HER HAIR WAS THE SAME PALE FUDGE COLOR, not curly but not quite straight either, the tips just touching her shoulders. Brown eyes, ellipse eyebrows, small straight nose, fine white skin sprinkled with freckles, Rodney Williams’s high domed forehead, and his small narrow mouth. But instead of jeans she wore a summer dress with white tights and white sandals. She stood in the doorway looking surprised at the sight of them, a little more than just startled.
Wendy Williams was taken aback.
In a flustered way she said, “This is my daughter Veronica,” and to the girl, “You’re home early.”
“Not much. It’s after nine.”
The voice was her mother’s, soft and slightly affected, but without the lisp. It was quite unlike Sara’s abrupt, uninflected tones. Recovering poise Wendy said to her, “These are police officers. They’ll only be a few minutes.” She lied fluently, “It’s to do with trouble at the shop. You won’t mind leaving us alone for a bit, will you, darling?”
“I’m going to have a bath anyway.”
Closing the door with the sort of precision her mother might use, she went off up the spiral staircase that was the core of this house.
“I don’t know why she’s so offhand with me lately. This past year …”
Wexford said, “You haven’t told her?”
“I haven’t seen her. She always goes to her friend’s straight from school on a Tuesday. Or so she says, she’s so secretive …”
“Which school, Mrs. Williams?”
“Haldon Finch Comprehensive. I’ll tell her about her father after you’ve gone. I suppose I shall have to tell her what he was—a bigamist, with another wife somewhere. It won’t be easy. I don’t know if you appreciate that.”
Wexford, when interrogating, would allow any amount of digression but never total distraction. Those he questioned were obliged to come back to the point sooner or later. It was hard on them, for often they believed they had escaped. The leash had snapped and freedom was surely there for the taking, but the hand always came down and snatched up the broken end.
“We were talking about this woman friend your husband had. He may have gone to her on the night he died.”
“I don’t know any more about her!”
Fear had come into her voice now. It was what many would have called caution or apprehensiveness, but it was really fear.
“You called her a girl. You implied a young girl.”
A panicky, jerky, rapid way of speaking—“A young, single girl, very young, that’s all I know. I told you, I don’t know any more!”
Wexford recalled the overtures Williams had once made to Sylvia. When Sylvia was fifteen. Was it something like that that Wendy had implied when she asked so pathetically if she didn’t still look young? That she at thirty-two to his forty-eight might not be young enough for him?
“Do you mean she’s young enough to live at home with her parents?”
A nod, painful and perplexed.
“What else do you know of her, Mrs. Williams?”
“Nothing. I don’t know any more. Do you think I wanted him to talk to me about her?”
That was reasonable enough. At first he thought she was lying when she said she was ignorant of the girl’s name. Now he was less sure. How often had he heard people say, “If my husband (my wife) were unfaithful to me I wouldn’t want to know,” and when they were forced to know, “I don’t want to hear anything about it”? The knives of jealousy are honed on details.
The question he sensed she would hate but which must be asked he had saved till last.
“How did you know it was happening at all? How did you know of her existence?”
He had been wrong. She didn’t mind. She didn’t mind because her answer was a lie that she had been rehearsing in her mind, silently and busily while they talked, waiting for the past half-hour for the question to come.
“I had an anonymous letter.”
Eventually he would get at the truth. It could wait.
“Now, Mrs. Williams, your daughter …”
“What about her?” Very quick and defensive.
“I shall want to talk to Veronica.”
“Oh no, not that. Please.”
“When you have told her and she has had a day or two to get over the shock.”
“But why?”
“Her father has been murdered. He was due to come here and she was here, alone here. It’s possible he did come and she was the last person to see him alive.”
“He didn’t come here. She would have told me.”
“We’ll see, Mrs. Williams. We shall also want to look over this house, particularly at any of your husband’s personal property.”
“WE KEEP COMING BACK TO THESE YOUNG girls,” Burden said. “And to ravens with women’s faces.”
“That too. Budd and Wheatley were both attacked by a young girl—not very seriously, either of them, but they were attacked and the assault was with a knife. Rodney Williams liked young girls—I mean, he seems especially to have liked them very young—and he had a very young girlfriend. He died as the result of a knife attack, he was stabbed to death. Now Wheatley says the girl who attacked him was wearing a white tee-shirt with a design on it of a sort of bird with a woman’s head …”
“And Sara Williams,” said Wexford, “possesses just such a tee-shirt and has a poster with a similar motif on her bedroom wall.”
“Does she? You’re kidding.”
“No. It’s true. And Eve Freeborn has a raven with a woman’s head tattooed or drawn on her left wrist, and since the sun came out, Mike, and women aren’t bundling themselves up in cardigans and jackets I’ve seen no less than five girls around Kingsmarkham and Pomfret wearing white tee-shirts with ravens with women’s faces on them. How about that?”
