by Ruth Rendell
THE RAIN HAD STARTED AGAIN. THAT WOULD put paid to Veronica’s match in the afternoon, as neither the Kingsmarkham Tennis Club nor the Mid-Sussex County at Myringham had covered courts. Wexford, back in his office though it was Saturday, noted the time. Twelve-thirty. Getting on for three hours since Mike had been in and announced the imminence of his new daughter. Well, it was too soon yet to expect much, early days.
Something kept nagging at the back of his mind, something Wendy had said. About the tennis match, he thought it was. But she hadn’t said anything except that Veronica would be playing that afternoon. Why did he have this curious feeling then that in what she said lay the whole answer to this case? He often had feelings like that about some small thing when a case was about to break, and the small thing always turned out to be vital and his hunch seldom wrong. The difficulty was that he didn’t know what he had a hunch about.
All the available men he had were either at Wendy’s taking her room apart or else, the far greater number of them, conducting a house-to-house in Down Road and interrogating every girl who had been at the ARRIA meeting. A mood of loneliness and isolation enclosed him. Dora had gone to London and to stay the night with Sheila in Hampstead. His elder grandson Robin would be nine today, his birthday party due to begin three hours from now, Crocker played golf all day on Saturdays. Wexford would have liked to sleep, but he found it hard to sleep in the daytime. What the hell was it Wendy had said? What was it? Tremlett was probably still at work on that poor girl’s body … She had got Phanodorm for Joy and threatened to tell that she had. Well, not threatened, warned rather that she would have to, she would be scared not to. Joy had given Rodney the Phanodorm, substituting it for his blood-pressure pills, and it took just the time of a drive to Pomfret to act. Follow him by bus to Wendy’s. He’s asleep when you get there and you look at him and remember what he’s done to you by way of what he’s done to your daughter. Married another woman too, like a bloody sheikh. And the other wife goes along with you, though you hate her. It’s her daughter at risk now since you told her where his tastes lie. Why let him ever wake up again? If there’s a mess she says the room’s going to be decorated tomorrow. And if you hide the body for long enough …
In the morning phone the office, say he’s ill, disguising your voice a bit. She’ll type his letter of resignation for you, she’s got access to a typewriter in a friend’s house that no one’s going to trace. You’re both in it equally, you and she, the two wives of Rodney Williams, for better for worse, till death parts you. She stabbed him too, though you gave him the sleeping pill. You and she together carried the body down that crackpot spiral staircase, through the doorway into the integral garage. Laid him in the car with his traveling bag. She drove because you never learned, but you did most of the grave-digging. Soiling your hands never bothered you the way it did her. Two wives, in it together equally, and whom murder has joined let no man put asunder.
Wexford had got himself under Joy’s skin and he very nearly finished this internal monologue with one of her awful laughs. The chances were Burden wouldn’t phone before evening. And then surely he’d phone him at home. He drove to the Old Cellar and had himself a slice of quiche, broccoli and mushroom, a pleasant novelty, one small glass of Frascati to go with it—it was Saturday, after all, though with nothing to celebrate—and then back again to the estate where the streets were named for Cornish towns, Bodmin, Truro, Redruth, Liskeard. A cold gray rain fell steadily. They were back to the weather they had had between Rodney Williams’s disappearance and the discovery of his body.
In Wendy’s living room considerable progress had been made. Three walls were more or less stripped. It wasn’t what Wexford would have called slick, sheer, and clean, but it wasn’t bad. Martin had got hold of someone from Forensics, a shaggy girl in navy all-in-ones, who nevertheless had the air of an expert and was painstakingly scraping samples of brownish plaster off the walls.
Wendy was downstairs in her sewing-ironing-laundry room or whatever, cutting patterns out of magazines. For therapy, no doubt. Veronica was with her, Miss Muffet on a velvet pouffe. No match for her today, as he had predicted. He suddenly remembered his threat to send a car for Joy “later” and the crisis over Kevin’s dinner this had precipitated. Well, it would have to be much later … Or tomorrow. Or every day on and forever. No, he mustn’t think that way.
