An Unkindness of Ravens

by Ruth Rendell

  The play threatened at first not to entertain at all. Shelley, Wexford thought to himself while aware he was no informed critic, wasn’t Shakespeare. And wasn’t he, in writing this sort of five-act tragedy in blank verse, some two hundred years out of date? Then Sheila came on, not looking like the portrait but with a small cap on her golden hair and dressed in white and gray, and he forgot everything, even the play, in his consuming pride in her. She had a peculiar quality in her acting, which critics as well as he had remarked on, of bringing clarity to obscure or periphrastic lines, so that her entrances always seemed to let light in upon the arcane. It was so now, it continued to be so … He saw and understood. The plot and purpose of the play began to unfold themselves for him and Shelley’s style ceased to be an anachronism.

  The effect on Dora was less happy.

  She whispered to Wexford while they were having a glass of wine during the interval, “There’s more to it than I can see, I know that. It’s not just that they can’t stand the old man’s harshness any longer, is it? I mean, why did Sheila come tearing in screaming about her eyes being full of blood?”

  “Her father raped her.” Wexford realized what he had said and corrected himself. “Count Cenci raped his daughter Beatrice.”

  “I see. Oh yes, I do see. It’s not made very clear, is it?”

  “I imagine Shelley couldn’t afford to spell it out. As it was, it must have been the incest theme that got the play banned.”

  While waiting for the curtain to go up on Act Four he read the essay on the historical facts on which the play was based, which had been written for the program by an eminent historian. Beatrice, her stepmother, and her brother had been put to death for the murder of Count Cenci. They really had. It had all happened. Guido had painted the portrait while Beatrice was in prison. Later they had tortured her to extract a confession.

  It wasn’t the kind of piece, he decided, that one would ever want to see again or read or remember a line from. When it was over they went backstage. They always did. Sheila, though in jeans and sweater now, still had a mask of gleaming white paint on her face and her hair topknotted for execution as when she had cried:

  “… Here, Mother,

  tie My girdle for me … My Lord,

  We are quite ready. Well, ‘tis very well.”

  Going home, Dora fell asleep in the train. Wexford found his mind occupied with the prosaic subject of typewriters.

  IT WAS THE CARETAKER OF THE HALDON Finch Comprehensive School, primed by a phone call from the County Education Department, who showed them round. Wexford had been inside the school before, years ago when the nucleus of these buildings had been the old county high school. Incorporated into it now were the buildings next door, a former clinic and health center, as well as a vast new assembly hall and the glass, concrete, and blue-slate complex of classrooms, music room, and concert hall, with the sports center a gilt-roofed rotunda that the sun set ablaze.

  “It reminds me,” Wexford said to Burden, “of a picture I once saw of the Golden Temple at Amritsar.”

  But the commercial department had no new building to house it. It was pushed away into three rear classrooms at the top of the old high school, as if the education authority had halfheartedly accepted the recent remark of a government minister that shorthand and typing were no part of education and should not be taught in schools. Wexford followed Burden and the caretaker up a remarkable (and remarkably battered) Art Deco marble staircase and along a wide vaulted passage. The caretaker unlocked and opened the double doors into the commercial department. These too were Art Deco, with parabolas and leaves in green ironwork on their frosted glass. The old high school had been built in 1930 and the classrooms inside looked as if they had received no more than one coat of paint since then. They were shabby, typically green and cream, with a view of rooftops and a brick well full of dustbins.

  It was in the farthest room that the typewriters were. Wexford asked himself what he had expected. The latest in word processors? Obviously here the country’s resources were mainly devoted to science and sport. Nor presumably would ARRIA encourage its members towards a secretarial career. There was not an electric typewriter among the machines and some of them looked older than the building itself. Burden, walking between the tables, had a piece of paper in his hand, probably with the faults of the typewriter they were looking for written on it. As if he couldn’t remember without that! A break in the head of the upper-case A and the ascender of the lower-case t, a comma with a smudged head.

