Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

have to sort out the sheep from the goats. God knows, we’ve done it before often enough.’

    The newspapers, as he put it, did him proud. They went, as always, too far with headlines more bizarre than those he had predicted. If the photograph, touched up out of recognition, struck no chords, he was sure the text must. Rhoda Comfrey’s past was there, the circumstances of her Kingsmarkham life, the history of her association with the old Gazette, the details of her father’s illness. Mrs Parker and Mrs Crown had apparently not been so useless after all.
    By nine the phone began to ring.

    For Wexford, his personal phone had been ringing throughout the night, but those calls had been from newspapermen wanting more details and all ready to assure him that Rhoda Comfrey hadn’t worked for them. In Fleet Street she was unknown. Reaching the station early, he set Loring to trying all the London local papers, while he himself waited for something to come from the special line. Every call that had the slightest hint of genuineness about it was to be relayed to him. Burden, of course, had been right. All the nuts were on the blower. There was the spiritualist whose sister had died fifteen years before and who was certain Rhoda Comfrey must have been that sister reincarnated; the son whose mother had abandoned him when he was twelve; the husband, newly released from a mental hospital, whose wife that he declared missing came and took the receiver from him with embarrassed apologies; the seer who offered to divine the dead woman’s address from the aura of her clothes.
       None of these calls even reached Wexford’s sanctum, though he was told of them. Personally he took the call from George Rowlands, former editor of the Gazette, who had nothing to tell him but that Rhoda had been a good secretary with the makings of a feature-writer. Every well-meant and apparently sane call he took, but the day passed without anything to justify his optimism. Friday came, and with it the inquest. It was quickly adjourned, and nothing much came out of it but a reproof for Brian Parker from an unsympathetic coroner. This was a court, not a child guidance clinic, said the coroner, managing to imply that the paucity of evidence was somehow due to Parker’s having rearranged Rhoda Comfrey’s clothes. The phone calls still came sporadically on the Saturday, but not one caller claimed to know Rhoda Comfrey by name or said he or she had lived next door to her or worked with her. No bank manager phoned to say she had an account at his bank, no landlord to say that she paid him rent.
       ‘This,’ said Wexford, ‘is ridiculous. Am I supposed to believe she lived in a tent in Hyde Park?’
       ‘Of course it has to be that she was living under an assumed name.’ Burden stood at the window and watched the bus from Stowerton pause at the stop, let off a woman passenger not unlike Rhoda Comfrey, then move off towards Forest Road. ‘I thought the papers were doing their usual hysterical stuff when they printed all that about her secret life.’ He looked at Wexford, raising his eyebrows. ‘I thought you were too.’
       ‘My usual hysterical stuff. Thanks very much.’
       ‘I meant melodramatic,’ said Burden, as if that mitigated the censure. ‘But they weren’t. You weren’t. Why would she behave like that?’
       ‘For the usual melodramatic reason. Because she didn’t want the people who knew Rhoda Comfrey to know what Rhoda Comfrey was up to. Espionage, drug-running, protection rackets, a call-girl ring. It’s bound to be something like that.’
       ‘Look, I didn’t mean you always exaggerate. I’ve said I was wrong, haven’t I? As a matter of fact, the call-girl idea did come into my mind. Only she was a bit old for that and nothing much to look at and - well . . .’
       ‘Well, what? She was the only virgin prostitute in London, was she? It’s a new line, Mike, it’s an idea. It’s a refreshing