An Unkindness of Ravens by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

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    The wardrobe contained Joy’s clothes, a collection that had an unwashed, uncleaned smell about it with a whiff of camphor and some kind of disinfectant. Rodney Williams’s
          clothes were in the cupboard. An overcoat, a sheepskin jacket, a plastic mac, two hip-length showerproof jackets, a shabby sports jacket and a new one, four suits, two pairs of slacks. All the clothes were good, all of much better quality than Joy’s. Not a large wardrobe, Wexford thought, looking into the linings of coats and feeling in pockets. In the side compartments were underwear, pyjamas, on the floor three pairs of shoes and a pair of sandals. Whatever Rodney Williams had spent his surplus money on it wasn’t clothes. Unless he had taken more with him than Joy or Sara knew. Maybe he had secreted a couple of bulging suitcases in Greta’s boot during the course of the day.
    The dining room, you could see, they hardly ever used. A light-coloured polished table stood in the dead centre of it with four light-coloured wood chairs with moquette seats around it. A sideboard with an empty Capo da Monte bowl on it nearly filled one wall and opposite this was a mahogany roll-top desk, perhaps a hand-down from a parent and certainly the nicest piece of furniture in the house. French windows, at which hung curtains of mustard-coloured rep —a favourite shade with Joy Williams—gave onto the back garden, a quarter acre of grass surrounded by close-board fencing and relieved by two small apple trees on which the blossom glimmered palely in the dusk. It didn’t look as if the grass, several inches long now,                         had been mown since Williams did it five weeks before.
    The desk wasn’t locked. Wexford rolled back the top. There wasn’t much inside. Writing paper, not the headed kind, envelopes, a bottle of ink in a cardboard box from which it had never been removed and never would be, a box of drawing pins, a glass jar of gum, a roll of Scotch tape. In one of the drawers was nothing but old Christmas cards, in the other a receipted electricity bill, a pocket calculator and a broken ballpoint pen.
    If Williams had meant to go away for good wouldn’t he have taken his passport?
    He looked through the pigeonholes but found no cheque books, used or in use. Joy probably kept hers in her handbag. He went back to her. She was still watching television and now the programme was the everlasting serial Runway in which his daughter Sheila played the stewardess heroine. Had, in fact, played her for the last time the previous week. But this was a secret known to no one but her own family as yet. No newspaper had so far got hold of the story that a major air disaster would in the autumn end the career of Stewardess Charlotte Riley for ever.
    Joy Williams didn’t know it. If she knew Sheila was his daughter—and surely she must—she gave no sign. He had the curious experience of standing beside her while they both watched his daughter attempting to placate an ill tempered passenger. Then he did what Crocker recommended—or nearly so. If he didn’t go so far as to pull out the plug he did switch off the set. She blinked at him.
    ‘Does your husband possess a typewriter, Mrs Williams?’
    ‘A typewriter? No.’
    ‘Is he still taking Mandaret?’
    She nodded, looking at the blank screen as if she expected it spontaneously and without benefit of electricity to spring into cinematic life.
    ‘It’s a form of methyldopa, isn’t it? A drug for high blood pressure?’
    ‘He’s had blood pressure for two or three years.’
    ‘I found an empty Mandaret container in his bedside cupboard. I suppose he took a supply with him?’
    ‘He wouldn’t forget them. He didn’t like to miss a day on them. He always took one when he got up and one with his tea.’
    ‘I take it he had a bag with him? A suitcase? Something to put his clothes in?’
    Again she simply nodded.
    ‘What was he dressed