  He felt a small flicker of excitement when he spotted the first of the Remington 315s.

  “Can you type?”

  “Enough to test these,” said Burden and impressed Wexford by getting to work and using all his fingers.

  Nothing wrong with the A, the t, and the comma on the first one. Burden slipped his paper into the roller of the second. The capital A wasn’t all it might have been, but neither was the B or the D or a lot of others. The lower-case faces and the comma seemed unflawed. He tried the third machine, the caretaker watching with the fascinated awe of one who expects the litmus paper to turn not red but all the colors of the spectrum. This typewriter, however, seemed without faults. It produced the best-looking copy so far. There was only one more. Burden slipped his paper in and this time, instead of “Now is the time for All good men to come to the Aid of the party,” typed “A thousand ages in Thy sight are like an evening gone.” If he had been a Freudian, Wexford thought, he would have wanted to know why. Perhaps it was just done to astonish the caretaker. Anyway, whatever the reason, this wasn’t the machine Rodney Williams’s letter of resignation had been typed on.

  “That’s it then.”

  “Show my four samples to the experts. We could be wrong.”

  “We’re not wrong. These are all the typewriters the school has?”

  “Apart from them as has gone away to be serviced.”

  “Now he tells me,” said Wexford.

  “There’s always some go away in the summer holidays. It’s never the lot of them. They go in like, rotation.”

  “Do you know how many have gone and where?”

  The caretaker didn’t know the answer to either question. No more than, say, five, he thought. He had never heard the name of any firm which might be servicing the machines or seen a van arrive to take them away.

  “We must be thankful,” Wexford said as they came out of the school, “that at least it’s an old manual portable we’re looking for and not one of the modern kind with a golfball or daisywheel.”

  “A what or a what?”

  “Let’s say with a detachable typeface that our perpetrator could simply have taken out and thrown away.”

  School might have broken up but sport went on. Half a dozen boys in shorts and tee-shirts were running laps round the biggest playing field and on the tennis courts a doubles game and a singles were in progress. The umpire seats were empty but Caroline Peters was there in the role of coach, and as they approached the wire fencing Wexford saw that what he had supposed to be a singles match was in fact instructor and instructed, the pupil here being Veronica Williams.

  The four doubles players were Eve and Amy Freeborn, Helen Blake, and another girl he had never seen before. So there were actually seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds in this corner of Sussex he had never seen before? He was beginning to think he knew them all by sight and usually by name too. He and Burden went over to the fence and watched, as they had done that previous time. Caroline Peters glared but didn’t come over to admonish. She knew who they were now.

  It was clear from the first that Veronica was streets ahead of the other players, though two years younger than any of them. She was the best tennis player Wexford had ever seen on a local court. This time the discrepancy between what he saw on TV and what he saw at home did not seem quite so wide. She was a strong, lithe, fast player with a hard, accurate backhand and a powerful smashing action. When Caroline Peters made her serve her service was as hard as Eve’s
but the balls struck the court well inside the line.

  The doubles players changed ends. Eve looked in Wexford’s direction and then ostentatiously away. Loyalty to the father he had had charged with possessing cannabis, he supposed. He had been getting a lot of stick of that kind lately. All part of a policeman’s lot, no doubt. Veronica returned Caroline Peters’s lob with a hard transverse drive which Caroline ran for but couldn’t reach. It was a mystery, Wexford thought, where somebody got that kind of talent from. You couldn’t imagine that finicking Wendy playing any sort of game or even walking more than half a mile, while Rodney Williams had been out of condition for years. Did the other Williams family play games? There had been a tennis racket up on Sara’s bedroom wall, he remembered. Of course, the probable answer was that any healthy young girl keen on tennis could be coached to the standard of Veronica Williams. She was already sixteen. It was already too late for her to begin competing in anything much more significant than inter-school matches.

