An Unkindness of Ravens

by Ruth Rendell

“A typewriter? No.”

  “Is he still taking Mandaret?”

  She nodded, looking at the blank screen as if she expected it spontaneously and without benefit of electricity to spring into cinematic life.

  “It’s a form of methyldopa, isn’t it? A drug for high blood pressure?”

  “He’s had blood pressure for two or three years.”

  “I found an empty Mandaret container in his bedside cupboard. I suppose he took a supply with him?”

  “He wouldn’t forget them. He didn’t like to miss a day on them. He always took one when he got up and one with his tea.”

  “I take it he had a bag with him? A suitcase? Something to put his clothes in?”

  Again she simply nodded.

  “What was he dressed in?”

  “Pardon?”

  “What clothes was he wearing when he left here to drive to Ipswich?”

  It was plain she couldn’t remember. She looked blank—and she looked bored. Wexford understood in that moment that she didn’t love Rodney Williams, hadn’t perhaps loved him for years. His presence or absence as a life companion were matters of indifference to her but his financial support and the status he gave her were not. Or were her feelings more subtle and diffuse than that? Of course they were. Feelings always are. There is never a simple, clear analysis of a woman’s reaction to her husband or his to her.

  He pressed the point he had made.

  “Sort of fawn trousers,” she said, screwing up her face with the effort of it. “Cavalry twill, they’re called. A dark blue pullover. Is his raincoat upstairs?”

  “A plastic mac?”

  “No, he’s got a good raincoat. It’s nearly new. He must have taken that. I expect he had a jacket in his bag too. He’s got a brown suede one.”

  “Did he like a wet or dry shave?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Did he use a razor with shaving cream and water?”

  “Oh, yes. He couldn’t get on with those electrics. He’d tried but he couldn’t get on with them.”

  And that accounted for the Remington and the Phillips upstairs. She was staring miserably at the blank, gray, shiny screen. Wexford felt it was cruel to deprive her of her solace, like keeping a dumb, hungry dog from its plate of Kennomeat. He asked her for her sister’s name and address and then he switched the television on again. She looked at him as if she thought him completely mad but she said nothing, and her eyes were compelled back to the screen and to Sheila, dressing now in a hotel bedroom for an evening out with the Boeing 747 captain in Hong Kong.

  Wexford walked home, thinking about Williams and money. What had he done with all that money? Even after tax and other deductions, after the stingy allotment to his household of £500 a month, he would have been left with at least £12,000 a year. He’d had a company car. It didn’t go on cars. The passport, which was seven years old, showed a single visit to Majorca. It didn’t go on foreign holidays. Of course, he had to keep his son Kevin at Keele and pay for his tuition and board. He wouldn’t get much of a grant on his salary …

  And then, suddenly, Wexford understood what had been bugging him for the past hour. It had been a Thursday evening when Williams had left. Kevin Williams always phoned home on Thursday evenings. And that Thursday was certainly the first since he had returned to university after the Easter vacation. Yet his mother, who plainly adored him, who waited excitedly for his call and spoke proudly of his devotion to duty in regularly phoning at that time, had gone out on that particular Thursday evening and for no more pressing or life-enhancing appointment than a visit to her sister.

  If she had visited her sister.

  And how about his clothes? Was she lying when she said he had taken only a jacket and a raincoat with him? Or didn’t she know? Somehow he couldn’t imagine Williams leaving his car in Arnold Road and then humping huge bulging suitcases the quarter of a mile to Myringham station. Why go to Myringham anyway, when, if he wanted to catch a train to London, Kingsmarkham station was eight miles nearer?

  The following week the clothes, or some of them, turned up.

  5

  A LONELY COUNTRY ROAD LINKS KINGSMARKHAM with Pomfret. Once Forest Road, Kingsmarkham, is past, the only houses to be seen are those few up on the hillsides crowned by Cheri-ton Forest. The forest is always rather dark and forbidding as coniferous forests are. On the horizon stands an obelisk, a needle of stone, placed there by some local magnate a hundred and fifty years ago.

