An Unkindness of Ravens

by Ruth Rendell

  Sara opened the front door to him. He hadn’t expected her to be there and he was a little taken aback. He would have preferred breaking the news to her mother alone. The school term wasn’t yet over but A-levels were, and with those examinations behind her there was perhaps nothing for her to go to school for.

  She had on a white tee-shirt, pure unrelieved white, short-sleeved and showing felt-tipped pen drawings on her arms and hands, the snake again in green, a butterfly with a baby face, a raven woman with aggressive breasts and erect wings, somehow obscene on those smooth golden arms, childish and rounded.

  “Is your mother in, Sara?”

  She nodded. Had the tone of his voice told her? She looked sideways at him, fearfully, as they went down the short passage to the kitchen door.

  Joy Williams anticipated nothing. On the table at which she was sitting were the remains of lunch for two. She looked up with a mildly disagreeable inquiring glance. They had been eating fish fingers with baked beans—an infelicitous mixture, Wexford thought. He could tell the constituents of their lunch by the quantity of it Sara had left on her plate. Joy had been reading a women’s magazine of the royalty-sycophantic—crocheted-tea-cozy kind which was propped against a bottle of soy sauce, pathetic import surely of Sara’s. What does a daughter do for her mother in a situation such as this? Go to her and put an arm round her shoulders? At least stand behind her chair? Sara went to the sink, stood with her back to them, looking out of the window above it at the grass and the fence and the meager little apple trees.

  Wexford told Joy her husband had been found. Her husband’s body. More than that he couldn’t tell her, he knew no more. The girl’s shoulders twitched. Mrs. Williams leaned forward across the table and put her hand heavily over her mouth. She sat that way for a moment or two. The whistling kettle on the stove began to screech. Sara turned round, turned the gas off, looked at her mother with her mouth twisted up as if she had toothache.

  “D’you want a coffee?” Joy said to Wexford.

  He shook his head. Sara made the coffee, instant in two mugs, one with a big “S” on it and the other with the head of the Princess of Wales. Joy put sugar into hers, one spoonful, then after reflection, another.

  “Shall I have to see him?”

  “Your brother-in-law has already made the identification.”

  “John?”

  “Have you any other brothers-in-law, Mrs. Williams?”

  “Rod’s got a brother in Bath. ‘Had,’ I should say. I mean he’s still alive as far as I know and Rod’s not, is he?”

  “Oh, Mum,” said Sara. “For God’s sake.”

  “You shut your mouth, you little cow!”

  Joy Williams screamed it at her. She didn’t utter any more words but she went on screaming, drumming her fists on the table so that the mug bounced off and broke and coffee went all over the strip of coconut matting on the floor. Joy screamed until Sara slapped her face—the doctor already, the cool head in an emergency. Wexford knew better than to do it himself. Once he’d slapped a hysterical woman’s face and later been threatened with an action for assault.

  “Who can we get hold of to be with her?” he asked. Mrs. Milvey? He thought of Dora and dismissed the thought.

  “She hasn’t any friends. I expect my Auntie Hope will come.”

  Mrs. Harmer that would be. Hope and Joy. My God, he thought. Although the girl was sitting beside her mother now, holding her hand, while Joy leaned back spent, her head hanging over the back of the kitchen chair, the tears silently rolling out of her eyes, he could see that it was all Sara could do to control her repugnance. She was almost shaking with it. The need to be parted, the one from the other, was mutual. Sara, no doubt, couldn’t wait for those exam results, the confirmation of St. Biddulph’s acceptance of her, for October and the start of term. It couldn’t come fast enough for her.

  “I’ll stay with Mum,” she said, and there was stoicism in the way she said it. “I’ll give her a pill. She’s got Valium. I’ll give her a couple of Valium and find something nice for her on the TV.”

  The ever-ready panacea.

  It was too late for lunch now. He and Burden might have something in the office, get a sandwich sent down from the canteen. He had said he’d see the press at 2:30. Well, young Varney of the local paper, who was a stringer for the nationals …

  There was a van on the police station forecourt marked “TV South” and a camera crew getting out of it.

