by Ruth Rendell
He walked back to the kitchen. It was as immaculate and neat as before. Fay Devenish looked stunned—literal— ly so, as if someone had given her a blow to the head and felled her. Perhaps Devenish had. She sat on one of the Windsor wheel-back chairs, pulled somewhat away from the table, bending forward, her head bowed, her knees and feet pressed close together. Her lank, pale brown hair hung across her cheeks. She looked up when he came in and he saw that her face was as white as if the blood had drained out of her rather than her husband.
In similar circumstances, when a woman has lost a husband by murder, Wexford would have begun with condolences as a preamble to the questions he had to ask. Here, sympathy seemed inappropriate. "You found your husband’s body."
She lifted her head again and looked at him, straight in the eye. "Yes." It was plainly all she wanted to say. She had nothing else to say, but she perhaps recognized that he would want more, much more, and she burst out in a hoarse, half-strangled voice, "I can’t believe it, you know. I find it quite unbelievable, it can’t be true. I was the one who’d die, I’d be killed, that’s what I thought..."
Wexford’s own sentiments too, his own fears.
"But Stephen’s dead. He’s been killed. I can’t believe it. I couldn’t when I—when I saw him. He was so big and strong and—and full of life. I still can’t believe it."
"It’s true."
"There was so much blood. How could anyone have so much blood in him?"
His own blood ran cold. It was Lady Macbeth’s phrase, the grotesque and inappropriate comment that stems from the shock of looking on horrors.
"What time did you find your husband’s body, Mrs. Devenish?"
"It was nine this morning. Just before nine. I went in there ... to ... to do the room. I only thank God, I thank God, Sanchia wasn’t with me. I’d left her in the playroom. She had a video on. The Lion King it was. She was watching a video, thank God, thank God!"
"Tell me about this man you say called on your husband at eight."
She didn’t like that "you say" and she frowned. "You mean you don’t believe me?"
"I don’t mean that." But perhaps he did. "Tell me about him."
"I heard his voice, I didn’t see him. I thought—I thought it was one of our neighbors. I suppose my husband let him in. My husband was—well, he was going to the Brighton office and sometimes this man gets a lift with him. That’s who I thought it was."
"What is his name, this neighbor?"
She said she didn’t know. "He lives at Laburnum House."
Sylvia’s old home. He tried to remember the name of the people who had bought it from Sylvia and Neil. Paulton? Poulson?
"I see you’ve cut your hand," he said.
"I haven’t cut it." She looked at her hand with a kind of wonder as if she had never seen it before. Across the palm, diagonally, where the lifeline ran, was a long, deep cut. "It bled a lot at the time."
"How did that happen?"
"Stephen did it." She began to laugh hysterically, mad-woman laughter, almost operatic, running up and down scales. Backward and forward she flung herself on the chair, against the table, laughing and shrieking, beating on the tabletop with her hands. "He did it, he did it," she shrieked, "but he’ll never do it again, never, never, never!"
Lynn came in, alerted by the noise. "Get her a glass of water, will you?" Wexford said to her.
By the time it came, Fay Devenish was sobbing. Lynn held the water to her lips, and to the surprise of both of them, she drank greedily. She drew a long breath and expelled it on a deep sigh. Then she did something that was all the more shocking because it was performed under absolute control and quite calmly. She got up and, showing surprising strength, seized hold of the cuckoo clock and struggled to pull it off the wall. She tugged at it for a moment before succeeding, then flung the clock on the floor with all the force she could muster. It smashed in pieces. The pert little cuckoo, defeated at last, its flapping beak silenced, rolled out from the wreckage and lay on its back under the table.
Violent activity had set her hand bleeding again. She seemed not to notice the blood that poured from her palm and dripped onto the floor.
Wexford said, "That needs treatment. It should probably be stitched."
She shrugged. "He bought that clock when we were on holiday in Lucerne. I always hated it. I used to feel it mocked my ... my sufferings."
Lynn got down on her knees and started picking up the pieces.
