by Ruth Rendell
“He’s dead, and, letter and phone call notwithstanding, he was dead within an hour or two of when his family last saw him.”
NEXT DAY THE SEARCHING OF GREEN POND Hall grounds began.
The grounds comprised eight acres, part woodland, part decayed overgrown formal gardens, part stables and paddock. Sergeant Martin led the search with three men and Wexford himself went down there to have a look at the dragged pond and view the terrain. It was still raining. It had been raining yesterday and the day before and for part of every day for three weeks. The weather people were saying it would be the wettest May since records began. The track was a morass, the color and texture of melted chocolate in which a giant fork had furrowed. There were other ways of getting down to the pond but only if you went on foot.
At three he had a date at Stowerton Royal Infirmary. Colin Budd had been placed in intensive care but only for the night. By morning he was sufficiently recovered to be transferred to a side room off the men’s surgical ward. The stab wounds he had received were more than superficial, one having penetrated to a depth of three inches, but by a miracle almost none of the five had endangered heart or lungs.
A thick white dressing covered his upper chest, over which a striped pajama pocket had been loosely wrapped. The pajama jacket was an extra large and Wexford estimated Budd’s chest measurement at thirty-four inches. He was a very thin, bony, almost cadaverous young man, white-faced and with black, longish hair. He seemed to know exactly what Wexford would want to know about him and quickly and nervously repeated his name and age, gave his occupation as motor mechanic and his address a Kingsmarkham one where he lived with his parents.
“Tell me what happened.”
“This girl stuck a knife in my chest.”
“Now, Mr. Budd, you know better than that. I want a detailed account, everything you can remember, starting with what you were doing waiting for a bus in the middle of nowhere.”
Budd had a querulous voice that always sounded mildly indignant. He was one of those who believes the world owes him elaborate consideration as well as a living.
“That’s got nothing to do with it,” he said.
“I’ll be the judge of that. I don’t suppose you were doing anything to be ashamed of. And if you were what you tell me will be between you and me.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at!”
“Just tell me where you’d been last evening, Mr. Budd.”
“I was at snooker,” Budd said sullenly.
What a fool! He’d made it sound at least as if he was having it away with a friend’s wife in one of the isolated cottages on the hillside.
“A snooker club?”
“It’s on Tuesday evenings. In Pomfret, a room at the back of the White Horse. It’s over at ten and I reckoned on walking home.” Budd shifted his body, wincing a bit, pulling himself up in the bed. “But the rain started coming down harder, I was getting soaked. I looked at my watch and saw the ten-forty bus’d be along in ten minutes and I was nearly at the stop by then.”
“I’d have expected a motor mechanic to have his own transport.”
“My car was in a crunch-up. It’s in a new wing. I wasn’t doing no more than twenty-five when this woman came out of a side turning …”
Wexford cut that one short. “So you reached the bus stop, the bus shelter. What happened?”
Budd looked at him and away. “There was this girl already there, sitting on the seat. I sat down next to her.”
The bus shelter was well known to Wexford. It was about ten feet long, the seat or bench inside two feet shorter.
“Next to her?” he asked. “Or at the other end of the seat?”
“Next to her. Does it matter?”
Wexford thought perhaps it did. In England at any rate, for good or ill, for the improving of social life or its worsening, a man of honorable intent who goes to sit on a public bench where a woman is already sitting will do so as far away from her as possible. A woman will probably do this too if a woman or man is already sitting there, and a man will do it if another man is there.
“Did you know her? Had you ever seen her before?”
Budd shook his head.
“You spoke to her?”
“Only to say it was raining.”
She knew that already, Wexford thought. He looked hard at Budd. Budd said, “I said it was a pity we were having such a bad May, it made the winter longer, something like that. She pulled a knife out of her bag and lunged it at me.”
“Just like that? You didn’t say anything else to her?”
“I’ve told you what I said.”
“She was mad, was she? A girl who stabs men because they tell her it’s raining?”