  “They’ve been up at the forest getting shots of the grave and Fitzgerald and the dog,” Burden said, “and they want you next.”

  “Good. I’ll be able to put out an appeal for anyone who may have seen that car parked.” A less encouraging thought struck Wexford. “They won’t want to make me up, will they?” He had never been on television before.

  Burden looked at him morosely, lifting his shoulders in a shrug of total indifference to any eventuality.

  “It’s not the end of the world if they do, is it?”

  There was no time like the present, even a present that would end in ten minutes with his first ever TV appearance.

  “What’s happened to end your world, Mike?”

  Burden immediately looked away. He mumbled something which Wexford couldn’t hear and had to ask him to repeat.

  “I said that I supposed I should tell you what the trouble is.”

  “Yes. I want to know.” Looking at Burden, Wexford noticed for the first time gray hairs among the fair ones. “There’s something wrong with the baby, isn’t there?”

  “That’s right.” Burden’s voice sounded very dry. “In Jenny’s opinion, mind you. Not in mine.” He gave a bark of laughter. “It’s a girl.”

  “What?”

  Wexford’s phone went. He picked up the receiver. TV South, the Kingsmarkham Courier, and two other reporters were downstairs waiting for him. Burden had already gone, closing the door quietly behind him.

  8

  SHE WAS LAYING THE TABLE WITH THEIR wedding present glass and silver. The lace cloth had been bought in Venice where they went for the first holiday after their honeymoon. Domesticity had delighted her when, as soon as she knew she was pregnant, she gave up teaching. It was the novelty, of course, being at home all day, playing house. Since then she had grown indifferent, she had grown indifferent to everything. Except to the child, and that she hated.

  Sometimes, walking about the house after Mike had gone to work, pushing the vacuum cleaner or tidying up, the tears fell out of her eyes and streamed down her face. She cried because she couldn’t believe that she who had longed and longed for a baby could hate the one inside her. All this she had told to the psychiatrist at their second session. She had listened to her in almost total silence. Once she said, “Why do you say that” and once “Go on,” but otherwise she simply listened with a kind, interested look on her face.

  Mike had suggested the psychiatrist. She had been so surprised because Mike usually scoffed at psychiatry that she said yes without even protesting. It was somewhere to go anyway, something different to do from sitting at home brooding about the future and her marriage and the unwanted child. And inevitably crying, of course, when she remembered as she always did what life used to be—when the days seemed too short, when she was teaching history to sixth-formers at Haldon Finch, playing the violin in an orchestra, taking an advanced art appreciation course.

  Jenny despised herself but that changed nothing. Her self-pity sickened her.

  The sound of his key in the door—time-honored heart-stopper, test of love sustained—did nothing for her beyond bringing a little dread of the evening in front of them. He came into the room and kissed her. He still did that.

  “How did you get on with the shrink?”

  She resented the haste he was in. He wanted her cured, she felt, so that life could get back to normal again. “What do you expect? A miracle in two easy lessons?”

  She sat down. That always made her feel a little less bad because the bulge was no longer so
apparent. And, thank God, the child was still, not rolling about and kicking.

  “Don’t let him give you drugs.”

  “It’s a woman.”

  She wanted to scream with laughter. The irony of it! She was a teacher and this other woman was a psychiatrist and Mike’s daughter Pat was very nearly qualified as a dentist, yet here she was reacting like a no-account junior wife in a harem. Because the baby was a girl.

  He gave her a drink, orange juice and Perrier. He had a whisky, a large one, and in a minute he would have another. Not long ago he hadn’t needed to drink when he got home. She looked at him, wishing she could bring herself to touch his arm or take his hand. An apathy as strong as energy held her back.

  “Mike,” she said, and said for the hundredth time, “I can’t help it, I wish I could. I have tried.”

  “So you say. I don’t understand it. It’s beyond my understanding.”

