An Unkindness of Ravens (3 page)

‘It’s you,’ said Gardner, smiling.

‘Yes, I expect it is. Somebody has given me the wrong end of the stick. Am I to take it then that Williams wasn’t one of your reps and didn’t cover the Suffolk area for you?’

‘He was once. He did once. Up till five years ago. We kept to our customary policy and when our former marketing manager took early retirement due to a heart condition, we promoted Rod Williams.’

‘As far as his wife knows he’s still a rep. That is, he’s still spending half his time selling up in Suffolk.’

Gardner’s eyebrows went up. He gave a twisted grin. ‘His private life is no affair of mine.’

‘Nor mine.’

It was Gardner who changed the subject. He began talking about his eldest daughter who was getting married in the late summer. Wexford finally parted from him with a promise to be in touch, to ‘get Dora to give Pam a ring and fix something up’. Driving home to Kingsmarkham, he thought for a while about Rodney Williams. There had been no room in his own marriage for alibis. He wondered what it would be like to have a marriage in which a permanent, on-going, five-year-long alibi existed as an integral part of life. Unthinkable. Unimaginable. He stopped trying to identify and thought about it with detachment.

What had happened perhaps was that five years ago Williams had met a girl with whom he wanted to spend time without ending his marriage. Keeping his promotion a secret from his wife would have been a way of achieving this. Probably the girl lived in Myringham. While Joy Williams believed her husband was staying at a motel outside Ipswich he was in reality seeing this other girl, no doubt sharing her home and doing his nine-to-five job at Sevensmith Harding in Myringham.

It was the sort of situation some men chuckle over. Wexford wasn’t one of them. And there was another aspect, one that few men would find funny. If Williams hadn’t told his wife about his promotion he presumably also hadn’t told her about the considerable increase in salary that went with it. Still, there was no more mystery. Williams had written to the company. Joy had phoned with excuses. Back in Alverbury Road Williams was still perhaps managing to shore up a few fragments of deceit against discovery.

 It was nine at night and he was still in his office, going through for the tenth time the statements he had taken for the preparation of a case of fraud against one Francis Wingrave Adams. He still doubted whether they would constitute a watertight case and so did counsel representing the police, though both knew he was guilty. On the final stroke of nine—St Peter’s clock had a dead sound too, like St Mary Woolnoth’s—he put the papers away and set off to walk homewards.

Lately he had taken to walking to and from work. Dr Crocker recommended it, pointing out that it was less than half a mile.

‘Hardly worth it then,’ Wexford said.

‘A couple of miles’ walk a day could make a difference of ten years’ life to you.’

‘Does that mean that if I walked six miles a day I could prolong my life by thirty years?’

The doctor had refused to answer that one. Wexford, though feigning to scoff, had gone some way towards obeying him. Sometimes his walk took him down Tabard Road past Burden’s bungalow, sometimes along Alverbury Road where the Williams family lived, and there was an occasional longer route along one of the meadow footpaths. Tonight he intended to drop in and see Burden for a final assessment of the Adams business.

But now he began to feel that there was very little left to say about this man who had conned an elderly woman out of 20,000 pounds penceHe wouldn’t talk about that. Instead he would try to get out of Burden what was happening in his life to account for his depression.

The Burdens still lived in the bungalow Burden had moved into soon after his first marriage where the garden after twenty years and more still had an immature look and the ivy which tried to climb up the house had been ruthlessly cut back with secateurs. Only the front door changed. It had been all colours—Burden was a relentless decorator —but Wexford had liked the rose pink best. Now it was a dark greenish blue—Sevenshine Oriental Peacock probably. Above the door, now dusk had come, the porch light was on, a lantern of leaded lights in the shape of a star.

Jenny came to let him in. She was halfway through her pregnancy now and ‘showing’, as the old wives say. Instead of a smock she wore a full-sleeved, square-necked dress with a high waist, like the one the woman is wearing in Vermeer’s The Letter. She had let her golden-brown hair grow and it hung to her shoulders. But, for all that, Wexford was shocked by her appearance. She looked drawn and dispirited.

Burden, having years ago agreed to stop calling Wexford ‘sir’, now called him nothing at all. But Jenny called him Reg. She said, ‘Mike’s in the living room, Reg,’ and added in a way quite unlike her usual self, ‘I was just going to bed.’

