Wexford 20 - End In Tears by Ruth Rendell

Author:Ruth Rendell
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

Chapter 18

He asked Burden and Hannah. ‘What qualification could Amber and Megan have had in common?’ he asked them. ‘Nothing academic, I don’t mean that. Some physical peculiarity?’

‘Both young,’ said Burden. ‘Both female white Caucasians. Much the same sort of height and figure.’

Hannah was shaking her head. ‘They had much more not in common. One woman was good-looking, the other not. One was blonde, the other dark. One was living with a partner, the other living at home with her family. One left school at sixteen, the other was going on to higher education.’

‘None of that gets us very far, does it?’ Burden shrugged. Everyone who came into this room gravitated to the window to contemplate the sky the gathering clouds, ink-coloured and snowy; ‘I’ve seen the builders who’ll do the work on Victoria Terrace. They’re William Fish and Son of Stowerton and they tell me they don’t have keys to any of the houses. They’ve been in to look the place over, of course they have, but they’ve no keys. Fish says no one would need a key if they were prepared to do a little breaking and entering. None of the back entrances was securely fastened. A child could have forced the back door of number four.'

‘As we know, Surrage-Samphire are doing the decorative work.’ Burden perched himself on his favourite corner of Wexford’s desk. ‘Ross Samphire is the dominant one in that partnership and the one with the cabinet-making skills. He’s been to Victoria Terrace and been inside all the houses, assessing what has to be done on the decorative side. On the face of it, he seems a respectable sort of bloke. . .‘

‘But yet,’ said Wexford, quoting from his favourite play. “I do not like but yet.” What’s wrong with him, Mike?’

‘It has to be prejudice,’ Burden said. ‘He’s a very good-looking man and he knows it. On his living-room wall he’s got a huge nude. I don’t know anything about art but could tell this wasn’t a reproduction of some thing you’d see in a gallery. More like the sort of stuff you used to see for sale in DIY places in the nineties. I don’t mean it was indecent. There were too many wispy bits of scarf floating about on it for that. But Ross Samphire is married with kids and it wasn’t the sort of thing a woman would fancy up on her walls.’

Wexford burst out laughing while Hannah fixed on the inspector a stony gaze. It was a glare, Wexford thought, which encompassed disgust with Ross Samphire, distaste for that sort of picture, militant feminism and impatient contempt at Burden’s whole philosophy of life.

‘It has to be prejudice, as you say,’ he said. ‘Who’s Surrage?’

‘His wife’s maiden name. I suppose it’s some tax dodge. She doesn’t take an active part in things. The brother is called Rick. He lives in Pomfret and his job description is “company secretary”. But these people only have a tenuous connection with the house where Megan’s body was found.

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