An Unkindness of Ravens by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

A12 which would take him to Ipswich.’
    ‘Why was he telling her the route? Would she be interested? I mean, wasn’t it the route he normally took?’
    ‘I said you didn’t know my father. I’d say for a start he wouldn’t be much concerned about the other person’s interest. Dad talks a lot about cars and driving, roads, that sort of thing. I’m not interested but he talks to me about it. The car’s a person to him, a woman, and she’s got a Christian name. He calls her Greta. Greta, the Granada, you see.’
    ‘So your father left and your mother went to Pomfret and you stayed here on your own studying?’
    Was he imagining that hesitation, that brief wary flare in her eyes?
    ‘That’s right. I don’t go out in the evenings at the moment. I haven’t time.’ She smiled again, this time with great artificiality. ‘I heard they’d found his car.’
    Tn the process of being dismembered for its wheels and its radio.’
    ‘Cannibalized,’ she said, and she laughed the way her mother did. ‘Poor old Greta.’
     Could he have a look round the rest of the house? Notably through Williams’s papers and clothes? Joy put up no objection. The television clack-clacked through the floor and the pop music thumped and droned through the wall. In the book of rules of human behaviour he kept in his head one of the first laws was the one about who got which bedroom. The British middle class mostly lived in three bedroorried houses, one big bedroom, one slightly smaller, one little. In a family of parents, son and daughter, the daughter invariably got the second bedroom and the son the tiny one, irrespective of seniority. It was one aspect of life (the women’s movement might have said if they’d noticed it) in which the female had the advantage over the male. Presumably it came about because girls from the first were conditioned into being more at home, more centred on home things and being confined within walls. In which case the women’s movement wouldn’t like it so much. But it was the girl in this household who had the smallest bedroom, even though her brother was now away most of the time. Of course, it might be that she had chosen this arrangement, but somehow he didn’t think so.
    He opened the door of the second bedroom and looked inside. There was a newish pine bedroom suite, two bright Afghan rugs, a fringed bedcover that was recognizably one of Marks and Spencer’s designs. It looked as if someone with not much taste or money had done her best to make a ‘nice’ room of it and the sole personal touch its occupant had contributed was to hang a map of the world on the wall opposite the bed.
    The main bedroom was like his own in size and proportions. The walls were even painted in the same colour as his own, Sevenstar emulsion Orange Blossom. There the resemblance ended. The Williamses slept in twin beds, each narrower than the standard three feet, he thought. He could tell hers was the one nearest the window by the nightdress case on it, quilted peach satin in the shape of a scallop shell. The rest of the furniture consisted of a wardrobe, dressing table, dressing-table stool, chest of drawers and two bedside tables all in some dark reddish wood with a matt finish and with rather bright gold chrome handles. There was also a built-in cupboard.
    Wexford looked first in the drawer of the bedside cabinet between Williams’s bed and the door. He found a box that had once held cufflinks but was now empty, a comb, a tube of antiseptic skin cream, an unused toothbrush, a packet of tissues, a tube of throat pastilles, two safety pins, several plastic collar stiffeners, a half-full bottle of nasal drops and an empty pill bottle labelled ‘Mandaret. One to be taken twice daily. Rodney Williams’.
    In the cupboard part of the cabinet were two paperback novels of espionage, an unused writing pad, a current British passport in the name of Mr R. J. Williams, a clean handkerchief initialled ‘R’ and two electric