An Unkindness of Ravens

by Ruth Rendell

  He didn’t dare come out. She might look back. Instead he dropped down into the field at the other side of the hedge. There had been a crop growing here, wheat or barley, but the grain had been cut and all that remained was a stubble that looked gray in this light. He ran along the hedge side, some few feet above the footpath. A long way ahead now he could just see the top of her head bobbing along. She had reached the corner of the copse.

  There was a barbed-wire entanglement here that threatened to bar his passage, the spaces between the wires too narrow to squeeze through, the top wire too high to sling a leg over without terrible detriment to trousers. There was nothing for it but to retrace steps, pass through the hedge, and clamber up the bank onto the footpath. She was too far away to see him even if she did look back. He jumped down, rounded the bend in the path, but now, though the copse was in full view, he couldn’t see her at all.

  His heart was in his mouth then. If she had met her assailant and gone into the wood, if Archbold truly had gone to sleep … He left the path and plunged into the copse. It was dark and dry in there, a million needles underfoot from the firs and larches. He ran through the trees and met Archbold head on.

  “There’s no one here, sir. I haven’t seen a soul in three hours.”

  “Except her,” said Wexford breathlessly.

  “She just walked past. She’s on her own, heading for the High Street.”

  He came out of the wood on the Kingsmarkham side, Archbold behind him. She was nowhere to be seen, the hedges too high, the foliage on the trees too thick and masking. And then he forgot discretion and catching a murderer and ran along the path in pursuit of her, afraid for her and for himself. A moment before he had been praying Bennett wouldn’t appear, walking from the Kingsmarkham end, and spoil it all. Now he hoped he would.

  There was one more field and that low-lying, the path passing diagonally across it and then running beside a hedge at right angles to the road. No sign of Bennett. Because he had seen her? Or seen her attacker? Would he be capable of that in this fast-fading light? The meadow was gray and the hedges black and the air had the density of fallen cloud. Through the mist you could just see a light or two from cars on the Pomfret road, behind that an irregular cluster of pale lights that was probably the police station.

  She was nowhere. The meadow was empty. There was a movement just discernible on the far side of it, where the path met the hedge. She had crossed the diagonal and come to the last hundred yards, her pale clothes catching what light there was so that she gleamed like a night moth. And like a night moth fluttered along against the dark foliage.

  Wexford and Palmer didn’t take the diagonal. They dared not risk being seen. They kept to the boundary hedge, though there was no path here, and Palmer, who was thirty, outran Wexford who felt that he had never run so hard in his life. All the time he could see the pale, fluttering moth moving down there, homing on the stile that would bring her to the wide grass verge of the Pomfret road.

  She never reached it. The fluttering stopped and there was something else down there with her at the bottom of the field where the dead elms stood, their roots a mass of underbrush, of brambles and nettles and fuzzy wild clematis. The something or someone else had come out of that and barred her way. He thought he heard a cry but he couldn’t be sure. At any rate it was no scream but a thin shriek of—surprise perhaps. He cut the corner, running hell for leather, his heart pounding fit to burst, running the way no man of close on sixty should run.

  And Archbold got there only just first. It was strange that the knife should catch a gleam on it even in this near darkness. Wexford saw the gleam and then saw it drop to the ground. Archbold was holding Veronica, who had turned her face into his chest and was clinging on to his coat. He went up to the other himself. She made no attempt to run. She clasped her hands and hung her head so that he couldn’t see her face.

  In that moment Bennett materialized, so to speak. He came out of the dark, running. Sara Williams looked up then with an expression of faint, dull surprise.

  “Take them both,” said Wexford. “They’ll be charged with the wilful murder of Rodney Williams.”

  1 * See A Sleeping Life

  22

  “IT WAS THEY, NOT THEIR MOTHERS, WHO knew each other,” Wexford said. “Edwina Klein told me but I misinterpreted what she said. ‘Those two women knew each other,’ she said to me. ‘I saw them together.’ I took her to mean Joy and Wendy. Joy and Wendy were women and Sara and Veronica were girls. Except that to a militant feminist founder member of ARRIA all females are women. Just as they are,” he added, “to organizers of sports events. It’s the women’s singles even if both players are fifteen.”

