Free The Fever Tree and Other Stories by Ruth Rendell Page B

father, also a farm worker, in a cottage on the outskirts of Wrexlade in Essex. During 1953 he strangled Wendy Cutforth, Maureen Hunter, Ann Daly and Mary Trenthyde without the police having the least suspicion of his guilt. Approximately a month elapsed between each of these murders, though there was no question of Brannel killing at the full moon or anything of that sort. Four weeks after Mary Trenthyde’s death he was arrested and charged with murder, for the strangled body of Norah Lestrange had been discovered in a ditch less than a hundred yards from his cottage. They found him guilty of murder in November of that same year, twenty-five days later he was executed.
    â€˜A terrible example of injustice,’ Michael Lestrange used to say. ‘If the M’Naughten Rules apply to anybody they surely applied to poor Brannel. With him it wasn’t only a matter of not knowing that what he was doing was wrong but of not knowing he was doing it at all till it was over. We have hanged a poor idiot who had no more idea of evil than a stampeding animal has when it tramples on a child.’
    People thought it amazingly magnanimous of Michael that he could talk like this when it was his own wife who had been murdered. She was only twenty-five and they had been married less than three years.
    It is probably best to draw on Miss Hallam Saul for the most accurate and comprehensive account of the Wrexlade stranglings. She attended the trial, every day of it, which Michael Lestrange did not. When prosecuting counsel, in his opening speech, came to describe Norah Lestrange’s reasons for being in the neighbourhood of Wrexlade that night, and to talk of the Dutchman and the hotel at Chelmsford, Michael got up quietly and left the court. Miss Hallam Saul’s eyes, and a good many other pairs of eyes, followed him with compassion. Nevertheless, she didn’t spare his feelings in her book. Why should she? Like everyone else who wrote about Brannel and Wrexlade, she was appalled by the character of Norah Lestrange. This was the fifties, remember, and the public were not used to hearing of young wives who admitted shamelessly to their husbands that one man was not enough for them. Michael had been obliged to state the facts to the police and the facts were that he had known for months that his wife spent nights in this Chelmsford hotel with Jan Vandepeer, a businessman on his way from The Hook and Harwich to London. She had told him so quite openly.
    â€˜Darling . . .’ Taking his arm and leading him to sit close beside her while she fondled his hand. ‘Darling, I absolutely have to have Jan, I’m crazy about him. I do have to have other men, I’m made that way. It’s nothing to do with the way I feel about you, though, you do see that, don’t you?’
    These words he didn’t, of course, render verbatim. The gist was enough.
    â€˜It won’t be all that often, Mike darling, once a month at most. Jan can’t fix a trip more than once a month. Chelmsford’s so convenient for both of us and you’ll hardly notice I’m gone, will you, you’re so busy at that old hospital.’
    But all this came much later, in the trial and in the Hallam Saul book. The first days (and the first chapters) were occupied with the killing of those four other women.
    Wendy Cutforth was young, married, a teacher at a school in Ladeley. She went to work by bus from her home in Wrexlade, four miles away. In February, at four o’clock dusk, she got off the bus at Wrexlade Cross to walk to her bungalow a quarter of a mile away. She was never seen alive again, except presumably by Brannel, and her strangled body was found at ten that night in a ditch near the bus stop.
    Fear of being out alone which had seized Wrexlade women after Wendy’s death died down within three or four weeks. Maureen Hunter, who was only sixteen, quarrelled with her boyfriend after a dance at Wrexlade village