  Almost the last building in Kingsmarkham is the police station. On the other side of the High Street Cheriton Lane runs down to the buildings and courts of the Kingsmarkham Tennis Club, and half a dozen other narrow roads compose a small residential web. The gardens of houses in Forest Park back onto open fields, and fields traversed by a footpath lie between the club grounds and the town. The street lamps stop two hundred yards on the Pomfret side of the police station and after that there is an isolated one to light the bus stop.

  Roughly halfway between the towns, at the point of no return, is the bus stop with bus shelter. The shelter was put there because there are no trees at this point to break the wind or provide cover from the rain. And on this night it was raining as it had been for many nights. The fine rain swept across the meadows in gray sheets.

  The last bus from Pomfret to Kingsmarkham was due at 10:40. It came ten minutes late, rolling along not too fast through the rain, sending up fountains of spray onto the grass verges. The stop where the bus shelter was was a compulsory one, not a request, so the bus pulled in to make a token stop and prepared to pull out again, for there was no one waiting. A shout from a woman passenger sitting in a front nearside seat alerted the driver. He had already taken off the brake but he put it on again and the bus juddered to a halt.

  “There’s a person crawling on the pavement!”

  Here, where the shelter was, the lay-by was bordered by a few yards of pavement. The driver got down. Two or three of the passengers, disobeying the driver—who was he to tell them?—got down. There was no conductor on those single-deckers. The rain was coming down in torrents, needles of it pounding the surface of the lay-by, the curb, and the sodden bundle that crawled and whimpered with blood coming from its chest.

  At first the conductor had thought it a wounded dog. But the passenger was right, it was a man. It crawled up to the conductor and rolled over at his feet.

  NEXT DAY, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF KINGSMARKHAM, the Forby side, a firm called Mid-Sussex Waterways began dragging a pond. Green Pond Hall had stood empty for years, but at the end of the previous January a buyer had been found for it and the purchase was completed by April. The grounds contained the pond and a stream, and the new owner intended to turn the estate into a trout farm.

  If the proper definition of a lake is a sheet of water covering the minimum of one acre, Green Pond was just too small to fit the requirement. But as a pond it was very large. It wasn’t stagnant, for the small fast stream flowed through the middle of it, disappearing into a pipe which passed under a path and gushing out through a spout on the other side to fall away down to the Kingsbrook. In spite of this the pond was shallow and coated with the thick, green slime of blanket weed. The purpose of the dragging was to clean it, increase its depth, and rid the water of the algae Mid-Sussex Waterways believed might be caused by an influx of the nitrates which had been applied as fertilizer to the nearby meadows.

  In the net, after the dragging, were found a wire supermarket basket minus its handle, a quantity of glass bottles, jars and light bulbs, the silencer part of a car exhaust system, wood in the form of twigs and chopped lengths, stones among which were flints and chalk pebbles, a rubber boot, a Pyrex casserole dish, chipped and cracked, a metal door handle and lock, a pair of scissors, and a dark burgundy-colored traveling bag.

  The bag was coated with green slime and thin, fine-grained black mud, but when the clasps were undone and the zip unfastened it was seen that only water had penetrated the seams of the bag, soaking but hardly discoloring the
clothes inside, the topmost of which was a brown suede blouson.

  It was a piece of luck, Wexford thought, that William Milvey, the boss of Mid-Sussex Waterways, had found money inside the bag, £50 in fivers rolled up and fastened with a rubber band. If it had contained nothing but clothes, and damaged clothes at that, it was probable he would have tossed it into the pit which had been dug out by a mechanical digger for the purpose of receiving the rubbish caught in the dragnet. Money, Wexford had often noticed, has this kind of electric effect on people. Many a man who thinks himself honest, on finding an object bought with money will keep the object but not the money itself. It is as if the adage “Finding’s keepings” applies to things but never to money, which has its own aura of sacredness, of being absolutely the preserve of him who has earned it.

  But even so, Wexford might never have heard of the existence of the bag were it not for a kidney donor card which was in the breast pocket of the blouson and which was signed R. J. Williams.

