Free Wolf to the Slaughter by Ruth Rendell

‘Whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.’
    Burden was offended. He went out into the corridor, looking for someone on whom to vent his temper. Bryant and Gates, who had been chatting up the sergeant, tried to look busy as soon as they saw him. Not so Mark Drayton. He was standing a little apart from the others, staring down at his feet and apparently deep in thought, his hands in the pockets of his duffel coat. The sight of his black hair sticking out over the hood lining inflamed Burden still further. He marched up to Drayton, but before he could speak, the young man said casually:
    ‘Can I have a word with you, sir?’
    ‘The only person you need a word with is a barber,’ Burden snapped. ‘Four words to be precise. Short back and sides.’ Drayton’s face was impassive, secretive, intelligent. ‘Oh, very well, what is it?’
    ‘An advert in Grover’s window. I thought we might be interested.’ From his pocket he took a neat flat notebook and opening it, read aloud: ‘Quiet secluded room to let for evenings. Suit student or anyone wanting to get away from it all. Privacy guaranteed. Apply, 82, Charteris Road, Stowerton.’
    Burden’s nostrils contracted in distaste. Drayton was not responsible for the advertisement, he told himself, he had only found it. Indeed it was to his credit that he had found it. Why then feel that this kind of thing, so squalid, so redolent of nasty things done in nasty corners, was right up his street?
    ‘Grover’s again, eh?’ said Wexford when they told him. ‘So this is their latest racket, is it? Last year it was – er, curious books. This place gets more like the Charing Cross Road every day.’ He gave a low chuckle which Burden would not have been surprised to hear Drayton echo. The fellow was a sycophant if ever there was one. But Drayton’s olive-skinned face was wary. Burden would have said he looked ashamed except that he could not think of any reason why he should be.
    ‘Remember the time when all the school kids were getting hold of flick knives and we knew for sure it was Grover but we couldn’t pin it on him? And those magazines he sells. How would you like your daughter to read them?’
    Wexford shrugged. ‘They’re not for daughters, Mike, they’re for sons, and you don’t read them. Before we get around to convening the purity committee, we’d better do something about this ad.’ He fixed his eyes speculatively on Drayton. ‘You’re a likely lad, Mark.’ It irked Burden to hear the Chief Inspector address Drayton, as he very occasionally did, by his Christian name. ‘You look the part.’
    ‘The part, sir?’
    ‘We’ll cast you as a student wanting to get away from it all, shall we, Inspector Burden?’ Still viewing Drayton, he added, ‘I can’t see any of the rest of us capering nimbly in a lady’s chamber.’
    The first time they went to the door there was no answer. It was a corner house, its front on Charteris Road, its side with a short dilapidated fence, bordering Sparta Grove. While Burden waited in the car, Drayton followed this fence to its termination in a lane that ran between the backs of gardens. Here the stone wall was too high to see over, but Drayton found a gate in it, locked but affording through its cracks a view of the garden of number eighty-two. On a clothes line, attached at one end to the wall and at the other to a hook above a rear window of the house, hung a wet carpet from which water dripped on to a brick path.
    The house was seventy or eighty years old but redeemed from the slumminess of its neighbours by a certain shipshape neatness. The yard was swept – a clean broom stood with its head against the house wall – and the back step had been whitened. All the windows were closed and hung with crisp net curtains. As Drayton contemplated these windows, a curtain in one, probably the back bedroom, was slightly raised and a small wizened face looked out. Drayton put his foot on a projecting hunk of