Fay said, "You must be the only person apart from me who’s ever done anything like that in this house."
"You shouldn’t be alone," Wexford said. "Is there anyone we can call on to be with you?"
"Jane. I can see Jane now "
The body had been taken away. Peach, Cox, and Archbold had searched the house in a quest for bloodstained clothing and found nothing of interest. Wexford went into the utility room where a pile of clean washing, folded but not ironed, lay on a counter. Among the items, as well as half a dozen snow-white shirts belonging to the dead man, he could see what looked like a cotton skirt, several T-shirts, and another button-through cotton dress. The portholes on the washing machine and the dryer both stood open. The utility room communicated with the kitchen where Fay Devenish still sat and Lynn Fancourt with her. He looked around him, saw the knife block, and noticed that each of its slots but one was occupied by a knife. Seven knives. On the day Stephen Devenish had cried in this room, his arms flung across the table, had there been seven knives or eight?
"Bag that knife block," he said to Cox, "and we’ll send it to forensics." Then he inquired of Fay Devenish if a knife was missing from the block.
"I don’t think so. Let me see. No, they’re all there." She looked fearfully up into his face. "You think that one of these knives ...?"
"I’m not thinking anything much yet, Mrs. Devenish. I wondered because while there are eight slots in the block, there are only seven knives."
"There never have been any more." She spoke flatly, her hysteria over. "There’s a reason for that. It’s made to take eight knives, but if you put eight in, they’re crowded together and when you try to pull one out, it brings the next one to it with it. Do you see what I mean?"
"I think so."
He waited for her to say that one of her kitchen knives couldn’t have been used to kill her husband. She had been in the kitchen all the time and the man who killed Stephen Devenish had never entered it. He expected her to say it but instead she said, "The knife my husband cut me with, I don’t know where that came from. It wasn’t one of these."
He said no more. They would soon know, forensics would tell them.
In the hallway he encountered Burden. "Where’s the little girl, Mike?"
"I had her taken to a neighbor. The Wingrave woman. It’s not ideal but better there than here. And I’ve phoned the boys’ school; it’s the Francis Roscommon School in Sewingbury. I said I’d go over there and talk to the head teacher, but he sounds a sensible man. He said he’d tell them when he found a suitable moment. And he’ll bring them home."
"I don’t want them brought home, Mike."
Burden looked at him.
"Or, rather, I want them brought here but not left alone with their mother. I don’t want her to have a chance to talk to them or they to her. Some other arrangement will have to be made."
"You’re thinking of the mysterious stranger she says called here this morning? She thought that up on the spur of the moment, didn’t she?"
Wexford shrugged. He went into the study and stood at the window. From here, because the room was in a block or wing of the house that jutted forward, you could look to your left and see the front door. Had Devenish been in here to watch this man arrive? Was there a man? Or was he a desperate woman’s invention? Wexford looked ahead of him again and saw Jane Andrews’s car approaching along the long, green tunnel of the driveway. Her arrival obscurely cheered him. It was better that she was here.
This, Stephen Devenish’s death chamber, was also the
room where so much of the regular meting out of violence to Fay Devenish took place. It had been searched, but he set about searching it himself. In a desk drawer he found a whip. It was the kind of whip he supposed a jockey might use, though not being familiar with this means of coercing horses he couldn’t be sure. One thing was certain, Devenish hadn’t used it on a horse. Another drawer held nothing but a pair of nutcrackers and an instrument that might have been pincers but whose purpose he couldn’t define. It was a relief to find that the top drawer contained only paper, much of it letters in envelopes.
All this would have to be gone through. Later, though, not now. He was closing the drawer when the writing, or rather the printing, on the top envelope caught his eye. It had been torn open, the contents no doubt read and then replaced inside. Addressed to Stephen Devenish Esq., Woodland Lodge, Ploughman’s Lane, Kingsmarkham KM2 4ZC, the lettering had been produced by a computer and printer. Hardly believing himself so competent in this area, he recognized Word for Windows, the program they used at the police station—and in millions of other locations, of course. The postmark was Brighton, the date July 24. He took out the letter. Same computer- and -printer-created text.
