A New Lease of Death Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ruth Rendell

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘I only know the Painter case was an open and shut affair,’ said Chief Inspector Wexford. ‘And nobody’s got a hope in hell of showing he didn’t do it.’

  It’s impossible to forget the violent bludgeoning to death of an elderly lady in her home. Even more so when it’s your first murder case.

  Wexford believed he’d solved Mrs Primero’s murder fifteen years ago. It was no real mystery. Everyone knew Painter, her odd-job man, had done it. There had never been any doubt in anyone’s mind. Until now…

  Henry Archery’s son is engaged to Painter’s daughter. Only Archery can’t let the past remain buried. He wants to prove Wexford wrong, and in probing into the lives of the witnesses questioned all those years ago, he stirs up more than old ghosts.

  A WEXFORD CASE

  Chief Inspector Wexford is one of the most memorable detectives ever created.

  Ruth Rendell’s timeless Wexford novels continue to intrigue, enthral and surprise readers time and time again.

  About the Author

  Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for 1976’s best crime novel with A Demon in My View; a second Edgar in 1984 from the Mystery Writers of America for the best short story, ‘The New Girl Friend’; and a Gold Dagger award for Live Flesh in 1986. She was also the winner of the 1990 Sunday Times Literary award, as well as the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE and in 1997 became a Life Peer.

  Also by Ruth Rendell

  OMNIBUSES:

  COLLECTED SHORT STORIES

  COLLECTED STORIES 2

  WEXFORD: AN OMNIBUS

  THE SECOND WEXFORD OMNIBUS

  THE THIRD WEXFORD OMNIBUS

  THE FOURTH WEXFORD OMNIBUS

  THE FIFTH WEXFORD OMNIBUS

  THREE CASES FOR CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD

  THE RUTH RENDELL OMNIBUS

  THE SECOND RUTH RENDELL OMNIBUS

  THE THIRD RUTH RENDELL OMNIBUS

  CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS:

  FROM DOON WITH DEATH

  A NEW LEASE OF DEATH

  WOLF TO THE SLAUGHTER

  THE BEST MAN TO DIE

  A GUILTY THING SURPRISED

  NO MORE DYING THEN

  MURDER BEING ONCE DONE

  SOME LIE AND SOME DIE

  SHAKE HANDS FOR EVER

  A SLEEPING LIFE

  PUT ON BY CUNNING

  THE SPEAKER OF MANDARIN

  AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS

  THE VEILED ONE

  KISSING THE GUNNER’S DAUGHTER

  SIMISOLA

  ROAD RAGE

  HARM DONE

  THE BABES IN THE WOOD

  END IN TEARS

  NOT IN THE FLESH

  THE MONSTER IN THE BOX

  SHORT STORIES:

  THE FALLEN CURTAIN

  MEANS OF EVIL

  THE FEVER TREE

  THE NEW GIRLFRIEND

  THE COPPER PEACOCK

  BLOOD LINES

  PIRANHA TO SCURFY

  NOVELLAS:

  HEARTSTONES

  THE THIEF

  NON-FICTION:

  RUTH RENDELL’S SUFFOLK

  RUTH RENDELL’S ANTHOLOGY OF THE MURDEROUS MIND

  NOVELS:

  TO FEAR A PAINTED DEVIL

  VANITY DIES HARD

  THE SECRET HOUSE OF DEATH

  ONE ACROSS, TWO DOWN

  THE FACE OF TRESPASS

  A DEMON IN MY VIEW

  A JUDGEMENT IN STONE

  MAKE DEATH LOVE ME

  THE LAKE OF DARKNESS

  MASTER OF THE MOOR

  THE KILLING DOLL

  THE TREE OF HANDS

  LIVE FLESH

  TALKING TO STRANGE MEN

  THE BRIDESMAID

  GOING WRONG

  THE CROCODILE BIRD

  THE KEYS TO THE STREET

  A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES

  ADAM AND EVE AND PINCH ME

  THE ROTTWEILER

  THIRTEEN STEPS DOWN

  THE WATER’S LOVELY

  PORTOBELLO

  My Father and Simon

  All the chapter heading quotations are extracts from The Common Book of Prayer

  1

  The laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death for heinous and grievous offences.

