An Unkindness of Ravens

by Ruth Rendell

  “I’D NEVER SEEN HER IN MY LIFE TILL YOU had us meet here.”

  That was Wendy. Joy said nothing.

  “I put it to you that you’d known each other for a long time. I suggest it was like this: Mrs. Joy Williams came into Jickie’s as a customer one day and in conversation you discovered the link between you. This happened a year ago.

  You’ve been in touch with each other ever since.”

  Joy gave one of her cold, rattling laughs that had something in it of the cackle of a game bird.

  “If I’d known about her why should I pretend I didn’t?” said Wendy.

  Joy answered. She didn’t exactly address Wendy, she hadn’t yet done that except to abuse her, but she made her first statement not inimical to the other Mrs. Williams.

  “If her and me knew each other he thinks we might have murdered Rod.”

  “I’m more likely to have murdered her,” said Wendy in a lofty voice. She looked down and noticed a ladder in her pale milk-colored tights. It crept up the outside of her right leg like a millipede. Joy noticed it too. She fixed her eyes on the slowly mounting run and her mouth moved. It was nearly a smile.

  Wexford said, looking at Joy, “Someone phoned Sevensmith Harding on Friday, April the sixteenth, to say Rodney Williams was ill and wouldn’t be coming to work. The girl who took the call isn’t in much doubt that it was your voice, Mrs. Williams.”

  “She doesn’t know my voice. How could she, whoever she is? Aren’t you forgetting, I didn’t know Rod worked there?”

  The door opened and Burden put his head round. Wendy was licking her finger and dabbing at the ladder with her wet fingertip, dabbing as it happened in vain, for the ladder quite suddenly crept another half-inch. It was this which might have occasioned Joy’s rattle laugh.

  Wexford got up and went out of the room, leaving the two women with the two women detectives.

  Burden had sent his typing sample to the forensics lab. He told Wexford the substance of his interview with Mrs. Tennyson. She had typed no letter of resignation herself and no one had asked her to do such a thing. Wendy Williams she had known for years, though her acquaintance with Rodney had been slight. Their daughters were the same age, were at school together, were “best friends.”

  “Could Wendy have typed it?” Wexford asked him. “I mean, could she have had access to this machine? If this killing was premeditated, and it looks as if it was, she could have typed that letter days or even weeks before.”

  “The Tennyson woman shuts herself up in a room she uses as an office and types for three or four hours a day. As a regular thing she uses the Olivetti and the Remington isn’t even kept in there. It’s usually in a cupboard in the hall unless the husband Eric wants it or the daughter Nicola uses it to type a school essay. Apparently, they’re allowed to do that at the Haldon Finch. Could you credit it?”

  “It seems a sensible and harmless practice,” said Wexford. “Was Wendy ever alone in that house?”

  “Early in April she came to call for Veronica, take her home or something. It was dark or late or she was passing. Anyway, the two girls were still out and Mrs. Tennyson was typing something. She left Wendy alone for at most ten minutes, she says, until she finished off what she was doing.”

  “Wendy would have to know the machine was there. She would have to have paper. But I agree it goes a long way to answering the question of how and where the letter was typed. As to typewriters, what better than to use one that was normally kept shut up in a cupboard? It was by the merest luck that we got on to it.” He listened while Burden told him about Ovington. “Is that a motive, Mike? We keep coming back to that, the lack of motive. But if Wendy wanted to marry Ovington …”

  “Who did Joy want to marry?”

  “Yes, OK, I see your point. If they did it they did it together and Joy wouldn’t be likely to help murder Rodney so that Wendy could marry someone else.” Wexford brought his fist to his forehead and drummed against it. “I’m a fool! There’s no motive. If Wendy knew about Joy she also knew she wasn’t married to Rodney, so there was no legal bar to her marrying someone else … What about the knife, the weapon we’re never going to prove was the weapon beyond a doubt? It could have been Joy’s or Wendy’s.”

  “Wendy works at Jickie’s and Jickie’s stock those knives.”

