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

keep a letter as a bookmark, Wexford decided as he and Dora walked along York Street, unless you’ve answered it or intend to answer it. It would be a permanent reminder to you and make you feel guilty. Talking of which, though he wasn’t . . .
    ‘You’re very silent,’ Dora said. ‘Gibbon on your mind?’
    ‘I was thinking of Sarah Hussain. You went to church most Sundays. What kind of sermons did she preach?’
    ‘The controversial kind. There was one about her idea that royal family members shouldn’t wear military uniforms. I told you about it.’
    ‘Dennis Cuthbert told me about one in support of single parents and wasn’t there one advocating gay marriage?’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Dora. ‘Her idea was that – well, in everything, not only gay marriage – the important thing was love. That was a central tenet of Christianity, she said. “Little children, love one another”, which of course comes from the New Testament and there’s nothing about only heterosexuals loving one another. If the Church held on to that, she said, the Church and clerics, there wouldn’t be any banning of men marrying men and women women provided they loved each other.’
    ‘I don’t suppose her bishop was overjoyed at that.’
    ‘No, I gather she got a dressing-down.’
    Sylvia had cooked one of her father’s favourite dishes for lunch, a fish pie, and her elder son was at home to help him eat it. Always interested in the way families behave, the patterns they follow, Wexford had often noticed that a grown-up child, in his or her early twenties, say, will make a point of being present when grandparents come, make conversation with them and eat with them, but depart pretty fast after the meal is over, leaving Mother to explain the pressing business that has taken him away. So it was in Robin’s case, though he explained the business himself while Wexford listened politely. When his grandson had left and Dora gone upstairs to be shown a dress Sylvia had bought for someone’s wedding, he reflected that while Robin was obviously totally bored by his pursuits, so was he by Robin’s. Gibbon held no more interest for the grandson than recording the latest production of a local rock group did for the grandfather. It must always be so. ‘Crabbed age and youth cannot live together,’ only he didn’t think he was crabbed – but what elderly person did think that of himself?
    But he did wonder if the rock group was the same one that Sarah Hussain had hoped would perform in St Peter’s Church and then his thoughts went back to Thora Kilmartin’s letter. Not so much to the letter as to his abstracting it without a word to Burden or any police officer, abstracting it moreover from a crime scene. Guilt wasn’t a feeling with which he was very familiar but he recognised it when he had it. It wasn’t just the guilt that troubled him but the necessity of confessing his offence to Burden. It was necessary, he had to do it, but he could hardly think of anything he wanted to do less. In the past Burden had confessed his mistakes and lapses to
him
, he was the appropriate person, the superior officer. Now their roles were reversed or almost. There was no way out. To ignore it, to forget the letter, was unthinkable. Not only should Burden and his team meet Thora Kilmartin and talk to her,
want
to meet her and talk to her, but to withhold that letter and pretend it didn’t exist was the kind of act that made him feel – in a phrase he had always despised when others used it – unable to live with himself.
    Dora and Sylvia came downstairs, announced that tea would soon be coming and looked at him as if they had expected him to be asleep.
    Most of the time Jeremy Legg watched television. Fiona would put up with it in the morning for the news and weather forecast but always turned it off when she left for work in her Aztec gold Prius. Jeremy switched it on again, playing about with various channels but mostly just sitting and