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

helplessly, “but we’re doing everything that’s humanly possible. We’re . . .”
       “Your people,” she sobbed, “they’ve been in and out all day, searching and - and asking me things. They searched this house! And people kept phoning, awful people. There was a woman - a woman . . . Oh my God! She said John was dead and she - she described how he died and she said it was my fault! I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it, I shall gas myself, I shall cut my wrists . . .”
       “You must stop this,” he shouted. She turned to him and screamed into his face. He raised his hand and slapped her stingingly on the cheek. She gagged, gulped and crumpled, collapsing against him. To stop her falling, he put his arms round her and for a moment she clung to him, as in a lover’s embrace, her wet face buried in his neck. Then she stepped back, the red hair flying as she shook herself.
       “Forgive me,” she said. Her voice was hoarse with crying. “I’m mad. I think I’m going mad.”
       “Come in here and tell me. You were optimistic earlier.”
       “That was this morning.” She spoke quietly now in a thin broken voice. Gradually and not very coherently she told him about the policeman who had searched her cupboards and tramped through the attics, how they had torn away the undergrowth that swamped the roots of old trees in that wild garden. She told him, gasping, of the obscene phone calls and of the letters, inspired by last night’s evening-paper story, the second post had brought.
       “You are not to open any letters unless you recognise the handwriting,” he said. “Everything else we’ll look at first. As to the phone calls . . .”
       “Your sergeant said you’d have an arrangement to get my phone monitored.” She sighed deeply, calmer now, but the tears were still falling.
       “Have you got any brandy in this – er – place?”
       “In the dining room.” She managed a damp, weak smile. It belonged to my great-aunt. This – er - place, as you call it, was hers. Brandy keeps for years and years, doesn’t it?”
       “Years and years make it all the better,” said Burden,
       The dining room was cavernous, cold and smelling of dust. He wondered what combination of circumstances had brought her to this house and why she stayed. The brandy was in a sideboard that looked more like a wooden mansion than a piece of furniture, it was so ornamented with carved pillars and arches and niches and balconies.
       “You have some too,” she said.
       He hesitated. “All right. Thank you.” He made his way back to the armchair he had occupied before going to the dining room, but she sat down on the floor, curling her legs under her and staring up at him with a curious blind trust. Only one lamp was alight, making a little golden glow behind her head.
       She drank her brandy and for a long time they sat without talking. Then, warmed and calmed, she began to speak about the lost boy, the things he liked doing, the things be said, his little precocious cleverness. She spoke of London and of the strangeness of Stowerton, to herself and her son. At last she fell silent, her eyes fixed on his face, but he had lost the embarrassment which this trusting childlike stare had at first occasioned in him and it didn’t return even when, leaning forward with quick impulsiveness, she reached for his hand and held it tightly.
       He wasn’t embarrassed, but the touch of her hand electrified him. It brought him such a shock and such sudden turbulence that instead of the normal reactions of a normal man enclosing the hand of a pretty woman in his own he had the illusion that his whole body was holding her body. The effect of this was to make him tremble. He loosened his fingers and said abruptly, breaking the now heavy and languorous silence, “You’re a Londoner. You like London. Why do you live here?”
       “It is rather ghastly, isn’t it?” All the harshness and terror