Free No Man's Nightingale by Ruth Rendell Page A

left her. He refused to believe her story, said she’d invented the rape when she found she was pregnant. I think she was well rid of him.
    ‘Then she said a funny thing. She was crying, she cried a lot at the time, she said the rapist was young and quite good-looking and an
Asian.
I asked her what difference that made, and she said, at least it might be a beautiful baby. And it was.’
    ‘Poor woman,’ Wexford said, a comment he wouldn’t have made in these circumstances when he was a policeman. He drove on to the forecourt of the Olive and Dove, parked in the last marked space. ‘And that was Clarissa. Why the name?’ Another remark he wouldn’t have made.
    ‘Oh, because she spent a good deal of the pregnancy reading Richardson’s
Clarissa.
She loved it. In a way it’s about rape, I suppose. It’s the most boring novel I’ve ever read.’
    Wexford had enjoyed it but he said nothing. ‘What happened next?’
    ‘Well, of course, she loved the child. She adored her. They were with me until Clarissa was about four. Sarah supported herself and the child by teaching English to foreign students and translating Urdu and Hindi into English for non-English-speaking immigrants. People from India and Pakistan may be able to talk to their neighbours but can’t read forms and instruction books and so on. You’d be surprised.’
    ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ said Wexford. ‘There can’t be much money in it.’
    ‘There isn’t. Most of the time, anyway, she wouldn’t let them pay her. She had to go back to teaching and she did once Clarissa was old enough to go to school. By then she had moved away and the last address I had for her was somewhere in Essex. She had a teaching job there.’
    Wexford said, ‘I don’t want to keep you but there are a few more details I’d like to have.’
    ‘You aren’t keeping me,’ Thora said. ‘I’ve nothing else to do but hang about here waiting for Georgina and Clarissa to come at seven. Why don’t you come in and let me give you tea?’
    For all the years he had worked in Kingsmarkham Wexford had been a habitué of the Olive and Dove. He had seen it change from a typical English country hotel where people, driving through on their way to the south coast, could stop without booking ahead and eat in a sunlit dining room a heavy lunch of soup, roast lamb, lemon meringue pie and cheese and biscuits, to what it was today, smart, four-starred, every bedroom with an en suite bathroom, TV, a computer and a basket of exotic fruits. Over the years the public bar had gone, the ‘snug’ had gone and the all-pervading cigarette smoke had gone. Food was available almost round the clock and wine from New Zealand had to a great extent replaced beer and spirits. But as with so many public buildings today, from shops to cathedrals, deconstruction and construction work was going on. The hallway they passed through was apparently about to lose its lift and a new one would replace it. Much of the area was boarded off, but as he passed Wexford caught a glimse of the discarded lift waiting, it seemed, to be taken away to the dump or landfill. The manufacturer’s name on it was one he had recently come across in another context: Cuthbert & Son.
    As a waitress was bringing the tea things to one of the tables, Wexford reflected that though he had probably drunk gallons of wine, beer and (once) whisky in this place, he had never before drunk tea here. Regretfully, he declined one of the pink, blue or purple meringues and the chocolate marzipan slices. Thora Kilmartin, overweight though she was, didn’t hesitate but helped herself to a blue meringue.
    ‘If you’re happy to go on talking about Sarah,’ Wexford began, ‘I’ll ask you if you can remember the name of her boyfriend, the man who left when she found she was pregnant.’
    ‘It so happens that I can. It was the same as mine. Oh, not Kilmartin, nowhere near as distinguished. My maiden name, Watson. His name was Gerald Watson, known as