An Unkindness of Ravens

by Ruth Rendell

  “Perhaps in the open air?”

  “And tied his neck up in a Marks and Spencer’s floral-printed tea-towel?”

  “It doesn’t say that there!”

  “I happened to notice it when the poor devil was resurrected. We’ve got one like it at home.”

  The phone rang. The telephonist said, “Mr. Wexford, there’s a Mrs. Williams here wanting to talk to someone about Mr. Rodney Williams.”

  Joy, he thought. Well.

  “Mrs. Joy Williams?”

  “Mrs. Wendy Williams.”

  “Have someone bring her up here, will you?”

  The sister-in-law? The wife of the brother in Bath? When you don’t know what to do next, Raymond Chandler advised writers of his sort of fiction, have a man come in with a gun. In a real-life murder case, thought Wexford, what better surprise visitor than the mysterious Wife of Bath?

  He looked up as Burden re-entered the room. Burden had been going through the clothes found on Williams’s body: navy blue briefs—very different from the white underwear in the cupboard in Alverbury Road—brown socks, fawn cavalry-twill slacks, blue, brown, and cream striped shirt, dark blue St. Laurent sweater. The back pocket of the slacks had contained a checkbook for one of the accounts with the Anglian-Victoria at Pomfret (R. J. Williams, private account), and a wallet containing one fiver, three £1 notes, and two credit cards, Visa and American Express. No car keys, no house keys.

  “He probably kept his house key on the same ring as his car keys,” Burden said. “It’s what I do.”

  “At any rate, we’ll get at that bank account now. The doctor here says there was a tea-towel wrapped round his neck. To stanch the blood, presumably.”

  There came a knock at the door. Bennett came into the room with a young woman, not anyone’s idea of a Wife of Bath.

  “Mrs. Wendy Williams, sir.”

  She looked about twenty-five. She was a pretty girl with a delicate, nervous face and fair, curly hair. Wexford asked her to sit down, the doctor having sprung to his feet. She slid into the chair, gripping the arms of it, and jumped as Crocker passed behind her on his way to the door. Burden closed the door behind them and stood there.

  “What did you want to see me about, Mrs. Williams?”

  She didn’t answer. She had fixed him with a penetrating stare and her tongue came in and out, moistening her lips.

  “I take it you’re Rodney Williams’s sister-in-law? Is that right?”

  She moved her body back a little, hands still tight on the chair arms. “What do you mean, his sister-in-law?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “Look, I … I don’t know how to say this. I’ve been so … I’ve been nearly out of my mind.” Mounting hysteria made her voice ragged. “I saw in the paper … a little bit in the paper and … Is that, that person they found … Is that my husband?”

  9

  IT WAS SELDOM HE COULD GIVE PEOPLE REASSURING news. He was tempted to say no, of course not. The body has been identified. She was holding on to the arms of the chair, rubbing her fingers up and down the wood.

  “What is your husband’s name, Mrs. Williams?”

  “Rodney John Williams. He’s forty-eight.” She spoke in short, jerky phrases, not waiting for the questions. “Six feet tall. He’s fair going gray. He’s a salesman. It said in the paper a salesman.”

  Burden stared, then looked down. She swallowed, made an effort against panic, an effort that concentrated on tensing her muscles.

  “Could you … please, I have a photo here.”

  Her hands, unlocked from the chair, refused to obey her when first she tried to open her bag. The photograph she handed to Wexford fluttered, she was shaking so. He looked at it, unbelieving.

  It was Rodney Williams all right, high domed forehead, crack of a mouth parted in a broad smile. It was a more recent picture than the one Joy had and showed Williams in swimming trunks (flabby hairless chest, spindleshanks, a bit knock-kneed) with this girl in a black bikini and another girl, also bikini’d but no more than twelve years old. Wexford’s eyes returned to the unmistakable face of Williams, to the head you somehow wanted to slap a fringed wig on and so transform it.

  She was waiting, watching him. He nodded. She brought a fluttery hand up to her chest, to her heart perhaps, froze for a moment in this tragic pose. Then her eyelids fell and she sagged sideways in the chair.

