by Ruth Rendell
‘Is it important?’ He was impatient to get his confession over. ‘It doesn’t matter what she told me. I can’t remember what we said.’
‘Can you remember where you went?’
‘Of course I can’t. I don’t know the place. I just drove and parked somewhere, I don’t know where, and we got out and walked and she drove me mad, the things she said, and I got hold of her throat and . . .’ He put his head in his hands. ‘I can’t remember what happened next. I don’t know where it was or when. I was so tired and I was mad, I think.’ He looked up. ‘But I killed her. If you’d like to charge me now, I’m quite ready.’
The chief superintendent said very calmly and stolidly, ‘That won’t be necessary, Dr Lestrange.’
Michael Lestrange shut his eyes momentarily and clenched his fists and said, ‘You don’t believe me.’
‘I quite believe you believe it yourself, doctor.’
‘Why would I confess it if it wasn’t true?’
‘People do, sir, it’s not uncommon. Especially people like yourself who have been overworking and worrying and not getting enough sleep. You’re a doctor, you know what the psychiatrists would say, that you had a reason for doing violence to your wife so that now she’s dead your mind has convinced itself you killed her, and you’re feeling guilt for something you had nothing to do with.
‘You see, doctor, look at it from our point of view. Is it likely that you, an educated man, a surgeon, would murder anyone? Not very. And if you did, would you do it in Wrexlade? Would you do it a hundred yards from the home of a man who has murdered four other women? Would you do it by strangling with the bare hands which is the method that man always used? Would you do it four weeks after the last strangling which itself was four weeks after the previous one? Coincidences like that don’t happen, do they, Dr Lestrange? But people do get overtired and suffer from stress so that they confess to crimes they never committed.’
‘I bow to your superior judgement,’ said Michael Lestrange.
He went to the mortuary and identified Norah’s body and then he made a statement to the effect that Norah had gone to Chelmsford to meet her lover. He had last seen her at four on the previous afternoon.
Brannel was found guilty of Norah’s murder, for he was specifically charged only with that, after the jury had been out half an hour. And in spite of the medical evidence as to his mental state he was condemned to death and executed a week before Christmas.
For the short time after that execution that capital punishment remained law, Michael Lestrange was bitterly opposed to it. He used to say that Brannel was a prime example of someone who had been unjustly hanged and that this must never be allowed to happen in England again. Of course there was never any doubt that Brannel had strangled Wendy Cutforth, Maureen Hunter, Ann Daly and Mary Trenthyde. The evidence was there and he repeatedly confessed to these murders. But that was not what Michael Lestrange meant. People took him to mean that a man must not be punished for committing a crime whose seriousness he is too feeble-minded to understand. This is the law, and there can be no exceptions to it merely because society wants its revenge. People took Michael Lestrange to mean that when he spoke of injustice being done to this multiple killer.
And perhaps he did.
Thornapple
The plant, which was growing up against the wall between the gooseberry bushes, stood about two feet high and had pointed, jaggedly toothed, oval leaves of a rich dark green. It bore, at the same time, a flower and a fruit. The trumpet-shaped flower had a fine, delicate texture and was of the purest white, while the green fruit, which rather resembled a chestnut though it was of a darker colour, had spines growing all over it that had a rather threatening or warning look.
According to Indigenous British Flora, which James held in his hand, the thornapple or Jimson’s Weed or datura stramonium also had an unpleasant smell, but he did not find it so. What the book did not say was that datura was highly poisonous. James already knew that, for although this was the plant’s first appearance in the Fyfields’ garden, he had seen it in other parts of the village during the previous summer. And then he had only had to look at it for some adult to come rushing up and warn him of its dangers, as if he were likely at his age to eat a spiky object that looked more like a sea urchin than a seed head. Adults had not only warned him and the other children, but had fallen upon the unfortunate datura and tugged it out of the ground with exclamations of triumph as of a dangerous job well done.
