An Unkindness of Ravens Read online

  Already the company had been renamed Sevensmith Harding. It kept its offices in Myringham High Street, though the factory behind was soon to be moved to sites on distant industrial complexes. With the disappearance of its retail trade the shop as such also disappeared.

  The world’s paint industry enjoyed a steady growth during the 1960s and early 1970s. It is estimated that close on five hundred companies make paint in the United Kingdom, but the bulk of the sales volume is handled by a few large manufacturers. Four of these manufacturers dominate the British Isles and one of them is Sevensmith Harding.

  Today their paints, Sevenstar vinyl silk and Sevenstar vinyl matte emulsion, Sevenshine gloss and satin finish, are manufactured at Harlow in Essex, and their wallpapers, borders, and coordinating tiles at Crawley in Sussex. The head offices in Myringham, in the center of the High Street opposite the Old Flag Hotel, have more a look of solicitors’ chambers or the establishment of a very refined antique dealer than the seat of paint-makers. Indeed, there is scarcely anything to show that they are paint-makers. The bow windows with their occasional pane of distorted glass that flank the front-door contain, instead of cans of paint and display stands of delighted housewives with brushes in their hands, a famille noire vase of dried grasses on one side and a Hepplewhite chair on the other. But over the door, Georgian in style and of polished mahogany, are royal armorial bearings and the legend: “By appointment to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Colorists and Makers of Fine Pigments.”

  The company chairman, Jeremy Harding-Grey, divided his time between his house in Monte Carlo and his house in Nassau, and the managing director, George Delahaye, though he lived in Sussex, was seldom seen in the vicinity of Myringham. But the deputy managing director was a humbler person and altogether more on the level of ordinary men. Wexford knew him. They had met at the home of Sylvia’s father-in-law, an architect, and since then the Gardners had once been guests at a drinks party at the Wexfords’ and the Wexfords guests at the Gardners’. But for all that Wexford would not have considered himself on the kind of terms with Miles Gardner to warrant dropping in at Seven-smith Harding when he found himself in Myringham at lunchtime to ask Miles out for a drink and a sandwich.

  A fortnight had passed since his talk with Joy Williams and he had virtually forgotten about it. He had dismissed it from his mind before he went to bed that same night. And if he had thought about it at all since then it had only been to tell himself that by now Mrs. Williams and her solicitor would be settling things to her satisfaction or that Williams had returned home, having found like many a man before him that domesticity is the better part of economics.

  But even if Williams were still missing there was nothing to justify Wexford’s making inquiries about him at Sevensmith Harding. Let Joy Williams do that. He wouldn’t be missing as far as his employers were concerned. No matter how complex a man’s love life he still has to go to work and earn his bread. Williams earned it on too humble a level though, Wexford reflected, for it to be likely Miles Gardner had ever heard of him.

  He and Burden had both been at Myringham Crown Court, witnesses in two separate cases, and the court had adjourned for lunch. Burden would have to go back to watch his case—a rather ticklish matter concerning the receiving of stolen goods—through to the bitter end, but Wexford’s day, at least as far as appearing in court went, was over. As they walked towards the hotel Burden was silent and morose. He had been like this since they came out of court. If it had been anyone else Wexford would have supposed his mood due to the dressing down, indeed the scathing tongue-lashing, meted out to him by the alleged receiver’s counsel. But Burden was impervious to such things. He had taken that sort of stick too many times to care. This was something else, something closer to home, Wexford thought. And now he came to think of it, this, whatever it was, had been growing on Burden for days now, weeks even, a morose, surly misery that didn’t seem to affect his work but militated badly against his relations with other people.