“God, and I thought we were really getting somewhere. It’s like that bit in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves when the woman says he’ll know the right oil jar because it’ll have a cross on it and when he gets there someone’s put crosses on all the oil jars.”
“You’ve been reading again. Or going to pantomimes. It looks to me as if these raven-happy pictures are the motif or symbol of some sort of society or cult. Latter-day anarchists or some sort of spurious freedom fighters.”
“Animal rights?” said Burden doubtfully.
“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. 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-story 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 agreed to buy a house there only 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 mistresses.
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 Kingsmarkham 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-colored 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 mistresses glared after them.
“Do they still call them games mistresses?”
Burden was silent for a moment. Then he said, screwing up his face, “I’ll 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 were 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, a sweatshirt 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 traveling 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 anytime.”
“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.
“Veronica had no need to wait in for Rodney. I’ve told you, we never really thought he’d come at all.”
“‘We,’ Mrs. Williams?”
“Well, I don’t really know what Veronica thought. I hadn’t said anything to her then about the possibility of our splitting up. I was waiting to see what would happen. But the point is Veronica had no need to wait in for him and I wouldn’t have … well, she’s got her own life to lead.”
What had she been going to say when she broke off and made that extraordinary statement about this little creature’s obviously nonexistent independence?
“You went out then?”
“I went to my friend’s. I didn’t stop there long. We played records. I wanted her to come out for a coffee but she couldn’t, she was baby-sitting with her brother. She’s got a brother who’s only two. That was why she couldn’t come over to me.”
“So you went back home. What time?”
“I didn’t go straight home. I had a coffee on my own at Castor’s. I got home about nine and Mummy came in ten minutes after.”
“You must have been disappointed your father wasn’t there.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t think about it,” and surprisingly, for this wasn’t really at issue, “I don’t mind being alone. I like it.”
“Well, my goodness,” said Wendy, not letting that one pass, “you’re never left alone if I can help it. You needn’t talk as if you’d been neglected.”
Wexford asked the name of the friend and was told it was Nicola Tennyson and given an address that was between here and the town center. No objection was put up by Wendy to their examining such of his personal property as Rodney Williams had in this house. It left Wexford with the feeling that this was because she rather wanted them to see over her house, its cleanliness, its elegant appointments, and the evidence of her skill as housekeeper.
Here, at any rate, was the rest of Williams’s wardrobe. It was interesting to observe how he had kept his more stylish and “in” clothes for this household. Jeans hung in the gilt-decorated white built-in cupboard, Westerner shirts, a denim suit, and another in a fashionably crumpled stone-colored linen mixture. There were two pairs of half-boots and a pair of beige kid moccasins. And the underwear was designed for a younger man than the part-time occupant of 31 Alverbury Road.
“He was two different men,” Wexford said.
“Perhaps three.”
“We shall see. At any rate he was two, one middle-aged, set in his ways, bored maybe, taking his family for granted, the other young still, even swinging—take a look at these underpants—making the grade with a young wife, living up to this little bandbox.”
Wexford looked around him at the room, thinking of Alverbury Road. There were duvets on the beds here, blinds at the windows, a white cane chair suspended from the ceiling, its seat piled with green, blue, and white silk cushions. And the bed was a six-foot-wide king-size.
“He probably called it the playpen,” said Burden pulling a face.
“Once,” said Wexford.
In this house Williams had had no desk, only a drawer in the gilt-handled white melamine chest of drawers. This had been Wendy’s house, no doubt about it, the sanctum where Wendy held sway. Girlish, fragile, soft-voiced though she might be, she had made this place her own, feminine and exclusive—exclusive in a way of Rodney Williams. He had been there on sufferance, Wexford sensed, his presence depending on his good behavior. And yet his behavior had not been very good even from the first. There had always been the traveling, the Bunbury of a mother, the long absences. So Wendy had made a home full of flowers and colors and silk cushions in which he was allotted small corners as if—unconsciously, he was sure it was unconsciously—she knew the day would come when it would be for herself and her daughter alone. Wexford looked inside the drawer but it told him little. It was full of the kind of papers he would have expected.
Except for Williams’s driving license with the Alverbury Road address.
“He was taking a risk leaving that about,” said Burden.
“Taking risks was his life. He took them all the time. He enjoyed the high wire. Anyway, suspicious wives read letters, not driving licenses.”
There were bills in the drawer, the carbons from credit-card chits, an American Express monthly account. Which address had that gone to? Yes, this one. It fitted somehow. Visa and Access were the workaday cards, American Express more cosmopolitan, more for the playboy. No doubt it was Wendy who paid the services’ bills from the joint account. There was none in the drawer, only a rates demand, a television rental account book, an estimate from Godwin and Sculp, builders, of Pomfret, dated 30 March, for painting the living room, and an invoice from the same firm (stamped Paid) for renewal of a bathroom cistern. Under this lot lay Rodney’s joint-account checkbook, a paying-in book for the joint account, and a small glass bottle, half full of tablets, labeled “Mandaret.”
