Blood Lines Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Blood Lines

  Lizzie’s Lover

  Shreds and Slivers

  Burning End

  The Man Who Was the God of Love

  The Carer

  Expectations

  Clothes

  Unacceptable Levels

  In all Honesty

  The Strawberry Tree

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Behind the quiet patterns of everyday life, lie the frailties and desires, the deceptions and guilty secrets of ordinary men and women. In this powerful new collection of long and short stories, incuding the acclaimed novella The Strawberry Tree, Ruth Rendell probes their lives with unerring and disturbing insight.

  About the Author

  Ruth Rendell was an exceptional crime writer, and will be remembered as a legend in her own lifetime. Her ground-breaking debut novel, From Doon With Death, was first published in 1964 and introduced readers to her enduring and popular detective, Inspector Reginald Wexford.

  With worldwide sales of approximately 20 million copies, Rendell was a regular Sunday Times bestseller. Her sixty bestselling novels include police procedurals, some of which have been successfully adapted for TV, stand-alone psychological mysteries, and a third strand of crime novels under the pseudonym Barbara Vine.

  Rendell won numerous awards, including the Sunday Times Literary Award in 1990. In 2013 she was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in crime writing. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 became a Life Peer.

  Ruth Rendell died in May 2015.

  BLOOD LINES

  Long and Short Stories

  Ruth Rendell

  For Don

  Blood Lines

  * * *

  ‘I THINK YOU know who killed your stepfather,’ said Wexford.

  It was a throwaway line, uttered on parting and over his shoulder as he reached the door. A swift exit was, however, impossible. The moment he got up he had not to duck his head merely but bend himself almost double. The girl he spoke to was a small woman, the boyfriend she lived with no more than five feet six. Life in the caravan, he thought, would otherwise have been insupportable.

  Stuck in the doorway, he said when she made no reply, ‘You won’t mind if I come back in a day or two and we’ll have another talk.’

  ‘All the same if I do, isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t have to talk to me, Miss Heddon. It’s open to you to say no.’ It would all have been more dignified if he could have stood up and faced her, but Wexford wasn’t much concerned with dignity. He spoke rather gravely but with gentleness. ‘But if you’ve no objection we’ll continue this conversation on Monday. I’ve a feeling you know a lot more than you’ve told me.’

  She said it, one of those phrases that invariably means its opposite. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘That’s unworthy of someone of your intelligence,’ he said and he had meant it.

  He opened the door and climbed out. Climbing, half-crouched, was the only way. It was with relief that he put his feet on the ground, got his head clear, and straightened himself up to his full height. She had followed him and stood there, holding the door, a pretty young woman of twenty who looked even younger than her age because her blonde hair was waist-length and her white blouse schoolgirlish.

  ‘Monday, then,’ Wexford said. ‘Shall we say threeish?’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ With one of her flashes of humour, she said, ‘You must feel like a Rottweiler in a rabbit hutch in here.’

  He smiled. ‘You may be right. It’s true my bite is worse than my bark.’

  Possibly digesting this, she closed the door without another word. He picked his way back to the car where Donaldson waited at the wheel. A path of cinders made a just usable track across the corner of a muddy field. In the cold haze the shape of a cottage converted from a railway carriage could just be seen against a grey tangle of wilderness. Two inches of rain had fallen in the week since Tom Peterlee’s death and the sky of massive grey cumulus was loaded with more.

  ‘We live in a caravan culture, Steve,’ he said to Donaldson. ‘As homes, I mean, not mobile tents. You can see two more over there – travelling farm workers, I imagine. The one on the corner patch up here has been there at least two years and to my knowledge is home to four people, a dog and a hamster.’

  ‘It wouldn’t suit me, sir. Though, mind you, I’d have gone down on my bended knees in gratitude for a caravan when the wife and me were first married and living with her mum.’

  Wexford nodded, invisibly, from the back. ‘Go by way of Feverel’s, will you? I don’t want to stop, just take a look.’

