No Man's Nightingale by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

gates. It’s not a thing one ought to say but you could usually pick out the middle-class mums from the working-class ones simply by the latter’s appearance, their size, their hair and those ubiquitous boots. Maxine Sams was the exception. You’d have taken her for a doctor’s wife. There, isn’t that an outrageous thing to say?’
    ‘Until she opened her mouth,’ said Burden. ‘What’s she been regaling you two with today?’
    They were round at the Wexfords’ partaking or due to partake of an Indian meal about to be brought to the door by a man on a bike from a takeaway purveyor called the Bombay Bicycle Club.
    ‘Not me,’ said Dora. ‘I wisely got out before she arrived.’
    ‘Well, you’ve heard about Dennis Cuthbert who told me nothing useful but a lot about his character. Maxine gave me a lot of useful stuff about Sarah Hussain. They may not be new to you, Mike, but I made notes of them after she’d gone in case they help.’
    Dora was making a face and on the point of banning shop when the doorbell rang, announcing the arrival of their food.
    ‘I don’t think it’s shop,’ Burden said, ‘but since we were on the subject of Jason Sams, once well known to the Mid-Sussex Constabulary but now a reformed character, I don’t suppose either of you have picked up anything about the rent he pays in these sessions you have with his mum.’
    ‘He lives in a council house, doesn’t he?’
    ‘Well, yes, Dora, he does. But it’s not his council house – that is, it was never allocated to him or to his grandfather or grandmother or to anyone who could legitimately have passed it on to him.’
    ‘What are you saying, Mike? That his landlord or landlady is a council tenant and letting his rented house off to Jason Sams? That’s illegal, isn’t it?’
    ‘It’s against the council’s rules. If you get found out doing it you can get evicted and of course your tenant too. And then the only roof over your head is a B & B. No doubt there are some who run an extra scam and are tenants of a council house that the council pays for as housing benefit and still rent it out while living elsewhere.’
    ‘Suppose you own the house under the right-to-buy provisions?’ Wexford asked.
    ‘In that case you can let it to whoever you like. Of course you can. It’s a free country.’
    ‘What are you going to do about it?’ said Dora.
    ‘Nothing. What can I do? It’s a matter for the council’s housing department.’
    ‘I suppose,’ said Wexford, ‘that he, whoever he is, could charge any rent he likes if the tenant is prepared to pay. Is it known who he is?’
    ‘“He”,’ said Burden, ‘is a woman called Diane Stow. She lives on the Costa del Sol with a man who’s made himself rich by dealing in prescription drugs. It’s him I’m interested in. She is quite comfortable enough not to need the rent from a Kingsmarkham council house.’
    ‘Right,’ said Wexford, ‘but how does she come to be, as I assume she is, the legitimate tenant of this council house?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ Burden spoke in the indifferent tone of one who no more cares than he knows. ‘She once lived in it, I suppose.’
    After that they ate their second course which was Dora’s home-made crème brûlée, and talked about their grandchildren, Burden’s daughter having just become the mother of a baby girl. But Wexford, five times a grandfather and getting rather blasé about it, let his thoughts wander to Sarah Hussain. The answer to the question which was starting to perplex him was probably that Clarissa’s father was a man Sarah had simply had an affair with. What else? Her husband had died, she had met someone she might have considered marrying and as time went on she realised that if she wanted a child there was no time to waste. The engagement or whatever it was didn’t work out, there was no marriage but she had her daughter. It seemed reasonable enough and a lot of women did it but it didn’t quite fit in with