by Ruth Rendell
Wendy insisted she had left at nine. She stuck to that. He left it. He said there was something he had to ask her. Seeing that her husband consistently neglected her and for two months she believed he had finally left her, had she formed a friendship with any other man?
“It would be a natural and normal thing to you. You’re a very young woman still. You said yourself that you felt life and youth had been denied you.”
“Are you suggesting I was having a—a relationship with someone?”
“It would be very understandable.”
“I think that’s disgusting! That’s really immoral. I’ve got my daughter to think of, haven’t I? I’ve got Veronica to set an example to. Just because Rodney behaved in that horrible way, that’s no reason for me to do the same. Let me tell you, I’ve always been absolutely faithful. I’ve never looked at another man, it would never have entered my head.”
He was beginning to know her and her protests. He said not another word on that one but thought the more. It was afternoon now and Burden would be setting in motion their prearranged plan. It might not work, of course—and if it did what would it show or prove? He didn’t even know if he expected it to work.
In the meantime he questioned her about her life, her feelings, her reactions. Still she hadn’t said a word about the other Williams family. She was prepared to acknowledge Rodney Williams had married her bigamously while ignoring the existence of his first or true wife. You would have expected her natural curiosity to get the better of her. Was she rising above such human failings? That was a possible explanation.
“Mrs. Joy Williams,” he said deliberately, “has a son and a daughter. Her daughter and Veronica are very much alike. Do you have any feelings about these people?” He was aware he sounded like a psychotherapist, though any interrogating policeman was one of those. But nevertheless he made a slight correction. “Aren’t you interested in knowing something about them?”
“No.” Once more she had flushed. She looked mulish. “Why should I be? They’re nothing to me. Rodney can’t have cared much for them.”
“Why do you say that?”
She made a little gesture with her hands to indicate that the answer was obvious. Wexford said that was enough for today and he’d organize a car to take her home. They went down in the lift, timing it perfectly, for the lift came to a stop and the doors opened. Burden came walking across the black and white checkerboard floor towards it with Joy Williams beside him. Wexford spoke to Burden for the sake of stopping and saying something. The two women stood there, Joy staring at Wendy, Wendy contemplating the wall ahead of her as if it were the most fascinating example of interior decor since the cave paintings of Trois Frères.
They presented a contrast, pathetic and grotesque. It was almost too marked to be quite real. They were like a cartoon for an old-fashioned advertisement, the wife who doesn’t use the face cream, floor polish, deodorant, stock cubes, and the wife who does. Joy had a cardigan on over a cotton dress with half its hem coming down. All her shoes had a curious way of looking like carpet slippers though they weren’t. Wendy swayed a little on her high heels, craning her neck and putting on a winsome look. Wexford smelt a gush of White Linen from her, perhaps because she was sweating. The irony was that both these women had been rejected.
Burden and Joy went into the lift. The doors closed.
“Do you know who that woman was?”
“What woman?” said Wendy.
“I’m not talking about Detective Bayliss. The woman who has just gone up in the lift with Inspector Burden.”
She raised her eyebrows, moved her shoulders.
“That was Mrs. Joy Williams.”
“His wife?”
“Yes,” said Wexford.
“She looked about sixty.”
Upstairs Burden was asking Joy about the phone call, the letter of resignation. Why had she gone out on the evening of 15 April instead of remaining at home to await her son’s phone call?
“I can’t be always at his beck and call,” she said, her voice full of bitterness. “It’s all one to him whether I’m there or not. He’s his father all over again—indifferent. I’ve done everything for him, worshipped the ground he walked on. Might as well not have bothered. Do you know where he is now? In Cornwall. On holiday. That’s all it means to him that his mother’s a widow.”
It could just be true. It could just be that she had at last seen the results of spoiling a son. A quarrel, Burden thought, the day before Kevin returned to university. He could hear the things that would have been said—all right, just wait till next time you want something; you phone, my lad, but don’t count on me being here … Yet there had been no sign since then of adoration flagging.
