Wexford 6 - No More Dying Then by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

that.
       “I expect I’ll just sit and play records,” she said, shifting a dirty cup from the record player to the floor. “Or read or something.”
       “As soon as we have any news, I’ll come to you. I won’t phone, I’ll come.”
       Her eyes shone. “If I were the Prime Minister,” she said, “I’d make you a superintendent.”
       He drove to Cheriton Forest where the search was now centred and found Wexford sitting on a log. It was misty this morning and the chief inspector was wrapped in an old raincoat, a battered felt hat pulled down over his eyes.
       “We’ve got a lead on the car, Mike.”
       “What car?”
       “Last night when they were out in the fields one of the search party told Martin he’d seen a car parked on Mill Lane. Apparently, he had a week off in August and he took his dog walking regularly up Mill Lane and three times he noticed a car parked near the spot where Mrs. Mitchell saw the man. He noticed it because it was obstructing the lane, only leaving room for single-line traffic. A red Jaguar. Needless to say, he didn’t get the number.” 
       “Did he see the man?”
       “He didn’t see anyone. What we want now is to find someone who regularly uses that road. A baker, for instance.”
       “I’ll see to that,” said Burden.
       In the course of the morning he found a baker’s roundsman who used the road every day and the driver of a van delivering soft drinks who used it only on Wednesdays and Fridays. The baker had seen the car because, coming round a corner one afternoon, he had almost hit it. A red Jaguar, he confirmed, but he hadn’t taken the number either. And although he had been on the road the day before, be had passed the swings-field hedge at two and the car wasn’t there then. At half-past four two women in a car had asked him if he had seen a little boy, but he was almost into Forby by then. The red Jaguar might have passed him, might have contained a child, but he couldn’t remember.
       The soft-drinks man was less observant. He had never noticed anything out of the way on that road, either recently or in August.
       Burden went back to the station and had a quick lunch in Wexford’s office. They spent the afternoon interviewing a sad little stream of men, all shifty and most undersized, who at some time or other had made overtures to children. There was the retarded nineteen-year-old whose speciality was waiting outside school gates; the middle-aged primary-school teacher, sacked by the authority years ago; the draper’s assistant who got into train compartments that contained a solitary child; the schizophrenic who had raped his own little daughter and since been discharged from mental hospital.
       “Lovely job, ours,” said Burden. “I feel slimy all over.”
       “There but for the grace of God . . .” said Wexford. “You might have been one of them if your parents had rejected you. I might if I’d responded to the advances made to me in the school cloakroom. They sit in darkness, they’re born, as Blake or some clever sod said, to endless night. Pity doesn’t cost anything, Mike, and it’s a damn sight more edifying than shouting about flogging and banging and castrating and what you will’
       “I’m not shouting, sir, I just happen to believe in the cultivation of self-control. And my pity is for the mother and that poor kid.”
       “Yes, but the quality of mercy is not strained. The trouble with you is you’re a blocked-up colander and your mercy stains through a couple of miserable little holes. Still, none of these wretched drop-outs was near Mill Lane yesterday and I don see any of them living it up in a red Jaguar.”

    If you haven’t been out in the evening once in ten months the prospect of a trip to the cinema in the company of your brother-in-law and two children can seem like high living. Grace Woodville went to the hairdresser’s at three and when she came out she felt more