A New Lease of Death

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Primero. Rose Isabel Primero. That was her married name. Far from being foreign, she’d been brought up at Forby Hall. Her people were by way of being squires of Forby.’

  Burden knew Forby well. What tourists there were in this agricultural country with neither seaside nor downs, castles nor cathedrals, made a point of going to Forby. The guide books listed it absurdly as the fifth prettiest village in England. Every local newsagent’s contained postcards of its church. Burden himself regarded it with certain affection because its inhabitants had shown themselves almost totally devoid of criminal tendencies.

  ‘This Archery could be a relative,’ he suggested. ‘Maybe he wants some gen for his family archives.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Wexford said, basking in the sun like a huge grey cat. ‘The only relatives she had were her three grandchildren. Roger Primero, the grandson, lives at Forby Hall now. Didn’t inherit it, had to buy it. I don’t know the details.’

  ‘There used to be a family called Kynaston at Forby Hall, or so Jean’s mother says. Mind you, that was years and years ago.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Wexford said with a hint of impatience in his rumbling bass voice. ‘Mrs Primero was born a Kynaston and she was going on for forty when she married Dr Ralph Primero. I imagine her people looked on it a bit askance – this was at the turn of the century, remember.’

  ‘What was he, a G.P.?’

  ‘Some sort of specialist, I think. It was when he retired that they came to live at Victor’s Piece. They weren’t all that well-off, you know. When the doctor died in the thirties Mrs Primero was left with about ten thousand pounds to live on. There was one child of the marriage, a son, but he’d died soon after his father.’

  ‘D’you mean she was living alone in that great place? At her age?’

  Wexford pursed his lips, reminiscing. Burden knew his chief’s almost supernatural memory. When he was sufficiently interested he had the nearest thing to total recall. ‘She had one maid,’ Wexford said. ‘Her name was – is, she’s still alive – her name was Alice Flower. She was a good bit younger than her employer, seventy odd, and she’d been with Mrs Primero for about fifty years. A real ancient retainer of the old school. Living like that, you might think they’d have become friends rather than mistress and servant, but Alice kept to her place and they were “Madam” and “Alice” to each other till the day Mrs Primero died. I knew Alice by sight. She was quite a local character when she came into town to do their shopping, particularly when Painter started bringing her in Mrs Primero’s Daimler. D’you remember how nursemaids used to look? No, you wouldn’t. You’re too young. Well, Alice always wore a long navy coat and what’s called a “decent” navy felt hat. She and Painter were both servants, but Alice put herself miles above him. She’d pull her rank on him and give him his orders just like Mrs Primero herself. He was Bert to his wife and his cronies but Alice called him “Beast”. Not to his face, mind. She wouldn’t have quite dared that.’

  ‘You mean she was frightened of him?’

  ‘In a way. She hated him and resented his being there. I wonder if I’ve still got that cutting.’ Wexford opened the bottom drawer of his desk, the one where he kept personal, semi-official things, grotesqueries that had interested him. He hadn’t much hope of finding what he sought. At the time of Mrs Primero’s murder Kingsmarkham police had been housed in an old yellow brick building in the center of the town. That had been pulled down four or five years ago and replaced by this block of startling modernity in the outskirts. The cutting had very probably got lost in the move from the high pitch pine desk to this one of lacquered rosewood. He leafed through notes, letters, odd little souvenirs, finally surfacing with a grin of triumph.

  ‘There you are, the “unperson” himself. Good-looking if you like the type. Herbert Arthur Painter, late of the Fourteenth Army in Burma. Twenty-five years old, engaged by Mrs Primero as chauffeur, gardener and odd-job man.’

  The cutting was from the Sunday Planet, several columns of type surrounding a double-column block. It was a clear photograph and Painter’s eyes were staring straight at the camera.

  ‘Funny, that,’ said Wexford. ‘He always looked you straight in the eye. Supposed to denote honesty, if you’ve ever heard such a load of rubbish.’