Wendy had changed her dress for a linen suit. Perhaps she had been going to watch her daughter play, for Veronica, as though not resigned to cancellation until the last moment, was in her tennis whites, pleated miniskirt—who could imagine her in shorts?—and a top almost too well finished to be called a tee-shirt.
“I suppose they’ll postpone it till Monday night,” said Wendy in a high, rather mad voice, “and that means half the spectators won’t come.”
Down the spiral staircase came the expert with her case of samples, the scraper still in her hand.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” whispered Veronica.
Her mother was all care, all solicitude, jumping up, hastening her to the ground-floor bathroom.
Wexford went back upstairs. Archbold had gone. The expert had gone. Martin was drinking tea from a flask and the other two Coke from cans while they waited for the Sevenstarker on the fourth wall to do its stuff. Wexford felt something very near a qualm. The room, which had been a shell-pink sanctuary, was a nasty mess. A shambles, Martin called it, but a shambles, meaning a slaughter house, was just what Wexford thought it had been used for, the reason for this destruction. Suppose he was wrong? Suppose the killing of Rodney Williams had taken place elsewhere?
Too late now.
The police’s loss would be Kitman’s gain. It is the business of the thinking man, he paraphrased, to give employment to the artisan.
“Let me have one of those, will you?” he said to Martin, pointing to the scrapers. The white patches of plaster among the brown were the areas Wendy herself had filled before Kitman began papering.
It wouldn’t budge the white plaster.
“Want me to have a go, sir?” Allison produced what Wexford thought might be a cold chisel.
“We’ll all have a go.”
It made Allison’s day. He had never before distinguished himself in any way since joining the force two years before. Sometimes he thought—and his wife—that they had taken him on only because he was black and not because he was suitable or any good. They were inverted race snobs. For weeks everyone had bent over backwards to treat him with more kindness, courtesy, and consideration than they would show, for instance, to a millionaire grandfather on his deathbed. That had worn off after a while. He was a bit lonely too in Kingsmarkham, where only his wife, his kids, and two other families were West Indian like him. But today paid for all that. It was what made him in his own eyes an officer of the law.
“Sir, I think I’ve found …” he began.
Wexford was there beside him like a shot. Under his eyes Allison dug in carefully, thanking his stars he’d remembered to put his gloves on. The object was stuck in the fissure wrapped up in newspaper, plastered over. He chipped and dug and then put his hand to it, looking at Wexford, and Wexford nodded.
The knife didn’t clatter out. It was unveiled as reverently as if it were a piece of cut glass. They all looked at it lying there on its wrappings, clean as a whistle and polished bright as a long prism in a chandelier.
20
WEXFORD HAD THEM WITH HIM ALL DAY SUNDAY, and Monday morning’s papers said an arrest was imminent. But Wexford wanted the two women, not just one, Joy as well as Wendy. Charging Wendy with Rodney Williams’s murder was an obvious act. The knife buried in her living room wall had a blade which exactly matched the knife wounds on the body, and it was wrapped in part of the Daily Mail of 15 April. Still, he wanted Joy as well and Joy had no apparent connection with the crime. The only evidence he had was a witness who claimed to have seen the two women together and a voice on the phone that was probably hers.
Joy also
had an alibi. Wendy didn’t. All day long nails were going into Wendy’s coffin, or at least the shades of the prison house were closing about her. Until Ovington came. That is, until Ovington’s second visit.
Alone in the house, eating a junk-food supper, Wexford got a call from Burden late on Saturday evening. Jenny’s labor hadn’t exactly been a false alarm but it had gradually subsided during the day. They were keeping her in, though, and considering some method of induction …
“You wanted her to wait a week,” said Wexford nastily. “You’d better come back to work.”
