by Ruth Rendell
Wexford put it out of his head, apart from wondering whether he should visit Castle Road and drop a word of warning to the gossips. Immediately he saw how impossible this would be. The slander would be denied, and besides he hardly saw his function as extending so far. No, let it die a natural death—as Mrs. Wrangton had.
On Monday morning he was having breakfast, his wife reading a letter just come from her sister in Wales.
"Frances says Bill's mother has got to go into a nursing home at last." Bill was Wexford's brother-in-law. "It's either that or Fran having her, which really isn't on."
Wexford, from behind his newspaper, made noises indicative of sympathy with and support for Frances. He was reading a verbatim report of the trial of some bank robbers.
"Ninety pounds a week," said Dora.
"What did you say?"
"I was talking to myself, dear. You read your paper."
"Did you say ninety pounds a week?"
"That's right. For the nursing home. I shouldn't think Bill and Fran could stand that for long. It's getting on for five thousand a year."
"But . . ." Wexford almost stammered, ". . . I thought a couple of years ago you said it was twenty a week for what's-her-name, Rosemary's aunt, wherever they put her?"
"Darling," said Dora gently, "first of all, that wasn't a couple of years ago, it was at least twelve years ago. And secondly, haven't you heard of the rising cost of living?"
An hour later he was in the matron's office at Summerland, having made no attempt to disguise who he was, but presenting himself as there to enquire about a prospective home for an aged relative of his wife's. Aunt Lilian. Such a woman had actually existed, perhaps still did exist in the remote Westmorland village from which the Wexfords had last heard of her in a letter dated 1959.
The matron was an Irishwoman, Mrs. Corrigan. She seemed about the same age as Nurse Radcliffe. At her knee stood a boy of perhaps six, at her feet, playing with a toy tractor, was another of three. Outside the window three little girls were trying to coax a black cat from its refuge under a car. You might have thought this was a children's home but for the presence of half a dozen old women sitting on the lawn in a half circle, dozing, muttering to themselves or just staring. The grounds were full of flowers, mauve and white lilac everywhere, roses coming out. From behind a hedge came the sound of a lawn mower, plied perhaps by the philoprogenitive Mr. Corrigan.
"Our fees are ninety-five pounds a week, Mr. Wexford," said the matron. "And with the extra for laundry and dry-cleaning, sure and you might say five thousand a year for a good round figure."
"I see."
"The ladies only have to share a room with one other lady. We bath them once a week and change their clothes once a week. And if you could please see to it your aunt only has synthetic fabrics, if you know what I mean, for the lot's popped in the washing machine all together. We like the fees a month in advance and paid on a banker's order, if you please."
"I'm afraid I don't please," said Wexford. "Your charges are more than I expected. I shall have to make other arrangements."
"Then there's no more to be said," said Mrs. Corrigan with a smile nearly equalling the candlepower of Dr. Moss's.
"Just out of curiosity, Mrs. Corrigan, how do your—er, guests meet your fees? Five thousand a year is more than most incomes would be equal to."
"Sure and aren't they widows, Mr. Wexford, and didn't their husbands leave them their houses? Mostly the ladies sell their houses, and with prices the way they are today that's enough to keep them in Summerland for four years or five."
Mrs. Wrangton had intended to sell her house, and she was having it redecorated inside and out in order to get a better price. She had intended to sell the roof over the Bettses' heads—no wonder she had implied to Dr. Moss that Doreen Betts would be sorry to see the back of her. What a woman! What malevolence at ninety-two! And who could have said she wouldn't have been within her moral as well as her legal rights to sell? It was her house. Doreen Wrangton might long ago have found a home of her own, ought perhaps to have done so, and as Doreen Betts might have expected her husband to provide one for her. It is universally admitted to be wrong to anticipate stepping into dead men's shoes. And yet what a monstrous revenge to have on an uncongenial son-in-law, a not always co-operative daughter. There was a subtlety about it that evoked Wexford's admiration nearly as much as its cruelty aroused his disgust. It was a motive all right, and a strong one.
So at last he had found himself in Castle Road, in the Bertses' living room, confronting an elderly orphan and her husband. The room was papered in a silvery oyster colour, the woodwork ivory. He was sure that that door had never previously sported a shade lighter than chocolate brown, just as the hall walls had, until their recent coat of magnolia, been gloomily clothed in dark Lincrusta.
When the two of them had protested bitterly about the gossip and the apparent inability of the police to get their priorities right, Doreen Betts agreed without too much mutiny to answer Wexford's questions. To the first one she reacted passionately.
