The Monster in the Box by Ruth Rendell

Author:Ruth Rendell [Rendell, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2009-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A second glass of red wine had been tempting but he had refused it. Not because he had some sort of premonition he would be called out – that hardly crossed his mind – but because it was early, he had only just sat down to his dinner, and if he had more claret now he would want another before bed. So he left the silver stopper his daughter Sheila had given him in the neck of the bottle and applied himself to the fusilli alla carbonara and roquette salad he didn’t much like but which Dora deemed good for him. As you got older, he thought, your taste reverted to the food of your youth. In your middle years you had quite liked deep-fried melon flowers and filo pastry and chorizo but now you wanted what you never got, sausages and steak-and-kidney pudding and stewed plums and custard. On the other hand, his preferred drink used to be beer but now he hardly touched it. He was musing on this, wondering if Dora felt the same but somehow feeling sure she didn’t, was on the point of asking her, when the phone rang.

She knew it would be for him. She passed it to him without answering it herself.

‘I have to go.’ He got up, leaving half his fusilli. ‘Something serious,’ he said. It was the phrase he always used to her when he was called out to an unexplained death or a lethal attack. So it had been when Billy Kenyon’s body was found in the botanical gardens, so it was when Nicky Dusan was stabbed. It was this economy of explanation he was later glad he adhered to. Telling her the address he was called out to this evening, though at the time it meant nothing to him, would have shocked and horrified her so that he would have baulked at leaving her alone.

She nodded, accepting. The days when she would have lamented his failing to finish his dinner were long gone. Now, his girth staying the same if not exactly increasing, she was pleased when he missed a meal or only ate half of it.

Again glad his evening’s drinking had been limited to one small glass of red wine, he drove himself to Pomfret. Two police cars, a police van and an ambulance – not to be needed – were already parked outside the row of white stucco cottages. He left his car fifty yards up Cambridge Road. A blue-and-white-striped canvas barrier with a doorway in it had already been erected to cover most of the front of number 6. Barry Vine lifted the flap over the doorway and came out as he approached.

‘Pathologist’s just come, sir,’ he said. ‘He’s with the deceased now.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Dr Mavrikian,’ Barry said.

‘I don’t mean the pathologist,’ said Wexford. ‘Who cares, anyway? I mean who’s what you call “the deceased”?’

Barry knew very well Wexford’s hatred of jargon and verbiage, so said, ‘Sorry, sir. The dead man is called Andrew Norton. This is his home and a neighbour …’ The look on Wexford’s face stopped him.

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