  The Kenhurst road ahead from the south for Edenwick and Kingsmarkham. Rain began to spit against the windscreen as they came to the outskirts of Edenwick and its half-mile-long village street. After the houses ended, Feverel’s buildings appeared as the car rounded a loop-like bend in the road.

  The farm shop remained closed, though a wooden board offering for sale apples, pears, plums and walnuts for pickling still stood by the gate. Wexford told Donaldson to stop the car and park for a few moments. Let Heather Peterlee see him. That sort of thing did no harm. He looked, for the dozenth time, at the shack that had been a shop, the huddle of wooden buildings, the house itself and the inevitable caravan.

  ‘She’ll have a job selling it, sir,’ said Donaldson as if reading his mind. ‘People won’t much fancy the idea.’

  ‘The murder took place in the kitchen,’ Wexford said rather sharply, ‘not in that thing.’

  ‘It’s all one to some,’ Donaldson said cryptically.

  The house was a Victorian building, rendered in a pale stone colour that the rain had turned to khaki, an uncompromising cheerless place with a window on either side of the front door that was plumb in the centre, and three windows above. No porch, balcony or even trellis broke the monotony of its façade. The shallow roof was of dull grey slate. Some ten yards of bleak ground, part gravel and part scrubby grass, separated the house from the shop. In between and a little distance behind, the caravan stood on a concrete slab, and beyond it stretched away the market gardens, looking from here no more than acres of cabbages. The only trees were the walnuts, still in leaf but the leaves tired and brown.

  The shop, its double doors closed and padlocked, its windows boarded up, the display stalls which stood outside it gone, seemed a dilapidated hut. A sheet of the corrugated iron that roofed it had come loose and clanged up and down rhythmically in the increasing wind. It was a dreary place. No visitor would have difficulty in believing a man had been clubbed to death there. Wexford remembered, with distaste, the little crowd which had gathered outside this gate during the previous week, standing and watching, or sitting in the line of cars, some of them waiting for hours, staring at the house, hoping for happenings. Some of them recalling, no doubt, how a matter of days ago they had driven in for half a hundredweight of Maris Bards, a couple of pounds of Coxes and one of Heather Peterlee’s apple pies from the freezer.

  As Donaldson started the engine a dog came out from the back of the house and began barking inside the gate. It was a black spaniel, but not of so mild a nature as is usually found in the breed. Wexford had felt its teeth through his jacket sleeve, though blood had not been drawn.

  ‘That the dog, is it, sir?’

  They all knew the story, even those only remotely involved. Wexford confirmed that this indeed was the dog, this was Scamp. The poor creature had recovered the voice it lost, giving continual tongue at the voyeurs until strain on its vocal cords struck it du mb.

  Wexford spared a glance for the neighbours, if a house fifty yards of field and copse away can be called neighbouring. Joseph Peterlee had a plant hire business and a customer was in the act of returning a mechanical digger with what looked like half a ton of the local chalky loam adhering to its giant wheels. In conversation with her husband and the digger driver on the concrete entrance, an area much cracked, pitted and now puddled, was Mrs Monica Peterlee in her unvarying uniform of rubber boots and floral crossover overall, holding over herself a green umbrella. And those are the characters in this drama, he thought, with the exception of one who (to paraphrase Kipling) has gone to the husband of her bosom the same as she ought to go, and one who has gone heaven only knows where.

  Why was he so sure Arlene Heddon had the answer? Mike Burden, his second-in-command at Kingsmarkham CID, said with contempt that at any rate she was more attractive than the sister-in-law and the widow. With his usual distaste for those whose lives failed to approximate fairly closely to his own, he spoke scathingly of ‘the Peterlee girl’ as if having no job and no proper roof over one’s head directly conduced to homicide.

  ‘Her name,’ Wexford said rather dourly, ‘is Heddon. It was her father’s name. Heather Peterlee, if you remember, was a Mrs Heddon before she re-married.’ He added, wondering as he did so why he bothered to indulge Burden’s absurd prejudices. ‘A widow, incidentally.’