Dear Mr. Devenish:
I often wonder if you know what a monster you are. A psychopath, not a human being at all. Evil like yours is, in fact, quite rare. Thank God. But God won’t have His revenge on you till after you have died a natural death in your comfortable, luxurious bed, so He has appointed me to carry out retribution. I shall kill you. In the next few days, perhaps, or weeks or even months. But it will happen. And it will be painful, as painful as the cruelty you have inflicted on your poor wife. I will make her a widow and your children orphans and laugh for joy, as they will.
There was no signature. It often amused him to note how, without a thought, we address people we dislike, despise, or distrust with the endearment dear. It was even done by writers of anonymous letters. In his time he had seen many of them but never one like this. It seemed, for one thing, the work of an educated person. There was something evangelical about that last sentence, almost like a line from a psalm, and a suggestion in the mention of God and the capital letters for the deity pronoun that the writer might be religious.
He changed his mind about not going through the drawer now. Two more letters in much the same vein came to light. Both began Dear Mr. Devenish and both mentioned Devenish’s "cruelty" to his wife, while the second referred to his habit of cutting her with a knife. One was dated early July and the other mid-June. So perhaps Devenish hadn’t lied when he said in April that he had had such letters but had destroyed them. Perhaps there had been many and they had come regularly.
When Wexford returned to Woodland Lodge in the afternoon, not two but three women were in the living room. Jane Andrews, neat and smart in a long-skirted, cream linen suit, was sitting with her friend on one of the sofas, holding her uninjured hand, while in an armchair was a woman Fay surprisingly introduced as her mother, Mrs. Dodds. Thin, worn Fay in the blue cotton frock that hung on her bore no resemblance to this tall, well-built lady in bright green dress and matching high-heeled shoes, her "big hair" a carefully teased golden helmet, her face skillfully painted. Cakes were on a table, with biscuits in a silver dish, and someone had made a pot of coffee. They offered Wexford a cup but he shook his head.
"Mrs. Devenish, I’d like to speak to you alone, so perhaps you can spare your mother and your friend for ten minutes."
Shepherding them outside, he called to Lynn to sit with Fay Devenish. He was thinking quickly, seeing a way to seize his chance. The study was obviously out of bounds. However much Jane Andrews had loathed Stephen Devenish, she would probably balk at going into the room so soon after he had met a violent death there. But it was a big house of many rooms. Opening a door, he looked into a playroom where the television set was still on, though The Lion King was long over, and where toys lay scattered everywhere as Sanchia had abandoned them. With his next attempt he was luckier. Here was the dining room. A table big enough to seat twenty—had the poor woman been obliged to hold dinner parties for Devenish’s business associates?—still left room for a sideboard, drinks cabinet, and occasional chairs.
He asked the two women to sit down, then said, "Mrs. Dodds, your grandsons will soon be brought home from school. I don’t think it a very good idea for them to be here, do you? Your daughter needs to rest. I’m wondering if you’d have them for a few days, just to—"
She cut him short. Her eager smile and rapturous voice changed the image he had of her as far from grandmotherly. "I’d love to have them. What a splendid idea. My husband and I are always saying we never see enough of them. I wouldn’t mind keeping them for a month. And they love being with us."
"That’s fine, then. If you could" —his glance took in Jane Andrews as well as Mrs. Dodds—"just make it appear the invitation came from you in the first place? It would ... well, come better that way."
"Of course I will."
"You and Miss Andrews could pack some clothes for them while I’m talking to Mrs. Devenish. I’m sure you know what they’ll need."
Fay was sitting quietly, contemplating her left hand, now bandaged. Perhaps she was thinking this was the last wound she would ever receive at Devenish’s hands. Or of what she had done? Or what her rescuer, this stranger, had done?
"What time was it when you heard this man’s voice, Mrs. Devenish?"
