A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

when he was privately considering trying to get hold of his son in Tenerife, that he disliked Adam and would have been pleased to spoil his holiday. Instead, he rationalized his thoughts and justified himself. Adam probably—indeed, almost certainly—knew nothing about the find in the pinewood, but Adam had once owned the house and thus taken on a responsibility. He could not shed that responsibility just because he had sold the place. Lewis would have agreed with Oscar Wilde that our past is what we are. We cannot rid ourselves of it. Therefore it was Adam’s duty to come home and face the music, even though this might be no more than a short blast on a tin whistle.
    But he had no precise idea where Adam was and he did not think Adam’s travel agent (a personal friend of the young Verne-Smiths) would tell him. Some excuse would be made for not telling him. Lewis’s bark, anyway, was always worse than his bite. He had virtually no bite, as he had once overheard Adam say to Bridget, and heard it with helpless chagrin.
    “A bloody good thing or our childhood would have been a misery instead of just a bore.”
    Lewis walked into his local police station in Edgware on Monday morning. They seemed surprised to see him but not astonished. The Suffolk police had begun hunting up previous owners of Wyvis Hall and they had been alerted that a Verne-Smith lived in their area. There were, after all, only two in the London phone directory.
    This might be a bonus. He was asked to wait and then shown into a room where a detective sergeant prepared to take a statement from him. With busy pomposity Lewis dictated it to a typist and would have gone on and on had he not been diplomatically restrained.
    “Wyvis Hall, Nunes, Suffolk, and the twenty acres of land surrounding it were the property, through his marriage, of my uncle Hilbert Verne-Smith. They came into the possession of my son Hilbert John Adam Verne-Smith under my uncle’s will, bypassing myself, though my son was no more than nineteen at the time of my uncle’s death. Being an undergraduate at the time, my son naturally never considered actually residing in the house. He was in agreement with my suggestion that the property be sold, and before he returned to college in the autumn of 1976, he took my advice and placed house and lands in the hands of a real estate agent.
    “Country properties were not selling well at the time. Forty-five thousand pounds was the asking price, and I was not surprised that the sale, so to speak, hung fire. However, in the spring of 1977 an offer was made which my son accepted. This sale later fell through and it was not until the following August that Wyvis Hall was finally sold to a Mr. and Mrs. Langan for the much improved figure of fifty-one thousand nine hundred ninety-five pounds.
    “As far as I know, my son’s personal acquaintance with Wyvis Hall was confined to my uncle’s lifetime when I, my wife, and son and daughter frequently stayed with him. After my uncle’s death in April 1976 he visited Wyvis Hall on perhaps two, or at the most three, separate occasions simply for the purpose of looking it over and reaching a decision about the disposal of furniture and effects.
    “I suppose it is possible that squatters or other vagrants took possession of the house between the time of my uncle’s death and the sale of the property. Certainly my son never rented it or allowed anyone to occupy it on either a temporary or permanent basis.
    “My son is at present on holiday in Tenerife with his wife and daughter. I cannot say precisely when I expect him to return, though I should suppose in about a week from now.”
    It was all very small and quiet and low key. The snippet in Rufus’s Monday morning newspaper measured just an inch in depth. It answered the question he had asked himself and told him that the bones of a very young child had been found as well as those of a young woman. This was not a shock. How could it be otherwise, since