  William Milvey knew who R. J. Williams was. He lived next door but one to him in Alverbury Road.

  THIS FACT IT TOOK WEXFORD SOME HALFHOUR to find out. He questioned Milvey thoroughly about the bag. Had he seen it in the pond before he saw it in the net? Well, yes, he thought he had, now Wexford came to mention it. He fancied he had. At any rate he thought he could remember seeing a brownish-red lump of something up against the bank of the pond nearest to the path and the Kingsbrook. No, he hadn’t touched it or attempted to pull it out. The dragnet had pulled it out.

  Milvey was a shortish, thick-set man with the heavy build and big, spread hands of someone who has done manual work for most of his life. He looked about fifty. The discovery of the bag seemed disproportionately to have excited him—or his excitement appeared disproportionate to Wexford at first.

  “Fifty quid in it,” he kept saying, “and that good jacket.”

  “Did you see anyone about the grounds of Green Pond Hall?”

  “Some fella up to no good, d’you mean?”

  “I meant anyone at all.”

  “We didn’t have sight nor sound of no one.”

  There might have been marks of car tires on the drive in from the Forby Road or on the track that ran round the lower bank of the pond, the constant rain had turned these surfaces to mud, but any tracks there were had been obliterated by the heavy tires of Mid-Sussex Waterways mechanical digger.

  Milvey simply couldn’t remember if there had been any tire marks on the track. They had the other man in and asked him, but he couldn’t remember either.

  “Fifty quid,” said Milvey, “and that good jacket. Just chucked away.”

  “Let me have your address, will you, Mr. Milvey? I’ll very likely want to talk to you again. Home or business.”

  “They’re one and the same. I operate from home, don’t I?” He said this as if it were a fact he would have expected Wexford to know, and, adding his address, used the same patient, mildly surprised tone. “Twenty-seven Alverbury Road, Kingsmarkham.”

  “Are you telling me you live next door but one to Mr. Williams?”

  Milvey’s expression, though bland and innocent, had become a little uncomfortable. “I reckoned you knew.”

  “No, I didn’t know.” Vaguely now Wexford recalled reading of a planning application made to the local authority for permission to erect a garage—more a hangar really—large enough to house a JCB in the garden of 27 Alverbury Road. The area being strictly residential, the application had naturally been rejected. “You must know Mr. Williams, then?”

  “Pass the time of day,” said Milvey. “The wife has a chat with Mrs. Williams. My girl’s in the same class at school with their Sara.”

  “Mr. Williams is missing,” said Wexford flatly. “He’s been missing from home for the past month and more.”

  “Is that right?” Milvey didn’t look surprised but he didn’t say he knew either. “Fifty quid in notes,” he said, “and a jacket worth three times that.”

  Wexford let him go.

  “It has to be coincidence,” Burden said.

  “Does it, Mike? It would be a hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t it? Williams disappears because he’s done something or someone’s done something to him. His overnight bag is dumped in a pond and who should find it but the guy who lives two doors down the street from him? I haven’t read any John Buchan for—well, it must be forty-five years. But I can remember in one of his books the hero’s car breaks down and the house he calls at for help just happens to be the home of the master anarchist. A bit later on the hit man who’s sent to get him turns out to be a burglar he’s recently successfully defended in court. Now that’s fiction and strictly for persons below fifteen, I’d say. But this that you call coincidence is comparable to those. Have you had any coincidences of that magnitude in your life?”

  “Both my grandmothers were called Mary Brown.”

  “Were they really?” Wexford was temporarily distracted. “You never told me that before. And did they come from the same part of the country?”

  “One from Sussex and one from Herefordshire. I bet you the odds against that happening are a lot longer than against Milvey finding Williams’s bag. You look at it and you’ll see it’s not that much of a coincidence. If it had been buried, say, or stuck in a hollow tree and Milvey had found it, that would be something else. But it was in a pond and Milvey’s in the pond-dragging business. Once it got in the pond and the pond was due to be dragged—which whoever put it there wouldn’t know, of course—the chances would be that Milvey would find it. You want to look at it like that.”