  The Thirty-nine Articles

  IT WAS FIVE in the morning. Inspector Burden had seen more dawns than most men, but he had never quite become jaundiced by them, especially summer dawns. He liked the stillness, the sight of the little country town in a depopulated state, the hard blue light that was of the same shade and intensity as the light at dusk but without dusk’s melancholy.

  The two men they had been questioning about last night’s fight in one of Kingsmarkham’s cafés had confessed separately and almost simultaneously just a quarter of an hour before. Now they were locked into two stark white cells on the ground floor of his incongruously modern police station. Burden stood by the window in Wexford’s office, looking at the sky which had the peculiar greenish tint of aquamarine. A flock of birds flying in dense formation crossed it. They reminded Burden of his childhood when, as at dawn, everything had seemed bigger, clearer and of more significance than it did today. Tired and a little sickened, he opened the window to get rid of cigarette smoke and the sweaty smell of youths who wore leather jackets in the height of summer.

  Outside in the corridor he could hear Wexford saying good night – or good morning – to Colonel Griswold, the Chief Constable. Burden wondered if Griswold had guessed when he arrived just before ten with a long spiel about stamping out hooliganism that he was in for an all-night session. That, he thought unfairly, was where meddling got you.

  The heavy front door clanged and Griswold’s car started. Burden watched it move off the forecourt, past the great stone urns filled with pink geraniums and into Kingsmarkham High Street. The Chief Constable was driving himself. Burden saw with approval and grudging amusement that Griswold drove at just about twenty-eight miles per hour until he reached the black and white derestriction sign. Then the car gathered speed and flashed away out of sight along the empty country road that led to Pomfret.

  He turned round when he heard Wexford come in. The Chief Inspector’s heavy grey face was a little greyer than usual, but he showed no other sign of tiredness and his eyes, dark and hard as basalt, showed a gleam of triumph. He was a big man with big features and a big intimidating voice. His grey suit–one of a series of low fastening, double-breasted affairs – appeared more shabby and wrinkled than ever today. But it suited Wexford, being not unlike an extension of his furrowed pachydermatous skin.

  ‘Another job jobbed,’ he said, ‘as the old woman said when she jobbed the old man’s eye out.’

  Burden bore with such vulgarisms stoically. He knew that they were meant to horrify him; they always succeeded. He made his thin lips crease into a tight smile. Wexford handed him a blue envelope and he was glad of the diversion to hide his slight embarrassment.

  ‘G
riswold’s just given me this,’ Wexford said. ‘At five in the morning. No sense of timing.’

  Burden glanced at the Essex postmark.

  ‘Is that the man he was on about earlier, sir?’

  ‘Well, I don’t have fanmail from beautiful olde worlde Thringford as a general rule, do I, Mike? This is the Rev. Mr Archery all right, taking advantage of the Old Pals’ Act.’ He lowered himself into one of the rather flimsy chairs and it gave the usual protesting creak. Wexford had what his junior called a love-hate relationship with those chairs and indeed with all the aggressively modern furnishings of his office. The glossy block floor, the square of nylon carpet, the chairs with their sleek chrome legs, the primrose venetian blinds – all these in Wexford’s estimation were not ‘serviceable’, they were dust-traps and they were ‘chi-chi’. At the same time he took in them an enormous half-secret pride. They had their effect. They served to impress visiting strangers such as the writer of this letter Wexford was now taking from its envelope.

  It too was written on rather thick blue paper. In a painfully authentic upper-class accent, the Chief Inspector said affectedly, ‘May as well get on to the Chief Constable of Mid-Sussex, my dear. We were up at Oxford together, don’t you know?’ He squeezed his face into a kind of snarling grin. ‘All among the bloody dreaming spires,’ he said. ‘I hate that sort of thing.’

  ‘Were they?’

  ‘Were they what?’