  “Wendy works there but the whole neighborhood shops there.” Wexford thought for a moment. “Among the stuff we found in Rodney Williams’s bedroom in Liskeard Avenue,” he said, “was an estimate from a firm of decorators for painting Wendy’s living room. When we saw that room it had obviously been painted very recently. By that firm? By another? By Wendy herself? I think we ought to find out, don’t you?”

  Burden looked at him. They were both thinking that Rodney Williams had been stabbed to death. One of the knife thrusts had pierced the carotid. “Yes, I do,” he said.

  The day was very warm and close, a heavy, sultry, almost sunless day of the kind that only comes as August wanes. For the few moments he and Burden were in his office, the window open and the half-closed blinds swaying slightly in a hint of breeze, he had kept his jacket off. Now he put it on again and went back downstairs to the interview room where the two women were.

  17

  A PICTURE OF JOY AND WENDY LEAVING Kingsmarkham Police Station was on most front pages of the national press next day. The more sensational of the newspapers managed to. give the impression that they were not leaving but entering and that readers would not be too wide of the mark in concluding they had never left. Joy had her hand up over her face, Wendy looked piteously into the cameras, a distraught waif in her little-girl smock. The ladder in her tights was cruelly evident. Burden stood by, cool and rather aloof in a newish suit.

  “You look young and handsome,” said Jenny at the breakfast table. “You look so thin!” She shifted her huge weight, pushing back her chair.

  “It’s the worry.”

  “I expect it is, poor Mike.” She put up her arms and hugged him. It was now possible for her to do this only while sitting down. He held her and thought, It may still be all right, we may still survive.

  He went out before nine into a morning that was anything but fresh, a gray, sultry, sticky day. The sky was a flat, very pale gray with the sun a puddle of white glowing through it. This was the kind of day, he thought; that only England knows. Fifty of them can compose a summer.

  How many builders and decorators were there in Pomfret? In Kingsmarkham? Not just the established firms but the one-man bands, the man who works in his spare time for money in the back pocket? With luck the Pomfret Williamses had availed themselves of the services of the firm who sent Rodney the estimate.

  He didn’t go to the police station first, so he was not present when Hope Harmer phoned to say her daughter was missing, had not been home all night or reappeared that morning.

  JOHN HARMER WAS IN HIS DISPENSARY AND business was as usual. That is, when customers wanted soap or disposable razors instead of a prescription made up he came out and served them. He refused to believe anything had happened to his daughter. She was a grown woman well able to take care of herself, as her prowess at that judo stuff evinced. Her absence probably had something to do with this women’s movement nonsense.

  Paulette’s mother had come to work, but only perhaps because of the pressures put on her by her husband. It was from there that she had phoned, the culminating act of a scene between them, Wexford guessed. She was in a piteous state. Hope Harmer was a woman whom it suited only to be happy. She was easily content and in contentment her plump, fair good looks bloomed. Unease affected her as it does an animal, drawing her face, freezing her features, mysteriously making bright hair lank and placid eyes stark with fear.

  Wexford had Martin with him, the two of them top brass for the mere matter of a missing girl—but circumstances alter cases.

  “My husband says what do I expect when I let her go out with her boyfriend at all hours and stay the night at his place. But they all do
it these days and you can’t be different. Besides they’re engaged and I always say if you really love each other …”

  She was talking for the sake of talking but her voice faltered. She began twisting her hands.

  “Did Paulette go out with her fiancé last night?”

  “No, he’s in Birmingham. He had to go to Birmingham for his firm.”

  Not for the first time Wexford marveled at how illogical human thinking can be.

  “But she did go out? Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say. She just went out at about seven.”

  Martin said, “You didn’t want to know where she was going?”

  “Want to know! Of course I wanted to know. If I had my way I’d know where she was every minute of the day and night. I mean I didn’t ask her, I’d forced myself to that. When she was younger her father used to say: I want to know where you’re going and who with but once you’re eighteen you’re legally grown-up and you can do what you like. Well, she’s eighteen and she remembered that and my husband remembers it and he stops me asking and Paulette wouldn’t answer anyway.”