  Burden must have seen the picture before, but he had entirely forgotten it. It was a large well-made face with a straight though fleshy nose, spread at the nostrils. Painter had the thick curved lips that on a man are a coarse parody of a woman’s mouth, a flat high brow and short tightly waving hair. The waves were so tightly crimped that they looked as if they must have pulled the skin and pained the scalp.

  ‘He was tall and well-built,’ Wexford went on. ‘Face like a handsome overgrown pug, don’t you think? He’d been in the Far East during the war, but if the heat and the privation had taken it out of him it didn’t show by then. He had a sort of glistening good health about him like a shire horse. Sorry to use all these animal metaphors, but Painter was like an animal.’

  ‘How did Mrs Primero come to take him on?’

  Wexford took the cutting from him, looked at it for a moment and folded it up.

  ‘From the time the doctor died,’ he said, ‘until 1947 Mrs Primero and Alice Flower struggled to keep the place going, pulling up a few weeds here and there, getting a man in when they wanted a shelf fixed. You can imagine the kind of thing. They had a succession of women up from Kingsmarkham to help with the housework but sooner or later they all left to go into the factories. The place started going to rack and ruin. Not surprising when you think that by the end of the war Mrs Primero was in her middle eighties and Alice nearly seventy. Besides, leaving her age out of it, Mrs Primero never touched the place as far as housework went. She hadn’t been brought up to it and she wouldn’t have known a duster from an antimacassar.’

  ‘Bit of a tartar, was she?’

  ‘She was what God and her background had made her,’ Wexford said gravely but with the faintest suspicion of irony in his voice. ‘I never saw her till she was dead. She was stubborn, a bit mean, what nowadays is called “reactionary”, inclined to be an autocrat and very much monarch of all she surveyed. I’ll give you a couple of examples. When her son died he left his wife and kids very badly off. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but Mrs Primero was quite willing to help financially provided it was on her terms. The family was to come and live with her and so on. Still, I daresay she couldn’t afford to keep up two establishments. The other thing was that she’d been a very keen churchwoman. When she got too old to go she insisted on Alice going in her place. Like a sort of whipping boy. But she had her affections. She adored the grandson, Roger, and she had one close friend. We’ll come to that later.

  ‘As you know, there was an acute housing shortage after the war and a hell of a servant problem too. Mrs Primero was an intelligent old woman and she got to thinking how she could use one to solve the other. In the grounds of Victor’s Piece was a coach house with a sort of loft over the top of it. The place for the coach was used to house the aforesaid Daimler. No one had driven it since the doctor died – Mrs Primero couldn’t drive and, needless to say, Alice couldn’t either. There was precious little petrol about but you could get your ration, enough to do the shopping and take a couple of old dears for a weekly jaunt around the lanes.’

  ‘So Alice was that much of a friend? Burden put in.

  Wexford said solemnly, ‘A lady can be accompanied by her maid when she goes driving. Anyway, Mrs Primero put an advert in the Kingsmarkham Chronicle for a young able-bodied man, willing to do the garden, perform odd jobs, maintain and drive the car in exchange for a flat and three pounds a week.’

  ‘Three pounds?’ Burden was a non-smoker and no lover of extravagant living, but he knew from doing his wife’s weekend shopping what a little way three pounds went.

  ‘Well, it was worth a good bit more in those days, Mike,’ Wexford said almost apologetically. ‘Mrs Primero had the loft painted up, divided into
three rooms and piped for water. It wasn’t Dolphin Square but, God, people were glad of one room back in 1947! She got a lot of answers but for some reason – God knows what reason – she picked Painter. At the trial Alice said she thought the fact that he had a wife and a baby daughter would keep him steady. Depends what you mean by steady, doesn’t it?’

  Burden shifted his chair out of the sun. ‘Was the wife employed by Mrs Primero too?’

  ‘No, just Painter. She’d got this little kid, you see, she was only about two when they came. If she’d worked up at the house she’d have had to bring the child with her. Mrs Primero would never have stood for that. As far as she was concerned between her and the Painters there was a great gulf fixed. I gathered she’d hardly exchanged more than a couple of words with Mrs Painter all the time Painter was there and as for the little girl – her name was Theresa, I think – she barely knew of her existence.’