“All I said was that normally at this time I’d have had my vehicle and I could have given her a lift.”
“In other words, you were trying to pick her up?”
“All right, what if I was? I didn’t touch her. I didn’t do anything to frighten her. That was all I said, that I could have given her a lift home. She pulled out this knife and stabbed at me four or five times and I cried out or screamed or something and she ran off.”
“Would you know her again?”
“You bet I would.”
“Describe her to me.”
Budd made the mess of that Wexford thought he would. He didn’t know whether she was tall or short, plump or thin, because he only saw her sitting down and he thought she had a raincoat on. A thin raincoat that was a sort of pale color. Her hair was fair, he did know that, though she had a hat on or a scarf. Bits of blond hair showed under it. Her face was just an ordinary face, not what you’d call pretty. Wexford began to wonder what had attracted Budd to her in the first place. The mere facts that she was female and young? About twenty, said Budd. Well, maybe twenty-five or six. Pressed to be more precise, he said she could have been any age between eighteen and thirty, he wasn’t good on ages, she was quite young though.
“Can you think of anything else about her?”
A nurse had come in and was hovering. Wexford knew what she was about to say, he could have written the script for her—“Now I think that’s quite enough. It’s time for Mr. Budd to have his rest …” She approached the bed, unhooked Budd’s chart, and began reading it with the enthusiastic concentration of a scholar who has just found the key to Linear B or some such.
“She had this sack with her. She grabbed it before she ran off.”
“What sort of sack?”
“The plastic kind they give you for your dustbin. A black one. She picked it up and stuck it over her shoulder and ran off.”
“I think that’s quite enough for now,” said the nurse, diverging slightly from Wexford’s text.
He got up. It was an extraordinary picture Budd’s story had created and one which appealed to his imagination. The dark wet night, the knife flashing purposefully, even frenziedly, the girl running off into the rain with a sack slung over her shoulder. It was like an illustration in a fairy book of Andrew Lang, elusive, sinister, and otherworldly.
6
WHAT HAD BURDEN MEANT WHEN HE SAID this amniocentesis had discovered something to worry Jenny? Wexford found himself brooding on that. Once or twice he had woken in the night and the question had come into his mind. Sitting in the car, being driven to Myringham, he saw a woman on the pavement with a Down’s syndrome child and the question was back, presenting itself again.
He hadn’t liked to pursue it with Burden. This wasn’t the sort of thing you asked a prospective father about. What small defect was there a father wouldn’t mind about but a mother would? It was grotesque, ridiculous, there was nothing. Any defect would be a tragedy. His mind ranged over partial deafness, a heart murmur, palate or lip deformities—the test couldn’t have shown those anyway. An extra chromosome? This was an area where he found himself floundering in ignorance. He thought of his own children, perfect, always healthy, giving him no trouble really, and his heart warmed towards his girls.
&nb
sp; This reminded him that he had the National Theatre’s program brochure for the summer season in his pocket. Sheila was with the company and this would be the first season she had top lead roles. Hence the disengagement from further work on Runway. He got out the program and looked at it. Dora had asked him to decide which days they should go to London and see the three productions Sheila was in. For obvious reasons it always had to be he who made those kind of decisions.
The new Stoppard, Ibsen’s Little Eyolf, Shelley’s The Cenci. Wexford had heard of Little Eyolf but he had never seen it or read it, and as for The Cenci, he had to confess to himself that he hadn’t known Shelley had written any plays. But there it was: “Percy Bysshe Shelley” and the piece described as a tragedy in five acts. Wexford was making tentative marks on the program for a Friday in July and two Saturdays in August when Donaldson, his driver, drew into the curb outside Sevensmith Harding.
Miles Gardner had been watching for him and came rushing out with an umbrella. It made Wexford feel like royalty. They splashed across the pavement to the mahogany doors.