“Do you know who that woman was with Chief Inspector Wexford?”
“I can guess.” The harsh clattering laugh. “Cheap little tart. I don’t admire his taste.”
He asked her if Sara had a boyfriend. Incredibly, she said she didn’t know. It was plain she didn’t care. Hatred came into her eyes when her daughter’s name was mentioned.
“And after all I’ve done for her,” said Joy as if their discussion had been on the subject of the host of services she had performed for Sara and the girl’s ingratitude. Burden had her driven home. He felt as if he had been brought up against a wall, the solid brick an inch from his face.
CAROL MILVEY WAS NOT A MEMBER OF ARRIA but she was eighteen years old and lived next door but one to Joy Williams. And it was her father, the boss of Mid-Sussex Waterways, who had found Rodney Williams’s traveling bag in Green Pond, a coincidence which had never been explained. Sergeant Martin saw her. The interview was a brief one, for Carol Milvey had been ill in bed with tonsillitis on 15 April and had taken two days off school.
A further ten members of ARRIA were cleared, both for 15 April and for the evening on which Brian Wheatley had been stabbed in the hand. It was August now and people were beginning to go away on holiday, ARRIA members surely included. The Anerley family and their daughter, the redheaded Nicola, had been in France since the end of the school term and were not expected back until 12 August. On this date too Pomfret Office Equipment Ltd. were due to reopen after two weeks’ holiday closure, a southern version of North Country wakes weeks, as Wexford remarked. If the typewriters missing from Haldon Finch were serviced in the neighborhood it was with Pomfret Office Equipment they had to be. No other firm of typewriter engineers admitted to knowledge of their whereabouts.
The commerce department at Sewingbury Sixth Form College had been checked out. They had microcomputers, ACT Apricots, as well as four dedicated word processors, and their typewriters were ten highly sophisticated Brother machines. Kingsmarkham High School had only one typewriter in the building and that in the school secretary’s office.
Kevin Williams came back from Cornwall and left again with six like-minded students to camp in the Channel Islands. The Harmers with Paulette’s boyfriend went to North Wales for a week, leaving an Indian pharmacist and his wife, both highly qualified but jobless, in charge of shop and dispensary. Sara went nowhere. Sara stayed at home, awaiting no doubt the A-level results due the second or third week of the month, after the degree results and before the O-levels.
“I can’t help wondering if there’ll still be A-levels when this new baby of ours grows up,” said Burden. Nowadays he talked gingerly and awkwardly about the coming child but as if its birth were a certainty and its future more or less assured. “I’ll be an old man by the time she wants to go to university. Well, I’ll be in my sixties. I’ll be retired. Do you remember filling in those grant forms? Getting one’s employer to vouch for one’s earnings and all that? Still, by then they’ll do it all on a computer, I suppose, a kind of twenty-first-century Apricot.”
“Or an Apple,” said Wexford. “Why do computer makers call their wares after fruit? There must be some unexpected Freudian explanation.” A glazed look of boredom blanked Burden’s face. “Talking of unexpected explanations,” Wex
ford said quickly, “do you realize there’s one aspect of this case we’ve given no thought to? Motive. Motive has scarcely been mentioned.”
Burden looked as if he were going to say that the police need not concern themselves with motive, that perpetrators in any case often stated motives that seemed thin or incredible. But he didn’t say that. He said hesitantly, “Aren’t we concluding Williams was killed in what ARRIA would call self-defense?”
“Surely the difficulty there is that if we assume—which we are doing—that the woman or girl who made the phone call and wrote the letter was Williams’s girlfriend, why should she need to defend herself against him? Budd and Wheatley were attacked because they made sexual advances. But this girl, being his girlfriend, presumably welcomed his sexual advances.”
Burden said in his prudish way, “That might depend on their nature.”
