by Ruth Rendell
“I don’t suppose my raincoat has turned up?”
“Not that I know of. Charlene Hebden denies knowing anything about it and says she’s never seen Donaldson in her life.”
Wexford faced up to something much more important. He drew breath. “And Fay Devenish?”
“Nothing new. Karen’s called on her while you were away. I gather she’s found out exactly how Devenish took revenge on Fay for attempting to get his child adopted. Karen will tell you herself. It’s not pleasant. Otherwise it’s snafu.”
“Your picking up bad language from the Muriel Campdenites,” said Wexford, making an attempt to lighten the atmosphere and failing.
He went back to work. The newly refurbished police station had a white and glaring look in the strong morning sunshine. The whole facade had been repainted and the windows renewed in new frames. He thought of Ted Hennessy who would never see it but might have admired it. Wexford remembered, from a conversation they had once had while on a case, the man’s fondness for modern, innovative architecture.
Karen Malahyde had started her holiday, so whatever horrors she had to tell him would have to wait. Instead, he was obliged to face a mountain of papers relating to the arrests, offences committed, and damage caused by fourteen eco-warriors in the arable country between Flagford and Sayle. Burden came in and said he had just heard that Vicky Cadbury had lapsed into a coma from which she was not expected to emerge. He sat on the edge of Wexford’s desk and Wexford remarked on his suit, obviously new lightweight and in a fetching shade of dark caramel. His tie was caramel and black stripes. Wexford said it would be fifty pee to speak to Burden now and he was sorry he still hadn’t done anything about getting a mirror put up in here.
The paperwork took till the next morning, till halfway through it. Vine was questioning Flay yet again, WPC Brodrick had been sent off to Muriel Campden where all the council’s recycling bins had taken to disappearing during the night and their contents of paper and card, bottles and cans, scattered on the triangular lawn, and Wexford was starting to think about lunch, when his phone rang for only the second time that morning.
“There’s been a murder, sir,” said Vine. “It’s just come through. Up in Ploughman’s Lane. Woodland Lodge.”
Afterward Wexford could have sworn that his heart had stopped. His heart stopped, his breath suspended and his voice lost. Time ceased.
Vine said, “Are you still there, sir? Can you hear me?”
Voices come back and time goes on. Healthy hearts miss no beats. It only seems as if they do. Wexford found a voice from somewhere in the depths of him, said, “I was afraid of this. Oh, God, I was afraid of it. Where’s her body? At the house?”
“In the study, and it’s not Mrs. Devenish who’s dead, it’s her husband, it’s Stephen Devenish.”
Chapter 20
The great trees were darker in color and their foliage heavier. They were like middle-aged people, handsome enough, vigorous and voluptuous, until set beside the flawless freshness of the young. The trees had no comparison to bear, for they were all growing old, all beginning to get tired, their leaves dry and browning the edges. Again, like aging humankind, they were fine when seen from a distance, less delectable in close-up.
Wexford looked at the trees as he got out of his car and thought how the first time he had come up here interview the Devenishes they had been in green bud. Stephen Devenish would never see them turn brown and fall. He would see nothing ever again. Wexford believed it was wrong to feel satisfaction at anyone’s death, but except for the circumstances, he would have felt positive pleasure and gratitude at Devenish’s. Except for the circumstances. . .
He would have given a lot to find out that she was somewhere else when her husband met his death, far far away out of reach and traveling distance. But Fay never went away. She was always here and she was here now. In the kitchen, according to Lynn Fancourt, who opened the front door to him and Burden. She was in her domain, the kitchen, sitting at the table, drinking tea.
“Where is he?” Wexford asked, saying “he” because it seemed too soon after the death to say “it.”
“In the study, sir. The scene-of-crimes team is there as well as the pathologist.”
Photographs were being taken. Perry, the scene-of-crimes officer, was busy taking measurements, and the pathologist Sir Hilary Tremlett (elevated to the House of Lords in the resignation honors as Lord Tremlett of Savesbury) was squatting on the dark brown rug, studying the dead man’s wounds. He turned his head when Wexford came in but he didn’t get to his feet.
