Free Wexford 6 - No More Dying Then by Ruth Rendell

said when he had looked at the list. “What about you, Roz?”
       “I don’t think so, my love.”
       Her love said, “I saw in the paper about the missing boy. You think the cases have some connection?”
       “Very possibly, Mr. Swan. You say you don’t know any of the people on this list. Do you know Mrs. Gemma Lawrence?”
       “We hardly know anyone around here,” said Rosalind Swan. “You might say we’ll still on our honeymoon, really.
       Burden thought this a tasteless remark. The woman was all of thirty-eight and married a year. He waited for her to say something about the child who had never been found, to show some feeling for her, but Mrs. Swan was looking with voracious pride at her husband. He thought it time to put his own spoke in and he said flatly:
       “Can you account for your movements on Thursday afternoon, sir?”
       The man wasn’t very tall, had small hands, and any one could fake a limp. Besides, Wexford had said he hadn’t had an alibi for that other Thursday afternoon . . .
       “You’ve quite cast me for the role of kidnapper, haven’t you?’ Swan said to Wexford.
       “It was Mr. Burden who asked you,” Wexford said imperturbably.
       “I shall never forget the way you hounded me when we lost poor little Stella.”
       “Poor little Stella,” Mrs. Swan echoed comfortably.
       “Don’t get upset, Rozzy. You know I don’t like it when you’re upset. All right, what was I doing on Thursday afternoon? Every time you add anyone to your missing persons list I suppose I must expect this sort of inquisition. I was here last Thursday. My wife was in London and Gudrun had the afternoon off. I was here all alone. I read for a bit and had a nap.” A flicker of temper crossed his face. “Oh, and at about four I rode over to Stowerton and murdered a couple of tots that were making the streets look untidy.”
       “Oh, Ivor, darling!”
       “That sort of thing isn’t amusing, Mr. Swan.”
       “No, and it’s not amusing for me to be suspected of making away with two children, one of them my own wife’s.”
       No more could be got out of him. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Burden as they drove back, “did she go on calling herself Rivers after her mother remarried?”
       “Sometimes she was one, sometimes the other, as far as I could gather. When she became a missing person she was Stella Rivers to us because that was her real name. Swan said he intended to have the name changed by deed poll, but he hadn’t taken any steps towards it. Typical of him.”
       “Tell me about this non-existent alibi,” said Burden.

Chapter 6

    Martin, Loring and their helpers were still interviewing rabbit-keepers, Bryant, Gates and half a dozen others continuing a house-to-house search of Stowerton. During the chief inspector’s absence Constable Peach had brought in a child’s sandal which he had found in a field near Flagford, but it was the wrong size, and, anyway, John Lawrence hadn’t been wearing sandals.
       Wexford read the messages which had been left on his desk, but most were negative and some needed immediate attention. He scanned the anonymous note again, then put it back in its envelope with a sigh.
       "We had enough letters in the Stella Rivers case to paper the walls of this office,” he said, “and we followed them all up. We had five hundred and twenty-three phone calls. The fantasies that go on in people’s minds, Mike, the power of their imaginations! They were nearly all well intentioned. Ninety per cent of them really thought they had seen Stella and . . .”
       Burden interrupted him. “I want to hear about Swan’s alibi.”
       “Swan drove Stella to Equita at two-thirty. Silly sort of name, isn’t it? Whether it’s supposed to mean all the pupils are equal or the only thing they teach is horse-riding, I wouldn’t know.”
       Burden was always impatient with these digressions. “What kind of a