Means Of Evil And Other Stories by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

seen her making her calls, and had sometimes wondered how district nurses could endure their jobs, the unremitting daily toil, the poor pay, the unsavoury tasks. Perhaps she felt the same about his. She was a fair, pretty woman, about thirty-five, overweight, with big red hands, who always looked tired. She looked tired now, though she hadn't long been back from two weeks' holiday. She was in her summer uniform, blue and white print dress, white apron, dark cardigan, small round hat and the stout shoes that served for summer and winter alike. Nurse Radcliffe. Judith Radcliffe.
   "Mr. Wexford?" she said. "Chief Inspector Wexford? Yes. I believe I used to look in on your daughter after she'd had a baby. I was doing my midwifery then. I can't remember her name but the baby was Benjamin."
   Wexford smiled and told her his daughter's name and wondered, looking at the bland faded blue eyes and the stolid set of the neck and shoulders, just how intelligent this woman was, how perceptive and how truthful. He pulled up one of the yellow chairs for her. His office was cheerful and sunny-looking even when the sun wasn't shining, not much like a police station.
   "Please sit down, Nurse Radcliffe," he said. "Sergeant Martin's given me some idea what you've come about."
   "I feel rather awful. You may think I'm making a mountain out of a molehill."
   "I shouldn't worry about that. If I do I'll tell you so and we'll forget it. No one else will know of it, it'll be between us and these four walls."
   At that she gave a short laugh. "Oh, dear, I'm afraid it's gone much further than that already. I've three patients in Castle Road and each one of them mentioned it to me. That's what Castle Road gossip is at the moment, poor old Mrs. Wrangton's death. And I just thought——well, you can't have that much smoke without fire, can you?"
   Mountains and molehills, Wexford thought, smoke and fire. This promised to be a real volcano. He said firmly, "I think you'd better tell me all about it."
   She was rather pathetic. "It's best you hear it from someone professional ." She planted her feet rather wide apart in front of her and leant forward, her hands on her knees. "Mrs. Wrangton was a very old woman. She was ninety-two. But allowing for her age, she was as fit as a fiddle, thin, strong, continent, her heart as sound as a bell. The day she died was the day I went away on holiday, but I was in there the day before to give her her bath—did that once a week, she couldn't get in and out of the bath on her own——and I remember thinking she was fitter than I'd seen her for months. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I came back from holiday and heard she'd had a stroke the next day."
   "When did you come back, Nurse Radcliffe?"
   "Last Friday, Friday the 16th. Well, it's Thursday now and I was back on my district on Monday and the first thing I heard was that Mrs. Wrangton was dead and suggestions she'd been——well, helped on her way." She paused, worked something out on her fingers. "I went away June 2nd, that was the day she died, and the funeral was June 7th."
   "Funeral?"
   "Well, cremation," said Nurse Radcliffe, glancing up as Wexford sighed. "Dr. Moss attended Mrs. Wrangton. She was really Dr. Crocker's patient, but he was on holiday too, like me. Look, Mr. Wexford, I don't know the details of what happened that day, June 2nd, not first-hand, only what the Castle Road ladies say. D'you want to hear that?"
   "You haven't yet told me what she died of."
   "A stroke——according to Dr. Moss."
   "I'm not at all sure," said Wexford dryly, "how one sets about giving someone a stroke. Would you give them a bad fright or push an empty hypodermic into them or get them into a rage or what?"
   "I really don't know." Nurse Radcliffe looked a little put out and as if she would like to say, had she dared, that to find this out was Wexford's job, not hers. She veered away from the actual death.