He felt constrained to say he was sorry for calling so late, though it was only twenty past nine. She shrugged and said it didn’t matter and she said it in a way which seemed to imply that nothing much mattered. He followed her into the room where Burden was.

On the middle cushion of the three-seater settee Burden sat reading Police Review, Wexford would have expected Jenny to have been sitting beside him but she hadn’t been. Beside a chair at the far end of the room lay her book face downwards and a piece of white knitting that had a look about it of the knitter’s having no enthusiasm for her task. In a glass vase on the windowsill dying wallflowers stood in three inches of water.

‘Have a drink,’ said Burden, laying down his magazine. ‘There’s beer. There is beer, isn’t there, Jenny?’

‘I don’t know. I never touch the stuff.’

Burden said nothing. He left the room, went out to the kitchen and came back with two cans on a tray. Burden’s first wife would have said, and Jenny once would have said, that they must have glasses to drink the beer out of. Jenny, languidly sitting down, picking up book and knitting but looking at neither, said, ‘You can drink it out of the can, can’t you?’

Wexford began to feel awkward. Some sort of powerful angry tension that existed between these two seemed to hang in the air like smoke, to get in his throat and give him a choky feeling. He snapped the top off his beer can. Jenny was holding the knitting needles in one clenched hand and staring at the wall. He had no intention of talking about Francis Wingrave Adams in her presence. On other occasions like this he and Burden would have gone into one of the other rooms. Burden sat on the settee, wearing his half-frown. He opened the beer can with a sharp, rough movement and a spurt of froth shot out across the carpet.

Three months before Wexford had seen Jenny soothing and practical when her husband had dropped, not a spoonful of beer, but a bowl of strawberry mousse on the paler newer carpet of the dining room. She had laughed and told him to leave the clearing up to her. Now she gave a cry of real distress and jumped up out of her chair.

‘All right,’ said Burden. ‘All right. I’ll do it. It’s nothing anyway. I’ll get a cloth.’

She burst into tears. She put one hand up to her face and ran out of the room. Burden followed her. That is, Wexford thought he had followed her but he came back almost immediately holding a floorcloth.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said on his hands and knees. ‘Of course it’s not the beer. It’s just any little thing sets her off. Take no notice.’ He lifted an angry face. ‘I’ve made up my mind I’m simply not going to take any notice any more.’

‘But if she’s not well, Mike

‘She is perfectly well.’ Burden got up and dropped the cloth onto the tiled kerb of the fireplace. ‘She is having an ideal trouble-free pregnancy. Why, she wasn’t even sick. When I remember what Jean went through .. . ‘ Wexford could hardly believe his ears. For a husband—and such a husband as Burden—to make that comparison! Burden seemed to realize what he had said and a dull flush crept across his face. ‘No, honestly, she’s perfectly fit, she says so herself. It’s simply neurotic behaviour.’

Wexford had sometimes thought in the past that if every instance diagnosed by Burden as neurotic were taken as sound, almost the entire population would have to be tranquillized, not to say confined in mental hospitals. He said, ‘The amniocentesis was all right, wasn’t it? They didn’t tell her something to worry her?’

Burden hesitated. ‘Well, as a matter of fact they did.’ He gave an ugly humourless laugh. ‘That’s just what they did. They told her something to worry her. You’ve hit the nail bang on the head. It doesn’t worry me and I’m the child’s father. But it worries her like hell and I’m the one who has to bear the brunt of it.’ He sat down and said very loudly, almost shouting, ‘I don’t want to talk about it anyway. I’ve said too much already and I’ve no intention of saying any more. I feel like learning a formula to explain my wife’s conduct and repeating it to people when they first come in the door.’

Wexford said quietly, ‘You can do it extempore for it is nothing but roaring.’

He got a glare for that. ‘I came to talk about Adams. Or are you too preoccupied with your domestic fracas to care?’

‘I told you, I’m simply not going to take any notice any more,’ said Burden, and they talked about Adams not very profitably for the next half-hour.

Dora was in bed when he got home, sitting up reading. While he undressed he told her about the Burdens.

‘They’re too old to have babies,’ was all she would say.

‘Flying in the face of nature, would you call it?’

‘You’d be surprised, my lad. I might. And by the way, Rod Williams hasn’t come back. I saw Joy and she hasn’t heard a word.’

