An Unkindness of Ravens (13 page)

‘It could be, I suppose. The implication being that the animal—or in this case bird—has the feelings and rights of a human being? The poster Sara Williams has in her bedroom has some letters on it as well as the picture. An acronym, I think, a, r, r, i, a, Arria.’

‘Animal Rights something or other?’

‘There was a woman called Arria, in Roman history, I seem to remember. I’ll try and find out. If it’s animal rights, Mike, you would expect its members to make their attacks on people who in their view were being cruel to animals. Factory farmers, for instance, or masters of foxhounds. I don’t suppose Wheatley keeps calves chained up in boxes in his back garden, does he? We’ll ask Sara.

 Ill

 But first I want to leave her and Joy to get over the shock of Williams having another wife and another child.’

‘You’ve told them?’

‘Yes. It was the money aspect that seemed to mean most to Joy. She had been deprived in order that he could maintain another household. She gave that bitter laugh of hers. If I’d had to live with that laugh it would have got horribly on my nerves.’

‘How’s Martin getting on with his typewriter inquiries?’

Wexford threw the report across the desk. It was no Sevensmith Harding machine that had been used to type Williams’s letter of resignation. All the typewriters in use in the Myringham office were of the sophisticated electronic kind. Neither of the Williams households contained a typewriter of any sort. The Harmers had a typewriter in the two-storey flat over the shop where they lived and both Hope Harmer and her daughter Paulette used it. It was a small Olivetti, an electric machine.

‘His new young lady typed that letter,’ Burden said. ‘Find her and we find the typewriter.’

‘Find her and it won’t matter whether we find the typewriter or not.’

Sergeant Martin had also been to Bath.

There, it seemed, Rodney Williams had had his origins. On an estate of houses some few miles outside the city, in a house very like the one Rodney had bought for his second bride, lived his brother Howard. It was Howard’s address that appeared on Wendy’s marriage certificate.

His parents had also once lived in Bath but his father had died when he was a child and his mother when Rodney was twenty-seven. That dead mother Rodney in his calculating way had used to his advantage. No doubt he had told Wendy that old Mrs Williams disapproved of his marriage to a young girl, would never wish to meet her, but the good son would be obliged to pay the occasional duty visit .. .

The brother seemed honest and straightforward. There was very little contact between him and Rodney. Years ago, fifteen or sixteen at least, some of Rodney’s mail had been sent to his address by mistake. He had simply sent it on. Communications from the registrar at the time of the marriage to Wendy, Wexford thought. Howard Williams was also a salesman and on 15 April he had been in Ireland on business for his firm.

Joy hadn’t told him of his brother’s death. He had seen it in the papers and seemed to have reacted with calm indifference.

Wendy Williams’s home was on the outskirts of Pomfret and a mile from the Harmers’ shop. Had the relative nearness of his in-laws to his second and bigamous home worried Williams? Had he only agreed to buy a house there to placate Wendy or gratify some wish of hers? Or did he see this sort of risk as just part of the tightrope walk?

Between the estate and the nucleus of the town, that which not long ago was the town, lay the sports grounds of the Haldon Finch Comprehensive School, playing fields, tennis courts, fives courts, running track. The Haldon Finch, though new and an example of the new education with its two thousand pupils of both sexes housed in no less than six buildings, was as much ‘into’ games as any public school of the past. You might get ten O-levels but you were nothing if you weren’t good at games.

At 5.30 in the afternoon twelve girls were playing tennis on the courts adjacent to Procter Road.

‘It must be a match with another school,’ Burden said. ‘They start after school’s finished.’

He and Wexford were in the car, on their way to see Veronica Williams. Donaldson had taken a short cut, or at least a traffic-avoiding cut, and they had found themselves amid this complex of sports fields.

‘We’ll get out and watch for a minute or two.’

Burden got out, though demurring.

‘It makes me feel funny standing about watching girls.

I mean, you ask yourself—they ask themselves—what sort of blokes would do that?’

‘What would you think if you saw two middle-aged women watching young men playing squash?’

Burden looked sideways at him.

‘Well, nothing, would I? I mean, I’d think they were their mothers or just women who liked watching sport.’