  The girl whose face and name he didn’t know served a double fault. One more of those and the set would be lost. She served one more of those and threw her racket down in the kind of petulance she wouldn’t have known about if she hadn’t watched Wimbledon on TV. Wexford and Burden walked back to the car.

  “Have we got anything on the fingerprints found in Williams’s car yet?” Burden asked.

  “They took about sixty prints,” Wexford said, “all made by nine people. By far the greater proportion were made by one man and they’ve more or less established that man was Williams.”

  “I don’t suppose his fingers were in very good shape after being in the ground for nine weeks.”

  “Exactly. They matched the car ones to prints in his bedroom—well, bedrooms—of course. The other prints were made by two unknown men, and may well belong to whoever began the dismantling of Greta, or by Joy, Wendy, Sara, Veronica, and two more women or girls who might be friends of the wives and daughters—or who might not. The steering wheel had been wiped.”

  “Much what you would expect really,” said Burden.

  Nicola Tennyson, Veronica’s friend, was thrilled to have her fingerprints taken. She was unable to remember much about 15 April. Certain it was that she had been baby-sitting he brother that evening and Veronica had come in. but she couldn’t remember times. Veronica and she were often in each other’s homes, she said.

  One of the two unidentified sets of fingerprints on Greta turned out to be hers.

  13

  WHEATLEY SAID THAT THE WOMAN WHO stabbed him had been more than commonly tall. Budd said that because he had only seen her sitting down he couldn’t tell her height. That wasn’t strictly true. He had seen her running off with the sack over her shoulder. The sack was the only thing he could really remember, that and the fact she had blond hair. The girl who attacked Wheatley had brown or lightish hair. She was eighteen or nineteen. Budd thought his assailant was twenty. Or twenty-five or -six. Or any age between eighteen and thirty.

  In each case their wounds had been made with the blade of a large penknife. Not necessarily the same penknife, though. Not necessarily the same woman. Wexford asked himself what had been in the sack. He didn’t think Budd had invented the sack. Budd wasn’t endowed with enough imagination for that. There had been a sack all right, a black plastic dustbin liner. What had she been carrying it for and why?

  It had been pouring with rain. Those plastic sacks were very good for keeping things dry. Keeping what dry? The bus stop was the nearest one to the place where they’d found Rodney Williams’s body. But he had been dead six weeks by the night Budd was attacked. Wendy Williams wasn’t particularly tall but she was blond and she looked much younger than she was. To Budd she might seem in her early twenties.

  SHE HAD BEGUN A FORTNIGHT OF HER ANNUAL holiday. Wexford thought to himself that she might be spending the major part of it at Kingsmarkham Police Station. He went with the car to fetch her.

  Veronica was in the raspberry-ice-cream living room, seated at the glass-topped table, turning the pages of Vogue. He thought she looked like a teenage girl in a French film of the sixties. He hadn’t seen many French films of the sixties but nevertheless the impression was there in Veronica’s bandbox look, the beautifully cut, newly washed, pageboy hair, the clothes—primrose pinafore dress, starched white blouse, blue bootlace tie, white ankle socks, sky-blue sandals—that were just a little too young for her, the expression on her face that was 99 percent innocence and 1 percent calculation.

  “I saw you playing tennis the other day.”

  “Yes, I saw you too.”

  Why the wary look suddenly, the shade of unease across that naiveté?

  “You’re very good.”

  She knew that already, she didn’t need to be told. A polite smile and than back to Vogue. Wendy Williams came down the spiral staircase, walking slowly, giving him a voyeur’s look, if he had wanted it, of shapely legs in very fine pale tights all the way up to a glimpsed border of cream lace. He wasn’t looking, but out of the corner of his eye he saw her hold her skirt down as if he had been.

  She had dressed up. Women these days didn’t bother with fancy dressing except for special occasions, except when it was fun. That was general, not just the ARRIA view of things. For going down the cop shop, Wexford thought, you went in the jeans and shirt you wore around the house. But this was something that hadn’t yet got through to Wendy Williams and maybe never would. She probably didn’t possess a pair of jeans. And Veronica’s would be the designer kind with Vidal Sassoon or Gloria Vanderbilt on the backside. Wendy had a pretty cotton dress on, the kind that needs a lot of ironing, a wide black patent belt to show she still had an adolescent waist, and red wedge-heeled shoes that pinched where they touched.