  ‘At Oxford together?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something like that. It may have been the playing fields of Eton. All Griswold said was, “Now we’ve got those villains wrapped up, I’d like you to have a look at a letter from a very good friend of mine called Archery. Excellent fellow, one of the best. This enclosure’s for you. I’d like you to give him all the help you can. I’ve a notion it’s got something to do with that scoundrel Painter.”’

  ‘Who’s Painter?’

  ‘Villain who got the chop about fifteen or sixteen years ago,’ said Wexford laconically.’ Let’s see what the parson has to say, shall we?’

  Burden looked over his shoulder. The letter was headed St Columba’s Vicarage, Thringford, Essex. The Greek e’s awakened in him a small hostility. Wexford read it aloud.

  ‘“Dear sir, I hope you will forgive me for taking up your valuable time…” Don’t have much choice, do I? “… but I regard this matter as being of some urgency. Col. Griswold, the Chief Constable of blah blah and so on, has very kindly told me you are the gentleman who may be able to assist me in this problem so I am taking the liberty, having first consulted him, of writing to You.”’ He cleared his throat and loosened his crumpled grey tie. ‘Takes a hell of a time coming to the point, I must say. Ah, here we go. “You will remember the case of Herbert Arthur Painter …” I will. “I understand you were in charge of it. I therefore supposed I should come to you before pursuing certain enquiries which, much against my will, I am compelled to make.”’

  ‘Compelled?’

  ‘That’s what the man says. Doesn’t say why. The rest’s a load of compliments and can he come and see me tomorrow – no, today. He’s going to phone this morning, but he “anticipates my willingness to meet him.”’ He glanced at the window to where the sun was coming up over York Street and with one of his distorted quotations, said, ‘I suppose he’s sleeping in Elysium at this moment, crammed with distressful cold mutton or whatever parsons go to bed on.’

  ‘What’s it all about?’

  ‘Oh God, Mike, it’s obvious, isn’t it? You don’t want to take any notice of this “being compelled” and “against his will” stuff. I don’t suppose his stipend amounts to much. He probably writes true crime stories in between early Communion and the Mothers’ Meeting. He must be getting desperate if he reckons on titillating the mass appetite by resurrecting Painter.’

  Burden said thoughtfully, ‘I seem to remember the case. I’d just left school …’

  ‘And it inspired your choice of a career, did it?’ Wexford mocked. ‘“What are you going to be, son?” “I’m going to be a detective, Dad.”’

  In his five years as Wexford’s right-hand man, Burden had grown immune to his teasing. He knew he was a kind of safety valve, the stooge perhaps on whom Wexford could vent his violent and sometimes shocking sense of humour. The people of this little town, indiscriminately referred to by Wexford as ‘our customers’ had, unless suspected of felony, to be spared. Burden was there to take the overflow of his chief’s rage, ridicule and satire. Now he was cast as the sponge to soak up the scorn that was rightly the due of Griswold and Griswold’s friend.

  He looked shrewdly at Wexford. After a trying, frustrating day and night, this letter was the last straw. Wexford was suddenly tense with irritation, his skin more deeply wrinkled than usual, his whole body flexed with the anger that would not suffer fools gladly. That tension must find release.

  ‘This Painter thing,’ Burden said slyly, slipping into his role of therapist, ‘a bit run of the mill, wasn’t it? I followed it in the papers because it was the big local sensation. I don’t remember it was remarkable in any other way.’

  Wexford slipped the letter back into its envelope and put it in a drawer. His movements were precise and under a tight control. One wrong word, Burden thought, and he’d have torn it up, chucked the pieces on the floor and left them to the mercy of the cleaner. His words had apparently been as right as possible under the circumstances for Wexford said in a sharp cool voice, ‘It was remarkable to me.’

  ‘Because you handled it?’

  ‘Because it was the first murder case I ever handled on my own. It was remarkable to Painter because it hanged him and to his widow, I daresay. I suppose it shook her a bit as far as anything could shake that girl.’

  Rather nervously Burden watched him observe the cigarette burn one of the men they had been interviewing had made in the lemon-coloured leather of a chair seat. He waited for the explosion. Instead Wexford said indifferently:

  ‘Haven’t you got a home to go to?’