‘Exactly. Doesn’t that tell you something? Two things? One is that, whatever the women’s movement says, there is a fundamental difference between men and women in their attitude to sex, and the other that this is an area in which women might claim—if it’s occurred to them—to be superior to us.’

‘It’s changing though, you have to admit. Look at all those clubs up north where men do strips for women audiences.’

‘The attitude is still different. Men go to strip shows and gawp in a sort of seething silence.’

‘Don’t women?’

‘Apparently women laugh,’ said Wexford.

One of the tennis players was Eve Freeborn. He spotted her from the purple slick in her hair. Her partner was a thin dark girl, their opponents a big heavily built blonde and another thin dark girl, this one wearing glasses. This four was on the court nearest to the road. Wexford could see enough of the other two courts and the other four couples only to be sure that Sara Williams was not among them. Sara didn’t attend the Haldon Finch, of course that would have been too great a risk even for Rodney Williams—but if this was a match six of the girls must come from another school. Seated on the three umpire chairs were three young women who had the look of games teachers.

He was aware at once that no one was playing very well. Had the standard deteriorated since the days when he had watched Sylvia and Sheila playing tennis? No, it wasn’t that. It was television. These days you saw tennis played on TV. Top championships week after week, it seemed, here or in Europe or in America, and it spoiled you for the real thing, the local article. A pity really. It made you irritated at how often they missed the ball. Eve Freeborn had a good hard service. She would have served aces—only they were always on the wrong side of the line. Her opponent in the glasses was the worst player of the twelve, slow on her feet with a weak service and a way of scooping the ball up into the air, making it easy prey for Eve’s slamming racket.

‘Two match points,’ said Burden, who had been attending more closely to the progress of the set.

Eve served a double fault. One match point. She served again, weakly, and the blonde shot it back like an arrow down the tramlines. The umpire announced deuce. Eve served another double fault.

‘Van out,’ said Wexford.

‘My God, but that shows your age. That’s what they said at tennis parties in the thirties.’

The umpire corrected him by saying crisply that the score was ‘advantage Kingsmarkham’. So it was Kings mar kham High who were the visitors here, once a grammar school, now private and fee-paying, no longer state aided.

Kingsmarkham won the game. They changed ends, the girls paused by the umpire’s chair and wiped faces and arms, drank Coke out of cans. Eve was standing only a few yards from Wexford. The little flame-coloured badge he had till now seen only as an orange spot near the neckline of her white tee-shirt showed itself at closer quarters to be a badge. He could make out spread wings on it and the letters ARRIA. Eve didn’t or wouldn’t look at him. Perhaps he wasn’t recognizable out of his office, in shirtsleeves. He peered more closely. The umpire got down from her chair and came to the wire fence. She was a stocky, muscular young woman with a cross face and flashing eyes. In a voice full of crushed ice she said, ‘Was there something you wanted?’

Wexford inhibited all the possible replies, improper, provocative, even mildly lecherous, that sprang to mind. He was a policeman. Anyway, Burden got in first with the flasher’s classic caught-before-the-act answer.

‘We were just looking.’

‘Well, perhaps you’d like to get on with whatever you’re supposed to be doing.’

‘Move along, Mike,’ said Wexford.

They went quickly to the car. The games mistress glared after them.

‘Do they still call them that?’

‘Call them what? Games mistresses?’ Burden was silent for a moment. Then he said, screwing up his face, Til tell you when my new daughter’s eleven. If she gets to exist. If she gets to be eleven. If she and I are together when she does.’

‘It’s not as bad as that.’

‘No? Maybe not. Maybe it’s she and I that’ll be together and not Jenny and I.’

Things must be bad with Burden for him to burst out with that in Donaldson’s hearing. Not that Donaldson would say a word. But he would hear and he would think. Wexford said nothing. He watched Burden’s face close up, the eyes grow dull and the mouth purse, the frown that was hardly ever absent re-establish itself in a deep double ridge. The car drew away. He looked behind him and saw Eve leaping to achieve her best volley of the match.