  The poor woman was wretchedly caught between husband and daughter, and bullied, doubtless, by both—or had she been happy to have decision-making taken out of her hands?

  “Tell me what happened later on. Of course you didn’t wait up for her?”

  “I would have. I knew Richard was in Birmingham, you see. John said he wasn’t having me get in a hysterical state. He took a sleeping pill and he made me take one.”

  Presumably sedatives were unlimitedly on tap chez Harmer …

  “This morning I—well, I left her bedroom door open before I went to sleep. That way—if it was shut, you see, I’d know she’d come in. I—I had to make myself open my own bedroom door and look. Her door was still open, it was such a shock, I … Well, I went to look, in case she’d come in and left her door but, of course, she hadn’t. John still wasn’t alarmed. Somehow I couldn’t make him see that if Richard was in Birmingham Paulette couldn’t have been with him …”

  Mrs. Harmer burst into raging tears. Instead of falling forward on to her arms to cry she lay back, let her head hang back, and wailed. Martin went into the dispensary and fetched John Harmer. He came in looking cross and harassed. The noise his wife was making had the effect of causing him to put his hands over his ears in the manner that does nothing to block out sound but indicates that the sound is in some way distasteful or irritating.

  “She’d better have a Valium. That’ll help her pull herself together.”

  “What she had better do, Mr. Harmer,” said Wexford, “is get off home. And you had better take her. Never mind the shop.”

  GODWIN AND SCULP HAD NOT DONE WENDY Williams’s decorating but they knew who had—a man who had once worked for them, who had left to set up in business on his own, and who undercut them, Burden was told, at every opportunity. Running Leslie Kitman to earth was less simple. He had no wife and his mother was no Mrs. Milvey to have his precise location at her fingertips. She gave Burden five possible addresses at which her son might be found: a farmhouse between Pomfret and Myfleet, a block of flats in Queen Street, Kingsmarkham, a cottage in Pomfret, and two houses on new estates outside Stowerton. Kitman was at none of them, but the second Stowerton household told Burden he might just be lucky and find him in—Liskeard Avenue.

  And it was there, three houses away from Wendy Williams’s, that Burden discovered Kitman on top of a ladder. The house was like Wendy’s—gray bricks and white weatherboard and picture windows. Kitman was painting a top-floor window frame when Burden, standing at the foot of the ladder, shouted up who he was. Kitman launched immediately into a catalogue of reasons for not renewing his car tax. Burden hadn’t even noticed his car, still less that the tax disc showed an expiry date of the end of June. At last, though, Kitman was made to understand and he came quickly down the ladder, his brush dripping white paint onto the lawn beneath.

  THE EVENING BEFORE WENDY WILLIAMS HAD spent in bed, where she had retired, worn out, as soon as she returned from the police station. Veronica had brought her tea and bread and butter. It was all she ever seemed to fancy when upset. Joy Williams had also been at home with her daughter. At any rate they had been in the same house, Sara in her room as usual, Joy watching television and intermittently struggling to complete the form of application for a grant that would take Sara through medical school. And although it was a Thursday evening there had been no phone call from Kevin, who extended this courtesy to his mother only when he was at college and not while junketing around holiday resorts. These were the alibis Wexford was given by his two principal suspects. Richard Cobb came back from Birmingham in the course of the afternoon and furnished Wexford with a very detailed and apparently satisfactory account of where he had been the night before. Police in Birmingham would help with a check on that. By six Paulette hadn’t come home and Wexford knew she never would, he felt in his bones she wouldn’t.

  The day was sultry and overcast. For hours the thunder had been growling and rumbling, and gradually a wind had risen, a dry gusty wind that did nothing to lower the temperature. It still remained hot and stuffy. Wexford and Burden sat in Wexford’s office. A search for Paulette hadn’t begun yet. Where would one search?