  Quick as a flash, Burden came back with, ‘What did her first husband die of?’

  ‘Oh God, Mike, some bone disease. We went into all that. But back to Arlene Heddon; she’s a very intelligent young woman, you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t know. You must be joking. Intelligent girls don’t live on benefit in caravans with unemployed welders.’

  ‘What a snob you are.’

  ‘Married welders. I’m not just a snob, I’m a moralist. Intelligent girls do well at school, go on to further education, get suitable well-paid jobs and buy themselves homes on mortgages.’

  ‘Somehow and somewhere along the line Arlene Heddon missed out on that. In any case, I didn’t say she was academically inclined. She’s sharp, she’s clever, she’s got a good brain.’

  ‘And her mother, the two-times widow, is she the genius Arlene inherited her IQ from?’

  This was neither the time nor the place to be discussing the murder, Wexford’s house on a Saturday evening, but Burden had come round for a drink, and whatever the topic of conversation, things had a way of coming back to the Peterlees. They came back to the extent of Wexford’s suggesting they go over the sequence of events again. Dora, his wife, was present, but sitting on the window seat, reading tranquilly. For once, he didn’t suggest he and Burden go somewhere private.

  ‘You can set me right on the details,’ Wexford began, ‘but I think you’ll agree it was broadly like this. On Thursday October 10 Heather Peterlee opened the farm shop at Feverel’s as usual at nine a.m. They had on sale their own produce and other more exotic vegetables and fruit they bought in. Heather had her sister-in-law Mrs Monica Peterlee to help her, again as usual. Heather’s husband, Tom, was working outside, and at lunchtime he brought up to the shop by tractor the vegetables he had lifted and picked during the morning.

  ‘They ate their midday meal in the shop, keeping it open, and at three or thereabouts Joseph Peterlee arrived in his car to fetch his wife and take her shopping in Kingsmarkham. Tom and Heather served in the shop until closing time at five when they returned to the house and Heather began preparing a meal. Tom had brought in the shop’s takings with him which he intended to put in the safe, but in the meantime he left the notes on the kitchen dresser that faces the outside door. The sum was about three hundred and sixty pounds. He put the money on the dresser shelf and placed on top of it his camera in its case, presumably to stop it blowing about when the door was opened. He then went to the caravan to discuss some matter of business with Carol Fox who had been living there since the summer. In fact, the matter of business was the question of raising the rent she paid.’

  ‘Tom Peterlee wasn’t killed for three hundred and sixty pounds,’ said Burden.

  ‘No, but various people would like us to think he was. It’s a problem even guessing why he was killed. Everyone seems to have liked him. We have had . . .’ Wexford hesitated, ‘“golden opinions from all sorts of people”. He was something of a paragon by all accounts, an ideal husband, good, kind, undeniably handsome. He was even handsome on the mortuary slab – forgive me, Dora.

  ‘But I’ll go on. They ate their meal at five-thirty. During the course of it, according to her statement, Tom said to his wife that they had fixed up the matter of the rent amicably. Carol wanted to stay on and understood the rent she was paying was inadequate . . .’

  Dora interrupted him. ‘Is that the woman who’d left her husband and Heather Peterlee said she could have their caravan because she’d nowhere to live?’

  ‘A friend of Heather’s from way back, apparently. According to Heather, she told Tom she’d be round in an hour to accompany her on a dog walk. Heather always took the dog out after supper and Carol had got into the habit of going with her. Heather washed up their dishes and Tom dried. As I’ve said, he was an ideal husband. At some point he went out to the woodshed and fetched in a basket of logs to feed the wood-burning stoves, of which there was one in the kitchen and another in the living room.

  ‘Carol knocked on the door and came into the kitchen at twenty past six. It wasn’t raining but it looked like rain and Carol was wearing only a cardigan. Heather suggested she put on one of the rainproof jackets of which there were several hanging behind the back door, and Carol took a fawn-coloured one.’