He phoned Ovington first thing in the morning. Never mind about Sunday and all that. By the time Ovington arrived at the police station he and Sergeant Martin and Polly Davies had Joy and Wendy in an interview room, the demented refugee and the broken doll. The curious thing was they had come closer to each other. In appearance, that is. There had been a sort of blending, and he thought of Kipling’s hedgehog and tortoise, combining to make an armadillo. Joy and Wendy hadn’t gone that far, but anxiety and harassment had done their work on the younger woman and the older had smartened herself up, perhaps because her son was back. At any rate the head-scarf was gone and she had proper shoes on. But Wendy’s make-up was stale, she had hairs all over the shoulders of her black cotton dress, and the ladder that sprang in her tights didn’t fidget her.
He left them to go and talk to Ovington. Smiling as usual, absurdly ingratiating, he could hardly have persuaded even the most gullible to believe him, certainly not a hard-headed policeman.
“She was with you on April the fifteenth?” Wexford said. “She came to your place after work for a drink? Why hasn’t she so much as mentioned this to me?”
“She doesn’t want anyone to know she was seeing me while her husband was still alive.”
That was in character. Wifely virtue was one of the aspects of the image Wendy liked to present. That didn’t mean Ovington’s story was true. Ovington was trying it on, a kind, stupid man with a misplaced idea of duty. Absently Wexford thanked him for coming. Then, as he was going back to the Williams wives, it occurred to him Ovington might have been in it with Wendy instead of Wendy with Joy. In that case who had made the phone call?
Wendy was crying. She said she was cold. It was true that the weather had turned very cold for the time of year, but she should have been prepared for that, sacrificed vanity, and brought a coat. He thought of all the places in the world and all the policemen in them where Wendy would have been allowed to shiver, where the temperature would have been lowered if possible, a little hypothermia encouraged. You couldn’t call it torture, cooling someone into admissions …
“Get her something to put on,” he said to Polly.
He took them through the incest again and he got more stories full of holes. Joy hadn’t believed Rodney would do that, yet she insisted Sara had led him on, insisted too that he would have gone to prison if she had breathed a word. Wendy now said Veronica had told her Rodney had started coming into her bedroom to kiss her goodnight and it wasn’t “nice.” That, said Joy, forgetting her former statement, was just how it had begun with Sara. Polly came back into the room with a gray knitted garment, something from Marks and Spencer’s range for old ladies—God knows where she found it—which Wendy put on with a show of reluctance.
Sandwiches were brought in to them at lunch-time, one lot corned beef, the other egg and cress. Not exactly the Sunday joint, two veg, and Yorkshire pudding. By that time Wexford had taken them through 15 April and was getting on to last Thursday night. Wendy had forgotten her coat but not her box of tissues, shades of peach this time. She sat sniveling into handfuls of them.
Just before three Joy broke at last. She started to howl like a dog. She rocked back and forth in her chair, howling and drumming her fists on the table. Wexford stopped the proceedings and sent for a cup of tea. He took Wendy into the interview room next door and asked her about Ovington. Rather to his surprise she agreed without much reluctance that she had been in Ovington’s flat on 15 April from about 7:45 until about 9:15. Why hadn’t she said so before? She gave the reason Ovington had given for her. They had hatched this up together, Wexford thought.
“I thought I might as well tell you,” she said with an aplomb that almost staggered him. “I didn’t before because you’ve all got minds capable of anything. But there’s been so much real dirt dug up I don’t think my innocent little friendship amounts to much.”
What did any of it weigh against that knife in the wall?
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON BURDEN WALKED in, looking a hundred years old.
“For God’s sake,” said Wexford. “I wasn’t serious.”
The truth was Burden didn’t know how otherwise to pass the time. He started on Joy, trying to break her alibi. But the tea had done wonders for her. She stuck to her story about watching television at the Harmers’ and after half an hour of that had the brainwave that might have struck her days ago. She didn’t have to talk at all if she didn’t want to. Nobody had charged her with anything.
Unfortunately, by this time Wendy was back in the room with her and heard what she said.
Through her tears she smiled quite amicably at Joy. “Good idea. I’m not talking either then. Pity I didn’t think of it before.”
Joy uttered one last sentence. “It was me thought of it, not you.”