James had discovered three specimens in the garden. The thornapple had a way of springing up in unexpected places and the book described it as ‘a casual in cultivated ground’. His father would not behave in the way of those village people but he would certainly have it out as soon as he spotted it. James found this understandable. But it meant that if he was going to prepare an infusion or brew of datura he had better get on with it. He went back thoughtfully into the house, taking no notice of his sister Rosamund who was sitting at the kitchen table reading a foreign tourists’ guide to London, and returned the book to his own room.
James’s room was full of interesting things. A real glory-hole, his mother called it. He was a collector and an experimenter, was James, with an enquiring, analytical mind and more than his fair share of curiosity. He had a fish tank, its air pump bubbling away, a glass box containing hawk moth caterpillars, and mice in a cage. On the walls were crustacean charts and life cycle of the frog charts and a map of the heavens. There were several hundred books, shells and dried grasses, a snakeskin and a pair of antlers (both naturally shed) and on the top shelf of the bookcase his bottles of poison. James replaced the wild flower book and, climbing on to a stool, studied these bottles with some satisfaction.
He had prepared their contents himself by boiling leaves, flowers and berries and straining off the resulting liquor. This had mostly turned out to be a dark greenish brown or else a purplish red, which rather disappointed James who had hoped for bright green or saffron yellow, these colours being more readily associated with the sinister or the evil. The bottles were labelled conium maculatum and hyoscyamus niger rather than with their common English names, for James’s mother, when she came in to dust the glory-hole, would know what hemlock and henbane were. Only the one containing his prize solution, that deadly nightshade, was left unlabelled. There would be no concealing, even from those ignorant of Latin, the significance of atropa belladonna.
Not that James had the least intention of putting these poisons of his to use. Nothing could have been further from his mind. Indeed, they stood up there on the high shelf precisely to be out of harm’s way and, even so, whenever a small child visited the house, he took care to keep his bedroom door locked. He had made the poisons from the pure, scientific motive of seeing if it could be done. With caution and in a similar spirit of detachment, he had gone so far as to taste, first a few drops and then half a teaspoonful of the henbane. The result had been to make him very sick and give him painful stomach cramps which necessitated sending for the doctor who diagnosed gastritis. But James had been satisfied. It worked.
In preparing his poisons, he had had to maintain a close secrecy. That is, he made sure his mother was out of the house and Rosamund too. Rosamund would not have been interested, for one plant was much the same as another to her, she shrieked when she saw the hawk moth caterpillars and her pre-eminent wish was to go and live in London. But she was not above tale-bearing. And although neither of his parents would have been cross or have punished him or peremptorily have destroyed his preparations, for they were reasonable, level-headed people, they would certainly have prevailed upon him to throw the bottles away and have lectured him and appealed to his better nature and his common sense. So if he was going to add to his collection with a potion of datura, it might be wise to select Wednesday afternoon when his mother was at the meeting of the Women’s Institute, and then commandeer the kitchen, the oven, a saucepan and a sieve.
His mind made up, James returned to the garden with a brown paper bag into
which he dropped five specimens of thornapple fruits, all he could find, and for good measure two flowers and some leaves as well. He was sealing up the top of the bag with a strip of Scotch tape when Rosamund came up the path.
‘I suppose you’ve forgotten we’ve got to take those raspberries to Aunt Julie?’
James had. But since the only thing he wanted to do at that moment was boil up the contents of the bag, and that he could not do till Wednesday, he gave Rosamund his absent-minded professor look, shrugged his shoulders and said it was impossible for him to forget anything she was capable of remembering.
‘I’m going to put this upstairs,’ he said. ‘I’ll catch you up.’
The Fyfield family had lived for many years – centuries, some said – in the village of Great Sindon in Suffolk, occupying this cottage or that one, taking over small farmhouses, yeomen all, until in the early nineteen hundreds some of them had climbed up into the middle class. James’s father, son of a schoolmaster, himself taught at the University of Essex at Wivenhoe, some twenty miles distant. James was already tipped for Oxford. But they were very much of the village too, were the Fyfields of Ewes Hall Farm, with ancestors lying in the churchyard and ancestors remembered on the war memorial on the village green.
