Free A New Lease of Death by Ruth Rendell Page A

could get on to the station and …’
    Burden raised his eyebrows. Kingsmarkham police station had apparently become the battleground of the Church Militant.
    ‘You do that, and quick …’
    He murmured something useless to the boy, and moved towards the girl who had begun to sob.
    She was not crying because of what she had done, but because of what she had seen two hours before. It was two or three years now since she had what she called a waking nightmare – though at one time they were more real than reality – and she was crying because the nightmares were going to begin again and the remedy she had tried had not erased the picture from her mind.
    She had seen it in the estate agent’s window when she was coming home from work. It was a photograph of a house, but not as it was now, dirty and weathered, set in a tangled wilderness. The estate agents deceived you, they meant you to think it was like it had once been long ago … You? As soon as she found she was addressing herself as ‘You’ she knew it was beginning again, the re-telling of the nightmare. So she had got into the Mini and driven to Flagford, away from associations and memories and the hateful You voice, to drink and drink and try to send it away.
    But it would not go away and you were back in the big house, listening to the voices that went on coaxing, cajoling, arguing until you were bored, so bored until you went out into the garden and met the little girl.
    You went up to her and you said, ‘Do you like my dress?’
    ‘It’s pretty,’ she said, and she didn’t seem to mind that it was much nicer than her own.
    She was playing with a heap of sand, making pies in an old cup without a handle. You stayed and played and after that you came to the sand every day, down there out of sight of the big windows. The sand was warm and nice and you could understand it. You could understand the little girl too, even though she was the only little girl you had ever known. You knew a lot of grown ups, but you could not understand them, nor the ugly words and the funny wheedling way the talk was always about money, so that you seemed to see coins dropping out of wriggling lips and sliding dirtily through twitching fingers.
    The little girl had some magic about her, for she lived in a tree. Of course it was not really a tree but a house inside a kind of bush all shivering with leaves.
    The sand was not dry like the desert you lived in now, but warm and moist, like beach sand washed by a tepid sea. It was dirty too and you were afraid of what would happen if you got it on your dress …
    You cried and stamped your foot, but you never cried as you were crying now as the good-looking inspector came up to the car, his eyes full of anger.
    Did he seriously imagine he was going to find anything new after so long? Archery considered Wexford’s question. It was, he decided, more a matter of faith than of any real belief in Painter’s innocence. But faith in what? Not, surely, in Mrs Kershaw. Perhaps it was just a childlike certainty that such things could not happen to anyone connected with him, Archery. The child of a murderer could not be as Tess was, Kershaw would not have loved her, Charles would not want to marry her.
    ‘It can’t do any harm to see Alice Flower,’ he said. He felt he was pleading, and pleading weakly. ‘I’d like to talk to the Primero grandchildren, particularly the grandson.’
    For a moment Wexford said nothing. He had heard of faith moving mountains, but this was simply absurd. To him it was almost as ridiculous as if some crank had come to him with the suggestion that Dr Crippen was the innocent victim of circumstances. From bitter experience he knew how difficult it was to hunt a killer when only a week had elapsed between a murder and the beginning of an investigation. Archery was proposing to open an enquiry a decade and a half too late and Archery had no experience at all.
    ‘I ought to put you off,’ he said at last. ‘You