Free Put on by Cunning by Ruth Rendell Page A

is he said he asked her and she admitted it.’
    Wexford leaned forward, frowning a little, his eyes on Dinah Sternhold’s intent face.
    ‘Are you telling me this woman admitted to Sir Manuel that she wasn’t Natalie Arno? Why didn’t you say so before?’
    ‘Because I don’t believe it. I think that when he said she admitted she wasn’t Natalie and seemed ashamed and embarrassed, I think he was – well, dreaming. You see, he told her to go. He was trembling, he was terribly distressed. It wasn’t in him to shout at anyone or be violent, you understand, he just told her not to say any more but to go. He heard her close the front door and then he did something he absolutely never did. He had some brandy. He never touched spirits in the normal way, a glass of wine sometimes or a sherry, that was all. But he had some brandy to steady him, he said, and then he went to lie down because his heart was racing – and he fell asleep.’
    ‘It was next day when you saw him?’
    She nodded. ‘Next day at about eleven. I think that while he was asleep he dreamt that bit about her admitting she wasn’t Natalie. I told him so. I didn’t humour him – ours wasn’t that kind of relationship. I told him I thought he was mistaken. I told him all sorts of things that I believed and believe now – that eye colour fades and features change and one can forget a language as one can forget anything else. He wouldn’t have any of it. He was so sweet and good and a genius – but he was terribly impulsive and stubborn as well.
    ‘Anyway, he started saying he was going to cut her out of his will. She was a fraud and an impostor who was attempting to get hold of a considerable property by false pretences. She was to have nothing, therefore, and I was to have the lot. Perhaps you won’t believe me if I say I did my best to dissuade him from that?’
    Wexford slightly inclined his head. ‘Why not?’
    ‘It would have been in my own interest to agree with him. However, I did try to dissuade him and he was sweet to me as he always was but he wouldn’t listen. He wrote to her, telling her what he intended to do, and then he wrote to his solicitors, asking one of the partners to come up to Sterries on February 4th – that would have been two days after our wedding.’
    ‘Who are these solicitors?’
    ‘Symonds, O’Brien and Ames,’ she said, ‘in the High Street here.’
    Kingsmarkham’s principal firm of solicitors. They had recently moved their premises into the new Kingsbrook Precinct. It was often Wexford’s lot to have dealings with them.
    ‘He invited Mr Ames to lunch with us,’ Dinah Sternhold said, ‘and afterwards he was to draw up a new will for Manuel. It must have been on the 22nd or the 23rd that he wrote to Natalie and on the 27th – he was drowned.’ Her voice shook a little.
    Wexford waited. He said gently, ‘He had no intention of coming to us and he wasn’t going to confide in his solicitor?’
    She did not answer him directly. ‘I think I did right,’ she said. ‘I prevented that. I couldn’t dissuade him from the decision to disinherit her but I did manage to stop him going to the police. I told him he would make a – well, a scandal, and he would have hated that. What I meant to do was this. Let him make a new will if he liked. Wills can be unmade and remade. I knew Natalie probably disliked me and was jealous but I thought I’d try to approach her myself a month or so after we were married, say, and arrange another meeting. I thought that somehow we’d all meet and it would come right. It would turn out to have been some misunderstanding like in a play, like in one of those old comedies of mistaken identity.’
    Wexford was silent. Then he said, ‘Would you like to tell me about it all over again, Mrs Sternhold?’
    ‘What I’ve just told?’
    He nodded. ‘Please.’
    ‘But why?’
    To test your veracity. He didn’t say that aloud. If she were intelligent enough she would know without his