The only other Fyfield at present living in Great Sindon was Aunt Julie who wasn’t really an aunt but a connection by marriage, her husband having been a second cousin twice removed or something of that sort. James couldn’t recall that he had ever been particularly nice to her or specially polite (as Rosamund was) but for all that Aunt Julie seemed to prefer him over pretty well everyone else. With the exception, perhaps, of Mirabel. And because she preferred him she expected him to pay her visits. Once a week these visits would have taken place if Aunt Julie had had her way, but James was not prepared to fall in with that and his parents had not encouraged it.
‘I shouldn’t like anyone to think James was after her money,’ his mother had said.
‘Everyone knows that’s to go to Mirabel,’ said his father.
‘All the more reason. I should hate to have it said James was after Mirabel’s rightful inheritance.’
Rosamund was unashamedly after it or part of it, though that seemed to have occurred to no one. She had told James so. A few thousand from Aunt Julie would help enormously in her ambition to buy herself a flat in London, for which she had been saving up since she was seven. But flats were going up in price all the time (she faithfully read the estate agents’ pages in the Observer), her £28.50 would go nowhere, and without a windfall her situation looked hopeless. She was very single-minded, was Rosamund, and she had a lot of determination. James supposed she had picked the raspberries herself and that her ‘we’ve got to take them’ had its origins in her own wishes and was in no way a directive from their mother. But he didn’t much mind going. There was a mulberry tree in Aunt Julie’s garden and he would be glad of a chance to examine it. He was thinking of keeping silkworms.
It was a warm sultry day in high summer, a day of languid air and half-veiled sun, of bumble bees heavily laden and roses blown but still scented. The woods hung on the hillsides like blue smoky shadows, and the fields where they were beginning to cut the wheat were the same colour as Rosamund’s hair. Very long and straight was the village street of Great Sindon, as is often the case in Suffolk. Aunt Julie lived at the very end of it in a plain, solidly built, grey brick, double-fronted house with a shallow slate roof and two tall chimneys. It would never, in the middle of the nineteenth century when it had been built, have been designated a ‘gentleman’s house’, for there were only four bedrooms and a single kitchen, while the ceilings were low and the stairs steep, but nowadays any gentleman might have been happy to live in it and village opinion held that it was worth a very large sum of money. Sindon Lodge stood in about two acres of land which included an apple orchard, a lily pond and a large lawn on which the mulberry tree was.
James and his sister walked along in almost total silence. They had little in common and it was hot, the air full of tiny insects that came off the harvest fields. James knew that he had only been invited to join her because if she had gone alone Aunt Julie would have wanted to know where he was and would have sulked and probably not been at all welcoming. He wondered if she knew that the basket in which she had put the raspberries, having first lined it with a white paper table napkin, was in fact of the kind that is intended for wine, being made with a loop of cane at one end to hold the neck of the bottle. She had changed, he noticed, from her jeans into her new cotton skirt, the Laura Ashley print, and had brushed her wheat-coloured hair and tied a black velvet ribbon round it. Much good it would do her, thought James, but he decided not to tell her the true function of the basket unless she did anything particular to irritate him.
But as they were passing the church Rosamund suddenly turned to face him and asked him if he knew Aunt Julie now had a lady living with her to look after her. A companion, this person was called, said Rosamund. James hadn’t known – he had probably been absorbed in his own thoughts when it was discussed – and he was somewhat chagrined.
‘So what?’
‘So nothing. Only I expect she’ll open the door to us. You didn’t know, did you? It isn’t true you know things I don’t. I often know things you don’t, I often do.’
James did not deign to reply.
‘She said that if ever she got so she had to have someone living with her, she’d get Mirabel to come. And Mirabel wanted to, she actually liked the idea of living in the country. But Aunt Julie didn’t ask her, she got this lady instead, and I heard Mummy say Aunt Julie doesn’t want Mirabel in the house any more. I don’t know why. Mummy said maybe Mirabel won’t get Aunt Julie’s money now.’
