Free Means Of Evil And Other Stories by Ruth Rendell Page B

now on the street corner, he about to go in one direction, she in the other. She dropped the cigarette end, stamped it out over-thoroughly with a high heel. From her handbag she took a small lacy handkerchief and dabbed her nostrils with it. The impression was that the tears, though near, would be restrained. "She left me two thousand pounds. Dear Ivy, she was so kind and generous. I knew I was to have something, I didn't dream as much as that." Elsie Parrish smiled, a watery, girlish, rueful smile, but still he was totally unprepared for what she said next. "I'm going to buy a car."
   His eyebrows went up.
   "I've kept my licence going. I haven't driven since my husband died and that's twenty-two years ago. I had to sell our car and I've always longed and longed for another." She really looked as if she had, a yearning expression crumpling the roses still further. "I'm going to have my own dear little car!" She was on the verge of executing a dance on the pavement. "And dear Ivy made that possible!" Anxiously: "You don't think I'm too old to drive?"
   Wexford did, but he only said that this kind of judgement wasn't really within his province. She nodded, smiled again, whisked off surprisingly fast into the corner supermarket. Wexford moved more slowly and thoughtfully away, his eyes down. It was because he was looking down that he saw the matchbook, and then he remembered fancying he had seen her drop something when she got out that handkerchief.
   She wasn't in the shop. She must have left by the other exit into the High Street and now she was nowhere to be seen. Deciding that matchbooks were in the category of objects which no one much minds losing, Wexford dropped it into his pocket and forgot it.
     
"You want Roy?"
   "That's right," said Wexford.
   The foreman, storekeeper, proprietor, whatever he was, didn't ask why. "You'll find him," he said, "doing the Snowcem on them flats up the Sewingbury Road."
   Wexford drove up there. Roy was a gigantic youth, broad-shouldered, heavily muscled, with an aureole of thick curly fair hair. He came down the ladder and said he'd just been about to knock off for his tea break, anyway. There was a carmen's café conveniently near. Roy lit a cigarette, put his elbows on the table.
   "I never knew a thing about it till I turned up there the next day."
   "But surely when Mrs. Betts came in the afternoon before she asked you how her mother had been?"
   "Sure she did. And I said the truth, that the old lady'd got a headache and asked for something for it and I'd given it her, and then she'd felt tired and gone in for a lay-down. But there was no sign she was dying . My God, that'd never have crossed my mind."
   A headache, Wexford reflected, was often one of the premonitory signs of a cerebral haemorrhage. Roy seemed to read his thoughts, for he said quickly:
   "She'd had a good many headaches while I was in the place working. Them non-drip plastic-based paints have got a bit of a smell to them, used to turn me up at first. I mean, you don't want to get thinking there was anything out of the way in her having an aspirin and laying down, guv. That'd happened two or three times while I was there. And she'd shovel them aspirins down, swallow four as soon as look at you."
   Wexford said, "Tell me about that afternoon. Did anyone come into the house between the time Mr. and Mrs. Betts went out and the time they got back?"
   Roy shook his head. "Definitely not, and I'd have known. I was working on the hall, see? The front door was wide open on account of the smell. Nobody could have come in there without my seeing, could they? The other old girl——Mrs. Betts, that is——she locked the back door before she went out and I hadn't no call to unlock it. What else d'you want to know, guv?"
   "Exactly what happened, what you and Mrs. Wrangton talked about, the lot."
   Roy swigged his tea, lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the last. "I got on OK