Put on by Cunning by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

on to participate in what might seem to be men’s business. But now, as he turned his eyes in Zoffany’s direction, he got a shock. The man was gazing at Natalie Arno, had probably been doing so for the past ten minutes, and his expression, hypnotic and fixed, was impenetrable. It might indicate contempt or envy or desire or simple hatred. Wexford was unable to analyse it but he felt a pang of pity for Zoffany’s wife, for anyone who had to live with so much smouldering emotion.
    Passing through the music room, Muriel Hicks took him first into the wing which had been private to Camargue. Here all was rather more austere than what he had so far seen. The bedroom, study-cum-sitting-room and bathroom were all carpeted in Camargue’s favourite yellow – wasn’t it in the Luscher Test that you were judged the best-adjusted if you gave your favourite colour as yellow? – but the furnishings were sparse and there were blinds at the windows instead of curtains. A dress of Natalie’s lay on the bed.
    Muriel Hicks had not so far spoken beyond asking him to follow her. She was not an attractive woman. She had the bright pink complexion that sometimes goes with red-gold hair and piglet features. Wexford who, by initially marrying one, had surrounded himself with handsome women, wondered at Camargue who had a beautiful daughter yet had picked an ugly housekeeper and a nonentity for a second wife. Immediately he had thought that he regretted it with shame. For, turning round, he saw that Mrs Hicks was crying. She was standing with her hand on an armchair, on the seat of which lay a folded rug, and the tears were rolling down her round, red cheeks.
    She was one of the few people he had ever come across who did not apologize for crying. She wiped her face, scrubbing at her eyes. ‘I’ve lost the best employer,’ she said, ‘and the best friend anyone could have. And I’ve taken it hard, I can tell you.’
    ‘Yes, it was a sad business.’
    ‘If you’ll look out of that window you’ll see a house over to the left. That’s ours. Really ours, I mean – he gave it to us. God knows what it’s worth now. D’you know what he said? I’m not having you and Ted living in a tied cottage, he said. If you’re good enough to come and work for me you deserve to have a house of your own to live in.’
    It was a largish Victorian cottage and it has its own narrow driveway out into Ploughman’s Lane. Sheila wouldn’t have wanted it, he supposed, its not going with Sterries would make no difference to her. He put up a show for Mrs Hicks’s benefit of scrutinizing the spot where Natalie Arno said the van had been.
    ‘There weren’t many like him,’ said Muriel Hicks, closing the door behind Wexford as they left. It was a fitting epitaph, perhaps the best and surely the simplest Camargue would have.
    Along the corridor, back through the music room, across the drawing room, now deserted, and into the other wind. Here was a large room full of books, a study or a library, and three bedrooms, all with bathrooms en suite . Their doors were all open but in one of them, standing in front of a long glass and studying the effect of various ways of fastening the collar of a very old Persian lamb coat, was Jane Zoffany. She rushed, at the sight of Wexford, into a spate of apologies – very nearly saying sorry for existing at all – and scuttled from the room. Muriel Hicks’s glassy stare followed her out.
    ‘There’s nothing missing from here,’ she said in a depressed tone. ‘Anyway, those people would have heard something.’ There was a chance, he thought, that she might lose another kind of control and break into a tirade against Camargue’s daughter and her friends. But she didn’t. She took him silently into the second room and the third.
    Why had Natalie Arno chosen to occupy her father’s bedroom, austere, utilitarian and moreover the room of a lately dead man and a parent, rather than one of these luxurious rooms with fur rugs