A New Lease of Death

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘That was when she hurt her leg,’ Archery said eagerly.

  ‘It wasn’t a serious injury but it made Mrs Primero angry and she blamed Painter. At about ten on the following morning she sent Alice down to the coach house to tell Painter she wanted to see him at eleven thirty sharp. He came up ten minutes late, Alice showed him into the drawing room and afterwards she heard him and Mrs Primero quarrelling.’

  ‘This brings me to the first point I want to raise,’ Archery said. He flipped through the transcript and, putting his finger at the beginning of a paragraph, passed it to Wexford. ‘This, as you know, is part of Painter’s own evidence. He doesn’t deny the quarrel. He admits that Mrs Primero threatened him with dismissal. He also says here that Mrs Primero finally came round to see his point of view. She refused to give him a rise because she said that would put ideas into his head and he would only ask for another increase in a few months’ time. Instead she’d give him what she understood was called a bonus.’

  ‘I remember all that well,’ Wexford said impatiently. ‘He said she told him to go upstairs and into her bedroom where he’d find a handbag in her wardrobe. He was to bring that handbag down to her and this, he said, he did. There was about two hundred pounds in the handbag and this he could have, take it away in the handbag and look upon it as a bonus on condition he was absolutely circumspect about bringing the coal at the required times.’ He coughed. ‘I never believed a word of it and neither did the jury.’

  ‘Why not?’ Archery asked quietly.

  God, thought Wexford, this was going to be a long session.

  ‘Firstly, because the stairs at Victor’s Piece run up between the drawing room and the kitchen. Alice Flower was in the kitchen cooking the lunch. She had remarkably good hearing for her age, but she never heard Painter go up those stairs. And, believe me, he was a big heavy lout if ever there was one.’ Archery winced faintly at this but Wexford went on, ‘Secondly, Mrs Primero would never have sent the gardener upstairs to poke about in her bedroom. Not unless I’m very mistaken in her character. She would have got Alice to have fetched the money on some pretext or other.’

  ‘She might not have wanted Alice to know about it.’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ Wexford retorted sharply. ‘She wouldn’t have. I said on some pretext or other.’ That made the parson draw in his horns. Wexford said very confidently, ‘In the third place Mrs Primero had a reputation for being rather mean. Alice had been with her for half a century but she’d never given Alice anything bar her wages and an extra pound at Christmas.’ He jabbed at the page. ‘Look, she says so here in black and white. We know Painter wanted money. The night before when he hadn’t brought the coal he’d been drinking up at the Dragon with a pal of his from Stowerton. The pal had a motorbike to sell and he’d offered it to Painter for a bit less than two hundred pounds. Apparently Painter hadn’t a hope of getting the money but he asked his friend to hold on to the bike for a couple of days and he’d contact him the minute anything came up. You’re saying he got the money before noon on Sunday. I say he stole it after he brutally murdered his employer in the evening. If you’re right, why didn’t he get in touch with his friend on Sunday afternoon? There’s a phone box at the bottom of the lane. We checked with the pal, he didn’t move out of his house all day and the phone never rang.’

  It was a very tempest of fact and Archery yielded, or appeared to yield, before it. He said only:

  ‘You’re saying, I think, that Painter went to the wardrobe after he’d killed Mrs Primero in the evening. There was no blood on the inside of the wardrobe.’

  ‘For one thing he wore rubber gloves to do the deed. Anyway, the prosecution’s case was that he stunned her with the flat side of the axe blade, took the money, and when he came downstairs, finished her off in a panic.’

  Archery gave a slight shiver. ‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd,’ he then said, ‘that if Painter did it he should have been so transparent about it?’

  ‘Some are. They’re stupid, you see.’ Wexford said it derisively, his mouth curling. He still had no notion what Archery’s interest in Painter might be, but that he was pro-Painter was apparent. ‘Stupid,’ he said again, intent on flicking the clergyman on the raw. Another wince from Archery rewarded him. ‘They think you’ll believe them. All they’ve got to say is it must have been a tramp or a burglar and you’ll go away satisfied. Painter was one of those. That old tramp thing,’ he said. ‘When did you last see a tramp? More than sixteen years ago, I’ll bet.’

