Read A New Lease of Death Online
Authors: Ruth Rendell
A New Lease of Death
Contents
About the Book
‘
I only know the Painter case was an open and shut affair,’ said Chief Inspector Wexford. ‘And nobody’s got a hope in hell of showing he didn’t do it
.’
It’s impossible to forget the violent bludgeoning to death of an elderly lady in her home. Even more so when it’s your first murder case.
Wexford believed he’d solved Mrs Primero’s murder fifteen years ago. It was no real mystery. Everyone knew Painter, her odd-job man, had done it. There had never been any doubt in anyone’s mind. Until now…
Henry Archery’s son is engaged to Painter’s daughter. Only Archery can’t let the past remain buried. He wants to prove Wexford wrong, and in probing into the lives of the witnesses questioned all those years ago, he stirs up more than old ghosts.
A WEXFORD CASE
Chief Inspector Wexford is one of the most memorable detectives ever created.
Ruth Rendell’s timeless Wexford novels continue to intrigue, enthral and surprise readers time and time again.
About the Author
Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for 1976’s best crime novel with A Demon in My View; a second Edgar in 1984 from the Mystery Writers of America for the best short story, ‘The New Girl Friend’; and a Gold Dagger award for
Live Flesh
in 1986. She was also the winner of the 1990
Sunday Times
Literary award, as well as the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE and in 1997 became a Life Peer.
Also by Ruth Rendell
OMNIBUSES:
COLLECTED SHORT STORIES
COLLECTED STORIES 2
WEXFORD: AN OMNIBUS
THE SECOND WEXFORD OMNIBUS
THE THIRD WEXFORD OMNIBUS
THE FOURTH WEXFORD OMNIBUS
THE FIFTH WEXFORD OMNIBUS
THREE CASES FOR CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD
THE RUTH RENDELL OMNIBUS
THE SECOND RUTH RENDELL OMNIBUS
THE THIRD RUTH RENDELL OMNIBUS
CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS:
FROM DOON WITH DEATH
A NEW LEASE OF DEATH
WOLF TO THE SLAUGHTER
THE BEST MAN TO DIE
A GUILTY THING SURPRISED
NO MORE DYING THEN
MURDER BEING ONCE DONE
SOME LIE AND SOME DIE
SHAKE HANDS FOR EVER
A SLEEPING LIFE
PUT ON BY CUNNING
THE SPEAKER OF MANDARIN
AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS
THE VEILED ONE
KISSING THE GUNNER’S DAUGHTER
SIMISOLA
ROAD RAGE
HARM DONE
THE BABES IN THE WOOD
END IN TEARS
NOT IN THE FLESH
THE MONSTER IN THE BOX
SHORT STORIES:
THE FALLEN CURTAIN
MEANS OF EVIL
THE FEVER TREE
THE NEW GIRLFRIEND
THE COPPER PEACOCK
BLOOD LINES
PIRANHA TO SCURFY
NOVELLAS:
HEARTSTONES
THE THIEF
NON-FICTION:
RUTH RENDELL’S SUFFOLK
RUTH RENDELL’S ANTHOLOGY OF THE MURDEROUS MIND
NOVELS:
TO FEAR A PAINTED DEVIL
VANITY DIES HARD
THE SECRET HOUSE OF DEATH
ONE ACROSS, TWO DOWN
THE FACE OF TRESPASS
A DEMON IN MY VIEW
A JUDGEMENT IN STONE
MAKE DEATH LOVE ME
THE LAKE OF DARKNESS
MASTER OF THE MOOR
THE KILLING DOLL
THE TREE OF HANDS
LIVE FLESH
TALKING TO STRANGE MEN
THE BRIDESMAID
GOING WRONG
THE CROCODILE BIRD
THE KEYS TO THE STREET
A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES
ADAM AND EVE AND PINCH ME
THE ROTTWEILER
THIRTEEN STEPS DOWN
THE WATER’S LOVELY
PORTOBELLO
My Father and Simon
All the chapter heading quotations are extracts from The Common Book of Prayer
1
The laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death for heinous and grievous offences.