  He looked the same as ever. There was no sign of anxiety or care in his appearance. He was thin but he had always been thin. Wexford didn’t know if it was a new suit he was wearing or last year’s cleaned and the trousers nightly pressed in the electric press his wife had given him for Christmas. (“Like those things you get in swish hotels,” Burden had said proudly.) It was a happy marriage, Burden’s second, as happy as his first. But almost any marriage Burden made would be happy, he had a gift for marriage. He was uxorious without making himself ridiculous. There couldn’t be anything in his marriage that was bugging him. His wife was pregnant with a longed-for child—longed-for by her at any rate. Burden had a grown-up son and daughter by his first marriage. Wexford considered an idea that came to him and then dismissed it as absurd and out of character. Burden was the last man to dread the coming child just because he was now in his mid-forties. That he would take in his stride.

  “What’s wrong, Mike?” he asked as the silence became oppressive.

  “Nothing.”

  The classic answer. One of the cases in which a statement means the precise opposite of what it says, as when a man in doubt says he’s absolutely certain.

  Wexford didn’t press it. He walked along, looking about him at the old market town which had changed so much since he had first known it. A huge shopping complex had been built, and since then an arts center, incorporating theater, cinema, and concert hall. The university term was three weeks old and the place was thronged with blue-jeaned students. But up at this end of the town, where preservation orders proliferated and buildings were listed, things were much the same. Things were even rather better since the local authority had woken up to the fact that Myringham was beautiful and worth conserving and had therefore cleaned and tidied and painted and planted.

  He looked into the bow windows of Sevensmith Harding, first at the Hepplewhite chair, then at the vase. Beyond the dried grasses he could see a young girl receptionist talking on the phone. Wexford and Burden crossed the road and went into the Old Flag.

  Wexford had been there once or twice before. It was not a place ever to be crowded in the middle of the day. The busy lunch trade went to the cheaper brighter pubs and the wine bars. In the smaller of the lounge bars where food was being served several vacant tables remained. Wexford was making for one of them when he caught sight of Miles Gardner sitting alone.

  “Won’t you join me?”

  “You look as if you’re waiting for someone,” Wexford said.

  “Any congenial company that offers itself.” He had a gracious warm manner of speaking that was in no way affected. Wexford recalled that this was what he had always liked about him. “They do a nice prawn salad,” Miles Gardner said. “And if you can get here before one they’ll send up to the butcher for a filet steak.”

  “What happens at one?”

  “The butcher closes. He opens at two and then the pub closes. There’s Myringham for you.”

  Wexford laughed. Burden didn’t laugh but sat wearing the sort of stiff polite expression that indicates to even the most insensitive that one would be happier—or less miserable—on one’s own. Wexford made up his mind to ignore him. Gardner seemed delighted with their company and, having bought a round of drinks, began to talk in the easy rather elegant way he had about the new house he had just moved into which Sylvia’s father-in-law had designed. It was a valuable gift, Wexford thought, to be able to talk to people, one whom you had only just met and the other a mere acquaintance, as if they were old friends whom you conversed with regularly.

  Gardner was a small, undistinguished-looking man. His style was in his voice and manner. He had a much taller wife and two or three rather noisy daughters, Wexford remembered. From the new house and the time it had taken to get itself built, Gardner had moved on to talk of work, lack of work, and unemployment, eliciting mild sparks of interest from Burden, at least to the extent of extracting monosyllables from him. Sevensmith Harding had battled against laying off workers at their H
arlow factory and the battle had been won—allowing for the few redundancies which Gardner insisted had been acceptable to the men and women concerned.

  “Yes,” said Burden. “I daresay.”

  Always reactionary, he had until a few years back threatened to become unbearably right-wing and Blimpish, but Jenny had reversed the tide. Burden was far more of a moderate now. He did not, as he once would have, launch into a tirade against unemployment benefits, Social Security payments, and general idleness. Or perhaps it was only this depression of his that made him forbear.

  “The whole attitude towards work and employment and keeping one’s job is changing, I find,” Gardner said. He began talking about what he thought gave rise to these new patterns and made it interesting enough. Or so Wexford thought. Burden, eating prawn salad rather too rapidly, kept looking at his watch. He had to be back in court by two. Wexford thought he would be glad to be rid of him for a while.