  Burden and the doctor said nothing. They were all sitting in Burden’s grass widower’s house, drinking Burden’s grass widower’s instant coffee. It was over. A special court for one and a special juvenile court for the other and the two girls had been committed for trial. Afterwards the press had caught Wexford, a camera crew springing out of their van with the agility of the SAS, and once again he would be on television. Looking a hundred years old, he thought, after being up half the night talking to Sara Williams. People would phone in suggesting it was time he retired.

  “They met at a tennis match, of course. The second time I met Sara I noticed she had a tennis racket up on her bedroom wall. She wasn’t anywhere near Veronica’s standard, not in the high school’s first or second six. She just scraped into their reserve. Still, one day she was called on to play and she met Veronica as her opponent. What happened then? I don’t know and she hasn’t told me. I’d guess that one of the other girls there commented that they looked alike and, seeing they had the same surname, were they cousins? It was up to one of them to probe further and one of them did. Sara, probably. After that it wouldn’t have been hard to find out, would it? ‘Look, I’ve got a photo, this is my mum and dad …’”

  “Something of a shattering experience, wouldn’t you say?” said the doctor.

  “Also I think an exciting one.”

  “That’s a superficial way of looking at it,” said Burden. “I’d almost say unfeeling. Both those girls were lonely, Veronica sheltered and smothered, Sara neglected, no one’s favorite. Wouldn’t it have been both shattering and immensely comforting to find a sister?”

  The sensitivity which had developed in Burden late in fife always brought Wexford a kind of affectionate amusement. It was so often misdirected. It resembled in a way those good intentions with which hell is paved.

  He picked his words carefully. They were strong words but his tone was hesitant.

  “Sara Williams doesn’t have normal feelings of affection, need for love, loneliness. I think she would be labeled a psychopath. She wants attention and she wants to impress. Also she wants her own way. I imagine that what she got from her half-sister was principally admiration. Sara has an excellent brain. Intellectually, she’s streets ahead of Veronica. She’s a strong, powerful, amoral, unfeeling solipsist with an appalling temper.”

  Crocker’s eyebrows went up. “You’re talking about an eighteen-year-old who was raped by her own father.”

  Wexford didn’t respond. He was thinking about what the girl had said to him, presiding at the table in the interview room with Marion Bayliss at one end, himself opposite, and Martin facing Marion. But Sara Williams had presided, holding her head high, describing her feelings and actions without a notion of defending herself.

  “My sister looks just like me. I used to feel she was another aspect of me, the weaker, pretty, feminine part, if you like. I wanted ultimately to be rid of that part.”

  Solipsism, according to the Oxford dictionary, is the view or theory that self is the only object of real knowledge or the only real thing existent.

  “Why didn’t you tell your parents you and Veronica had met?”

  “Why should I?”

  Her cool answers took the breath away.

  “It would have been the natural thing to confront your fathe
r with what you had found out.”

  She was honest in her way. “I liked having the secret. I enjoyed knowing what he thought I didn’t know.”

  “So that you could hold it over him?”

  “Perhaps,” she said indifferently, bored when the discussion was not totally centered on herself.

  Was that what she had had to threaten him with in the matter of the incest? Was that how she had stopped it?

  “You prevented Veronica from telling her mother?”

  “She did what I told her.”

  It was uttered the way a trainer speaks of an obedient dog. The trainer takes the obedience for granted, so effective are his personality and technique, so unthinkable would an alternative reaction be. Wexford thought Crocker and Burden would have had to hear and see Sara to appreciate all this. He couldn’t even attempt to put it across to them. “The two girls met quite often,” he went on. “Sara even went to Veronica’s home when Wendy was at work. Veronica came to admire her extravagantly. She followed her, she would have obeyed her in anything.”

  “Would have?”

