Some Lie and Some Die by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

carrying in the bag. She seems to have gone in for a lot of clothes changing, doesn’t she? I wonder why. No other help from The Pathway?’
    ‘No one else saw her. Each of the bungalows has only one occupant and they were both out at the relevant time. Miss Mowler’s a retired district nurse and she was out on Mondaytill eight. Dunsand—he’s a lecturer at the University of the South, philosophy or something—didn’t get home from work till after half past six. I can’t find anyone else who saw her on Monday or at any other time. My guess is she picked up some bloke and made a date to meet him between Sundays and Stowerton that evening.’
    ‘Ye-es. I expect that’s it. She left her mother at four and she must have caught the five-twelve bus. There are only two buses going to Forby in the afternoon, as you know. What did she do in that spare hour and ten minutes? We’ll have to find out if anyone saw her in the High Street. There’s the London angle too, but I’ve already got wheels moving there.’
    ‘D’you want to see Mrs Peveril?’
    ‘Not now, Mike. I doubt if we can make much progress tonight. I’ll let them finish the house-to-house. They may get something more. She may have been seen later. I don’t want to speculate at this stage.’
    Burden left the car and, throwing his raincoat over his head, plunged off through the rain. Wexford turned the car, moving off in low gear through the torrents, the steady downpour, glancing once at Sundays where the last dispirited stragglers were leaving the park.

6

    By the morning it had been established that Mrs Margaret Peveril of number five, The Pathway, was very probably the last person to have seen Dawn Stonor alive. On Monday, June sixth, Dawn had entered the pathfields at five-thirty and disappeared. By nine Wexford and Burden were back in The Pathway. By nine also an emergency interview room had been set up in the Baptist church hall where Sergeant Martin and a team of detectives waited to talk to anyone who might have seen Dawn on the previous Monday afternoon. The photograph had been blown up to poster size ready to jog memories, and another photograph prepared, this time of Polly Davies wearing a blonde wig and dressed in clothes resembling as nearly as possible Mrs Stonor’s description of the mauve suit.
    The rain had stopped during the night and the town and its environs looked washed, battered, wrung out to dry. All the summer warmth had gone with the storm, leaving a cloud-splashed sourly blue sky, a high sharp wind and mid-winter temperatures.
    At Sundays Martin Silk was burning litter, the accumulated detritus of eighty thousand people’s weekend. A row of fires blazed just behind the wall and the wind blew acrid whitesmoke in clouds over the Sundays estate, the Forby road and the barren brown plain of the park. Silk’s little herd of Friesians had returned to their pasture. They stood in a huddle under the cedars, bewildered by the smoke.
    The Pathway was shaped like an arm with bent elbow, its shoulder the junction with the Forby road, its wrist and hand—or perhaps its one pointing finger—a footpath which ran through hilly meadows and copses to Stowerton. Three houses and two bungalows had been built along this arm, but in its crook there were only open fields. The bungalows were identical, rather large pink plastered bungalows with red tiled roofs and detached garages. They stood ‘in their gardens’, as estate agents put it, meaning that there are sections of garden at the sides as well as at front and back. Some twenty feet separated one from the other, and a further twenty feet down stood a two-storey house. Similar building materials had been used for this house and the two dwellings on the upper arm, red brick, white stone, cedarwood, but they varied in size and in design. All had sparse lawns and flower-beds planted with unhappy-looking annuals.
    ‘The Peverils came in first,’ said Burden. ‘Their place was finished in