An Unkindness of Ravens

by Ruth Rendell

  A few drops of rain struck the windows, needles on the glass. The thunder thudded and cracked over Myringham way. Martin and Marion Bayliss brought the two Mrs. Williamses in and Wexford went down to the interview room to confront them. Wendy in her Jickie’s suit, hair freshly set—in Jickie’s hairdressing department?—was in tears, dabbing at her eyes with a pink tissue. Joy had never looked so down at heel, broken sandals on her bare feet, a button missing from her creased cotton dress, a scarf tied round her head. She looked like a refugee, such as have passed in streams across Europe at frequent times in modern history. Her face was gray and drawn.

  Burden came in and sat beside him. The room had got so dark they had to have the light on. Still it wasn’t really raining. When no one attempted to comfort Wendy and no offers of cups of tea were made she stopped crying. Rather defiantly, she produced the box of pink tissues from her bag and set it on the table in front of her.

  “Was Paulette Harmer the girl your husband was seeing?”

  Wexford addressed the question to both women. It was awkward. It seemed to treat polygamy as a legal state. Joy gave a dry cackle, more than usually scornful. Wendy said she didn’t know who Paulette Harmer was, she had never heard of her.

  “Who was it, then?”

  “He didn’t have a young girlfriend,” said Joy. “He didn’t have any girl.” She nodded at Wendy. “Unless you count her. And that’s not the word I’d use for her.”

  Wendy sniffed and pulled a tissue out of the box.

  “Well, Mrs. Williams?” Wexford said to her.

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  “On the contrary, you told me you knew there was one. This very young girl living around here with her parents—you never heard of her, she doesn’t exist?”

  Wendy looked at Joy. Their eyes met. For the first time Wexford thought he sensed a rapport between them. Then Wendy turned sharply away and shook her head violently.

  “Rodney Williams was attracted by young girls,” Wexford said. “You’re an example yourself, Mrs. Williams. How old were you when you and he met? Fifteen? Is that why you invented a young girlfriend for him? You knew it was in his nature?”

  “I didn’t invent it.”

  He was suddenly aware of a change taking place in Joy. She was shaking with emotion. Her hands held the table edge. Rain had begun to patter on the windows. Burden got up and closed the fanlight. Joy leaned forward.

  “Has Sara been talking to you?” she said.

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say he would ask the questions. But he didn’t say it. He felt his way. “It’s possible.”

  “The little bitch!”

  How was it he sensed that the two women were at last united by some common bond? And that bond wasn’t the dead man. The noise of the rain was intense now, a crashing cloudburst. He thought, they did know each other. The Klein girl was telling me the truth. They were close in a conspiracy and they’re back in it again, the acting is over … He turned to Joy and it was as if his approaching, ultimately fixed gaze lit the fuse.

  She spoke in a raucous, throaty voice.

  “You may as well have it. It wasn’t young girls he was attracted to, not any young girls. It was his own daughter.”

  18

  IT HAPPENED, IT WASN’T EVEN UNCOMMON. Lately it had been the modish subject for the pop sociology paperback. Yet that father—daughter incest might be a motivating factor in this case had not crossed Wexford’s mind. Afterwards he was to ask himself why it hadn’t crossed his mind, knowing his mind and the way it worked, but now in the interview room with the two women across the table from him he could only recall The Cenci and Beatrice—his own daughter playing Beatrice—running onto the stage crying:

  “O world! O life! O day! O misery!”

  That should have told him. Wendy had covered her face with her hands. Joy stared at him, her lips sucked in. A bead of saliva had appeared at the left corner of her mouth. She put her hand out for one of Wendy’s tissues, tentatively, cautiously, watching Wendy, like an old dog approaching the food bowl but uncertain as to what the young dog will do. Wendy took her hands down. She didn’t speak. She gave the tissue box a little push in Joy’s direction. Burden sat, wearing his stony, contemptuous look.

  Wexford was framing a question. Before he could utter it Joy spoke.

