Free An Unkindness of Ravens by Ruth Rendell

days when he was a sales rep. His salary had always gone to the Pomfret bank, never to Kingsmarkham.
    ‘We’ve heard nothing,’ Miles Gardner said. ‘Whatever he meant by the PS to that letter he hasn’t been in touch.’
    ‘Williams didn’t write that letter,’ Wexford reminded him.
    Gardner nodded unhappily.
    ‘The first time we talked about this business,’ Wexford said, ‘you told me someone phoned here saying she was Mrs Williams and that her husband was ill and wouldn’t be coming in. Would that have been on Friday, April the sixteenth?’
    ‘Well, yes, I suppose it would.’
    ‘Who took the call?’
    ‘It must have been one of our telephonists. They’re part timers. I can’t remember whether it was Anna or Michelle. The phone call came before I got in, you see. That is, before nine-thirty.’
    ‘Williams had a secretary, I suppose?’
    ‘Christine Lomond. He shared her with our assistant sales director. Would you like to talk to her?’
    ‘Not yet. Maybe not today. It’s Anna or Michelle I want. But which one do I want?’
    ‘Michelle, I expect,’ said Gardner. ‘They tend to swop shifts a bit but it’s usually Michelle on mornings.’
    It had been, that Friday, and it was today. Michelle was a very young, very pretty girl with a vividly made-up face. The room where the switchboard was, not much more than a cupboard, was stamped with her personality (or perhaps Anna’s) and there was a blue cineraria in a pot, a stack of magazines, a pile of knitting that had reached the bulky stage, and on the table in front of her, hurriedly placed face downwards, the latest diet paperback.
    It was clear that Michelle had already discussed that phone call exhaustively. Perhaps with Anna or with Christine Lomond. Williams’s disappearance would have been the talk of the office.
    ‘I get in at nine,’ she said. ‘That’s when the phone calls really start. But the funny thing was there weren’t any that morning till Mrs Williams phoned at about twenty past.’
    ‘You mean till someone phoned who called herself Mrs Williams.’
    The girl looked at him. She shook her head quite vehemently. ‘It was Mrs Williams. She said, “This is Joy Williams.” ‘
    Wexford let it go for the time being.
    ‘What exactly did she say?’
    ‘ “My husband Mr Williams won’t be coming in today.” And then she sort of hesitated and said, “That’s Mr Rodney Williams, I mean, the marketing manager.” I said there was no one else in yet and she said that didn’t matter but to give Christine the message he’d got flu and wouldn’t be in.’
    Whoever it was, it hadn’t been Joy. At that time Joy didn’t know her husband was Sevensmith Harding’s marketing manager. Wexford had thanked Michelle and was turning away, diverting his mind to the matter of the firm’s stock of typewriters, when he stopped.
    ‘What makes you so sure the woman you spoke to was Mrs Joy Williams?’
    ‘It just was. I know it was.’
    ‘No, let me correct that. You know it was a woman who said she was Mrs Joy Williams. She had never phoned here before, had she, so you couldn’t have recognized her voice?’
    ‘No, but she phoned here afterwards.’
    ‘What do you mean, afterwards?’
    ‘About three weeks later.’ The girl spoke with exaggerated patience now, as if to a very confused or simpleminded person. ‘Mrs Joy Williams phoned here three weeks after her husband left.’
    Of course. Wexford remembered that call. It was he who had advised Joy to make it.
    ‘I put her through to Mr Gardner,’ Michelle said. ‘I was a bit embarrassed, to be perfectly honest. But I know it was the same voice, really I do. It was the same voice as the woman who phoned that Friday morning, it was Mrs Williams.’
     He picked up the girl at the roundabout where the second exit is the start of the Kingsmarkham bypass. She was standing on the grass verge at the side of the roundabout, holding up a piece of cardboard with ‘Myringham’ printed on