On this the top floor of the house were two more bedrooms and a bathroom. Veronica’s room was neat as a pin, white with a good deal of broderie anglaise about it and owing much to those magazine articles prevalent in Wendy’s own childhood on how to make a dream bedroom for your daughter. No doubt poor Wendy had never had a dream bedroom of her own, Wexford thought, and he sensed that her youth had been nearer to that of Sara. No posters here, no home-made mobiles, and no books either. It was designed for a girl who would do nothing in it but sit in the window seat looking pensive and wearing white socks.
The spiral staircase, a contraption of hideous discomfort and danger to all but the most agile, went through the middle of the house like a screw in a press. Down on the ground floor was a shower room, a separate lavatory, the third door on that side opening into the integral garage, and at the end of the passage a room the width of the house that opened through French windows onto patio and garden roughly the size of a large dining table. The room, which might have been for dining in or as a study for Rodney Williams if he had been allowed one, was plainly devoted to Wendy’s interests. She had a sewing machine in it and a knitting machine, an ironing board set up with two irons on it, one dry and one steam, and there were clothes everywhere, neatly hung or draped, sheathed in plastic bags.
Mother and daughter were still sitting upstairs at the glass-topped table. Wendy had taken up some sewing, a handkerchief or possibly a tray-cloth into which she was inserting tiny stitches, her little finger crooked in the way it used to be said was vulgar to hold a teacup. Veronica nibbled at dry-roasted peanuts out of a foil packet. The dry kind it would be, the other sort tending to leave grease spots. They were both as tense as compressed springs, waiting for the police to go and leave them alone.
“Have you heard of a society or club called ARRIA?” Wexford said to Veronica.
The spring didn’t leap free of its bonds. There was no shock. Veronica merely nodded. She didn’t screw up the empty peanut packet but flattened it and began folding it very carefully, first into halves, then quarters.
“At school?”
She looked up. “Some of the girls in the sixth and seventh years belong to it.”
“But you don’t?”
“You have to be over sixteen.”
“Why girls?” he said. “Haldon Finch is co-ed. Don’t any boys belong?”
She was a normal teenager really. Underneath the prissy looks, the shyness, the Mummy’s girl air, she was one of them. The look she gave him seethed with their scorn for the cretinous incomprehension evinced by adults.
“Well, it’s all women, isn’t it? It’s for women. They’re—what d’you call it?—feminists, militant feminists.”
“Then I hope you’ll keep clear of it, Veronica,” Wendy said very quickly and sharply for her. “I hope you’ll have nothing to do with it. If there’s anything I really hate it’s women’s lib. Liberation! I’m liberated and look where it’s got me. I just hope you’ll do better than I have when the time comes and find a man who’ll really support you and look after you, a nice good man who’ll—who’ll cherish you.” Her lips trembled with emotion. She laid down her sewing. “I wasn’t enough of a woman for Rodney,” she said as if the girl wasn’t there. “I wasn’t enough of a girl. I got too hard and independent and—and mature, I know I did.” A heroic effort was made to keep the tears in, the break out of the voice, and a victory was won. “You just remember that, Veronica, when your turn comes.”
SERGEANT MARTIN WAS HANDLING THE COMPLAINT, though, as he told Wexford, he hadn’t much to go on. Nor had any harm been done—yet.
“A Ms. Caroline Peters, who’s a physical education instructor at the Haldon Finch Comprehensive,” Martin said. “Miz not Miss. She got very stroppy, sir, when I called her Miss. I called her an instructress too and had a job getting my tongue round it but that wasn’t right either. She says two men were hanging about watching the girls playing a tennis match. Acting in a suspicious manner, she says. Came in a car which was parked for the express purpose of them getting out to watch. Voyeurs she called them. Afterwards she asked the girls if any of them knew the men but they denied all knowledge.”
Thank you, Miss Freeborn, thought Wexford.
“Leave it, Martin. Forget it. We’ve better things to do.”
“Leave it altogether, sir?”
“I’ll handle it.” A note to the woman or a phone call explaining all, he supposed. She had a right to that. She was a good, conscientious teacher acting in a responsible manner. He mustn’t laugh—except later perhaps with Burden.
There had been much food for thought picked up on his visits to Liskeard Avenue. And there had been something to make him wonder, something that was neither a piece of information nor the germ of an idea but entirely negative.
Wasn’t it extraordinary that during those visits, those long talks, and during his initial interview with her, Wendy Williams had shown not the slightest interest in Rodney’s other family? She had asked not a single question about the wife she had supplanted but not replaced, nor about the children who were siblings by half-blood of her own Veronica. Because she was inhibited by intense jealousy? Or for some other reason more germane to this inquiry?