Read Online Wexford 18 - Harm Done by Ruth Rendell - Free Book Online Page B

wanted to join them but Wexford advised against it. He still believed, against the odds, that Rachel would turn up later in the afternoon, and what he had discovered in Framhurst that morning only reinforced his belief. Olga Strang had never met Rachel, had never even seen a photograph of her. The two girls had met at university, not through living only five miles apart or having been to the same school. Rachel was a stranger to Olga and she to Rachel.
       “How were you to know her?” Wexford had asked. “You were to give her a lift, but how were you to recognize her?”
       “You mean, she wore a yellow ribbon and I wore a big red rose? There was nothing like that. I never, thought about it, I was just there and she was supposed to be there but she wasn’t.”
       A scatty woman who seemed unable to collect her thoughts for two minutes at a time, Mrs. Strang gave the impression of being harassed by everything in her surroundings and perhaps by life itself. The cottage she lived in with her husband and three children was frighteningly disordered, with papers mixed with clothes, chairs laden with newspapers and magazines, used cups and glasses set or left beside vases of dead flowers, an iron switched on, its red light glistening, standing upended between a naked loaf of bread and an open packet of kettle descaler.
       She herself, perhaps about to use the iron, wore a diaphanous dressing gown over blouse and slip and clutched in her left hand something made of crumpled red material that might have been a skirt or a pair of trousers. Without relinquishing her hold on it, she sat on the edge of the table, crumpling the red stuff to a worse state of creasedness while running her right hand through her wispy, reddish gold hair.
       “I won’t keep you long,” Wexford said. “I can see you’re getting ready to go to work.” He couldn’t keep his eyes off that iron, which seemed to come closer and closer to her muslin frills as she swayed nervously back and forth. “But did Rachel know the make of your car? Its color?”
       “Oh, I don’t know, I can’t answer.”
       “Had Caroline described you to her?”
       “You’ll have to ask her. I can’t remember.” She brightened and suddenly smiled. “I knew she had dark hair. I was looking for a dark-haired girl. And Caroline said she was very good-looking.”
       “Mrs. Strang, you’re about to singe your, er, dressing gown.”
       “Am I? Oh, God. Thank you. Caroline’s not here, she’s back at college, you could phone her and ask her. Or I could. I must get this skirt ironed, you must excuse me, I’m late . . .”
       He knew enough. Rachel had no more idea as to the woman due to give her a lift than that she was middle-aged and driving a car. Someone else had come along at eight and picked her up, and when Rachel said, “Mrs. Strang?” or some such thing, this woman had agreed, had fallen in with the misapprehension, and used it to her advantage.
       Was she the same woman who had offered a lift to Lizzie Cromwell? And had Lizzie, in spite of what she’d said, accepted it? To risk acting on this wild intuition would be criminal. There must be a search, and next day, if she hadn’t come home, he would have Rosemary Holmes up before the television cameras, But she’d come home. She’d walk into the house on Oval Road. She wouldn’t be distraught or soaked to the skin, she would simply stroll in and, after her mother had had hysterics, ask what all the fuss was about. Or else, instead, she’d turn up at her university with a considerable amount of explaining to do. He turned his attention to his post, first to the document that lay uppermost on his desk.
       If someone addresses you, in a letter, by your given name and signs himself “yours always,” you may confidently expect your correspondent to be a close friend. This printout of an E-mail began “Dear Reg” and ended “Yours always, Brian,” but Wexford would