  In a low voice, looking down, she said, “It’s beyond mine.” The child began to move, with flutters only at first, then came a hearty kick right under her lower ribs, giving her a rush of heartburn. She cried out, “I wish to God I’d never had the thing done. I wish I’d never let them do it. They shouldn’t have told me. Why did I let them? If I’d been ignorant I’d have gone on being happy, I’d have had the baby and I wouldn’t have minded what it was, I’d have been pleased with any healthy baby. I didn’t even specially want a son, or I didn’t know I did. I didn’t mind what it was, but now I know what it is I can’t bear it. I can’t go through all this and all through having it and the work and the pain and the trouble and a lifetime of being with it, having it with me, for a girl!”

  He had heard it all before. It seemed to him that she said it every night. This was what he came home to. With slight variations, with modifications and changed turns of phrase, that was what she said to him on and on every evening. Until she grew exhausted or wept or slumped spent in her chair, until she went away to bed—earlier and earlier as the weeks passed. In vain he had asked why this prejudice against girls, she who was a feminist, a supporter of the women’s movement, who expressed a preference for her friends’ small girls over their small sons, who got on better with her stepdaughter than her stepson, who professed to prefer teaching girls to boys.

  She didn’t know why, only that it was so. Her pregnancy, so long desired, at first so ecstatically accepted, had driven her mad. The worst of it was that he was coming to hate the unborn child himself and to wish it had never been conceived.

  THE WINE BAR WAS DARK AND COOL. THE RESTORATION of an old house in Kingsmarkham’s Queen Street had revealed and then opened up its cavernous cellars. The proprietor had resisted the temptations of roof beams, medieval pastiches, flintlocks, and copper warming pans and simply painted the broad squat arches white, tiled the floor, and furnished the place with tables and chairs in dark-stained pine.

  Wexford and Burden had taken to lunching at the Old Cellar a couple of times a week. It had the virtue of being warm on cold days and cool on hot ones like this. The food was quiche and salad, smoked mackerel, coleslaw, pork pie, quiche, quiche, and more quiche.

  “What did they serve in these places before quiche caught on? I mean, there was a time not long ago when an Englishman could say he’d never heard of quiche.”

  “He’s always eaten it,” said Wexford. “He called it cheese and onion flan.”

  He had the morning papers with him. The Kingsmarkham Courier was a weekly and wouldn’t be out till Friday. The national dailies had given no more than a paragraph to the discovery of Rodney Williams’s body and had left out all the background details he was sure Varney had passed on to them. The Daily Telegraph merely stated that the body of a man had been found in a shallow grave and later identified as Rodney John Williams, a salesman from Kingsmarkham in Sussex. Nothing about Joy, his children, his job at Sevensmith Harding, or the fact that he had been missing for two months. True, they had put him, Wexford, on TV but only on the regional bit that came after the news and then only forty-five seconds of the half-hour-long film they’d made.

  The corpses of middle-aged men weren’t news as women’s were or children’s. Women were always news. Perhaps they would cease to be when the day came that they got their equality as well as their rights. An interesting speculation and one which reminded him …

  “You were going to tell me but we were interrupted.”

  “It’s not that she’s anti-girls usually,” Burden said. “For God’s sake, she’s a feminist. I mean, It’s not some stupid I-must-have-an-heir thing or every-woman’s-got-to-have-a-son-to-prove-herself. In fact I think she secretly thinks women are better than men—I mean cleverer and more versatile, all that. She says she doesn’t understand it herself. She says she had no feelings about the child’s sex one way or the other, but when they told her, when she knew, she was—well, dismayed. That was at first. It’s got worse. It’s not just dismay now, it’s hatred.”

  “Why doesn’t she want a girl?” Wexford remembered certain sentiments expressed by his daughter Sylvia, mother of two sons. “Is it that she feels women have a raw deal and she doesn’t want to be responsible for bringing another into the world?” By way of apology for this crassness, he added, “I have heard that view put.”

  “She doesn’t know. She says that ever since the world began sons have been preferred over daughters and now it’s become part of race memory, what she calls the collective unconscious.”