  “Isn’t what you’re really saying,” he said to Gardner, “that, in spite of the threat of unemployment and the inadequacy of unemployment benefits, men seem to have lost that craven fear of losing their jobs they had in the thirties?”

  “Yes, and to a great extent, at any rate among the middle class, lost the feeling they used to have that they had to stick in a hated job or career for the rest of their lives just because it’s the job or career they went into at twenty.”

  “Then what’s brought this change about?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve thought about it but the answers I come up with don’t satisfy me. But I can tell you that just as the fear has gone, and the respect for employers because they were employers, so has pride in one’s job and the old loyalty to a company. My marketing manager is a case in point. Time was when you could say a man in that position would also be a responsible person, someone you could trust not to let you down. He’d have been proud—and yes, I’ll say it, grateful—to be where he was and he’d have had a real feeling for the firm’s welfare too.”

  “What’s he done?” said Burden. “Decided to change his career in midstream?”

  It was said acidulously but Gardner gave no sign of having noticed the edge to Burden’s voice and replied pleasantly.

  “Not so far as I know. He simply walked out on me. He’s on three months’ notice, or supposed to be. First we get a phone call from his wife saying he’s sick, then not a word until a letter of resignation comes, very clipped and curt, and a note at the bottom—” Gardner looked apologetic and said almost apologetically, “Quite an insolent sort of note, saying he’d be in touch with our accounts department about his superannuation.”

  “Had he been with you long?”

  “All his working life, I gather, and five years as marketing manager.”

  “At least you’ll have no difficulty in finding a replacement in these hard times.”

  “It’s going to be a case of promotion for one of our best reps. That’s always been Sevensmith Harding’s policy. Promote rather than take in from outside. Only usually, of course, we’re given a bit more time.”

  Burden got up and said he must get back to court. He shook hands with Gardner and had the grace to mutter something about its having been good to meet him.

  “Let me get you another beer,” said Wexford when Burden had left and been described (very much to his surprise) by Gardner as a “nice chap.”

  “Thanks so much. I don’t suppose they’ll sling us out before two-thirty, will they?”

  The beer came, one of the 130 varieties of “real ale” the Old Flag claimed to stock.

  “It’s not by any chance my neighbor Rodney Williams you’ll be promoting, is it?”

  Gardner looked up at him, surprised.

  “Rod Williams?”

  “Yes. He lives in the next street to me.”

  Gardner said in a patient tone, “Rod Williams is our former marketing manager, the one I was telling you resigned.”

  “Williams?”

  “Yes, I thought I explained. Perhaps I didn’t say the name.”

  “Somebody,” said Wexford, “is getting hold of the wrong end of the stick here.”

  “It’s you,” said Gardner, smiling.

  “Yes, I expect it is. Somebody has given me the wrong end of the stick. Am I to take it then that Williams wasn’t one of your reps and didn’t cover the Suffolk area for you?”

  “He was once. He did once. Up till five years ago. We kept to our customary policy and when our former marketing manager took early retirement due to a heart condition, we promoted Rod Williams.”

  “As far as his wife knows he’s still a rep. That is, he’s still spending half his time selling up in Suffolk.”

  Gardner’s eyebrows went up. He gave a twisted grin. “His private life is no affair of mine.”

  “Nor mine.”

  It was Gardner who changed the subject. He began talking about his eldest daughter, who was getting married in the late summer. Wexford finally parted from him with a promise to be in touch, to “get Dora to give Pam a ring and fix something up.” Driving home to Kingsmarkham, he thought for a while about Rodney Williams. There had been no room in his own marriage for alibis. He wondered what it would be like to have a marriage in which a permanent, on-going, five-year-long alibi existed as an integral part of life. Unthinkable. Unimaginable. He stopped trying to identify and thought about it with detachment.

