Read Online Wolf to the Slaughter by Ruth Rendell - Free Book Online

began very slowly and developed with a kind of secrecy. He noticed that she smiled without showing her teeth, without parting her lips, and it devastated him. They stood looking at each other in the rainy dusk. Drizzle spattered the tiers of newspapers. Drayton shifted his gaze rudely and deliberately back to the glass case.
    ‘You’re very interested in those cards, I must say,’ she said sharply. ‘What’s so fascinating about a load of second-hand stuff?’
    ‘I shouldn’t mind it being second-hand,’ he said, and when she blushed he knew she had seen him witness that kiss.
    A charwoman with ginger hair. It might be. Everything pointed that way. Mrs Penistan seemed to fill the requirements. She had cleaned for Anita Margolis, why should she not also clean for Mrs Harper of Waterford Avenue? A woman who lived in unsalubrious Glebe Road might steal paper from one employer to write anonymous letters about another. In Glebe Road they were no strangers to crime, even to murder. A woman had been killed down there only last year. Monkey Matthews had once lived there and it was behind one of these squat stuccoed façades that he had mixed up sugar and sodium chlorate to make his bomb.
    Burden tapped smartly on the door of the small terraced house. A light came on, a chain was slipped, and before the door opened he saw a little sharp face peering at him through the glass panel.
    ‘Mrs Penistan?’
    Her mouth snapped open like a spring trap and there came forth a voluble stream of words. ‘Oh, here you are at last, dear. I’d nearly given you up. The Hoover’s all ready for you.’ She produced it, an enormous, old-fashioned vacuum cleaner. ‘I reckon it’s a bit of grit caught up in the motor. My boys don’t care what muck they bring in on their shoes. Won’t be a long job, will it?’
    ‘Mrs Penistan, I haven’t come to service your cleaner. I’m not a . . .’
    She peered at him. ‘Not a Jehovah’s Witness, I hope?’
    ‘A police officer.’ They sorted it out, Mrs Penistan laughing shrilly. Even in her own home, she still wore her hat. The hair which showed under its brim was not ginger but grey. You could neither describe her as middle-aged, nor showily dressed. In addition to the pudding basin hat, she wore a cross-over sleeveless overall, patterned in mauve and black, over a green cardigan. Burden thought she was approaching seventy.
    ‘You won’t mind coming in the kitchenette, will you, dear? I’m getting me boys’ tea.’ On the cooker chips were frying. She lifted out the wire basket, replenished it with a fresh mound of cut wet potatoes. ‘How about a nice cuppa?’
    Burden accepted the offer and when the tea came it was hot and strong. He sat down on a grubby chair at the grubby table. The frowsty appearance of the place surprised him. Somehow he expected a charwoman’s house to be clean, just as a bank manager’s account should always be in the black.
    ‘Smith?’ she said. ‘No, it doesn’t ring a bell.’
    ‘Fitzwilliam?’
    ‘No, dear. There was a Mr Kirkpatrick. Would it be him?’
    ‘It might be.’ Knowing Margolis, it very well might be.
    ‘Lives in Pomfret somewhere. Funny you should ask about him because it was on account of him I left.’
    ‘How was that, Mrs Penistan?’
    ‘I don’t know why I shouldn’t tell you. Missing, you said? Well, it don’t surprise me. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d done her in like he said he would.’
    ‘He did, did he?’
    ‘Threatened her in my hearing. D’you want to hear about it?’
    ‘I do indeed, but first I’d like to hear about her, what you thought of her, that kind of thing.’
    ‘She was a nice enough girl, mind, no side to her. First day I came I called her Miss and she just screamed out laughing. “Oh, Mrs P., darling,” she says, “you call me Ann. Everyone calls me Ann”. One of the free and easy ones she is, takes things as they come. Mind you, they’ve got money, got wads of it, but they’re not always