United in silence, they stared at Wexford. Why not charge them both? With murdering Rodney Williams and, if he couldn’t make that stick, with murdering Paulette Harmer? Special court in the morning, a remand in custody … Archbold came in and said there were three people to see him. He left the silent women with Burden and Martin and went down in the lift.
James Ovington was sitting there with his taciturn father and an elderly woman he introduced as his mother. Somehow Wexford had never thought of Ovington père as having a wife, but, of course, he would have; James Ovington must have come from somewhere. He only looked like a waxwork. More so than ever this afternoon, his complexion fresher, his cheeks pinker, his smile flashing.
“My parents want to tell you something.”
That was one way of putting it. They didn’t look as if they had any desire beyond that of going home again. Wexford asked them to go up to the first floor with him to his office, but Mrs. Ovington said she’d rather not, thank you, as if any suggestion of going upstairs in the company of men was indecent. They compromised with an interview room. Mrs. Ovington looked disparagingly about her, evidently thinking it wasn’t very cozy. James Ovington said, “What were you going to tell the chief inspector, Dad?”
Nothing, apparently.
“Now you know you were willing to come here and tell him.”
“Not willing,” said Ovington senior. “If I must I must. That’s what I said.”
“Is this something about Mrs. Wendy Williams, Mr. Ovington?” prompted Wexford.
Very slowly and grudgingly Ovington said, “I saw her.”
“We both did,” said Mrs. Ovington, suddenly brave. “We both saw her.”
Wexford decided patience was the only thing. “You saw her, yes. When was this?”
James opened his mouth to speak, wisely shut it again. His father pondered, at last said, “She’s got a car. She’d parked it outside the shop on the yellow line. That don’t matter after half six. We never saw her go in.”
Silence fell and endured. Wexford had to prompt.
“Go in where?”
“My son’s place, of course. What else are we talking about? He’s got the bottom flat and we’ve got the top, haven’t we?”
“Up four flights,” said his wife. “Wear the old ones out first, that’s what it is.”
“We saw her come out,” said Ovington. “Out of our front window. Round a quarter past nine. Tripped over and nearly fell in them heels. That’s how Mother come to see her. I said, Here, Mother, look at this, them heels’ll have her over.”
“It was April the fifteenth!” said James, unable to contain himself any longer.
<
br /> “I don’t know about that.” His father shook his head. “But it was the first Thursday after Easter.”
THAT NIGHT HE WENT TO BED EARLY AND slept for nine hours. He didn’t let himself think about the two women, Joy with no evidence against her, Wendy exonerated by the Ovingtons. They had been sent home with the warning that he would very likely want them back again on Monday morning. Old Ovington hadn’t been lying, but still his story didn’t militate against the possibility that while Joy had done the deed in Wendy’s house, Wendy had later met her in time to help her dispose of the body, the clothes, and the car.
In the morning he awoke clear-headed and calm. Immediately he remembered what it was Wendy had said to him. It had been when she told him Veronica was to play in a tennis singles final. The significance was in what it reminded him of, and now he remembered that too and as he did so everything began to fall gently and smoothly into place, so that he felt like one recalling and then using the combination of a safe until the door slowly swings open.
“But what a fool I’ve been,” he said aloud.
“Have you, darling?”
“If I’d got on to it sooner maybe that poor girl wouldn’t have died.”
“Come on,” said Dora. “You’re not God.”
The phone was ringing as he left the house. It was Burden, but Wexford wasn’t there to answer it and Dora spoke to him.
A report on the postmortem, rushed through by Sir Hilary Tremlett, was awaiting Wexford. He went through it with Crocker beside him. Strangling had been with a fine powerful cord, and whatever this was had left a red staining in the deep indentation it had made around the victim’s neck.
“The nylon line from the spool of an electric edge trimmer,” said Wexford.
Crocker looked at him. “That’s a bit esoteric.”
“I don’t think so. Joy Williams has three such spools in her garage and one of them, unless I’m much mistaken, will be empty.”