  “The lines I’m thinking along,” said Wexford, “are that Paulette Harmer procured the Phanodorm with which Rodney Williams was sedated. She was in a position to do that, she could easily have done it. I’m wondering if she lost her nerve and told someone—well, Joy—she was going to admit it before we found out.”

  “Of course, there’s another possibility …” Burden left the suggestion suspended.

  Wexford looked abstractedly out of the window. It was time to go home but he had no inclination to go. The weather, the atmosphere, the late day, hung heavy with expectation. The thunder, of course, was a threat in itself, a sign of imminent storm, yet it seemed to contain some kind of emotional menace as well, as of looming tragedy.

  “Tell me about Kitman,” Wexford said. “In detail.” Burden had already given him an outline of his talk with the painter.

  “He started doing that job for Wendy on April the fourteenth. There was paper on the walls, he said, and he had a job stripping it off. He was doing it all through the fourteenth and the fifteenth and he still hadn’t finished by the time he knocked off on the fifteenth.”

  “Should have used Sevensmith Harding’s Sevenstarker, shouldn’t he?” said Wexford and quoting, “‘The slick, sheer, clean way to strip your walls.’”

  “Maybe he did. He says the room was still furnished, but he had covered the pieces of furniture up with his own dust sheets. When he came back in the morning—the morning of Friday the sixteenth, that is—some of the sheets were off and folded up. But that was also on the morning of the fifteenth and other mornings, I gather. Wendy and Veronica were to some extent still living in that room.”

  “Did he notice anything else that Friday morning?”

  “A stain on the wall is what we want, isn’t it? A great bloodstain? And blood all over his dust sheets? There wasn’t anything like that, or if there was he didn’t notice or can’t remember. The walls were splashed and marked and patchy anyway, you can imagine. And on the sixteenth he covered up whatever might have been there by putting his first coat of paint on. Sevenstar emulsion, no doubt. One thing he did notice, though, and I didn’t ask him about this, he volunteered it. Apparently it’s been vaguely preying on his mind ever since. One of the dust sheets wasn’t his.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. I thought that’d make you sit up. He has a few dust sheets he takes about with him. Some of them are old bed sheets and there are a couple of curtains and a candlewick bedspread too. Well, according to him, when he left on the fifteenth all seven of his sheets were covering the furniture and part of the carpet. Next morning he came in to find that three of the sheets had been taken off the furniture and were folded up on the floor. He thought nothi
ng much of it but later he noticed that one of the folded sheets wasn’t his. It was newer than his and in better condition.”

  “Did he ask Wendy about it?”

  “He says he did. On the Saturday. She told him she knew nothing about it. And what did it matter to him, after all? He had the right number of dust sheets. You don’t go to the police because someone has taken one of your dust sheets and substituted another. But he wondered about it, he said. It niggled him is the way he puts it. Are we going to have those two women back?”

  “Of course we are.”

  It was Friday, the last Friday in the month. ARRIA met on the last Friday of the month, Wexford thought. No, the last Thursday. It was two months ago yesterday that he had gone to the Freeborns’ house and interrupted a meeting.

  He picked up the phone and spoke to John Harmer. Paulette’s father was anxious now, no longer calm and scathing. He said his wife was asleep. Heavily sedated, Wexford guessed.

  “The place is crawling with police,” said Harmer.

  Wexford replied dryly, “I know.”

  He thought it an unfortunate way of describing the initial search he had mounted in the environs of the Harmers’ home. The man’s breathing at the other end of the line was audible. His voice had been rough and shaky. If insulting the police helped him, well …

  “I can’t tell you I don’t think this a serious cause for concern, Mr. Harmer. I’m very sorry. I think you should prepare yourself for bad news. Perhaps it would be best to say nothing to your wife as yet.”

  “I’m not likely to wake her up and tell her you think her only child’s dead, am I?”

  Wexford said a polite goodbye and rang off. Harmer’s rudeness gratified him a little. It was more than excusable in the circumstances and at least it showed Harmer wasn’t the unfeeling husband he had thought him. Tomorrow morning they would widen the search for Paulette. By then he might have some idea of where and how to widen it.