  Wexford knew there was more to it than that; he couldn’t dismiss it in the easy way Burden did. Milvey’s behavior had been a shade odd anyway, and Wexford was sure he hadn’t told all he knew.

  “How long do you think the bag’s been in the pond?”

  It was on the floor between them, deposited on sheets of newspaper, its contents, which Wexford had already examined, now replaced.

  “Since the night he went, I suppose, or the next day.”

  Wexford didn’t go along with that either but he let it pass for the time being. As well as the brown suede blouson there was a raincoat in the bag, a trendy version of a Burberry, the fifty pounds, a toothbrush, tube of toothpaste, and disposable razor wrapped up in a pair of underpants, a bottle of Monsieur Rochas cologne, and a pair of brand-new socks with the label still on them. The underpants were a young man’s Homs, pale blue and white, the socks dark brown, an expensive brand made of silk.

  It was the kind of packing a man would do for an overnight stay somewhere, not for three nights, and the pants and socks and cologne seemed to indicate a night not spent alone. Or had there been more articles in the bag which had been removed? This could surely only have been done to prevent identification of the bag’s owner. In that case why leave the donor card in, the blouson pocket? “I would like to help someone to live after my death,” it stated somewhat naively in scarlet and white, and on the reverse side Rodney Williams had requested that in the event of his death any part of his body which might be required should be used in the treatment of others. Underneath this was his signature and the date a year past. The next of kin to contact was given, as might have been expected, as Joy Williams, with the Alverbury Road phone number.

  Men’s natures were a mass of contradictions, there was no consistency, and yet Wexford marveled a little that a husband and father could deliberately and ruthlessly deceive his wife over his income and pursue a course of skinflint meanness to her and his children yet want to donate his body for transplants. It would cost him nothing though, he would be dead after all. Was he dead?

  “We’re going to have to start looking for him. I mean really looking. Search the grounds of Green Pond Hall for a start.”

  Burden had been pacing the office. He had taken to doing this lately and his restless pacing had a stressful effect on anyone he happened to be with, though he himself hardly seemed aware of what was going on. Twice he had been
to the window, twice back to the door, pausing once to perch briefly on the edge of the desk. Now he had reached the window again, where he stopped, turned, and stared at Wexford in irritable incredulity.

  “Search for him? Surely it’s plain he’s simply done a bunk to escape the consequences of whatever it is he’s done.”

  “All right, Mike. Maybe. But in that case what has he done? Nothing at Sevensmith Harding. He’s as clean as a whistle there. What else could he have done? It’s just possible he could be involved in some fraud that hasn’t yet come to light but there’s a strong case against that one. He got out. The only reason for that would be that discovery of the fraud was imminent. In that case why hasn’t that discovery been made?”

  Burden shrugged. “Who knows? But it may just be a piece of luck for Williams that it hasn’t been.”

  “Why hasn’t he come back, then? If the outcome of this fraud has blown over why doesn’t he come home? He hasn’t left the country unless he’s gone on a false passport. And why bother with a false passport when he’d got one of his own and no one started missing him till three days after he’d gone?”

  “Doesn’t it occur to you that leaving one’s clothes on the riverbank is the oldest disappearing trick in the world?”

  “On the beach, I think you mean, not on the shores of a pond where the water’s so shallow that to commit suicide you’d have to lie on your face and hold your breath. Besides, that bag has been in the pond only a couple of days at most. If it had been there since Williams went it’d be rotting by now, it’d stink. We’ll send it over to the lab and see what they say, but we can see what they’ll say with our own eyes and smell it with our own noses.

  “Williams is dead. This bag of his tells me he is. If he had put it into the pond for the purpose of making us think he was dead he’d have done so immediately after he left. And the contents would have been different. More identification, for instance, no scent and powder-blue underwear. And I don’t think the money would have been in it. He would have needed that money, he would have needed all the money he could lay hands on. There’s no reason to think he could easily spare fifty pounds—whatever he’s done he hasn’t robbed a bank.