“You mean they were sadistic or he wanted to wear one of her nightdresses? We’ve no evidence Williams was funny in that way. And aren’t you forgetting something? It looks as if this murder was somewhat premeditated. Williams was given a sleeping drug before he was stabbed. I don’t see my way to accept a theory that one day Williams suggested to his girlfriend that they have sex in this new naughty way, whereupon she substitutes a sedative for his blood-pressure pill and when he’s asleep stabs him eight times with a French cook’s knife.”
“Then what motive do you suggest?”
“I don’t. I can’t see a girlfriend killing him to be rid of him, because surely all she had to do was give him the out, tell him to go back to his wife or wives. And although a girl could have killed him on her own, she couldn’t have disposed of his body on her own. A girl with a jealous husband or boyfriend? ARRIA members don’t have husbands. ARRIA members aren’t supposed to get sufficiently involved with men for a triangular jealousy situation to arise. But is she an ARRIA member? Does she exist?”
“If one could only read the book of fate,” said Burden, unaware that he was quoting and no longer thinking about the Williams case anyway.
“If this were seen,” said Wexford, “the happiest youth, viewing his progress through, would shut the book and sit him down and die …”
He went home to fetch Dora and the two of them went to see Sheila in Little Eyolf at the Olivier.
14
POMFRET OFFICE EQUIPMENT LTD. WAS OPEN for business by 9:30 on the morning of 12 August. It was a shopfront with a big storage shed behind. The business was run by two men called Ovington, father and son. Edgar Ovington, the father, acknowledged at once that his firm serviced typewriters for the Haldon Finch Comprehensive School. The machines were usually attended to during the long summer holiday. His son had fetched the Haldon Finch machines the day before term ended, 26 July.
Wexford and Burden followed him into the shed at the back. It was full of typewriters, manual, electric, and electronic machines. They stretched away, rows of them ranked on slatted shelves, all labeled with tie-on luggage labels. Ovington pointed out the Haldon Finch typewriters, three on the lower shelf, two on the upper. The label on each said: H. Finch. Three portable Remington 315s, two Adler Gabrielle 5000s. Burden gave Ovington a condensed explanation of why they were looking for a particular typewriter and what made it particular. He asked for a sheet of paper. Ovington broke open a packet of 70-gram white bond and peeled off two sheets from the top.
A flaw in the upper-case A, the ascender of the lower-case t and the head of the comma smudged. Burden slipped a sheet of paper into the roller of the first machine and typed a few lines from “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” the only hymn he knew by heart. No flaws. No flaws in the second machine, either.
“You haven’t put a new typeface on any of these machines?” Wexford asked.
“I haven’t so much as touched them yet,” said Ovington.
Burden tried the third Remington. It was perfect, a better face than the others had, its need of servicing apparent only in the tendency of one or two of the keys to stick.
“These were the only typewriters fetched from the Haldon Finch Comprehensive School?”
“That’s right. I label everything the minute it comes in to be on the safe side.”
“Yes, I see. So there’s no possibility one of these machines could accidentally have been returned to a private customer?”
“It wouldn’t go to a private customer if it was labeled Haldon Finch, would it?” said Ovington truculently.
He was a dour, prickly, suspicious man, always on the lookout for slurs anyone might cast on his ability or efficiency. Burden’s request to try out any other Remington 315s there might be among the two hundred or so machines in the shed started him arguing and might have held them up but for the arrival, smiling and anxious to please, of the son, James Ovington. He was a tall, big-built young man with a toothy smile and a head as bald as an egg.
“Help yourselves. Be my guest.” The big white teeth glared as the lips stretched. “Would you like me to have a sample of typing done from every machine here?” He meant it too, there was no sarcasm.
“We’ll do it,” said Burden. “And it’s only the 315s we’re interested in.”
Two more stood on the shelves besides the three he had tested. “Sufficient is Thine Arm alone,” he typed, “And our defense is sure.” Nothing wrong with that one. “The busy tribes of flesh and blood With all their cares and fears, Are carried downward by the flood, And lost in following years.” No flaws.