  ‘Let’s come to the murder itself,’ Archery said quietly.

  ‘By all means.’ Again Wexford took the transcript, gathering with a quick glance the information he needed. ‘Now, then,’ he began, ‘Painter said he went over to fetch the coal at half six. He remembered the time – twenty-five past six when he left the coach house – because his wife said five minutes to go before the child’s bedtime. The time’s not all that important, anyway. We know it was between twenty past six and seven o’clock that she was killed. Painter went over, chopped some wood and cut his finger. Or so he said. He certainly did cut his finger – cut it deliberately.’

  Archery ignored this last. ‘He and Mrs Primero belonged to the same blood group,’ he said.

  ‘They were both Group O. They weren’t quite so accurate about the minute grouping of blood sixteen years ago as they are now. It was handy for Painter, that. But it didn’t do him any real good.’

  The clergyman crossed his legs and leaned back. Wexford could see he was trying to appear relaxed and making a poor job of it. ‘I believe you personally went to interview Painter after the crime was discovered?’

  ‘We were round at the coach house by a quarter to eight. Painter was out. I asked Mrs Painter where he was and she said he’d come back from the big house some time after six-thirty, washed his hands and gone straight out again. He’d told her he was going to Stowerton to see his friend. We’d only been there about ten minutes when he came in. His story didn’t stand up, there was far too much blood around to have come from a cut finger and – well, you know the rest. It’s all down there. I charged him on the spot.’

  The transcript fluttered a little in Archery’s hand. He could not keep his fingers quite steady. ‘In evidence,’ he said, speaking slowly and evenly, ‘Painter said he hadn’t been to Stowerton. “I waited at the bus stop at the end of the lane, but the bus never came. I saw the police cars turn into the lane and I wondered what was up. Presently I felt a bit faint on account of my finger bleeding a lot. I came back to my flat. I thought my wife might know what it was all about.”’ After a pause, he added with a kind of pleading eagerness, ‘That doesn’t sound like the evidence of the complete moron you make him out to be.’

  Wexford answered him patiently as if he were talking to a precocious teenager. ‘They edit these things, Mr Archery. They condense them, make them sound coherent. Believe me. You weren’t in court and I was. As to the truth of that statement, I was in one of those police cars and I was keeping my eyes open. We overtook the Stowerton bus and turned left into the lane. There wasn’t anyone waiting at that bus stop.’

  ‘I imagine you mean that while he said he was at the bus stop he was in fact hiding some clothes.’

  ‘Of course he was hiding the clothes! When he was working he habitually wore a raincoat. You’ll see that in Mrs Crilling’s evidence and in Alice’s. Sometimes it hung in the coach house and sometimes on a hook behind the back door of Victor’s Piece. Painter said he had worn it that evening and had left it hanging on the back door. That raincoat couldn’t be found. Both Alice and Roger Primero said they remembered having seen it on the back door that afternoon, but Mrs Crilling was certain it wasn’t there when she brought Elizabeth in at seven.’

  ‘You finally found the raincoat rolled up in a ball under a hedge two fields away from the bus stop.’

  ‘The raincoat plus pullover,’ Wexford retorted, ‘and a pair of rubber gloves. The lot was sodden with blood.’

  �
�But anyone could have worn the raincoat and you couldn’t identify the pullover.’

  ‘Alice Flower went so far as to say it looked like one Painter sometimes wore.’

  Archery gave a deep sigh. For a time he had been firing questions and statements briskly at Wexford, but suddenly he had fallen silent. Little more than indecision showed on his face. Wexford waited. At last, he thought, Archery had reached a point where it was going to become necessary to reveal those ‘personal reasons’. A struggle was going on within him and he said in an artificial tone:

  ‘What about Painter’s wife?’

  ‘A wife cannot be compelled to give evidence against her husband. As you know, she didn’t appear at the trial. She and the child went off somewhere and a couple of years later I heard she’d married again.’