“He’s been stabbed in the chest. There are three wounds, one of which was made when the knife passed clean through the heart. Another may have punctured a lung. You can take him away when you like and I’ll have a better look at him in the morgue. I don’t want to get blood on my shoes. They’re new.”
The body lay half on the rug, half on the hardwood floor. It appeared as if Devenish, when attacked, had sunk to his knees, then tumbled over-backward. His handsome features were so white in death that they looked like the face on a marble bust. He was dressed as became a professional man leaving for the day’s work, in a dark gray suit of perfect cut, a pearl gray shirt, and a pink silk tie with a gray horizontal stripe. Or, rather, this was the appearance he must have presented when first dressed that morning. Now suit jacket and shirt were dark with blood and the pink tie spattered with it in a pattern like a bunch of roses.
“I can’t be sure yet,” said Lord Tremlett, “but I’d say whoever did this was a lot shorter than he. Wouldn’t be difficult, though, he was a big chap.” Staring up at Wexford, Tremlett said as if height were a disadvantage, “Like you.”
“When did he die?” Wexford asked.
“I knew it! I was waiting for that. You want me to say, ‘At precisely twelve minutes past eight, give or take a second or two.’ That’s what you want, isn’t it? Well, I can’t. No one could. I can guess.”
“Go on then, guess,” said Wexford, bored with the man’s posturing. “Break the rule of a lifetime.”
Tremlett didn’t like that. “I didn’t get into their lordships’ House on guesswork but on my reputation for accuracy and thoroughness.”
Some say with a hundred thousand pounds, said Wexford silently. “All right, when was it? Approximately.”
“Approximately between seven-thirty and eight-thirty this morning. I hope you won’t twist my arm, I’d take a very dim view of anything like that, but if you did, I might say between seven-thirty and eight-fifteen.”
Wexford left the room, went into the hall, and asked Barry Vine who had found the body.
“She did, sir. She phoned us.”
“When?”
“Just after nine. She thought he’d gone to work and she went in there to clean the place.”
“Where were the children?”
“The boys had gone to school. It’s their last day of term. I suppose the little girl was with her.” Vine hesitated. “She says someone called on Devenish at eight this morning. Devenish let him in himself and took him into the study. She didn’t see him but she heard a man’s voice.”
“Mrs. Devenish did?”
“That’s right.”
“She told you that?”
“It was almost the first thing she said.”
“I see. No sign of the weapon, I suppose?”
“There was no knife in the study, sir. Plainly, a knife was used. There are knives in a block in the kitchen and no one’s touched them. That is, no one’s touched them since I got here. Lynn’s in the kitchen with Mrs. Devenish.”
Wexford remembered the knife block. It and the cuckoo clock were to him symbols of that kitchen, and in a curious way symbols of Stephen Devenish too.
“Right. I’ll go and see her now.”
He found her where Vine said he would, said good morning to her and that this was a dreadful business, and motioned to Lynn to come out into the hail. There, with the living-room door shut, he asked her if the clothes Fa
y was wearing, a long button-through dress of white-spotted blue cotton and blue straw-soled espadrilles, were what she had on when she found her husband’s body.
“I asked her, sir. She said they were.”
“We’ll start a search of the house immediately.”
He walked back to the kitchen. It was as immaculate and neat as before. Fay Devenish looked stunned - literally so, as if someone had given her a blow to the head and felled her. Perhaps Devenish had. She sat on one of the Windsor wheel-back chairs, pulled somewhat away from the table, bending forward, her head bowed, her knees and feet pressed close together. Her lank, pale brown hair hung across her cheeks. She looked up when he came in and he saw that her face was as white as if the blood had drained out of her rather than her husband.
In similar circumstances, when a woman has lost a husband by murder, Wexford would have begun with condolences as a preamble to the questions he had to ask. Here, sympathy seemed inappropriate. “You found your husband’s body.”
