric haemorrhages, oedema of gastric mucosa, possible rupture of the oesophagus. In a person of that age, consequent upon such a shock and localized haemorrhages, I suppose a brain haemorrhage . . .’ He stopped, realizing what he had said.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ said Wexford. ‘I think you’ve more or less described what happened to Mrs Wrangton on June 2nd after she’d taken four three hundred milligram tablets of aspirin.’

  Dr Moss was looking stunned. He looked as if he would never smile again. Wexford passed an envelope to Crocker.

  ‘Those are aspirins?’

  Crocker looked at them, touched one to his tongue. ‘I suppose so, but . . .’

  ‘I’ve sent the rest away to be analysed. To be certain. There were fifty-six in the bottle.’

  ‘Reg, it’s unthinkable there could have been a mistake on the part of the pharmacist, but just supposing by a one in a million chance there was, she couldn’t have taken forty-four tablets of aspirin. Not even over the months she couldn’t.’

  ‘You’re being a bit slow,’ said Wexford. ‘You prescribed one hundred paracetamol, and one hundred paracetamol were put into that bottle at Fraser’s, the chemist’s. Between the time the prescription was made up and the day before, or a few days before, or a week before, she died, she took forty tablets of paracetamol, leaving sixty in the bottle. But on June 2nd she took four tablets of aspirin. Or, to put it bluntly, some time before June 2nd someone removed those sixty tablets of paracetamol and substituted sixty tablets of aspirin.’

  Dr Moss found his voice. ‘That would be murder.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Wexford spoke hesitantly. ‘The hypersensitivity might not have resulted in a stroke. The intent may only have been to cause illness of a more or less severe kind. Ulceration of the stomach, say. That would have meant hospitalization for Mrs Wrangton. On the Welfare State. No exorbitant nursing home fees to be paid there, no swallowing up of capital or selling of property. Later on, if she survived, she would probably have been transferred, again for free, to a geriatric ward in the same hospital. It’s well-known that no private nursing home will take the chronically sick.’

  ‘You think Mrs Betts . . . ?’ Dr Moss began.

  ‘No, I don’t. For two good reasons, Mrs Betts is the one person who wouldn’t have done it this way. If she had wanted to kill her mother or to make her seriously ill, why go to all the trouble of changing over sixty tablets in a bottle, when she had only to give Mrs Wrangton the aspirins in her hand? And if she had changed them, wouldn’t she, immediately her mother was dead, have changed them back again?’

  ‘Then who was it?’

  ‘I shall know tomorrow,’ said Wexford.

  Crocker came to him at his office in the police station.

  ‘Sorry I’m late. I just lost a patient.’

  Wexford made sympathetic noises. Having walked round the room, eyed the two available chairs, the doctor settled for the edge of Wexford’s desk.

  ‘Yesterday,’ Wexford began, ‘I had a talk with Mrs Elsie Parrish.’ He checked the doctor’s exclamation and sudden start forward. ‘Wait a minute, Len. She dropped a matchbook before we parted. It was one of those with a glossy surface that very easily take prints. I had the prints on it and those on the paracetamol bottle compared. There were Mrs Betts’s prints on the bottle, and a set that were presumably Mrs Wrangton’s, and a man’s that were presumably the painter’s. And there was also a very clear set identical to those on the matchbook.

  ‘It was Elsie Parrish who changed those tablets, Len. She did it because she knew that Mrs Wrangton fully intended to retire to Summerland and that the first money to go, perhaps before the house was sold, would be the few thousands of capital she and Doreen Betts were to share. Elsie Parrish had waited for years for that money, she wanted to buy a car. A few more years and if she herself survived it would be too late for driving cars. Besides, by then her legacy would have been swallowed up in nursing home fees.’

  ‘A nice old creature like that?’ Crocker said. ‘That’s no proof, her prints on the bottle. She’ll have fetched that bottle often enough for old Ivy.’

  ‘No. She told me she had never been upstairs in Ivy Wrangton’s house.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she saw it as murder. It wouldn’t seem like murder, or manslaughter, or grievous bodily harm, changing tablets over in a bottle.
’ Wexford sat down, wrinkled up his face. He said crossly, dispiritedly, ‘I don’t know what to do, Len. We’ve no way of proving Mrs Wrangton died of aspirin poisoning. We can’t exhume her, we can’t analyse “two handfuls of white dust shut in an urn of brass”. And even if we could, would we be so inhumane as to have a woman of – how old is Elsie Parrish?’

  ‘Seventy-eight.’

  ‘Seventy-eight up in court on a murder charge. On the other hand, should she be allowed to profit from her crime? Should she be permitted to terrorize pedestrians in a smart little Ford Fiesta?’

  ‘She won’t,’ said Crocker.

  Something in his voice brought Wexford to his feet. ‘Why? What d’you mean?’

  The doctor slid lightly off the edge of the desk. ‘I told you I’d lost a patient. Elsie Parrish died last night. A neighbour found her and called me.’

  ‘Maybe that’s for the best. What did she die of?’

  ‘A stroke,’ said Crocker, and went.

  Ginger and the Kingsmarkham Chalk Circle

  ‘There’s a girl downstairs, sir,’ said Polly Davies, ‘and she says someone’s taken her baby out of its pram.’

  Chief Inspector Wexford had been contemplating a sheet of foolscap. On it, written by himself in the cause of crime prevention, was a politely worded request to the local authority, asking them to refrain from erecting scaffolding around their rented property a full nine months before building work was due to commence. Because of the scaffolding there had already been two burglaries and an assault on a young woman. He looked up from the paper, adjusted his thoughts and sighed.

  ‘They will do it,’ he said. ‘Leave their babies about I mean. You’d never find them leaving their handbags outside shops.’

  ‘It was outside her flat, sir, not a shop, and the thing is, whoever took the baby left another one in its place.’