  ‘Too late now,’ said Burden, stifling a yawn that threatened. ‘Besides, my wife’s away at the seaside.’

  A strongly uxorious man, he found his bungalow like a morgue when Jean and the children were absent. This was a side of his character that afforded Wexford many opportunities for quips and snide remarks, this coupled with his comparative youth, his stolid stick-in-the-mud nature and a certain primness of outlook. But all Wexford said was, ‘I forgot.’

  He was good at his job. The big ugly man respected him for that. Although he might deride, Wexford appreciated the advantage of having a deputy whose grave good looks were attractive to women. Seated opposite that ascetic face, warmed by a compassion Wexford called ‘softness’, they were more inclined to open their hearts than to a majestic fifty-five-year-old heavyweight. His personality, however, was not strong and his superior effaced him. Now, in order to channel off that sharp-edged vitality, he was going to have to risk a rebuke for stupidity.

  He risked it. ‘If you’re going to have to argue the toss with this Archery, wouldn’t it be a good idea if we had a re-cap of the facts?’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Well, you then, sir. You must be a bit rusty yourself on the case after so long.’

  The outburst came with an undercurrent of laughter. ‘God Almighty! D’you think I can’t see your brain working? When I want a psychiatrist I’ll hire a professional.’ He paused and the laughter became a wry grin. ‘O.K. it might help me. …’ But Burden had made the mistake of relaxing too soon. ‘To get the facts straight for Mr Bloody Archery, I mean,’ Wexford snapped. ‘But there’s no mystery, you know, no cunning little red herrings. Painter did it all right.’ He pointed eastwards out of the window. The broad Sussex sky was becoming suffused with rose and gold, bands of soft creamy pink like strokes from a water-colour brush. ‘That’s as sure as the sun’s rising now,’ he said. ‘There never was any doubt. Herbert Arthur Painter killed his ninety-year-old employer by hitting her over the hea
d with an axe and he did it for two hundred pounds. He was a brutal savage moron. I read in the paper the other day that the Russians call anti-social people “unpersons” and that just about describes him. Funny sort of character for a parson to champion.’

  ‘If he’s championing him.’

  ‘We shall see,’ said Wexford.

  They stood in front of the map that was attached to the yellow ‘cracked ice’ wallpaper.

  ‘She was killed in her own home, wasn’t she?’ Burden asked. ‘One of those big houses off the Stowerton road?’

  The map showed the whole of this rather sleepy country district. Kingsmarkham, a market town of some twelve thousand inhabitants, lay in the centre, its streets coloured in brown and white, its pastoral environs green with the blotches of dark veridian that denoted woodland. Roads ran from it as from the meshy heart of a spider’s web, one leading to Pomfret in the South, another to Sewingbury in the North-east. The scattered villages, Flagford, Clusterwell and Forby, were tiny flies on this web.

  ‘The house is called Victor’s Piece,’ said Wexford. ‘Funny sort of name. Some general built it for himself after the Ashanti Wars.’

  ‘And it’s just about here.’ Burden put his finger on a vertical strand of the web that led from Kingsmarkham to Stowerton, lying due north. He pondered and light dawned. ‘I think I know it,’ he said. ‘Hideous dump with a lot of green woodwork all over it. It was an old people’s home up until last year. I suppose they’ll pull it down.’

  ‘I daresay. There are a couple of acres of land to it. If you’ve got the picture we may as well sit down.’

  Burden had moved his chair to the window. There was something consoling and at the same time rejuvenating in watching the unfolding of what was going to be a lovely day. On the fields tree shadows lay long and densely blue and bright new light glinted on the slate roofs of ancient houses. Pity he hadn’t been able to get away with Jean. The sunlight and the fresh heady air turned his thoughts towards holidays and prevented him from recalling details of this case that had long ago shocked Kingsmarkham. He searched his memory and found to his shame that he could not even remember the murdered woman’s name.

  ‘What was she called?’ he asked Wexford. ‘A foreign name, wasn’t it? Porto or Primo something?’