  Afterwards he was to think of it as having been beautifully done but at the time he saw it only as a genuine faint. Burden held her shoulders, bringing her face down onto her knees. Picking up the phone, Wexford asked for a policewoman to come up, Polly Davies or Marion Bayliss, anyone who was around. And someone send a pot of strong tea and don’t forget the sugar basin.

  Wendy Williams came out of her faint, sat up, and pressed her face into her hands.

  “YOU ARE THE WIFE OF RODNEY JOHN WILLIAMS and you live in Liskeard Avenue, Pomfret?”

  She drank the tea sugarless and very hot, at first with her eyes closed. When she opened her eyes and they met his he noticed they were the very clear pale blue of flax flowers. She nodded slowly.

  “How long have you been married, Mrs. Williams?”

  “Sixteen years. We had our sixteenth wedding anniversary in March.”

  He could hardly believe it. Her skin had the clear bloom of an adolescent’s, her hair was baby-soft and the curl in it looked natural. She saw his incredulity and in spite of her emotion was flattered, a little buoyed up. He could tell she was the sort of woman to whom compliments, even unspoken ones, were food and drink. They nourished her. A faint, tremulous smile appeared. He looked again at the photographs.

  “My daughter Veronica,” she said. “I got married very young. I was only sixteen. That picture was taken three or four years back.”

  A bigamist he had been, then. Not a common or garden wayward husband with a girlfriend living in the next town, not a married man with a sequence of pricey mistresses, but your good old-fashioned true-blue bigamist. There was no doubt in Wexford’s mind that Wendy Williams had as good-looking a marriage certificate as Joy’s, and if hers happened not to be valid she would be the last to know it.

  That, then, was why he had taken no change of clothes with him. He had those things in his other home. And more than that, much more.

  Wexford now saw the point of those bank accounts: one for his salary to be paid into and two joint accounts to be fed from it, one for each household, R. J. Williams and J. Williams; R. J. Williams and W. Williams. There had been no need to assume a different name on his second marriage—Williams was common enough to make that unnecessary. He had been like a Moslem who keeps strictly to Islamic law and maintains his wives in separate and distinct dwellings. The difference here was that the wives didn’t know of each other’s existence.

  That Williams had had another wife, what one might call in fact a chief wife, was something this girl was going to have to be told. And Joy was going to have to be told about her.

  “Can you tell me when you last saw Mr. Williams?” Not calling him “your husband” any more was the beginning of breaking the news.

  “About two months ago. Just after Easter.”

  This wasn’t the time to ask her to account for that eight-week gap. He told her he would come and see her at home that evening. Polly Davies would look after her and see she got home safely.

  Something had at last happened to distract Burden temporarily from his private troubles. His expression was as curious and as alert as a little boy’s.

  “What did he do at Christmas?” he said. “Easter? What about holidays?”

  “No doubt we shall find out. Other bigamists have handled it. He probably had a Bunbury as well.”

  “A what?”

  “A nonexistent friend or relative to provide him with alibis. My guess is Williams’s Bunbury was an old mother.”

  “Did he have an old mother?”

  “God knows. Creating one from his imagination wouldn’t have been beyond his capacity, I’m sure. You know what
they say, a mother is the invention of necessity.”

  Burden winced. “That night he left Alverbury Road, d’you think he went to his other home?”

  “I think he set off meaning to go there. Whether he reached it is another matter.”

  Fascinated by Williams’s family arrangements, Burden said, “While Joy thought he was traveling for Sevensmith Harding in Ipswich he was with Wendy, and while he was with Joy Wendy thought he was where?”

  “I don’t suppose she knew he worked for Sevensmith Harding. He probably told her a total lie about what he did.”

  “You’d think he’d have got their names muddled—I mean called Wendy Joy and Joy Wendy.”

  “There speaks the innocent monogamist,” said Wexford, casting up his eyes. “How do you think married men with girlfriends manage? Wife and all get called ‘darling.’”

  Burden shook his head as if even speculating about it was too much for him. “Do you reckon it was one of them killed him?”