The Thirty-nine Articles
IT WAS FIVE
in the morning. Inspector Burden had seen more dawns than most men, but he had never quite become jaundiced by them, especially summer dawns. He liked the stillness, the sight of the little country town in a depopulated state, the hard blue light that was of the same shade and intensity as the light at dusk but without dusk’s melancholy.
The two men they had been questioning about last night’s fight in one of Kingsmarkham’s cafés had confessed separately and almost simultaneously just a quarter of an hour before. Now they were locked into two stark white cells on the ground floor of his incongruously modern police station. Burden stood by the window in Wexford’s office, looking at the sky which had the peculiar greenish tint of aquamarine.
A
flock of birds flying in dense formation crossed it. They reminded Burden of his childhood when, as at dawn, everything had seemed bigger, clearer and of more significance than it did today. Tired and a little sickened, he opened the window to get rid of cigarette smoke and the sweaty smell of youths who wore leather jackets in the height of summer.
Outside in the corridor he could hear Wexford saying good night – or good morning – to Colonel Griswold, the Chief Constable. Burden wondered if Griswold had guessed when he arrived just before ten with a long spiel about stamping out hooliganism that he was in for an all-night session. That, he thought unfairly, was where meddling got you.
The heavy front door clanged and Griswold’s car started. Burden watched it move off the forecourt, past the great stone urns filled with pink geraniums and into Kingsmarkham High Street. The Chief Constable was driving himself. Burden saw with approval and grudging amusement that Griswold drove at just about twenty-eight miles per hour until he reached the black and white derestriction sign. Then the car gathered speed and flashed away out of sight along the empty country road that led to Pomfret.
He turned round when he heard Wexford come in. The Chief Inspector’s heavy grey face was a little greyer than usual, but he showed no other sign of tiredness and his eyes, dark and hard as basalt, showed a gleam of triumph. He was a big man with big features and a big intimidating voice. His grey suit–one of a series of low fastening, double-breasted
affairs
– appeared more shabby and wrinkled than ever today. But it suited Wexford, being not unlike an extension of his furrowed pachydermatous skin.
‘Another job jobbed,’ he said, ‘as the old woman said when she jobbed the old man’s eye out.’
Burden bore with such vulgarisms stoically. He knew that they were meant to horrify him; they always succeeded. He made his thin lips crease into a tight smile. Wexford handed him a blue envelope and he was glad of the diversion to hide his slight embarrassment.
‘Griswold’s just given me this,’ Wexford said. ‘At five in the morning. No sense of timing.’
Burden glanced at the Essex postmark.
‘Is that the man he was on about earlier, sir?’
‘Well, I don’t have fanmail from beautiful olde worlde Thringford as a general rule, do I, Mike? This is the Rev. Mr Archery all right, taking advantage of the Old Pals’ Act.’ He lowered himself into one of the rather flimsy chairs and it gave the usual protesting creak. Wexford had what his junior called a love-hate relationship with those chairs and indeed with all the aggressively modern furnishings of his office. The glossy block floor, the square of nylon carpet, the chairs with their sleek chrome legs, the primrose venetian blinds – all these in Wexford’s estimation were not ‘serviceable’, they were dust-traps and they were ‘chi-chi’. At the same time he took in them an enormous half-secret pride. They had their effect. They served to impress visiting strangers such as the writer of this letter Wexford was now taking from its envelope.
It too was written on rather thick blue paper. In a painfully authentic upper-class accent, the Chief Inspector said affectedly, ‘May as well get on to the Chief Constable of Mid-Sussex, my dear. We were up at Oxford together, don’t you know?’ He squeezed his face into a kind of snarling grin. ‘All among the bloody dreaming spires,’ he said. ‘I hate that sort of thing.’
‘Were they?’
‘Were they what?’
‘At Oxford together?’
‘I don’t know. Something like that. It may have been the playing fields of Eton. All Griswold said was, “Now we’ve got those villains wrapped up, I’d like you to have a look at a letter from a very good friend of mine called Archery. Excellent fellow, one of the best. This enclosure’s for you. I’d like you to give him all the help you can. I’ve a notion it’s got something to do with that scoundrel Painter.”’