"Mother would never have done it. I know she wouldn't, it was all bluff with her. Even Mother wouldn't have been that cruel."
Her husband pulled his moustache, slowly shuffling his slippered feet back and forth. His angry excitement had resulted in a drop of water appearing on the end of his nose. It hung there, trembling.
Doreen Betts said, "I knew she didn't mean to go ahead with it when I said, Can I tell the builders to leave the upstairs? And she said, I daresay. That's what she said, I daresay, she said, I'm not bothered either way. Of course she wouldn't have gone ahead with it. You don't even get a room to yourself in that place. Ninety-five pounds a week! They'll put you to bed at eight o'clock, Mother, I said, so don't think they'll let you sit up till all hours watching TV."
"Quite right," said Harry Betts ambiguously.
"Why, if we'd known Mother meant to do a thing like that, we could have lived in Harry's flat when we got married. He had a nice little flat over the freezer centre in the High Street. It wasn't just one room like Mother went about saying, it was a proper flat, wasn't it, Harry? What'd we have done if Mother'd done a thing like that? We'd have had nowhere." Her husband's head-shaking, the trembling droplet, the fidgety feet, seemed suddenly to unnerve her. She said to him, distress in her voice, "I'm going to have a little talk to the officer on my own, dear."
Wexford followed her into the room where Mrs. Wrangton had slept for the last years of her life. It was on the ground floor at the back, presumably originally designated as a dining room, with a pair of windows looking out onto a long narrow concrete terrace and a very long, very narrow garden. No redecorations had been carried out here. The walls were papered in a pattern of faded nasturtiums, the woodwork grained to look like walnut. Mrs. Wrangton's double bed was still there, the mattress uncovered, a pile of folded blankets on top of it. There was a television set in this room as well as in the front room, and it had been placed so that the occupant of the bed could watch it.
"Mother came to sleep down here a few years back," said Mrs. Betts. "There's a toilet just down the passage. She couldn't manage the stairs any more except when nurse helped her." She sat on the edge of the mattress, nervously fingering a cage-like object of metal bars. "I'll have to see about her walking frame going back, I'll have to get on to the welfare people." Her hands resting on it, she said dolefully, "Mother hated Harry. She always said he wasn't good enough for me. She did everything she could to stop me marrying him." Mrs. Betts's voice took on a rebellious girlish note. "I think it's awful having to ask your mother's consent to marry when you're sixty-five, don't you?"
At any rate, he thought, she had gone ahead without receiving it. He looked wonderingly at this grey wisp of a woman, seventy years old, who talked as if she were a fairy princess.
"You see, she talked for years of changing her will and leaving the house to my brother. It was after he died that the nursing home business started. She quarrelled out
right with Harry. Elsie Parrish was in here and Mother accused Harry in front of her of only marrying me to get this place. Harry never spoke a word to Mother again, and quite right too. I said to Mother, You're a wicked woman, you promised me years ago I'd have this house and now you're going back on your word. Cheats never prosper, I said."
The daughter had inherited the mother's tongue. Wexford could imagine the altercations, overheard by visitors, by neighbours, which had contributed to the gossip. He turned to look at the framed photograph on a mahogany tallboy. A wedding picture, circa 1903. The bride was seated, lilies in her lap under a bolster of a bosom hung with lace and pearls. The bridegroom stood behind her, frock coat, black handlebar moustache. Ivy Wrangton must have been seventeen, Wexford calculated, her face plain, puffy, young, her figure modishly pouter-pigeon-like, her hair in that most unflattering of fashions, the cottage loaf. She had been rather plump then, but thin, according to Nurse Radcliffe in old age. Wexford said quietly, apparently idly:
"Mrs. Betts, why did you send for Dr. Moss on May 23rd? Your mother wasn't ill. She hadn't complained of feeling ill."
She held the walking frame, pushing it backwards and forwards. "Why shouldn't I? Dr. Crocker was away. Elsie came in at nine and Mother was still asleep, and Elsie said it wasn't right the amount she slept. We couldn't wake her, though we shook her, we were so worried. I wasn't to know she'd get up as fit as a flea ten minutes after I'd phoned for him, was I?"
"Tell me about the day your mother died, Mrs. Betts, Friday, June 2nd," he said, and it occurred to him that no one had yet told him anything much about that day.