  “Did. Psychiatrists call what overtook them folie à deux, a kind of madness that overtakes two people only when they are together and through the influence of each on the other. But in all such cases you’ll always find one party who is easily led and one who is dominant.” Wexford digressed a little before returning to the point. “Looking back, I don’t think Sara Williams has ever addressed a sentence to me that didn’t begin with ‘I’ or wasn’t about herself.”

  He went on: “The coming and going between the Williams homes led to a pooling of information. For instance, Sara had believed her father was a sales rep with Sevensmith Harding for the Ipswich area. Veronica thought he was a rep with a bathroom fittings company. They took steps to find out the truth and did. It’s over a year now since they found out what Rodney really did, what his position was, and discovered—via some research into marketing managers’ earnings on Sara’s part—what his actual salary was.

  “Sara also warned Veronica of their father’s—proclivities. That, of course, is how Wendy came to fear an incest attempt. Not because she witnessed anything herself or because Veronica put two and two together from a kiss and a cuddle but because Sara told Veronica what to expect and Veronica passed it on without disclosing her source. One way and another Sara made Veronica into a very frightened girl. A very bewildered and confused girl. Think of her situation. First she discovers her father has a legal wife and a grown-up family, next that he could never have in fact married her mother and she must be illegitimate. Necessarily, therefore, he’s deceitful and a liar. He doesn’t even have the job he says he has. Worst of all, he has raped his other daughter and will certainly have the same designs on her. No wonder she was frightened.

  “Telling Wendy her fears of a sexual attack had the effect only of causing trouble between her mother and father. Did Wendy accuse Rodney and Rodney hotly deny it? Almost certainly. The quarrel was at any rate bad enough to make Wendy believe Rodney would leave her but fear that if he did Veronica would be in danger. So we see that the reason she didn’t want Veronica to stay in on the evening of April the fifteenth was that if Rodney did come back she would be alone with her father—and this would be the first time she would be alone with him after the disclosure was made.

  “But Veronica had another confidante and friend now, apart from her mother. She had Sara. And Sara absolutely justified the faith she put in her. Sara had a good idea for diverting Rodney’s attention from his daughter, diverting his attention from everything, in fact. Substitute sleeping pills for his blood-pressure tablets. It was something that could be done only once though and in an emergency.

  “Now on April the fifteenth, however much their mothers may have been in ignorance, Sara and Veronica knew that when Rodney left Alverbury Road he would drive straight to Liskeard Avenue. So Sara herself made the exchange of tablets, two only remaining in the container. Don’t forget we found an empty Mandaret container in Alverbury Road and a half-full one in

  Liskeard Avenue. Rodney took his two Mandaret as he thought, leaving the empty container in his bedroom, and drove to Pomfret. No doubt he began to feel drowsy on the way.”

  “But these were Phanodorm, supplied by Paulette Harmer?” said the doctor.

  “I suppose they were supplied by her. It seems most likely. But Paulette didn’t die because she illicitly provided a sleeping drug. She died because the turn events were taking made her concentrate her mind on the evening of April the fifteenth, made her remember in fact what had really happened. What she remembered was her mother speaking to her aunt Joy on the phone that evening and making some remark about being glad Kevin had settled in back at college. And she was going to tell us because she knew from the papers and television and her parents’ conversation how strong was the suspicion against her aunt. She knew very well her aunt had been at home that evening, in at eight to receive Kevin’s phone call and still in at eight forty-five to receive her mother’s.”

  THE GIRL SHOULD HAVE BEEN STREWING flowers or rising from the waves in a cockleshell. The face was bland, innocent, and somehow secretive. Even now there was a tiny, self-satisfied smile. Her hair was scraped back tight from that high forehead, but wisps had come free and lay in gold tendrils on the white skin.

  “I got a phone call from Veronica. It was just to tell me he’d gone to sleep like I said he would. I said I’d come over.”

  He had interrupted her to ask why.

  “I just thought I would. I wasn’t going to get a chance like that again, was I?”

  He stopped himself asking her what she meant. Her eyes seemed to enlarge, her face grow blanker.