  He stared at Archery, raising his eyebrows. Something he had said had made the clergyman’s mind up for him. A slight flush coloured Archery’s even tan. The brown eyes were very bright as he leaned forward, tense again.

  ‘That child …’

  ‘What of her? She was asleep in her cot when we searched Painter’s bedroom and that’s the only time I saw her. She was four or five.’

  Archery said jerkily. ‘She’s twenty-one now and she’s a very beautiful young woman.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. Painter was a nice enough looking fellow if you like the type, and Mrs Painter was pretty.’ Wexford stopped. Archery was a clergyman. Had Painter’s daughter taken after her father and somehow come into his care as a result of her transgressions? Archery could be a prison visitor. It was right up his street, Wexford thought nastily. Anger rose in his throat as he wondered if all this sparring discussion had been engineered merely because Archery wanted his help in getting the right psychological approach to a convicted thief or confidence woman. ‘What about her?’ he snapped. Griswold could go to hell! ‘Now come on, sir, you’d better tell me and have done.’

  ‘I have a son, Chief Inspector, an only child. He also is twenty-one …’

  ‘Well?’

  Obviously the clergyman had difficulty in framing the words. He hesitated and pressed his long hands together. At last he said diffidently and in a low voice, ‘He wishes to marry Miss Painter.’ When Wexford started and stared at him, he added, ‘or Miss Kershaw, as her legal name now is.’

  Wexford was all at sea. He was astonished, a rare thing for him, and he felt a sharp-edged excitement. But he had shown all the surprise he thought consistent with policy and now he spoke soberly.

  ‘You must excuse me, Mr Archery, but I can’t see how your son, the son of an Anglican clergyman, came to meet a girl in Miss Painter’s – er, Miss Kershaw’s – position.’

  ‘They met at Oxford,’ Archery said easily.

  ‘At the university?’

  ‘That is so. Miss Kershaw is quite an intelligent young woman.’ Archery gave a slight smile. ‘She’s reading Modern Greats. Tipped for a First, I’m told.’

  4

  If any of you know cause or just impediment why these two persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony, ye are to declare it.

  The Banns of Marriage

  IF HE HAD been asked to predict the future of such a one as Theresa Painter, what would he have foreseen for her? Children like her, Wexford reflected as he recovered from his second shock, children like Painter’s little girl started life with a liability and a stain. The surviving parent, well-meaning relatives and cruel schoolfellows often made matters worse. He had hardly thought about the fate of the child until today. Now, thinking quickly, he supposed he would have counted her lucky to have become an anonymous manual worker with perhaps already a couple of petty convictions.

  Instead to Theresa Painter had apparently come the greatest blessings of civilized life: brains, advanced education, beauty, friendship with people like this vicar, an engagement to this vicar’s son.

  Wexford cast his mind back to the first of only three encounters with Mrs Painter. A quarter to eight it had been on that Sunday in September. He and the sergeant with him had knocked on the door at the foot of the coach house stairs and Mrs Painter had come down to let them in. Whatever might have been fashionable in London at that time, the young women of Kingsmarkham were still doing their hair in a big pile on the forehead with tight curls falling to the shoulders. Mrs Painter was no exception. Hers was naturally fair, her face was powdered and her mouth painted diffidently red. Respectable provincial matrons did not go in for eye make-up in 1950 and Mrs Painter was of all things respectable. There seemed to be very little else to her. On her dry fine skin lines had already begun to form, little indentations which marked a regular prudish pursing of the lips, a setting of the chin that accompanied an outraged flounce.

  She had the same attitude to the police as others might have to bugs or mice. When they came upstairs she alternated her replies to their questions with reiterated remarks that it was a disgrace to have them in the house. She had the blankest, most obtuse blue eyes he had ever seen on anyone. At no time, even when they were about to take Painter away, did she show the least pity or the least horror, only this fixated dread of what people would think if they found the police had been questioning her husband.

