Guilty Thing Surprised by Ruth Rendell

Author:Ruth Rendell [Rendell, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82954-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

9

Burden listened with disdain and incredulity to Wexford’s condensed and to some extent expurgated account of his two interviews. It aroused in him a cold angry disgust. Anyone who knew the chief inspector less well than he might imagine Wexford to be quite smitten by the charms—invisible to Burden—of that immoral Dutch girl.

‘I cannot see,’ he said, standing by the window in Wexford’s office and disentangling a knot in the string of the Venetian blind, ‘why you suppose this story of theirs lets them out at all.’ He straightened the string and wound it round its hooks in a figure of eight. Burden liked everything to be neat and shipshape even in someone else’s domain. ‘On the contrary, they could have been in it together. You’ve only got that girl’s word that he—er, joined her at eleven-fifteen. It could have been later. Of course she’d back him up.’

‘Oh? Why would she? Just what would she get out of being an accessory to the murder of her employer’s wife?’

Burden stared at him. Really, the old man was almost simple at times.

‘Get out of it? Marriage with Nightingale, of course.’

‘Don’t keep saying “of course”. It’s far from of course. And leave that blind alone. Sometimes I think you’ve got a compulsion complex, always tidying everything up. Listen to me, Mike. You’ve got to bring your ideas up to date a bit. You may be only thirty-six but you’re so dead old-fashioned it isn’t true. First of all I want you to know that I believe Nightingale. I believe his story because some instinct in me recognises the truth when I hear it. I don’t believe he’s capable of violence. If he thought his wife had a lover—if he cared, which is more to the point—he’d divorce her. Secondly, Katje Doorn isn’t a kind of Lady Macbeth. She’s a very contemporary young woman who is enjoying life enormously and not the least of what she enjoys is plenty of anxiety-free sex.’

Burden went pink at that and blinked his eyes. He tried to put on a sophisticated expression and failed.

‘What reason have we to suppose she wants to marry Nightingale?’ Wexford went on. ‘He’s an old man to her,’ he said urbanely. ‘She said as much. And for all her immorality, as you’d put it, she’s a nice normal girl who’d recoil in horror from the thought of taking into her bed a man fresh from murdering his wife. Mike, we’ve got to change our whole pattern of thinking in these domestic murder cases. Times have changed. Young women don’t look on marriage as the be-all and end-all of existence any more. Girls like Katje won’t help kill a man’s wife just so that he can make an honest woman of them. They don’t think they’re dishonest women just because they’re not virgins. And as for Katje wanting him for his money, I don’t think she’s given much thought to money yet. That may come later. At present she’s out for a good time without any worry.

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