  “She came and told me. Her own mother! His own wife! She said he’d come into her bedroom in the middle of the night. He said he was cold, he never seemed to get warm since we’d slept in twin beds. That’s what he said to her. He said she could make him warm. Why didn’t she scream out? Why didn’t she run away? He got into bed with her and did it to her. I’m not going to repeat the word she used, they all use it for that. It was while I was asleep. I was asleep and he was doing that with his own daughter.”

  She laughed. The sound was drier than ever, with more of a rattle in it, but it was a laugh. She looked at Wendy and directed the laugh at her. And, Wexford thought, she may have been in cahoots with her, she may have told her all this before in womanly confidence, in sisters-under-the-skin conspiracy, but she enjoys telling it now—in our presence, a public triumphant put-down.

  Like the therapist to whom he had compared himself, he would let her talk without interruptions, without breaking in to question. If she would talk. The pause endured. Wendy looked away and at the screen of water, curiously claustrophobic, the rain was making down the panes. She had pushed her fingers so hard into the skin of her face that they left pink pressure marks. Without prompting, Joy went on.

  “She waited till he’d gone to work and then she told me. I was ironing her a blouse for school.” Insult had been thus added to injury, she implied. The father’s rape would have been less offensive to the mother if the news had been imparted to her while she was ironing a shirt for Kevin. “She burst right out with it. There wasn’t a question of being tactful, mind, of—well, breaking it gently. He was only my husband. It was only my husband she was telling me about being unfaithful to me.” The laugh came again, but a ghost of it this time. “I wouldn’t listen to her. I said, don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear. I put my hands over my ears.”

  A rejecting gesture not unknown in the Harmer—Williams families, Wexford thought. He nodded at Joy, feeling it was necessary to give some sign.

  “I put my hands over my ears,” she said again. “She started shouting at me. Didn’t I care? Wasn’t I upset? I answered her then. I said of course I was upset. No mother wants to hear her daughter’s like that, does she? I said to her, You spread that about and you’ll split us all up, your father’ll go to prison and what are people going to think of me? What’s Kevin going to say to them at college?”

  Burden said quietly, “What did you mean by that, Mrs. Williams, your daughter was ‘like that’?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m not saying he wasn’t weak.” A glance for Wendy and a quick withdrawal of the eyes. “Well, we know he was. But he’d never have done that without …”

  She stopped and looked at Wexford. He remembered when he had first talked to Sara and her mother had sent him up to her bedroom saying she wouldn’t object—“Rather the reverse if I know her.”

  “Encouragement?” he said flatly.

  She nodded impatiently. “Putting her arm round him, trying to get his attention. She wasn’t ten. I said to her, you’re not ten anymore. Sitting on his knee—what did you expect? Now the least you can do is keep quiet about it, I said, think of my feelings for a change.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “It was before Christmas. I know it was because I remember saying that she’d picked a fine time, hadn’t she, just when we were all going to be together for Christmas.”

  Wendy, whose face had been impassive, winced slightly. Had she realized at last where and how Rodney Williams spent his Christmases? It was soon after that, probably in the first week of January, Wexford recalled, that Edwina Klein had seen the two women together.

  “Did y
ou tell anyone?” Burden asked.

  “Of course I didn’t. I wasn’t going to broadcast it.”

  He turned on Wendy. “When did she tell you? Or should I say warn you?”

  Wendy had looked shocked by none of this. Not even surprised. But she shook her head. “She never did.”

  “Come on, Wendy …” Wexford had solved the names problem at last. “Joy found out you existed, sought you out especially to tell you what Rodney was really like. To tell you, in fact, to have a care to your own daughter.”

  “Tell her?” said Joy. “Why should I care?”

  “Wendy,” Wexford said more gently, almost insinuatingly, “you’re not going to tell us you didn’t know about Rodney and his daughter Sara. You’re not going to make believe what we heard just now was all news to you. You couldn’t have looked less surprised than if I told you it was raining. Joy came into Jickie’s, didn’t she, and told you who she was? I’ll make a guess at the week before Christmas. How did she know who you were? She’d seen Veronica in the street and spotted the resemblance to Sara—a likeness no one could mistake …”

  That they were surprised now, both of them, he couldn’t doubt. He had been wrong there then. Never mind. There were other ways—following Rodney, seeing him and Wendy together, a host of ways.