  ‘She doesn’t sound a very nice sort of woman,’ Burden said doubtfully.

  ‘She was typical of her age and class,’ Wexford said tolerantly. ‘Don’t forget she was a daughter of the lord of the manor when lords of the manor still counted for something. To her Mrs Painter was comparable to a tenant’s wife. I’ve no doubt that if Mrs Painter had been ill she’d have sent old Alice over with a bowl of soup and some blankets. Besides, Mrs Painter kept herself to herself. She was very pretty, very quiet and with a sort of deadly respectability about her. She was a bit scared of Painter which wasn’t hard to understand, she being so small and Painter such a great hulking brute. When I talked to her after the murder I noticed she’d got bruises on her arm, too many bruises for her just to have got them through the usual kitchen accidents, and I wouldn’t mind betting her husband used to knock her about.’

  ‘So, in fact,’ Burden said, ‘they were two completely separate units. Mrs Primero and her maid living alone at Victor’s Piece, the Painter family in their own home at the bottom of the garden.’

  ‘I don’t know about “bottom of the garden”. The coach house was about a hundred feet from the back door of the big house. Painter only went up there to carry in the coal and receive his instructions.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Burden, ‘there was some complicated business about coal, I seem to remember. Wasn’t it more or less the crux of the whole thing?’

  ‘Painter was supposed to chop wood and carry coal,’ Wexford continued. ‘Alice was past carrying coal and Painter was supposed to bring a scuttleful at mid-day – they never lit a fire before that – and another one at six-thirty. Now, he never objected to the gardening or the car maintenance, but for some reason he drew the line at the coal. He did it – apart from frequent lapses – but he was always grumbling about it. The mid-day duty cut across his dinner time, he said, and he didn’t like turning out on winter evenings. Couldn’t he bring two scuttles at eleven? But Mrs Primero wouldn’t have that. She said she wasn’t going to have her drawing room turned into a railway yard.’

  Burden smiled. His tiredness had almost worn off. Given breakfast, a shave and a shower down, he would be a new man. He glanced at his watch, then across the High Street to where the blinds were going up on the Carousel Café.

  ‘I could do with a cup of coffee,’ he said.

  ‘Two minds with but a single thought. Root someone out and send them over.’

  Wexford stood up and stretched, tightened his tie and smoothed back the hair that was too sparse to become untidy. The coffee arrived in wax cups with plastic spoons and little cubes of wrapped sugar.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Wexford. ‘D’you want me to go on?’ Burden nodded.

  ‘By September 1950 Painter had been working for Mrs Primero for three years. The arrangement appeared to work pretty well apart from the difficulties Painter made about the coal. He never brought it in without complaining and he was always asking for a rise.’

  ‘I suppose he thought she was rolling in money?’

  ‘Of course, he couldn’t have known what she’d got in the bank or in shares or whatever it was. On the other hand it was an open secret she kept money in the house.’

  ‘In a safe, d’you mean?’

  ‘Not on your life. You know these old girls. Some of it was in drawers stuffed into paper bags, some of it in old handbags.’

  With a feat of memory Burden said suddenly, ‘And one of those handbags contained the two hundred pounds?’

  ‘It did,’ Wexford said grimly. ‘Whatever she might have been able to afford, Mrs Primero refused to raise Painter’s wages. If he didn’t like the set-up he could go, but that would mean giving up the flat.

  ‘Being a very old woman, Mrs Primero felt the cold and she liked to start fires in September. Painter thought this unnecessary and he made the usual fuss about it …’

  He stopped as the telephone rang and he took the receiver himself. Burden had no idea from Wexford’s reiterated, ‘Yes, yes … all right,’ who it could be. He finished his coffee with some distaste. The rim of the wax cup had become soggy. Wexford dropped the phone.

  ‘My wife,’ he said. ‘Am I dead? Have I forgotten I’ve got a home of my own? She’s run out of housekeeping and she can’t find the cheque book.’ He chuckled, felt in his pocket and produced it. ‘No wonder. I’ll have to nip back.’ He added with sudden kindness, ‘Go home and have a bit of shuteye, why don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t like being left in the air,’ Burden grumbled. ‘Now I know how my kids feel when I break off in the middle of a bedtime story.’