Kenneth Risby, the chief accountant, told him Rodney Williams’s salary had been paid into the account Williams had with the Pomfret branch of the Anglian-Victorian Bank. From that account then, it would seem, Williams had each month transferred £500 into the joint account he had with Joy. Risby had been with the company for fifteen years and said he could recall no other arrangement being made for Williams, either recently or in the days when he was a sales rep. His salary had always gone to the Pomfret bank, never to Kingsmarkham.
“We’ve heard nothing,” Miles Gardner said. “Whatever he meant by the PS to that letter he hasn’t been in touch.”
“Williams didn’t write that letter,” Wexford reminded him.
Gardner nodded unhappily.
“The first time we talked about this business,” Wexford said, “you told me someone phoned here saying she was Mrs. Williams and that her husband was ill and wouldn’t be coming in. Would that have been on Friday, April the sixteenth?”
“Well, yes, I suppose it would.”
“Who took the call?”
“It must have been one of our telephonists. They’re part-timers. I can’t remember whether it was Anna or Michelle. The phone call came before I got in, you see. That is, before nine-thirty.”
“Williams had a secretary, I suppose?”
“Christine Lomond. He shared her with our assistant sales director. Would you like to talk to her?”
“Not yet. Maybe not today. It’s Anna or Michelle I want. But which one do I want?”
“Michelle, I expect,” said Gardner. “They tend to swap shifts a bit but it’s usually Michelle on mornings.”
It had been that Friday, and it was today. Michelle was a very young, very pretty girl with a vividly made-up face. The room where the switchboard was, not much more than a cupboard, she had stamped with her own personality (or perhaps Anna’s) and there was a blue cineraria in a pot, a stack of magazines, a pile of knitting that had reached the bulky stage, and on the table in front of her, hurriedly placed face downwards, the latest diet paperback.
It was clear that Michelle had already discussed that phone call exhaustively. Perhaps with Anna or with Christine Lomond. Williams’s disappearance would have been the talk of the office.
“I get in at nine,” she said. “That’s when the phone calls really start. But the funny thing was there weren’t any that morning till Mrs. Williams phoned at about twenty past.”
“You mean till someone phoned who called herself Mrs. Williams.”
The girl looked at him. She shook her head quite vehemently. “It was Mrs. Williams. She said, ‘This is Joy Williams.’”
Wexford let it go for the time being.
“What exactly did she say?”
“‘My husband Mr. Williams won’t be coming in today.’ And then she sort of hesitated and said, ‘That’s Mr. Rodney Williams, I mean, the marketing manager.’ I said there was no one else in yet and she said that didn’t matter but to give Christine the message he’d got flu and wouldn’t be in.”
Whoever it was, it hadn’t been Joy. At that time Joy didn’t know her husband was Sevensmith Harding’s marketing manager. Wexford had thanked Michelle and was turning away, diverting his mind to the matter of the firm’s stock of typewriters, when he stopped.
“What makes you so sure the woman you spoke to was Mrs. Joy Williams?”
“It just was. I know it was.”
“No, let me correct that. You know it was a woman who said she was Mrs. Joy Williams. She had never phoned here before, had she, so you couldn’t have recognized her voice?”
“No, but she phoned here afterwards.”
“What do you mean, afterwards?”
“About three weeks later.” The girl spoke with exaggerated patience now, as if to a very confused or simpleminded person. “Mrs. Joy Williams phoned here three weeks after her husband left.”
Of course. Wexford remembered that call. It was he who had advised Joy to make it.
“I put her through to Mr. Gardner,” Michelle said. “I was a bit embarrassed, to be perfectly honest. But I know it was the same voice, really I do. It was the same voice as the woman who phoned that Friday morning, it was Mrs. Williams.”