  The car filled with her perfume. Estée Lauder’s White Linen, decided Wexford, who was good on scent. He made up his mind to take her up to his office, not into one of the interview rooms.

  “You haven’t told me much about this girlfriend of your husband’s, Mrs. Williams,” he said when they were there.

  “I’ve told you all I know. I’ve told you it was a very young girl and that’s all I know.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “There’s more if you search your memory.”

  A secretive look was closing up her face. Why? Why should she want to conceal this girl’s identity from him?

  “I wish I’d never mentioned any girl to you!” Exasperated. The tone of a mother to a child who keeps nagging her about a treat she has promised him.

  “You had an anonymous letter, you said.”

  She hesitated. She opened her mouth to begin an explanation. He cut her short.

  “You didn’t keep it, though. You burned it.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Mrs. Williams, let me tell you what I do know. First, it’s only in books that people burn anonymous letters. In real life they may not care much for them, they may even recoil from them in disgust, but they don’t burn them. Most people don’t have fires any more, for one thing. Where would you burn something?”

  She didn’t say anything. A sullen, crushed look made her almost ugly.

  “People who get anonymous letters may not like looking at them. Usually they put them away in a drawer in case or until we want to see them. Or there’s the dustbin. You read somewhere that the requisite thing to do with an anonymous letter was burn it, didn’t you? In a detective story probably. The truth is you never received one.”

  “All right, I didn’t.”

  “Hasn’t anyone ever told you you musn’t tell lies to the police?”

  He hadn’t spoken harshly. His tone was almost bantering. It was mockery, even as mild as this, she couldn’t stand. She flushed and her mouth set mulishly.

  “I didn’t tell lies. There was a girl.” Perhaps she could see he wasn’t going to say anything for a moment or two. “He was perverted about young girls, that’s what it amounted to, and it ruined my life.” Her voice rose, edgy and plai
ntive. “I thought he was in love with me when we first met. I thought he loved me but now I know he just fancied me because I was young. And when Veronica was coming he had to marry me. Well, marry. It’s easy to marry, isn’t it? You can do it over and over again.

  “I never had any life, I never had any youth. Do you know something? I’m thirty-two and I’ve never so much as been taken out to dinner in a decent restaurant by a man. I’ve never been abroad. I’ve never had a thing to wear that didn’t come discount from Jickie’s. I never even had an engagement ring!”

  He asked her how she knew of the girl’s existence. Just at this point Marion came in with coffee on a tray, three unprepossessing cheese sandwiches, and three custard-cream biscuits. Wendy looked at the sandwiches and shook her head in a shuddery, genteel sort of way.

  He repeated the question.

  “Rodney confessed.”

  “Just like that? Out of the blue? You didn’t suspect anything, but he confessed to you he had a young girlfriend?”

  “I told you.”

  “Why did he confess? Was he intending to leave you for her? As in fact you thought he had done?”

  That made her laugh in the way someone does who has knowledge of a secret you will never guess. He persisted and she looked exasperated, answering that she had told him already. She ate nothing, he ate a sandwich, leaving the rest for Marion, who had a hearty appetite. Afterwards, he thought, Wendy Williams would probably tell people she was kept at the police station for hours and not given a thing to eat or drink.

  He asked her once more about 15 April. The evening. What time had she left Jickie’s to drive home to Pomfret? All the staff at Jickie’s had been questioned by Martin and Bennett and Archbold. They had forgotten. Why should they remember that particular evening? One of the girls on the fashion-floor pay desk said that if Mrs. Williams hadn’t actually left the building before nine, that would have been very late for her. On Thursdays she usually left as soon after eight as possible and had been known to leave at 7:30.