  “What Jung called it.”

  Burden hesitated and then passed over that one. “She’s mad, you know. Pregnancy has driven her mad. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’ve given up caring about being disloyal. I’ve given up damn well caring, if you must know. Do you know what she says? She says she can’t contemplate a future with a daughter she doesn’t want. She says she can’t imagine living for twenty years, say, with someone she hates before it’s born. What’s my life going to be like with that going on?”

  “At the risk of uttering an old cliché, I’d say she’ll feel differently when the baby’s born.”

  “Oh, she will? You can be sure of that? She’ll love it when it’s put into her arms? Shall I tell you what else she says? That she never wants to see it. We’re to put it up for adoption immediately without either of us seeing it. I told you she was mad.”

  All this made Wexford feel like a drink. But he couldn’t start drinking at lunchtime with all he’d got ahead of him. Burden wasn’t going to drink either. Judging by the look of him some mornings, he saved that up for when he got home. They paid the bill and climbed up the stone steps out of the Old Cellar into a bright June sunshine that made them blink.

  “She’s seeing a psychiatrist. I pin my faith to that. Me of all people! I sometimes wonder what I’ve come to, saying things like that.”

  Sir Hilary Tremlett’s report of the results of the postmortem had come. To decipher the obscurer bits for Wexford, Dr. Crocker came into the office as Burden was departing. They nearly passed each other in the doorway, Burden long-faced, monosyllabic. The doctor laughed.

  “Mike’s having a difficult pregnancy.”

  Wexford wasn’t going to enlighten him. The other chair had been pushed under the desk. He shoved it out with his toe.

  “He says here he found three hundred and twenty milligrams of cyclobarbitone in the stomach and other organs. What’s cyclobarbitone?”

  “It’s an intermediate-acting barbiturate—that means it has about eight hours’ duration of effect—a hypnotic drug, a sleeping pill if you like. The proprietary brand name would be Phanodorm, I expect. Two hundred milligrams is the dose. But three hundred and twenty wouldn’t kill him. It sounds as if he took two tablets of two hundred each.”

  “It didn’t kill him, though, did it? He died of stab wounds.”

  Wexford looked up to see the doctor looking at him. They were both thinking the same thing. They were both thinking about Colin Budd and Brian Wheatley.

  “What actually killed him was a wound that pie
rced the carotid.”

  “Did it now? The blood must have spouted like a fountain.”

  “There were seven other wounds in the neck and chest and back. A lot of stuff here’s about fixed and mobile underlying tissues.” Wexford handed the pages across the desk, retaining one. “I’m more interested in the estimate he makes of the proportions of the knife. A large kitchen knife with a dagger point, it would seem to have been.”

  “I see he suggests death occurred six to eight weeks ago. What d’you reckon? He took two sleeping pills and someone did him in while he was away in the land of nod? If it happened as you seem to think soon after he left his house at six that evening, why would he take sleeping pills at that hour?”

  “He might have taken them,” said Wexford thoughtfully, “in mistake for something else. Hypertension pills, for instance. He had high blood pressure.”

  While the doctor was reading Wexford picked up the phone and asked the telephonist to get him Wheatley’s number. Wheatley had said he worked in London on only three days a week so there was a chance he might be at home now. He was.

  “I didn’t think you showed much interest,” he said in an injured way.

  That one Wexford wasn’t going to answer. It was true anyway. They hadn’t shown all that much interest in a man getting his hand scratched by a girl hitcher. Things had taken on a different aspect since then.

  “You gave me a detailed description of the girl who attacked you, Mr. Wheatley. The fact that you’re a good observer makes me think you may have observed more. Will you think about that, please, and try and remember everything that happened? Principally, give us some more information about what the girl looked like, her voice, and so on. We’d like to come and see you.”

  Mollified, Wheatley said he’d give it some thought and tell them everything he could remember and how about some time that evening?

  The doctor said, “It couldn’t have happened inside a car, you know, Reg. There’d have been too much blood.”