 ‘Veronica was supposed to be playing in a tennis match,’ said Wendy Williams, ‘but of course she was too upset. She hasn’t been to school today and I had to take the day off. I had to tell her her father had another wife and family. It was bad enough telling her he was dead.’ The second Mrs Williams, whom Wexford had at first thought of as rather sweet and gentle, he now saw had other sides to her nature, among them a rather unpleasant habit of laying the blame for her misfortunes on whomsoever else might be present.

‘I told her everything and at first she wouldn’t speak and then she became very distressed.’ The soft little voice trickled round the phrases. The eyes opened wide and wistful, like a Pear’s Soap child seeing distant angels. Wexford had the disturbing thought that perhaps she had cultivated all this because Williams had fancied little girls. ‘You’ll be gentle with her, won’t you? You’ll remember she’s only sixteen? And it’s not just that she’s lost her father, it’s worse than that.’

No question here of being sent up to the girl’s bedroom. Veronica would come down. And Wendy would be there. He supposed Veronica must have been the missing tennis player for whom the dark girl not wearing glasses had substituted. While he was speculating Veronica came in, walking diffidently, a dead look still on her face. She had been crying but that was a long while ago now. Her eyes wre dry and the lids pale, but a puffiness remained. Nevertheless she had dressed herself carefully for this encounter, as had her mother. Such things, which would have been lost on many men, never escaped Wexford. Wendy was in a black cotton dress with big sleeves that was a little too becoming to qualify as true mourning and Veronica in a pink pleated skirt, sweat shirt with a gold V on it and pink and white running shoes. Probably Wendy got their clothes from Jickie’s at a discount.

‘This is Chief Inspector Wexford and Inspector Burden, darling. They want to ask you one or two questions. Nothing difficult or complicated. They know what a bad shock you’ve had. And I shall be here all the time.’

For God’s sake, she’s not ten, Wexford thought. The girl’s dull staring look disconcerted him.

‘I’m sorry about your dad, Veronica,’ he began. ‘I know you’re feeling unhappy and you’d probably like to be left alone. But your mother’s told you what’s happened. Your father isn’t simply dead. He was killed. And we have to find out who killed him, don’t we?’ A not unfamiliar doubt assailed him. Did they? Cui bono? Who would be satisfied, avenged, recompensed? He was a policeman and it wasn’t for him to think such thoughts. Not a hint of them was in his tone. He looked at the girl and wondered what had been going on in her mind all those weeks her father was missing. Had she believed, like her mother, that he was with another woman? Or had she accepted his absence as she must have accepted all his other absences when he was allegedly away travelling for his firm or paying filial visits in Bath? She was no longer looking at him but down at the floor, her head drooping like a tired flower on a stalk.

‘Do you think we could go back to April the fifteenth?’ he said. ‘It was a Thursday. Your mother expected your father home that evening but she had to stay on late at work. You were here though, weren’t you?’

The ‘yes’ came very quietly. He might not have understood it for what it was if she hadn’t nodded as well.

‘What did you do? You came home from school when at four?’ He too was talking to her as if she were ten, but something in her attitude, her bowed head, feet crossed, hands in lap, seemed to invite it. Again that nod, the head lifted a little to make it. ‘And then what happened? What sort of time did you expect your father to come?’

She murmured that she didn’t know.

‘We never knew what time to expect him,’ Wendy said. ‘We never knew. It might have been any time.’

‘And did he come?’ said Wexford.

‘Of course he didn’t! I’ve told you.’

‘Please, Mrs Williams, let Veronica answer.’

The girl was shy, nervous, perhaps also unhappy. She was certainly in shock still. But suddenly she made an effort. It was as if she saw that there was no help for it, she was going to have to talk, she might as well get it over.

Sara’s tortoiseshell brown eyes looked into his and Sara’s Primavera lips parted with a quiver.

‘I had tea. Well, a Coke and some stuff Mummy left me in the fridge.’ Yes, Wendy for all her own youth was the kind of woman who would be smotheringly protective, even to the extent of preparing meals in advance for a sixteen-year-old as if she were an invalid. Veronica said, ‘I’d asked my friend round—the one whose place I was at when you came before—but she rang up and said she couldn’t come. She said I could go to her.’

‘But you wanted to wait in for your father?’

She was no Sara, no Eve Freeborn. She turned her head and looked to her mother for help. It came, as no doubt it always did.