  “Carried his body and stuck it in that grave? Williams weighed a good fifteen stone or two hundred and ten pounds or ninety something kilos or whatever we’re supposed to say these days.”

  “It might have been Wendy made that phone call.”

  “You reckon her voice sounds like Joy’s?”

  Burden was obliged to admit that it didn’t. Joy’s was monotonous, accent-free, uninflected; Wendy’s girlish, rather fluting, with a faint lisp. Wexford was talking about voices, about the rather unattractive but nevertheless memorable quality of Joy’s voice, when his phone rang again.

  “Another young lady to see me,” he said to Burden, putting the receiver back.

  “Bluebeard’s third wife?” It was the first attempt at a joke he had made in two months.

  Wexford appreciated that. “Let’s say a fan, rather. Someone who saw me on the telly.”

  “Look, why don’t I take Martin and get on over to Wheatley? Then I’ll be able to come to Wendy’s with you tonight.”

  “OK, and we’ll take Polly along.”

  The girl walked into his room in a breeze of confidence. She was seventeen or eighteen and her name was Eve Freeborn. Apposite names of the Lady Dedlock—Ernest Pontifex—Obadiah Slope kind that Victorian novelists used are in real life less uncommon than is generally supposed. That Eve Freeborn was aptly named Wexford came quickly to understand. She might have been dressed and cast for the role of Spirit of Freedom in a pageant. Her hair was cropped short and dyed purple in parts. She wore stretch jeans, a checked shirt, and thongs.

  The story she told Wexford, sitting with legs wide apart, hands linked, forearms making a bridge from the chair arms to rest her chin on, was delivered in a brisk and articulate way. Eve was still at school, had come there straight from school. President of the debating society no doubt, he thought. As she turned her hands outwards, thumbs on her jaw, he noticed the felt-tipped pen drawing on her wrist, a raven with a woman’s head, and then as she moved her arm the shirtsleeve covered it.

  “I realized it was my duty as a citizen to come to you. I delayed just long enough to discuss the matter with my boyfriend. He’s at the same school as me—Haldon Finch. In a way he’s involved, you see. We have the sort of relationship where we believe in total openness.”

  Wexford gave her an encouraging smile.

  “My boyfriend lives in Arnold Road, Myringham. It’s a single-story house, number forty-three.” Opposite Graham Gee, who had reported the presence of poor old Greta, Wexford thought. “His mother and father live there too,” said Eve in a tone that implied enormous condescension and generosity on the part of the boyfriend in allowing his parents to live in their own house. “The point is—and you may not believe this but it’s the honest truth, I promise you—they don’t like him having me to stay the night with him. I mean, not me personally, you could understand that if they didn’t like me, but any girl. So what we do is I come round after he’s gone to bed and get in the window.”

  Wexford didn’t gape at her. He merely felt like doing this. He couldn’t resist asking, “Why doesn’t he come to you?”

  “I share a room with my sister. Anyway, I was telling you. I went round to his place around ten that Thursday night. There wasn’t all that much space to park and when I was reversing I went into the car behind. I just bashed the wing of it a bit, not much, it wouldn’t have had to have a new wing or anything, but I did think it was my duty to take responsibility and not just leave it, so I …”

  “Just a moment. This was the night of April the fifteenth?”

  “Right. It was my boyfriend’s birthday.”

  And a charming present he must have had, Wexford thought.

  “What was this car you went into?”

  “A dark blue Ford Granada. It was the car you asked about on TV. I wrote a note and put it on the windscreen, under a wiper. Just with my name and address on and phone number. But it blew away or got lost or something because the car was still there a long while after that and the driver never got in touch with me.”

  At ten that night. Greta the Granada had been there at ten but how long had it been there?

  “Just as a matter of curiosity, whose car were you driving?”

  “My own,” she said, surprised.

  “You have your own car?”

  “My mother’s technically. But it comes to the same thing.”

  No doubt it did. They were amazing, these young people. And the most amazing thing about them was that they had no idea previous generations had not behaved as they did. People got old, of course, became dull and staid, they knew that, but in their day surely teenage girls had slept with their boyfriends, appropriated their parents’ cars, stayed out all night, dyed their hair all colors of the spectrum.