"I told you. About eight. I was in the kitchen, clearing away the breakfast things. The boys were with me, waiting for their lift to school."
"I should like to get the sequence of events right, if you please. I won’t keep you longer than I can, I appreciate what a strain this must be on you."
Fay cleared her throat. She glanced across the room, and for a moment Wexford thought she was going to ask if it was necessary for Lynn to be present, but she didn’t.
She sighed. "Sanchia was awake by six-thirty. She always is. I got up when I heard her and got her dressed and downstairs. By that time my husband was up and having a shower. I went into the boys’ rooms at seven and got them up. I had to go back and tell them again, but I always do have to. I was helping Sanchia with her breakfast when my husband came down. I gave him his breakfast. He always has—had—a cooked breakfast. Then the boys came down for their cornflakes and toast.
I’d ... I’d run out of oranges to make juice from, it’s a bad time of the year for oranges, so I used some frozen juice but it wouldn’t thaw out—you don’t want to hear all this."
"I want to hear everything," said Wexford. "Go on."
"My husband finished his breakfast and went into the study. That was about a quarter to eight. He called to me to come in there ... I—oh, I don’t..."
Her face crumpled in distress. There were no tears, rather a twisting of her features into a grimace of dismay and pain. It was as if—and Wexford thought he read it plainly—she was asking herself, as she had always asked herself, why this man of hers had felt the need to hurt her over and over and on and on. Why? Had she really been so bad that she deserved this?
Wexford said gently, "Your husband called you into the study to punish you, didn’t he, for failing to supply fresh orange juice?"
She sucked in her lips, bent her head, said an almost silent, "Yes."
"He had a knife but it wasn’t a knife from the kitchen? It was a knife he happened to have with him in the study?"
No more than a nod this time.
"He told you to hold out your hand—your left hand because he had no wish to interfere with your ability to do housework—and cut you across the palm."
"Yes."
Unsuitably and uncharacteristically, Wexford found himself exulting in his heart that the man was dead, had died by violence, had been punished. He said nothing.
Fay said in a voice that trembled, "He was much, much worse to me after that—that business with Sanchia. Every day there was—there was—something, beatings or cutting me or kicking. Edward and Robert saw it, San
chia saw it."
"It’s over now," said Wexford, adding silently to himself, whatever the truth of this, whatever the outcome, there would be no more of that. "Tell me what happened after your husband cut you."
"I went back to the kitchen. No, I went into the downstairs cloakroom first and tied my hand up in the towel that was in there. The boys didn’t see the cut, but they saw my hand was tied up. They were just leaving for school. On the days I don’t take them, they walk about a hundred yards down the road and get a lift with a woman who’s also got children at their school. I sent them off—"
"Excuse me—do you mean you went to the front door with them?"
She looked at him, puzzled at first. "Did I ... oh, I see what you mean. No, I just told them it was time to go and said good-bye to them, and they went out of the kitchen into the hall and out of the front door. I didn’t actually see them leave the house, but I know they did. And then, almost immediately—well, a couple of minutes later, the doorbell rang. It was this man. I heard his voice and my husband’s voice, talking to him."
He noticed that she never referred to Devenish as Stephen, but always as "my husband," as a slave might say "my master." "That would have been at eight o’clock. Did you hear him leave?"
"I don’t know. I thought I heard the front door close, but that could have been my husband going, only it wasn’t."
"Weren’t you surprised, Mrs. Devenish, that your husband said nothing to you before he left? That he didn’t say good-bye to you?"
Her shaky laugh rang shockingly in that quiet place. "Would you be surprised if someone didn’t say good-bye to you when he’d just slashed you with a knife?"
"Perhaps not. Perhaps not."
Suddenly she sprang from her chair, looked around her wildly. "Where’s my little girl? Where’s Sanchia?"
"With Mrs. Wingrave."
"I want her, I want her back! Oh, God, d’you realize, I never need fear for her again!"
"Of course you can have her back."
"I’ll go and fetch her," said Lynn.