She lifted her head again and looked at him, straight in the eye. “Yes.” It was plainly all she wanted to say. She had nothing else to say, but she perhaps recognized that he would want more, much more, and she burst out in a hoarse, half-strangled voice, “I can’t believe it, you know. I find it quite unbelievable, it can’t be true. I was the one who’d die, I’d be killed, that’s what I thought . . .”
Wexford’s own sentiments too, his own fears.
“But Stephen’s dead. He’s been killed. I can’t believe it. I couldn’t when I - when I saw him. He was so big and strong and - and full of life; I still can’t believe it.”
“It’s true.”
“There was so much blood. How could anyone have so much blood in him?”
His own blood ran cold. It was Lady Macbeth’s phrase, the grotesque and inappropriate comment that from the shock of looking on horrors.
“What time did you find your husband’s body, Mrs. Devenish?”
“It was nine this morning. Just before nine. I went in there . . . to . . . to do the room. I only thank God, I thank God, Sanchia wasn’t with me. I’d left her in the playroom. She had a video on. The Lion King it was. She was watching a video, thank God, thank God!”
“Tell me about this man you say called on your husband at eight.”
She didn’t like that “you say” and she frowned. “You mean you don’t believe me?”
“I don’t mean that.” But perhaps he did. “Tell me about him.”
“I heard his voice, I didn’t see him. I thought - I thought it was one of our neighbours. I suppose my husband let him in. My husband was - well, he was going to the Brighton office and sometimes this man gets a lift with him. That’s who I thought it was.”
“What is his name, this neighbour?”
She said she didn’t know. “He lives at Laburnum House.”
Sylvia’s old home. He tried to remember the name of the people who had bought it from Sylvia and Neil. Paulton? Poulson?
“I see you’ve cut your hand,” he said.
“I haven’t cut it.” She looked at her hand with a kind of wonder as if she had never seen it before. Across the palm, diagonally, where the lifeline ran, was a long, deep cut. “It bled a lot at the time.”
“How did that happen?”
“Stephen did it.” She began to laugh hysterically, mad woman laughter, almost operatic, running up and down scales. Backward and forward she flung herself on the chair, against the table, laughing and shrieking, beating on the tabletop with her hands. “He did it, he did it,” she shrieked, “but he’ll never do it again, never, never, never!” Lynn came in, alerted by the noise. “Get her a glass of water, will you?” Wexford said to her.
By the time it came, Fay Devenish was sobbing. Lynn held the water to her lips, and to the surprise of both of them, she drank greedily. She drew a long breath and expelled it on a deep sigh. Then she did something that was all the more shocking because it was performed under absolute control and quite calmly. She got up and, showing surprising strength, seized hold of the cuckoo clock and struggled to pull it off the wall. She tugged at it for a moment before succeeding, then flung the clock on the floor with all the force she could muster. It smashed in pieces. The pert little cuckoo, defeated at last, its flapping beak silenced, rolled out from the wreckage and lay on its back under the table.
Violent activity had set her hand bleeding again. She seemed not to notice the blood that poured from her palm and dripped onto the floor.
Wexford said, “That needs treatment. It should probably be stitched.”
She shrugged. “He bought that clock when we were on holiday in Lucerne. I always hated it. I used to feel it mocked my . . . my sufferings.”
Lynn got down on her knees and started picking up the pieces.
Fay said, “You must be the only person apart from me who’s ever done anything like that in this house.”
“You shouldn’t be alone,” Wexford said. “Is there any one we can call on to be with you?
“Jane. I can see Jane now.”
The body had been taken away. Peach, Cox, and Archbold had searched the house in a quest for bloodstained clothing and found nothing of interest. Wexford went into the utility room where a pile of clean washing, folded but not ironed, lay on a counter. Among the items, as well as half a dozen snow-white shirts belonging to the dead man, he could see what looked like a cotton skirt, several T-shirts, and another button-through cotton dress. The portholes on the washing machine and the dryer both stood open. The utility room communicated with the kitchen where Fay Devenish still sat and Lynn Fancourt with her. He looked around him, saw the knife block, and noticed that each of its slots but one was occupied by a knife. Seven knives. On the day Stephen Devenish had cried in this room, his arms flung across the table, had there been seven knives or eight?