  He thanked her for her help and as she got up he saw the little drawing or tattoo again. He realized that he didn’t know which of the local schools Sara Williams attended. And there remained the as yet unknown quantity, Veronica Williams …

  “Do you know a girl of your own age called Sara Williams? Is she perhaps at school with you?”

  He was positive she hadn’t made the connection before, was making it now for the first time. “Do you mean Sara is the daughter of this man who was murdered?”

  “Yes. You go to the same school?”

  “No, we don’t,” she said carefully, “but I know her.”

  WHEATLEY LIVED ON AN ESTATE OF NEW houses on the Pomfret side of Myringham. They had been built, Burden recalled, by a company so anxious to sell their houses that 100 percent mortgages had been guaranteed with them and a promise given to buy a house back for its purchase price if after two years the occupier was dissatisfied. The place had a raw look, oddly cold in the June sunshine. Wheatley’s pregnant wife came to the door. A child of about three, a girl, was behind her, holding on to her skirt. Burden registered the fact of the pregnancy and the sex of the child with his heightened sensitivity to such matters and then he thought that his wife’s pregnancy might have affected Wheatley’s attitude to the girl he picked up. For instance, he might be sexually frustrated. Burden knew all about that. Wheatley too might have exaggerated the purity of his attitude towards the girl because he dared not risk the possibility of his pregnant wife finding out he was capable of putting his hand on other women’s knees—or, in this instance no doubt, on other women’s breasts.

  The third bedroom of this very small house had been turned into a study or office for Wheatley. He was on the phone but rang off within seconds of Burden’s and Martin’s arrival. Yes, he had remembered some more about the girl. He was sure he could give them a more detailed description. There was no question of his remembering more of what the girl had said to him because she hadn’t said any more. “Thanks” and a gasp had been the only sounds that had come from her.

  “I told you she was tall for a woman, at least five feet nine. Still in her teens, I’m sure. She had dark brown shoulder-length hair with a fringe, very fair skin, and very white hands. I think I can remember
a ring, not a wedding or engagement ring or anything, but one of those big silver rings they wear. I wouldn’t call her pretty, not a bit.” Was that a sop to the wife who had come quietly into the room, carrying the little girl? “Sunglasses, a dark leather shoulder bag. She had blue denim jeans on and a gray cardigan. She was thin—really skinny, I mean.” Another matrimonial sop. “And underneath the cardigan she had a tee-shirt on. It was a white tee-shirt with a crazy picture on it—some sort of bird with a woman’s head.”

  “You didn’t mention that before, Mr. Wheatley.”

  “I didn’t mention the ring before or what color her clothes were. You asked me to think about it and I thought about it and that’s what I remember. You can take it or leave it. A white tee-shirt with a bird on it with a woman’s face.”

  “I DON’T BELIEVE IT!”

  She stared at Wexford, her mouth open in an appalled sort of way, her eyelids moving. She brought her hands up and scrabbled at her neck.

  “I don’t believe it!” Now there was defiance in her tone. Then, by changing one word, she showed him she accepted, she understood that what he had told her was true. “I won’t believe it!”

  Polly Davies was with him, sitting there like a good chaperone, silent but attentive. She glanced at Wexford, got a nod from him.

  “I’m afraid it’s true, Mrs. Williams.”

  “I don’t—I don’t have a right to be called that, do I?”

  “Of course you do. Your name doesn’t depend on a marriage certificate.” Wexford thought of Eve Freeborn. There was a world between her and Wendy Williams, though a mere fourteen years, less than a generation, separated them. Would Eve know such a thing as a marriage certificate existed?

  “Mrs. Williams,” said stalwart Polly, “why don’t you and I go and make some coffee? We’d all like coffee, I’m sure. Mr. Wexford will want to ask you some questions but I know he’d like you to have time to get over the shock of this.”

  She nodded and got up awkwardly as if her bones were stiff. A glazed look had come across her face. She walked like a sleepwalker and no one now would have mistaken her for a twenty-five-year-old.