Free No Man's Nightingale by Ruth Rendell

foreign students and found herself some private pupils. She was bilingual, you know, Urdu was as much her first language as English was. Leo was a landscape architect. It sounds quite grand but she told me he didn’t earn very much though he would have done if he’d lived, apparently. But he didn’t live.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘He was driving his father’s car on some motorway. His father was sitting beside him. They had been to a football match. It was foggy and there was one of those sudden pile-ups. Leo had been the end of the queue and a lorry came up behind him going much too fast. It crashed into their car, destroying the entire back and forcing them so far into the car in front that they came out the other end. Apparently Leo and his father were killed instantly. Leo was only twenty-eight, Sarah a widow at just twenty-six.’
    Wexford didn’t interrupt. He let her continue, soon realising that Burden’s version of Sarah’s life had got things out of order.
    ‘Left alone, she went to India – Darjeeling, it was – to live with her grandmother, her father’s mother. There was an uncle and an aunt and several cousins already living there. Grandmother was quite well off and it was a large comfortable compound.’
    ‘That was before Clarissa was born?’
    It was a slightly different story from the one Burden had. ‘Oh, yes.’ Thora’s tone had become weary, almost grim. ‘Sarah had gone to India originally with an aid agency but she couldn’t stand some of the sights she saw, the poverty, the disease. She had some sort of breakdown and took refuge with the grandmother. She stayed there for two years. After that Sarah said she felt she needed to earn her own living, she couldn’t go on taking the grandmother’s charity, though the old lady was perfectly willing to support her, would have done so, I gathered, for the rest of her life.’
    Wexford calculated that Sarah Hussain must by this time have been twenty-eight or twenty-nine. ‘She came back here?’
    ‘She got a job teaching at Bridgwell Comprehensive. I was teaching history there, we got to know each other, became friends and shared a flat. Sarah met a man she liked, the first man in her life since her husband died. I suppose you’ll want to know his name?’
    ‘He was Clarissa’s father?’
    ‘Oh, no. Unfortunately, no. Sarah was – well, not prudish or strict, but let’s say she wouldn’t have lived with a man without marriage.’
    ‘Then, how –’
    Thora said almost brutally, ‘She was raped. Clarissa is the result of rape.’
    It was at this point that Georgina Bray put her head round the door and said in a curiously coquettish tone, ‘Have you finished with all your secrets? Can Clarissa and I come back now?’

CHAPTER SEVEN
    WEXFORD WAS WONDERING how and where he could prolong this interview when Thora Kilmartin came to his rescue. ‘Oh, Georgina, I think I told you earlier that I haven’t yet looked in at the Olive and Dove hotel where I’m staying tonight. I wonder if Mr Wexford would be kind enough to give me a lift there. I think it may be on his way.’
    Wexford said, of course. It would be a pleasure.
    ‘And since you and Clarissa will be having dinner with me tonight perhaps you’ll meet me there at seven?’
    At the wheel, he didn’t speak. He was sure she would if he kept silent for a moment or two and he was right.
    ‘We were talking about the awful thing that happened to Sarah.’
    ‘Did she report it to the police?’
    ‘When she told me I wanted her to but she wouldn’t. She said she couldn’t face the questions and the – well, the doctor examining her. And if it came to court, that would be impossible. I think she thought she could forget it, just put it out of her head. But she couldn’t because she found she was pregnant. I tell you frankly I wanted her to have an abortion. It was the obvious thing to do but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t take a life, she said. The man she was going out with