James whistled a few bars from the overture to the Barber of Seville. ‘I know why.’
‘Bet you don’t.’
‘O.K., so I don’t.’
‘Why, then?’
‘You’re not old enough to understand. And, incidentally, you may not know it but that thing you’ve got the raspberries in is a wine basket.’
The front door of Sindon Lodge was opened to them by a fat woman in a cotton dress with a wrap-around overall on top of it. She seemed to know who they were and said she was Mrs Crowley but they could call her Auntie Elsie if they liked. James and Rosamund were in silent agreement that they did not like. They went down the long passage where it was rather cold even on the hottest day.
Aunt Julie was in the room with the french windows, sitting in a chair looking into the garden, the grey cat Palmerston on her lap. Her hair was exactly the same colour as Palmerston’s fur and nearly as fluffy. She was a little wizened woman, very old, who always dressed in jumpers and trousers which, James thought privately, made her look a bit like a monkey. Arthritis twisted and half-crippled her, slowly growing worse, which was probably why she had engaged Mrs Crowley.
Having asked Rosamund why she had put the raspberries in a wine basket – she must be sure to take it straight back to Mummy – Aunt Julie turned her attention to James, demanding of him what he had been collecting lately, how were the hawk moth caterpillars and what sort of a school report had he had at the end of the summer term? A further ten minutes of this made James, though not unusually tender-hearted towards his sister, actually feel sorry for Rosamund, so he brought himself to tell Aunt Julie that she had passed her piano exam with distinction and, if he might be excused, he would like to go out and look at the mulberry tree.
The garden had a neglected look and in the orchard tiny apples, fallen during the ‘June drop’, lay rotting in the long grass. There were no fish in the pond and had not been for years. The mulberry tree was loaded with sticky-looking squashy red fruit, but James supposed that silkworms fed only on the leaves. Would he be allowed to help himself to mulberry leaves? Deciding that he had a lot to learn about the rearing of silkworms, he walked slowly round the tree, remembering now that it was Mirabel who had first identified the tree for him and had said ho
w wonderful she thought it would be to make one’s own silk.
It seemed to him rather dreadful that just because Mirabel had had a baby she might be deprived of all this. For ‘all this’, the house, the gardens, the vaguely huge sum of money which Uncle Walter had made out of building houses and had left to his widow, was surely essential to poor Mirabel who made very little as a free-lance designer and must have counted on it.
Had he been alone, he might have raised the subject with Aunt Julie who would take almost anything from him even though she called him an enfant terrible. She sometimes said he could twist her round his little finger, which augured well for getting the mulberry leaves. But he wasn’t going to talk about Mirabel in front of Rosamund. Instead, he mentioned it tentatively to his mother immediately Rosamund, protesting, had been sent to bed.
‘Well, darling, Mirabel did go and have a baby without being married. And when Aunt Julie was young that was a terrible thing to do. We can’t imagine, things have changed so much. But Aunt Julie has very strict ideas and she must think of Mirabel as a bad woman.’
‘I see,’ said James, who didn’t quite. ‘And when she dies Mirabel won’t be in her will, is that right?’
‘I don’t think we ought to talk about things like that.’
‘Certainly we shouldn’t,’ said James’s father.
‘No, but I want to know. You’re always saying people shouldn’t keep things secret from children. Has Aunt Julie made a new will, cutting Mirabel out?’
‘She hasn’t made a will at all, that’s the trouble. According to the law, a great niece doesn’t automatically inherit if a person dies intestate – er, that is, dies . . .’
‘I know what intestate means,’ said James.
‘So I suppose Mirabel thought she could get her to make a will. It doesn’t sound very nice put like that but, really, why shouldn’t poor Mirabel have it? If she doesn’t, I don’t believe there’s anyone else near enough and it will just go to the state.’