  “You met at Jickie’s, went on to meet again after Christmas. No doubt there were many meetings …”

  Wendy jumped up, eyes full of tears, grabbing a handful of tissues.

  “I want to talk to you alone! Just you and me quite alone!”

  “Surely,” said Wexford.

  He got up. Burden didn’t wait for them to leave the room before starting on Joy with his questions. When did she first suspect Rodney had a second home? Did she ever ask him? Joy was laughing at this second suggestion when Wexford closed the door. He took Wendy upstairs to his own office. The rain had abated, was now merely trickling, slipping, spilling, down the washed gleaming glass. Twilight hadn’t yet begun and the sky was a clear gray, light from cloud-coated sunshine. Wendy stumbled a little going into the room. He thought it might be unwise to touch her, even to the extent of steadying her. She held on to the door frame and shot him a look of grievance.

  In the chair he held out for her she sat down gingerly, treating herself as if she had become fragile. She had turned into a convalescent, tentatively putting out feelers to the world. Her shoulders she was keeping permanently lifted.

  “What did you want to say to me, Wendy?” He had dropped the “Mrs. Williams” altogether now.

  She whispered it, sustaining the invalid image, a broken woman, wan-faced, such as might fittingly inhabit the Castle of Petrella and be called Lucretia.

  “The same as what she said.”

  “I’m sorry, Wendy. You must make yourself plainer than that.”

  “It was the same for us. The same as what she said. Or—well, it would have been. I mean, he would have done but he went away and got himself killed.”

  Light penetrated. “You mean Rodney also made advances to Veronica? Only, if I interpret what you’re saying correctly, it was merely advances?”

  She nodded, tears splashing now, wads of tissues held to her eyes like swabs.

  “Before Joy warned you or afterwards?”

  A shrugging, then a shaking, of the whole body. Make-up scrubbed off with that cheapest and most readily available cleanser, tears, Wendy presented to Wexford a youthful, naked, desperate face.

  “He had been a little more attentive to her, had he, than we in our society expect of a father to a teenage daughter? Did she tell you or did you see? Kissed her and said it was good to be alone with her and you out of the way?”

  She jumped up. “Yes, yes, yes!” she shouted.

  “So on April the fifteenth, although you didn’t think there was much chance of Rodney coming back, you encouraged your daughter to go out so as not to be alone with him? You told her not to run the risk of being alone with him but to stay out until you came home?”

  Guilt was heavy on her face now, driving away indignation. He felt she was on the brink of a confession.

  “Or did you send her out so that you could be alone with Rodney—you and Joy?”

  THE AIR WAS SHARPLY CLEAR, THE RAIN passed, the sky two shades of blue, a dark clean azure and the smoky blue of massed cloud. Nine o’clock and growing dark. Water lay in glassy pools, reflecting the sky. There was an unaccustomed coolness, almost a nip, in the temperature. Before morning there would be more rain. Wexford could see it in the clarity and smell it in the atmosphere. He walked from the police station and kept on walking, just to get away from the enclosing four walls, the stuffiness, the millions of uttered words, the weariness of lies.

  People used to tell him when they needed an alibi—now they cited television—that they had been for a walk. They didn’t know where, just for a walk. He hadn’t believed them. Everyone knew where they had been on a walk. Now he thought he might not be able to say where he had been tonight. His progress was aimless, though not slow, a fairly brisk marching in the fresh, cold air, a thinking walk to dwell on what had passed.

  So inconclusively. So unsuccessfully. He had wrung those two women, turned the handle, and ground them through the rollers. Joy had laughed and Wendy had wept. He had kept on repeating over and over to himself: Edwina Klein saw them together. Why should she lie? Why should she invent? He had to let them go at last. Wendy was near collapse—or feigning it beautifully.