‘But I had the distinct impression she’d phoned Sevensmith Harding,’ Wexford began.

‘You told her to, you mean. You told her to phone them and find out if they could tell her anything and she’s going to.’

That wasn’t what he had meant. He got into bed, sure now that he hadn’t heard the last of the Williams affair.

3

 For more than a couple of weeks now he had been keeping his eye on the dark blue Ford Granada parked outside his house in Arnold Road, Myringham. It had appeared there for the first time soon after Easter. Graham Gee couldn’t see it from his front windows nor, because of the tall lonicera hedge, from his front garden. He saw it when he drove his own car out of the entrance to his garage each morning and when he drove it in each afternoon at 5.30.

At first (he told the police) he thought it might have something to do with the boy opposite, the teenage son of the people in the bungalow. But it was too respectable a car for that. Well, it was then. Dismissing that theory, he wondered if it belonged to some commuter who was using Arnold Road as a station car park. Arnold Road wasn’t very near Myringham Southern Region Station, it was a good quarter of a mile away, but it was probably the nearest street to the station not clogged on both sides with commuters’ cars.

Graham Gee began to see the presence of the Ford Granada outside his gate as the thin end of the wedge. Soon there would be a hundred rail travellers’ cars parked in Arnold Road. He was not a commuter himself but a partner in a firm of accountants in Pomfret.

Arnold Road was known as a ‘nice neighbourhood’. The houses were detached, standing in large gardens. There weren’t any rough elements, there wasn’t any trouble, except perhaps for the theft of dahlias from someone’s front garden the previous autumn. So Graham Gee was surprised to notice one morning that the Granada’s hub caps had gone. Perhaps they had always been gone though, he couldn’t remember. Still, he knew the wheels hadn’t always been gone. The car hadn’t always been propped up on bricks. Dirty now, streaked with rain, it sat on its brick supports, looking as if it might after all be the property of the teenager opposite.

He still did nothing about it, though he knew by now that it was there all the time. It wasn’t driven there in the morning and taken away in the evening. For a week now it hadn’t been drivable. It took the smashing of a rear window to get him to do something.

The rear window had been broken, the front doors opened and the interior stripped. The radio had been removed, the headrests taken off the front seats, and something dug out of the dashboard, a clock perhaps. Though the boot was open, the thieves hadn’t thought it worth their while to help themselves to the snow shovel inside. Gee phoned the police.

 There was no need for the police to go through the procedure of tracing the driver through the Vehicle Licensing Department in Swansea, for the vehicle registration document was in the Granada’s glove compartment along with a road map of southern England, a ballpoint pen and a pair of sunglasses.

Vehicle registration documents have named on them the ‘keeper’ of the vehicle, not its owner, a fact which was also of assistance to the police. This one listed the keeper as Rodney John Williams of 31 Alverbury Road, Kingsmarkham.

 Why had Williams dumped the car in Arnold Road when Sevensmith Harding’s own car park was less than a quarter of a mile away behind the company’s High Street offices? That car park was never locked. It had no gates, only an opening in the fence and on the fence a notice requesting ‘unauthorized personnel’ not to park there.

‘I don’t understand it,’ Miles Gardner said. ‘Frankly, we’ve been wondering what to do about recovering the car but we don’t know where Williams is. He didn’t mention the car in his letter of resignation. Apparently, wherever he was when he first left, he’s no longer with his wife, otherwise we would have tackled her. He’s disappeared into thin air. It’s a bit much really, isn’t it? I gather the car’s in a state, not much more than a shell?’

‘The engine’s still there,’ said Wexford.

Gardner made a face. They were in his rather gloomy though luxurious office, a room not so much panelled as lined with oak, the decor dating from those between-wars days when hardwood was plentiful. None of your Sevenstar matt emulsion here, Wexford thought to himself.

There were more framed photographs than in the average elderly couple’s living room. On Gardner’s desk, placed to catch his eye every time he looked up, was a big one of tall Mrs Gardner and her three girls, all affectionate nestling and entwined arms. The walls were reserved for various groups and gatherings of men at company functions or on sporting occasions. One was of a cricket match with a tall gangling man going in to bat. Rodney Williams. The high forehead, slight concavity of features that would no doubt show more clearly in profile, the thin mouth stretched in a grin, were unmistakable.