  What had happened perhaps was that five years ago Williams had met a girl with whom he wanted to spend time without ending his marriage. Keeping his promotion a secret from his wife would have been a way of achieving this. Probably the girl lived in Myringham. While Joy Williams believed her husband was staying at a motel outside Ipswich he was in reality seeing this other girl, no doubt sharing her home and doing his nine-to-five job at Sevensmith Harding in Myringham.

  It was the sort of situation some men chuckle over. Wexford wasn’t one of them. And there was another aspect, one that few men would find funny. If Williams hadn’t told his wife about his promotion he presumably also hadn’t told her about the considerable increase in salary that went with it. Still, there was no more mystery. Williams had written to the company. Joy had phoned with excuses. Back in Alverbury Rod Williams was still perhaps managing to shore up a few fragments of deceit against discovery.

  IT WAS NINE AT NIGHT AND HE WAS STILL IN his office, going through for the tenth time the statements he had taken for the preparation of a case of fraud against one Francis Wingrave Adams. He still doubted whether they would constitute a watertight case and so did counsel representing the police, though both knew he was guilty. On the final stroke of nine—St. Peter’s clock had a dead sound too, like St. Mary Woolnoth’s—he put the papers away and set off to walk homewards.

  Lately he had taken to walking to and from work. Dr. Crocker recommended it, pointing out that it was less than half a mile.

  “Hardly worth it then,” Wexford said.

  “A couple of miles’ walk a day could make a difference of ten years’ life to you.”

  “Does that mean that if I walked six miles a day I could prolong my life by thirty years?”

  The doctor had refused to answer that one. Wexford, though feigning to scoff, had gone some way towards obeying him. Sometimes his walk took him down Tabard Road past Burden’s bungalow, sometimes along Alverbury Road, where the Williams family lived, and there was an occasional longer route along one of the meadow footpaths. Tonight he intended to drop in and see Burden for a final assessment of the Adams business.

  But now he began to feel that there was very little left to say about this man who had conned an elderly woman out of £2,0,000. He wouldn’t talk about that. Instead he would try to get out of Burden what was happening in his life to account for his depression.

  The Burdens still lived in the bungalow Burden had moved into soon after his first marriage, where the garden after twenty years and more still had an immature look and the ivy which tried to climb up the house had been ruthlessly cut back
with secateurs. Only the front door was changed. It had been all colors—Burden was a relentless decorator—but Wexford had liked the rose pink best. Now it was a dark greenish blue—Sevenshine Oriental Peacock, probably. Above the door, now dusk had come, the porch light was on, a lantern of leaded lights in the shape of a star.

  Jenny came to let him in. She was halfway through her pregnancy now and “showing,” as the old wives say. Instead of a smock she wore a full-sleeved, square-necked dress with a high waist, like the one the woman is wearing in Vermeer’s The Letter. She had let her golden-brown hair grow and it hung to her shoulders. But, for all that, Wexford was shocked by her appearance. She looked drawn and dispirited.

  Burden, having years ago agreed to stop calling Wexford “sir,” now called him nothing at all. But Jenny called him Reg. She said, “Mike’s in the living room, Reg,” and added in a way quite unlike her usual self, “I was just going to bed.”

  He felt constrained to say he was sorry for calling so late, though it was only twenty past nine. She shrugged and said it didn’t matter and she said it in a way which seemed to imply that nothing much mattered. He followed her into the room where Burden was.

  On the middle cushion of the three-seater settee Burden sat reading Police Review. Wexford would have expected Jenny to have been sitting beside him but she hadn’t been. Beside a chair at the far end of the room lay her book face downwards and a piece of white knitting that had a look about it of the knitter’s having no enthusiasm for her task. In a glass vase on the windowsill dying wallflowers stood in three inches of water.

  “Have a drink,” said Burden, laying down his magazine. “There’s beer. There is beer, isn’t there, Jenny?”

  “I don’t know. I never touch the stuff.”