  It was clear, the whole case, Burden said. A motive had at last emerged. Joy killed out of bitterness and jealousy, Wendy out of fear Rodney would serve Veronica the same way as he had served Sara. An unfortunate verb in the circumstances, but perhaps not inept … A conspiracy laid just after Christmas, brooded over through the early spring, hatched out in April. Murder in the room that would be decorated tomorrow. Stanch the blood with Kitman’s dust sheet, realize too late what you have used.

  It must have happened that way, there was no other. Perhaps they hadn’t intended to kill, only confront him jointly, threaten and shock. But the French cook’s knife had been handy, lying on the table maybe. That didn’t explain drugging him with Phanodorm. The knife Milvey had found? Its blade matched the width and depth of the wounds. So would a thousand knives.

  He was in Down Road, under the dripping lime trees. Perhaps, all along, he had known he was making his way here. The big old houses, houses that could justly be called “piles,” seemed sunken tonight in dark, still, sodden foliage. A dark green perfume arose from grass and leaf and rain-bathed flowers. Somewhere nearby a spoilt dog, left alone for the evening, vented its complaints in little bitter whimpering wails. Wexford opened the gate to the Freeborns’ house. Lights were on, one upstairs and one down. The dustmen had been that morning, long before the rain started, and left the scattering of litter they didn’t bother to remove from the places where the occupants failed to tip lavishly. A sodden sheet of paper, pasted by rain onto the gravel, bore the ARRIA logo and a lot of printing it was too dark to read.

  Both twins came to the door. He approved their caution. Once more they were alone in the house, left to their own devices, the switched-on parents far away at some veteran hippies’ haunt. Both had pale blue hair tonight, pink stuff on the eyelids; otherwise the nearly identical faces were bare. And identical on both faces was dismay at the sight of him. Eve spoke.

  “Do you want to come in?”

  “Yes, please.” The house no longer smelt of marijuana. That was one thing he had achieved, a dubious success. The girls seemed not to know where to take him. They stood in the hall. “There was a meeting of ARRIA last night,” he said. “Where was it? Here?”

  “They’re mostly held here,” said Amy.

  “And it was here last night?”

  “Yes.”

  He pushed open a door and switched a light on. It was a huge living room, floor cushions making islands on parquet that hadn’t been polished for two decades, a divan with thrown over it something that might
have had its origin in Peru, the only chair a wicker hemisphere hanging from the ceiling. French windows, uncurtained, gave on to what seemed an impenetrable wood.

  He sat in the hanging chair, refusing to be alarmed by its immediate swinging motion.

  “Who was at the meeting?”

  They exchanged glances, looked at him. “The usual crowd,” said Amy, and conversationally, “It’s always the same lot that turn up, isn’t it?”

  The names he ran through got a nod at every pause. “Caroline Peters? Nicola Anerley? Jane Gardner? Paulette Harmer?” Eve nodded. She nodded in the same way as she had at the other names. “Edwina Klein?”

  There must have been a note of doubt in his voice.

  “Yes, Edwina was here. Why not?”

  “Why not indeed. And why not Sara Williams, come to that?”

  “Sara didn’t come,” said Amy. “She had to stay home with her mother.”

  So John Harmer hadn’t been so far out when he suggested his daughter’s disappearance had something to do with this “women’s movement nonsense.”

  “What time did the meeting end?”

  “About ten,” said Amy. “Just about ten.” She had forgiven him if her sister never would. She had altogether put off that distant manner. “Someone told me today that Paulette didn’t go home all night and …” She left the sentence hovering.

  “You never told me,” Eve said sharply.

  “I forgot.” Amy turned her eyes back on Wexford. “She was a bit late. She didn’t say why. Edwina brought her aunt—not to join, just to see what went on, though she’s eligible of course, never having married. It was good seeing someone old who’d had principles and stuck to them.”

  “I have fought the good fight,” said Wexford. “I have run a straight race. I have kept the faith.”

  “That’s right. That was exactly it. How did you know?”

  He didn’t answer her. The Authorized Version was unknown to them, lost to their generation as to the one before, a dusty tome of theology, in every way a closed book.

  “Was Paulette alone when she left?”