  Perhaps she had not been so stupid as he had thought. Somewhere in that pretty respectable mouse and the great hunk of sub-humanity, her husband, must have been the spring from which their daughter drew her intelligence. ‘Quite an intelligent girl,’ Archery had said casually. Good God, thought Wexford, remembering how he had boasted when his own daughter got eight O Level passes. Good God! What were Modern Greats, anyway? Were they the same as Mods and did that mean Modern Languages? He had a vague idea that this might be the esoteric and deliberately deceptive name given to philosophy and Political Economy. He wouldn’t show his ignorance to Archery. Philosophy! He almost whistled. Painter’s daughter reading – yes, that was the term, reading – philosophy! It made you think all right. Why, it made you doubt …

  ‘Mr Archery,’ he said, ‘you’re quirte sure this is Herbert Arthur Painter’s girl?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure, Chief Inspector. She told me.’ He looked almost defiantly at Wexford. Perhaps he thought the policeman would laugh at his next words. ‘She is as good as she is beautiful,’ he said. Wexford’s expression remained unaltered. ‘She came to stay with us at Whitsun. It was the first time we’d seen her, though naturally our son had written to us and told us about her. We took to her at once.

  ‘Chief Inspector, times have changed since I was at college. I had to face the possibility that my son would meet some girl at Oxford, perhaps want to marry her at an age when I’d thought of myself as still a boy and when Orders were a lifetime away. I’d see my friends’ children marry at twenty-one and I was prepared to try and manage something for him, give him something to start life on. All I hoped was that the girl would be someone we could like and understand.

  ‘Miss Kershaw – I’ll use the name if you don’t mind – is just what I would have chosen for him myself, beautiful, graceful, well-mannered, easy to talk to. Oh, she does her best to hide her looks in the uniform they all wear nowadays, long shaggy hair, trousers, great black duffel coat – you know the kind of thing. But they all dress like that. The point is she can’t hide them.

  ‘My wife is a little impulsive. She was hinting about the wedding before Theresa had been with us for twenty-four hours. I found it hard to understand why the young people were so diffident about it. Charles’s letters had been paeans of praise and I could see they were deeply in love. Then she told us. She came out with it quite baldly. She said – I remember the very words – “I think you ought to know something about me, Mrs Archery. My father’s name was Painter and he was hanged for killing an old woman.”

  ‘At first my wife didn’t believe it. She thought it was some sort of a game. Charles said, “It’s true. It doesn’t matter. People are what they are, not what their parents did.” Then Theresa – we call her Tess – said, “It would matter if
he had done it, only he didn’t. I told you why he was hanged. I didn’t mean he’d done it.” Then she began to cry.’

  ‘Why does she call herself Kershaw?’

  ‘It’s her stepfather’s name. He must be a very remarkable man, Chief Inspector. He’s an electrical engineer, but …’ You needn’t come that rude mechanicals stuff with me, thought Wexford crossly. ‘… but he must be a most intelligent, perceptive and kind person. The Kershaws have two children of their own, but as far as I can gather, Mr Kershaw has treated Tess with no less affection than his own son and daughter. She says it was his love that helped her to bear – well, what I can only call the stigma of her father’s crime when she learnt about it at the age of twelve. He followed her progress at school, encouraged her in every way and fostered her wish to get a County Major Scholarship.’

  ‘You mentioned “the stigma of her father’s crime”. I thought you said she thinks he didn’t do it?’

  ‘My dear Chief Inspector, she knows he didn’t do it.’

  Wexford said slowly, ‘Mr Archery, I’m sure I don’t have to tell a man like yourself that when we talk of somebody knowing something we mean that what they know is a fact, something that’s true beyond a reasonable doubt. We mean that the majority of other people know it too. In other words, it’s history, it’s written down in books, it’s common knowledge.’ He paused. ‘Now I and the Law Lords and the official records and what your son means when he talks about the Establishment, know beyond any reasonable doubt, that Painter did kill Mrs Rose Primero.’

  ‘Her mother told her so,’ said Archery. ‘She told her that she had absolute irrefutable personal knowledge that Tess’s father did not kill Mrs Primero.’

  Wexford shrugged and smiled. ‘People believe what they want to believe. The mother thought it was the best thing for her daughter. If I’d been in her shoes I daresay I’d have said the same.’