  Wexford began bundling things into his briefcase.

  ‘Leaving out all the circumstantial stuff,’ he said, ‘there isn’t much more. I told you it was straightforward. It was the evening of September 24th it happened, a cold wet Sunday. Mrs Primero had sent Alice off to church. She went at about a quarter past six, Painter being due to bring the coal at half past. He brought it all right and departed two hundred pounds to the good.’

  ‘I’d like to hear the circumstantial stuff,’ Burden said.

  Wexford was at the door now.

  ‘To be continued in our next,’ he grinned. ‘You can’t say I’m leaving you in suspense.’ The grin faded and his face hardened. ‘Mrs Primero was found at seven. She was in the drawing room lying on the floor by the fireplace in a great pool of blood. There was blood on the walls and on her armchair, and in the hearth was a blood-stained wood chopper.’

  2

  When sentence is given upon him let him be condemned … let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.

  Psalm 109, appointed for the 22nd Day

  THE NAP WEXFORD had prescribed for him would have been attractive on a dull day, but not this morning when the sky was blue and cloudless and the sun promised tropical heat by mid-day. Moreover, Burden remembered that he had not made his bed for three days. Better have that shower and that shave instead.

  After a canteen breakfast of two eggs and a couple of rashers of the greenback he liked, he had made up his mind what he was going to do. An hour could easily be spared. He drove northwards along the High Street with all the car windows down, past the shops, over the Kingsbrook Bridge, past The Olive and Dove and out on the Stowerton road. Apart from a new house here and there, a supermarket on the site of the old police station, and aggressive road signs all over the place, things had not changed much in sixteen years. The meadows, the tall trees burdened with the heavy foliage of July, the little weatherboard cottages were much the same as when Alice Flower had seen them on her shopping trips in the Daimler. There would have been less traffic, then, he thought. He braked, pulled in and raised his eyebrows at the youth on a motorbike who, overtaking the oncoming stream, had missed him by inches.

  The lane where Victor’s Piece was must be somewhere about here. Those circumstantial details Wexford had been so tantalizing about were coming back to him from his own memory. Surely he had read about a bus stop and a telephone box at the end of the lane? Would these be the meadows he remembered reading that Painter had crossed, desperate
to conceal a bundle of blood-stained clothing?

  Here was the phone box now. He indicated left and turned slowly into the lane. For a short way its surface was metalled, then it petered out into a track ending in a gate. There were only three houses: a white-plastered semi-detached pair and opposite them the late Victorian pile he had described as ‘a hideous dump’.

  He had never been as near to it as this before, but he saw nothing to make him change his opinion. The roof of grey slates had been constructed – tortured almost – into a number of steep gables. Two of these dominated the front of the house, but there was a third on the right-hand side and out of it grew another smaller one that apparently overlooked the back. Each gable was criss-crossed with timbering, some of it inexpertly carved into chevrons and all painted a dull bottle green. In places the plaster between the wood had fallen away, exposing rough pinkish brickwork. Ivy, of the same shade of green, spread its flat leaves and its rope-like grey tendrils from the foot of the downstairs windows to the highest gable where a lattice flapped open. There it had crept and burrowed into the mealy wall, prising the window frame away from the bricks.

  Burden observed the garden with a countryman’s eye. Never had he seen such a fine selection of weeds. The fertile black soil, cultivated and tended for many years, now nourished docks with leaves as thick and glossy as rubber plants, puce-headed thistles, nettles four feet tall. The gravel paths were choked with grass and mildewed groundsel. Only the clarity of the air and the soft brilliance of sunlight prevented the place from being actually sinister.

  The front door was locked. No doubt this window beside it belonged to the drawing room. Burden could not help wondering with a certain wry humour what insensitive administrator had decreed that this scene of an old woman’s murder should be for years the home – indeed the last refuge – of other old women. But they were gone now. The place looked as if it had been empty for years.