HE PICKED UP THE GIRL AT THE ROUNDABOUT where the second exit is the start of the Kingsmarkham bypass. She was standing on the grass verge at the side of the roundabout, holding up a piece of cardboard with “Myringham” printed on it. Brian Wheatley pulled in to the first exit, the Kingsmarkham town-center road, and the girl got into the passenger seat. Then, for some unclear reason, perhaps because he had already pulled out of the roundabout and it would not have been easy to get back into the traffic, Wheatley decided to continue through the town instead of on the bypass. This wasn’t such a bad idea anyway, the anomaly being that the bypass which had been built to ease the passage of traffic past the town was often more crowded than the old route.
Wheatley was driving from London where he worked three days a week. It was about six in the evening and of course broad daylight. He had moved to Myringham only two weeks before and was still unfamiliar with the byways and back-doubles of the area. The girl didn’t speak a word. She had no baggage with her, only a handbag with a shoulder strap. Wheatley drove through Kingsmarkham, along the High Street, and became confused by the signposting. Instead of keeping straight on he began to think he should have taken a left-hand turn some half a mile back. He therefore—on what he admitted was a lonely and secluded stretch of road—pulled into a lay-by and consulted his road map.
His intention to do this, he said, he announced plainly to the girl. After he had stopped and switched off the engine he was obliged to reach obliquely across her in order to open the glove compartment where the map was. He was aware of the girl giving a gasp of fright or anger, and then of a sharp pain, more like a burn than a cut, in his right hand.
He never even saw the knife. The girl jumped out of the car, slamming the door behind her, and ran not along the road but onto a footpath that separated a field of wheat from a wood. Blood was flowing from a deep cut in the base of Wheatley’s thumb. He tied up his hand as best he could with his handkerchief but shock and a feeling of faintness made it impossible for him to continue his journey for some minutes. Eventually he looked at his map, found himself nearer home than he had thought, and was able to drive there in about a quarter of an hour. The general practitioner with whom he had registered the week before was still holding his surgery. Wheatley’s wife drove him there and the cut in his hand was stitched, Wheatley telling the doctor he had been carving meat and had inadvertently pressed his hand against the point of the carving knife. Whether or not the doctor believed this was another matter. At any rate he had made no particular comment. Wheatley himself had wanted to tell him the truth, though this would have meant police involvement. It was his wife who had dissuaded him on the grounds that if the police were called the conclusion they would r
each would be that Wheatley had first made some sort of assault on the girl.
This was the story Wheatley told Wexford three days later. His wife didn’t know he had changed his mind. He had come to the police, he said, because he felt more and more indignant that this girl, whom he hadn’t touched, whom he had scarcely spoken to except to say he was going to stop and look at his map, should make an unprovoked attack on him and get away with it.
“Can you describe her?”
Wexford waited resignedly for the kind of useless description furnished by Colin Budd. He was surprised. In many ways Wheatley did not seem to know his way around but he was observant and perceptive.
“She was tall for a woman, about five feet eight or nine. Young, eighteen or nineteen. Brown hair or lightish hair, shoulder-length, sunglasses though it wasn’t sunny, fair skin—I noticed she had very white hands. Jeans and a blouse, I think, and a cardigan. The bag was some dark color, black or navy blue.”
“Did she give you the impression she lived in Myringham? That she was going home?”
“She didn’t give me any sort of impression. When she got into the car she said thanks—just the one word ‘thanks,’ otherwise she didn’t speak. I said to her that I thought I’d drive through the town instead of the bypass and she didn’t answer. Later on I said I’d stop and look at the map and she didn’t answer that either, but when I reached across her—I didn’t touch her, I could swear to that—she gave a sort of gasp. Those were the only sounds she made, ‘thanks’ and a gasp.”
The same girl as attacked Budd, one would suppose. But if Wheatley were to be believed, while there was some very slight justification for the attack on Budd, there was none for this second stabbing. Could the girl possibly have thought that the hand which reached across to open the glove compartment intended instead to take hold of her by the left shoulder? Or lower itself onto her knee? There was something ridiculous about these assaults, and yet two meant that they were not ridiculous at all but serious. Next time there could be a fatality. Or had there been one already?