  “I saw him sleeping there and I thought, I’ve got him in my power. I thought of the power he had over me. I started to get angry, really angry.”

  “And Veronica?”

  “I didn’t think about Veronica. I suppose she was there. Well, I know she was. I said to her, ‘We could kill him and stop all of it.’ I told her to get me a knife. I wasn’t serious then, it was fantasy. I was angry and I was excited—high like when you’ve had a drink.”

  Folie à deux. Was Veronica excited too? He wouldn’t get much about another’s feelings out of this girl.

  “I took the knife out of her hands and took off the cardboard guard that was on it. I went up to my father, who was lying on the settee, and I started playing around, waving the knife over him, pretending to stick it in him. I could tell he was sound asleep. I was making Veronica laugh because I was doing all this stuff and he was just oblivious of it. I don’t remember what made me stop playing. I was so excited and high I don’t remember. But that’s how it was. One minute it was fantasy and the next it was for real.”

  She looked down the table at Marion and then the other way at Martin. It was as if she were gathering the attention of her audience. Once more her eyes met Wexford’s in a steady gaze.

  “I raised the knife and stuck it in his neck, right in hard with both hands. I’d made him wake up then and make noises, so I stabbed him a few more times to stop the blood spraying like that. I’m going to be a doctor so I knew the blood would stop when he was dead …”

  It took Wexford, hardened as he was, a moment or two to collect words.

  “Did Veronica stab him?”

  “I gave her the knife and told her to have a go. I’d made a big wound in his neck and she stuck it in there and then she went off and was sick.”

  “COMPLETELY MAD,” SAID BURDEN. “BONKERS.”

  “Perhaps. I’m not sure. Let’s not get into defining psychosis.”

  “What happened next?” said the doctor.

  “The room was covered for the most part in dust sheets. Rodney had come in half asleep, climbed the stairs, and lain down on the settee, which had a dust sheet over one end. The end, incidentally, where he laid his head. It was this sheet, the property of Leslie Kitman, which received most of the blood. Some went on to an area of wall from which the
paper had been stripped that day. Sara washed the wall and wrapped Rodney’s head up in the dust sheet. Veronica, recovered and very much under orders from Sara, washed the knife and then had the idea of plastering it into the wall. This was the first weird too-clever thing the girls did. There were others. There were fissures in the walls needing to be filled in and in the garage was a packet of filler. Also in the garage was Rodney’s car, Greta the Granada, which Sara, though not Veronica, was able to drive. They rolled up the dust sheet and wrapped one of Wendy’s Marks and Spencer’s tea cloths round Rodney’s neck. Having cleaned up the room, they carried Rodney down the spiral staircase, through the door from the hall into the garage, and put him into the boot of the car. On their way out in the car they deposited the dust sheet in the dustbin. It was about seven-thirty.”

  “Then,” said Burden, “how did Kevin manage to speak to his sister when he phoned Alverbury Road at eight o’clock?”

  “He didn’t. He spoke to his mother. And, of course, he and Joy were both well aware it was his mother he had spoken to. They lied to protect Sara. Oh, I know Joy hasn’t much affection for Sara, but she was her daughter. Once she began to think about it she saw that Sara might have had something to do with Rodney’s disappearance. At first she genuinely thought he had left her and she got me in to advise her. But then things changed. I think I know why. On my advice, she phoned Sevensmith Harding and they told her she had spoken to them on Friday, April the sixteenth, to explain Rodney was ill. Now Joy no doubt at first thought this a mere mistake, but they had been so sure it was her voice.

  Joy knew someone whose voice sounded very like hers—her own daughter.”

  “Don’t forget that she knew how Sara felt towards her father on account of the incest. She also knew Sara had been out of the house for hours on the evening of April the fifteenth. So she told us and got Kevin to agree—no difficulty there, he distrusts the police and is close to his sister—that it was she who had gone out and Sara who had been at home to take the phone call. Was there collusion with Sara? I doubt it. There was no real communication between her and her mother. My guess is Joy said it might be wiser to arrange things this way and Sara agreed with just a nod and a ‘yes’ probably.”