"Well . . ." Her mouth trembled and she said quickly, "You don't think Harry did anything to Mother, do you? He wouldn't, I swear he wouldn't."
"Tell me about that Friday."
She made an effort to control herself, clenching her hands on the metal bar. "We wanted to go to a whist drive. Elsie came round in the morning and I said, if we went out would she sit with Mother, and she said, OK, of course she would if I'd just give her a knock before we left." Mrs. Betts sighed and her voice steadied. "Elsie lives two doors down. She and Mother'd been pals for years and she always came to sit with her when we went out. Though it's a lie," her old eyes flashing like young ones, "to say we were always out. Once in a blue moon we went out."
Wexford's eyes went from the pudding-faced girl in the photograph, her mouth smug and proud even then, to the long strip of turfed-over garden—why did he feel Betts had done that turfing, had uprooted flowers?—and back to the nervous little woman on the mattress edge.
"I gave Mother her lunch and she was sitting in the front room, doing a bit of knitting. I popped down to Elsie's and rang her bell but she can't have heard it, she didn't come. I rang and rang and I thought, well, she's gone out, she's forgotten and that's that. But Harry said, Why not go out just the same? The painter was there, he was only a bit of a boy, twenty, twenty-two, but he and Mother got on a treat, a sight better than her and I ever did, I can tell you. So the upshot was, we went off and left her there with the painter—what was he called? Ray? Rafe? No, Roy, that was it, Roy—with Roy doing the hall walls. She was OK, fit as a flea. It was a nice day so I left all the windows open because that paint did smell. I'll never forget the way she spoke to me before I left. That was the last thing she ever said to me. Doreen, she said, you ought to be lucky at cards. You haven't been very lucky in love. And she laughed and I'll swear Roy was laughing too."
You're building an edifice of motives for yourself, Mrs. Betts, reflected Wexford. "Go on," was all he said.
She moved directly into hearsay evidence, but Wexford didn't stop her. "That Roy closed the door to keep the smell out, but he popped in a few times to see if Mother was all right. They had a bit of a chat, he said, and he offered to make her a cup of tea but she didn't want any. Then about half-past three Mother said she'd got a headache—that was the onset of the stroke but she didn't know that, she put it down to the paint—and would he fetch her a couple of her paracetamols from the bathroom. So he did and he got her a glass of water and she said she'd try and have a sleep in her chair. Anyway, the next thing he knew she was out in the hall walking with her walking frame, going to have a lay-down on her bed, she said.
"Well, Harry and me came in at five-thirty and Roy was just packing up. He said Mother was asleep on her bed, and I just put my head round the door to check. She'd drawn the curtains." Mrs. Betts paused, burst out, "To tell you the honest truth, I didn't look too closely. I thought, well, thank God for half an hour's peace to have a cup of tea in before she starts picking on Harry. It was just about a quarter to seven, ten to seven, before I went in again. I could tell there was something going on, the way she was breathing, sort of puffing out her cheeks, and red in the face. There was blood on her lips." She looked fearfully at Wexford, looked him in the eye for the first time. "I wiped that clean before I called the doctor, I didn't want him seeing that.
"He came straightaway. I thought maybe he'd call an ambulance but he didn't. He said she'd had a stroke and when people had strokes they shouldn't be moved. We stayed with her—well, doctor and I stayed with her—but she passed away just before half-past."
Wexford nodded. Something about what she had said was wrong. He felt it. It wasn't that she had told a lie, though she might well have done, but something else, something that rang incongruously in that otherwise commonplace narrative, some esoteric term in place of a household word . . . He was checking back, almost there, when a footstep sounded in the hall, the door opened and a face appeared round it.
"There you are, Doreen!" said the face which was very pretty considering its age. "I was just on my way to—Oh, I beg your pardon, I'm intruding."
"That's all right," said Mrs. Betts. "You can come in, Elsie." She looked blankly at Wexford, her eyes once more old and tired. "This is Mrs. Parrish."
Elsie Parrish, Wexford decided, looked exactly as an old lady should. She had a powdery, violet cashew, creamy smell, which might equally well have been associated with a very clean baby. Her legs were neat and shapely in grey stockings, her hands in white gloves with tiny darns at the fingertips, her coat silky navy-blue over blue flowery pleats, and her face withered rose leaves with rouge on. The bouffant mass of silvery hair was so profuse that from a distance it might have been taken for a white silk turban. She and Wexford walked down the street together towards the shops, Elsie Parrish swinging a pink nylon string bag.
"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 he
r 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."
