Free Sins of the Fathers by Ruth Rendell Page B

note of enquiry. He bent closer as the confession began to flow out, jerky, toneless, spasmodic, like the gulping of a sluggish stream. It was something about a girl, but it was utterly incoherent. He could make nothing of it. We fly unto Thee for succour, he thought, on behalf of this Thy servant, here lying under Thy hand in great weakness of body...
    The Anglican Church provides no order quite comparable to that of Extreme Unction. Archery found himself saying urgently over and over again, "It will be all right, it will be all right." The boy's throat rattled and a stream of blood welled out of his mouth, splashing Archery's folded hands. "We humbly commend the soul of this Thy servant, our dear brother, into Thy hands..." He was tired and his voice broke with compassion and with horror. "Most humbly beseeching Thee that it may be precious in Thy sight..."
    It was the doctor's hand that appeared, mopping with a handkerchief at Archery's fingers, then feeling a still heart and an inert pulse. Wexford looked at the doctor, gave an infinitesimal shrug. Nobody spoke. Across the silence came the sound of brakes, a horn braying and an oath as a car, taking the diversion too late, veered into Queen Street. Wexford pulled the coat up over the dead face.
    Archery was shattered and cold in the evening heat. He got up stiffly, feeling an utter loneliness, a terrible desire to weep. The only thing to lean on now the bollard was gone was the rear of that lethal white car. He leaned on it, feeling sick.
    Presently he opened his eyes and moved slowly along the body of the car to where Wexford stood contemplating a girl's shaggy black head. This was no business of his, Archery's. He wanted no hand in it, only to ask Wexford where he could find an hotel for the night.
    Something in the other man's expression made him hesitate. The big Chief Inspector's face was a study in irony. He watched Wexford tap on the glass. The window was slid back and the girl inside lifted to them a face drowned in tears.
    "This is a bad business," he heard Wexford say, "a very bad business, Miss Crilling."
 
    "God moves in a mysterious way," said Wexford as he and Archery walked over the bridge, "His wonders to perform." He hummed the old hymn tune, apparently liking the sound of his rather rusty baritone.
    "That's true," said Archery very seriously. He stopped, rested his hand on the granite parapet and looked down into the brown water. A swan sailed out from under the bridge, dipping its long neck into the drifting weed. "And that is really the girl who found Mrs. Primero's body?"
    "That's Elizabethan Crilling, yes. One of the wild young things of Kingsmarkham. A boyfriend—a very close friend, I may add—gave her the Mini for her twenty-first and she's been a menace in it ever since."
    Archery was silent. Tess Kershaw and Elizabeth Crilling were the same age. Their lives had begun together, almost side by side. Each must have walked with her mother along the grass verges of the Stowerton Road, played in the fields behind Victor's Piece. The Crillings had been comfortably off, middle-class people; the Painters miserably poor. In his mind's eye he saw again that tear-wrecked face down which grease and mascara ran in rivulets, and he heard again the ugly words she had used to Wexford. Another face superimposed itself on Elizabeth Crilling's, a fair aquiline face with steady intelligent eyes under a pageboy's blonde fringe. Wexford interrupted his thoughts.
    "She's been spoilt, of course, made too much of. Your Mrs. Primero had her over with her every day, stuffing her with sweets and what-have-you, by all accounts. After the murder Mrs. Crilling was always taking her to psychiatrists, wouldn't let her go to school till they had the kid-catcher down on her. God knows how many schools she has been to. She was what you might call the female lead in the juvenile court here."
    But it was Tess whose father had been a murderer, Tess who might have been expected to grow