An Unkindness of Ravens (24 page)

‘The lines I’m thinking along,’ said Wexford, ‘are that Paulette Harmer procured the Phanodorm with which Rodney Williams was sedated. She was in a position to do that, she could easily have done it. I’m wondering if she lost her nerve and told someone—well, Joy—she was going to admit it before we found out.’

‘Of course, there’s another possibility ... ‘ Burden left the suggestion suspended.

Wexford looked abstractedly out of the window. It was time to go home but he had no inclination to go. The weather, the atmosphere, the late day, hung heavy with expectation. The thunder, of course, was a threat in itself, a sign of imminent storm, yet it seemed to contain some kind of emotional menace as well, as of looming tragedy.

Tell me about Kitman,’ Wexford said. ‘In detail.’ Burden had already given him an outline of his talk with the painter.

‘He started doing that job for Wendy on April the fourteenth. There was paper on the walls, he said, and he had a job stripping it off. He was doing it all through the fourteenth and the fifteenth and he still hadn’t finished by the time he knocked off on the fifteenth.’

‘Should have used Sevensmith Harding’s Sevenstarker, shouldn’t he?’ said Wexford and quoting, ‘ “The slick, sheer, clean way to strip your walls.” ‘

‘Maybe he did. He says the room was still furnished but he had covered the pieces of furniture up with his own dustsheets. When he came back in the morning—the morning of Friday the sixteenth, that is—some of the sheets were off and folded up. But that was also on the morning of the fifteenth and other mornings, I gather. Wendy and Veronica were to some extent still living in that room.’

‘Did he notice anything else that Friday morning?’

‘A stain on the wall is what we want, isn’t it? A great bloodstain? And blood all over his dustsheets? There wasn’t anything like that or if there was he didn’t notice or can’t remember. The walls were splashed and marked and patchy anyway, you can imagine. And on the sixteenth he covered up whatever might have been there by putting his first coat of paint on. Sevenstar emulsion, no doubt. One thing he did notice, though, and I didn’t ask him about this, he volunteered it. Apparently it’s been vaguely preying on his mind ever since. One of the dustsheets wasn’t his.’

‘What?’

‘Yes. I thought that’d make you sit up. He has a few dustsheets he takes about with him. Some of them are old bed sheets and there are a couple of curtains and a candlewick bedspread too. Well, according to him, when he left on the fifteenth all seven of his sheets were covering the furniture and part of the carpet. Next morning he came in to find that three of the sheets had been taken off the furniture and were folded up on the floor. He thought nothing much of it but later he noticed that one of the folded sheets wasn’t his. It was newer than his and in better condition.’

‘Did he ask Wendy about it?’

‘He says he did. On the Saturday. She told him she knew nothing about it. And what did it matter to him, after all? He had the right number of dustsheets. You don’t go to the police because someone has taken one of your dust sheets and substituted another. But he wondered about it, he says. It niggled him is the way he puts it. Are we going to have those two women back?’

‘Of course we are.’

It was Friday, the last Friday in the month. ARRIA met on the last Friday of the month, Wexford thought. No, the last Thursday. It was two months ago yesterday that he had gone to the Freeborns’ house and interrupted a meeting.

He picked up the phone and spoke to John Harmer. Paulette’s father was anxious now, no longer calm and scathing. He said his wife was asleep. Heavily sedated, Wexford guessed.

‘The place is crawling with police,’ said Harmer.

Wexford replied dryly, ‘I know.’

He thought it an unfortunate way of describing the initial search he had mounted in the environs of the Harmers’ home. The man’s breathing at the other end of the line was audible. His voice had been rough and shaky. If insulting the police helped him, well ...

‘I can’t tell you I don’t think this a serious cause for concern, Mr Harmer. I’m very sorry. I think you should prepare yourself for bad news. Perhaps it would be best to say nothing to your wife as yet.’

‘I’m not likely to wake her up and tell her you think her only child’s dead, am I?’

Wexford said a polite goodbye and rang off. Harmer’s rudeness gratified him a little. It was more than excusable in the circumstances and at least it showed Harmer wasn’t the unfeeling husband he had thought him. Tomorrow morning they would widen the search for Paulette. By then he might have some idea of where and how to widen it.

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 button-through 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 grey 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 putdown.

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 any more. 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 you 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, ‘y°u’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 grey, 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.