A New Lease of Death by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

come the greatest blessings of civilized life: brains, advanced education, beauty, friendship with people like this vicar, an engagement to this vicar’s son.
    Wexford cast his mind back to the first of only three encounters with Mrs Painter. A quarter to eight it had been on that Sunday in September. He and the sergeant with him had knocked on the door at the foot of the coach house stairs and Mrs Painter had come down to let them in. Whatever might have been fashionable in London at that time, the young women of Kingsmarkham were still doing their hair in a big pile on the forehead with tight curls falling to the shoulders. Mrs Painter was no exception. Hers was naturally fair, her face was powdered and her mouth painted diffidently red. Respectable provincial matrons did not go in for eye make-up in 1950 and Mrs Painter was of all things respectable. There seemed to be very little else to her. On her dry fine skin lines had already begun to form, little indentations which marked a regular prudish pursing of the lips, a setting of the chin that accompanied an outraged flounce.
    She had the same attitude to the police as others might have to bugs or mice. When they came upstairs she alternated her replies to their questions with reiterated remarks that it was a disgrace to have them in the house. She had the blankest, most obtuse blue eyes he had ever seen on anyone. At no time, even when they were about to take Painter away, did she show the least pity or the least horror, only this fixated dread of what people would think if they found the police had been questioning her husband.
    Perhaps she had not been so stupid as he had thought . Somewhere in that pretty respectable mouse and the great hunk of sub-humanity, her husband, must have been the spring from which their daughter drew her intelligence. ‘Quite an intelligent girl,’ Archery had said casually. Good God, thought Wexford, remembering how he had boasted when his own daughter got eight O Level passes. Good God! What were Modern Greats, anyway? Were they the same as Mods and did that mean Modern Languages? He had a vague idea that this might be the esoteric and deliberately deceptive name given to philosophy and Political Economy. He wouldn’t show his ignorance to Archery. Philosophy! He almost whistled. Painter’s daughter reading – yes, that was the term, reading – philosophy! It made you think all right. Why, it made you doubt …
    ‘Mr Archery,’ he said, ‘you’re quirte sure this
is
Herbert Arthur Painter’s girl?’
    ‘Of course I’m sure, Chief Inspector. She told me.’ He looked almost defiantly at Wexford. Perhaps he thought the policeman would laugh at his next words. ‘She is as good as she is beautiful,’ he said. Wexford’s expression remained unaltered. ‘She came to stay with us at Whitsun. It was the first time we’d seen her, though naturally our son had written to us and told us about her. We took to her at once.
    ‘Chief Inspector, times have changed since I was at college. I had to face the possibility that my son would meet some girl at Oxford, perhaps want to marry her at an age when I’d thought of myself as still a boy and when Orders were a lifetime away. I’d see my friends’ children marry at twenty-one and I was prepared to try and manage something for him, give him something to start life on. All I hoped was that the girl would be someone we could like and understand.
    ‘Miss Kershaw – I’ll use the name if you don’t mind – is just what I would have chosen for him myself, beautiful, graceful, well-mannered, easy to talk to. Oh, she does her best to hide her looks in the uniform they all wear nowadays, long shaggy hair, trousers, great black duffel coat – you know the kind of thing. But they all dress like that. The point is she can’t hide them.
    ‘My wife is a little impulsive. She was hinting about the wedding before Theresa had been with us for twenty-four hours. I found it hard to understand why