  ‘Strange, wasn’t it,’ Burden put in, ‘that she didn’t fetch a coat of her own from the caravan? Especially a woman like that. Very conscious of her appearance, I’d say. But perhaps she wouldn’t care, out on her own with another woman. It was a dull evening and they weren’t likely to meet anyone.’

  Dora gave him a look, enigmatic, half-smiling, but said nothing.

  Her husband went on, ‘If you remember, when the caravan was searched as the house was, the fact was remarked on that Carol Fox had no raincoat among her clothes. She has said and Heather has confirmed it that she always used one of Heather’s. They took the dog and went for a walk through the Feverel’s land, across the meadows by the public footpath and down to the river. It was sometime between six-twenty and six-thirty that they left. It was still light and would be for another half-hour. What Tom did in their absence we don’t know and probably never shall know, except that putting that money into the safe wasn’t among his activities.

  ‘At about ten to seven Arlene Heddon arrived at Feverel’s, brought in her boyfriend’s van.’ Wexford raised an eyebrow at Burden. ‘The unemployed, married welder, Gary Wyatt.

  ‘Arlene and Gary have no phone and Arlene got the message from Grandma on whose land she lives. She’s not really her grandmother, of course, but she calls her Grandma.’

  ‘The old witch,’ said Dora. ‘That’s what people call her. She’s well known.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s as old as she looks and she’s definitely not a witch, though she cultivates that appearance. To be the mother of Joseph and Tom she need be no more than sixty-five and I daresay she’s not. The message Arlene got from Mrs Peterlee Senior was that Mum had finished her jumper and if she wanted it for the Friday, could she come and pick it up? The time suggested was about eight. Grandma said she’d drive Arlene herself on account of she was going to her Conservative Association meeting in Kingsmarkham – I kid you not, Dora – but she said, no, Gary and she would still be eating their tea. Gary would take her in the van a bit later on.

  ‘In fact, Gary wanted to go out at half past six. He dropped her off at Feverel’s, thus getting her there more than an hour earlier than her mother had suggested, and went on to have a drink with his pals in the Red Rose at Edenwick. Not that anyone has confirmed this. Neither the licensee nor the girl b ehind the bar remembered him being there. Which is in direct contrast to the evidence of the old witch’s witnesses. Strange as her presence there might seem, every Tory in Kingsmarkham seems to remember her in the Seminar Room of the Olive and Dove Hotel that night. Not until seven-thirty, however, when the meeting started. Where had she been in that lost hour and a half?

  ‘Gary promised to come back for Arlene in an hour. Arlene went round the back of the house and entered by the kitchen door, which was unlocked. As a daughter of the house, she didn’t knock or call out, but walked straight in.

  ‘There, in the kitchen, on the floor, she found the body of her stepfather, Tom Peterlee, lying face-downwards, with a wound in the back of the head. She knelt down and touched his face. It was still faintly warm. She knew there was a phone in the sitting room but, fearing whoever had done this might still be in the house, she didn’t go in there but ran back outside in the hope Gary had not yet gone. When she saw that he had she ran the hundred yards or so to Mr and Mrs Joe Peterlee’s where she used their phone and dialled 999.

  ‘Joe Peterlee was out, according to his wife. Arlene – all this is Arlene’s evidence, partly confirmed by Monica Peterlee – Arlene asked her to come back with her and wait for the police but she said she was too frightened to do that, so Arlene went back alone. Within a very few minutes – it was now five past seven – her mother and Carol Fox returned from their walk with the dog. She was waiting for them outside the back door.

  ‘She prepared them for what they would see and Heather cried out, pushed open the door and rushed into the kitchen. She threw herself on the body and when Arlene and Carol pulled her off and lifted her up, she began banging her head and face against the kitchen wall.’

  Burden nodded. ‘These two – what do we call them? Hysterical acts? Manifestations of grief? – account for the blood on the front of her jacket and the extensive bruising to her face. Or at least are possible explanations for them.’