Wexford 14 - The Veiled One by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page B

news to Wexford, that hip replacements could be carried out almost at once if the patient were prepared to pay but that the waiting time for National Health Service surgery might be very protracted. The unfairness of this was not lost on him, but he was more intent on trying to assess the genuineness of Robson’s disability. He turned his eyes towards the girl and she looked at him artlessly, her face a beautiful blank.
       ‘Where do you work, Miss Arbel?’
       ‘Kim magazine.’
       ‘Could you give me the address, please, and your own address in London too? Do you live alone or share?’
       ‘I share with two other girls.’ She sounded peevish, muttering the north-west London address. ‘Kim’s office is at Orangetree House in the Waterloo Road.’
       Wexford had only once seen the magazine when Dora had bought it for the sake of some mail-order bargain it featured. A semi-glossy weekly, it had seemed aimed at a not very youthful market but at the same time making little provision for women past forty or so. The issue Wexford had seen had carried articles he thought dreary but which the magazine itself vaunted as controversial and lively, under such headings as: ‘Is it OK to be a Lesbian?’ and ‘Your Daughter Your Own Clone?’
       ‘Could you eat some scrambled egg, Uncle, and a little thin bread and butter?’
       Robson shrugged, then nodded. Burden began speaking to him of Mrs Whitton, the neighbour who had come to sit with him before Lesley Arbel arrived. Had he seen anyone, spoken on the phone to anyone, while his wife was out?
       Lesley got up, said, ‘Well, if you’ll just excuse me . . .’
       While Robson told Burden about the Hastings Road neighbours, speaking in a wretched halting monotone and separating virtually every sentence from the next with a phrase to the effect that Gwen had known them all better than he did, Wexford left the room. He found Lesley Arbel standing in front of an electric stove, a printed tea-towel rather than an apron tied round her waist to protect the coffee silk skirt. Two eggs reposed in a bowl, a beater beside them, but instead of preparing her uncle’s lunch she was examining her face in a handbag mirror and painting something on to it with a small, fat brush.
       As soon as she saw Wexford she put brush and mirror away with extreme haste, as if this rapid manoeuvre would somehow render the prior activity invisible. She broke open the eggs, not very skilfully, got a piece of shell into the bowl and had to pick it out with a long red nail.
       ‘Why would anyone want to murder your aunt, Miss Arbel?’
       She didn’t answer him for a moment, but reached up into a cabinet for a plate and put a cruet on to the tray she had laid with a cloth. Her voice when it came was nervous and irritable. ‘It was some crazy person, wasn’t it? There’s never any reason for murders, not these days. The ones you read about in the papers, they’re all people who say they don’t know why they did it or they’ve forgotten or had a blackout or whatever. The one who killed her will have been like that. I mean, who would have wanted to kill her for a reason? There wasn’t any reason.’ She turned away from him and started beating the eggs.
       ‘Everybody liked her?’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t have had enemies?’
       In her left hand she held the pan in which butter was smoking too strongly, in her other the bowl with the egg mixture. But instead of pouring one into the other, she stood with the two vessels poised. ‘It’s a laugh really, hearing you talk like that. Or it would be if it wasn’t such a tragedy. She was a wonderful, lovely lady - don’t you understand that? Hasn’t anyone told you? Look at Uncle Ralph, he’s heart broken, isn’t he? He worshipped her and she worshipped him. They were just a lovely couple, like young lovers right up to when this happened. And this’ll be the death of him, I can promise you that -