“Thanks for your help,” said Wexford.
James Ovington said it was his pleasure and smiled so widely that his dragon-seed teeth threatened to spill out. His father scowled.
“It’s going to be in a ditch somewhere or a pond,” said Burden.
“Not in Green Pond, anyway. Or Milvey would have found it.” Wexford was reminded again of the as yet unexplained coincidence. The connecting link between Milvey and Rodney Williams wasn’t Carol Milvey, for Carol Milvey had been ill with tonsillitis on the evening of Williams’s death. So what was it? Connecting link there must be. Wexford refused to believe that it was by pure chance that Milvey had discovered his neighbor’s overnight bag in Green Pond.
And coincidence became remarkable beyond any possible rational explanation, entering the realms of magic or fantasy, when a call came in from Milvey himself next day to say he had found not the typewriter but a long kitchen knife, a French cook’s knife, in a small ornamental pond on the Green Pond Hall estate.
THE THREE PONDS IN THE OLD WATER GARDEN, now a wilderness, had been silted up with soil and fine sand washed down by springs from Cheriton Forest. Wexford’s men had cleaned out those ponds during their search of the estate, but since that time a further silting-up had taken place. The prospective trout farmer had called Mid-Sussex Waterways in once more to attempt to find a solution to the problem of the clogged water course.
Had the knife been placed there since the police search? Or had it been washed down from a hiding place upstream? It was a large knife, the handle of ivory-colored plastic six inches long, the blade nine inches, a right-angled triangle with the hypotenuse the cutting edge. It had a sharp and vicious-looking point. There were traces of gray mud in the rivet sockets of the handle but not a streak or pinpoint of rust anywhere. Wexford had the knife sent to Forensics at Stowerton. The Milvey link was still a mystery to him. He confronted Milvey across his desk, at a loss for what to ask him next. The wild thought entered his head that Milvey and Joy Williams might have been lovers. It was too wild—not fat, dull Milvey and draggle-tailed Joy. And if Milvey were involved in Williams’s death, why should he produce the weapon?
He found himself reduced to saying, “You do see, don’t you, Mr. Milvey, that this situation and your position in it is a very mystifying one. The man who lives next door but one to you is murdered. You find first the bag he had with him when he disappeared, then a knife that in all probability is the murder weapon.”
“Somebody,” said Milvey who didn’t seem to see the point, “had to find them soon
er or later.”
“The population of Kingsmarkham is somewhere in the area of seventy-eight thousand souls.”
Milvey stared at him with bull-headed stupidity. At last he said with truculence, “Next time I find something I reckon will help the police with their inquiries I’ll keep quiet about it.”
While Forensics were testing the knife against Williams’s wound measurements, Sergeant Martin with Bennett and Archbold made inquiries as to its provenance. They listed thirty-nine shops and stores in the area where similar knives were sold. Only Jickie’s, however, stocked that particular brand of French cook’s knife.
“Wendy Williams may work there,” Wexford said, “but everyone shops there. We do. You do. Martin’s asking the staff in the hardware department if they can remember anyone recently buying a French cook’s knife. You know how far that’ll get us. Besides, they’ve stocked the things for the past five years. There’s no reason to believe the knife was bought specifically to kill Williams. In fact, the chances are it wasn’t.”
“Yes, we’re still at square one,” Burden said.
“You’re being faint-hearted. Come and spend an afternoon among the typewriters. I’ve a hunch I want to put to the test.”
Ovington senior was on his own. He tried at first to fob them off with pleas of pressure of work. Wexford suggested gently that this might be construed as obstructing the police in the course of their inquiries. Ovington, grumbling under his breath, led them once more into the shed at the back of the shop.
Walking between the rows, Wexford examined the labels tied to the machines.
“You always use this method of labeling?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it. I don’t think it’s very clear, that’s all. For instance, what does ‘P and L’ stand for?” He pointed to the labels on a pair of Smith Corona SX 440s.