“Bag that knife block,” he said to Cox, “and we’ll send it to forensics.” Then he inquired of Fay Devenish if a knife was missing from the block.
“I don’t think so. Let me see. No, they’re all there.” She looked fearfully up into his face. “You think that one of these knives . . .?”
“I’m not thinking anything much yet, Mrs. Devenish. I wondered because while there are eight slots in the block, there are only seven knives.”
“There never have been any more.” She spoke flatly, her hysteria over. “There’s a reason for that. It’s made to take eight knives, but if you put eight in, they’re crowded together and when you try to pull one out, it brings the next one to it with it. Do you see what I mean?”
“I think so.”
He waited for her to say that one of her kitchen knives couldn’t have been used to kill her husband. She had been in the kitchen all the time and the man who killed Stephen Devenish had never entered it. He expected her to say it but instead she said, “The knife my husband cut me with, I don’t know where that came from. It wasn’t one of these.”
He said no more. They would soon know, forensics would tell them.
In the hallway he encountered Burden. “Where’s the little girl, Mike?”
“I had her taken to a neighbour. The Wingrave woman. It’s not ideal but better there than here. And I’ve phoned the boys’ school; it’s the Francis Roscommon School in Sewingbury. I said I’d go over there and talk to the head teacher, but he sounds a sensible man. He said he’d tell them when he found a suitable moment. And he’ll bring them home.”
“I don’t want them brought home, Mike.”
Burden looked at him.
“Or, rather, I want them brought here but not left alone with their mother. I don’t want her to have a chance to talk to them or they to her. Some other arrangement will have to be made.”
“You’re thinking of the mysterious stranger she says called here this morning? She thought that up on the spur of the moment, didn’t she?”
Wexford shrugged. He went into the study and stood at the window. From here, because the room was in a block or wing of
the house that jutted forward, you could look to your left and see the front door. Had Devenish been in here to watch this man arrive? Was there a man? Or was he a desperate woman’s invention? Wexford looked ahead of him again and saw Jane Andrews’s car approaching along the long, green tunnel of the driveway. Her arrival obscurely cheered him. It was better that she was here.
This, Stephen Devenish’s death chamber, was also the room where so much of the regular meting out of violence to Fay Devenish took place. It had been searched, but he set about searching it himself. In a desk drawer he found a whip. It was the kind of whip he supposed a jockey might use, though not being familiar with this means of coercing horses he couldn’t be sure. One thing was certain, Devenish hadn’t used it on a horse. Another drawer held nothing but a pair of nutcrackers and an instrument that might have been pincers but whose purpose he couldn’t define. It was a relief to find that the top drawer contained only paper, much of it letters in envelopes.
All this would have to be gone through. Later, though, not now. He was closing the drawer when the writing, or rather the printing, on the top envelope caught his eye. It had been torn open, the contents no doubt read and then replaced inside. Addressed to Stephen Devenish Esq., Woodland Lodge, Ploughman’s Lane, Kingsmarkham KM2 4ZC, the lettering had been produced by a computer and printer. Hardly believing himself so competent in this area, he recognized Word for Windows, the program they used at the police station - and in millions of other locations, of course. The postmark was Brighton, the date July 24. He took out the letter. Same computer - and printer-created text.
Dear Mr. Devenish:
I often wonder if you know what a monster you are. A psychopath, not a human being at all. Evil like yours is, in fact, quite rare. Thank God. But God won’t have His revenge on you till after you have died a natural death in your comfortable, luxurious bed, so He has appointed me to carry out retribution. I shall kill you. In the next few days, perhaps, or weeks or even months. But it will happen. And it will be painful, as painful as the cruelty you have inflicted on your poor wife. I will make her a widow and your children orphans and laugh for joy, as they will.
