End in Tears (31 page)

“Hard-core,” said Damon.

“Yes, thank you, DC Coleman. Amber didn't even have to leave school. The hated Diana, barely spoken to in former days, was handy as babysitter and full-time nanny. Why didn't Diana go? Why didn't she just leave? She no longer loved George and she had never loved Amber. She had money of her own, plenty of it, even without working. But she didn't go. She stayed and looked after Brand. And it seemed as if Amber and Brand would be there forever. Well, Brand would because Amber would very likely go off to university and after university would come a job. Brand would stay and Amber might possibly go to London or America or somewhere in Europe—or even marry a man who didn't want her child.

“Then the Hillands offered Amber their flat in a London suburb. Not that offer but her acceptance of it accomplished what you would call, Barry, ‘signing her own death warrant.' If she had said no she'd be alive today. But she said yes.”

He looked at the perplexed faces confronting him and at one that wasn't puzzled, one on which light was dawning, causing her to wince. “Oh, my God,” Hannah said softly.

“Ross Samphire was having a love affair. His much-vaunted happy family life was so much image making. We saw Ross driving away from Mill Lane and then we saw Lydia Burton at her gate. Knowing Lydia Burton ‘had someone,' as they say, we assumed, or we assumed for a while, she was Ross's girlfriend. But if this were so it would have meant Ross had actually been in Mill Lane at half past midnight on the eleventh of August, somewhere he would never have dreamt of being when his brother was due there an hour or so later to do murder. Besides, why would Ross and Lydia have used Colin Fry's flat for their assignations when Lydia was a single woman with a house of her own?

“No, Ross's girlfriend lived in Mill Lane, but she wasn't Lydia Burton. She was a rich woman and a married woman who had no wish for her affair to be discovered and she perhaps divorced. Diana Marshalson wanted her affair with Ross to continue, but there was something else she wanted far more. Enough to kill for and pay someone to kill for.”

Wexford paused, looking from one startled face to another, all but Hannah's. He went on, “All the way through this case we've been looking for the reason why. Why? What was the motive for killing Amber? Amber was leaving, she was going to take away the child George and Diana found such a burden, take him to London, and maybe they'd scarcely see him again. So why take the appalling step of killing her? Maybe Diana didn't think of it. It could have been Ross. But Diana handed over the money to be passed on to Ross's poor brother, so dogged by ill luck as he was.

“Why? Diana put up a very good show of finding Brand a nuisance, a bit of a pain to have around. No one would have guessed how she really felt, that though she had had no children with her first husband, the blame for that she thought was his. George didn't want children. She was growing older, by now she was too old to have a baby. But Amber had one and by chance it was she who was destined to look after him, to bring him up. Diana may have found caring for Brand a chore at first. Not for long. She soon came to love him. She loved him, she adored him, as if he were her own. No wonder she didn't want to keep a nanny. And Brand was virtually hers. She was becoming first in his life. His mother wasn't indifferent to him but she was very young and she was careless. Without Diana, where would he have been? She worshipped him—much as her husband had worshipped Amber.

“But Amber was going. She was going to London and taking the beloved child with her. It was a curious situation, wasn't it? There was George wanting Amber and Brand to stay because he wanted Amber, and Diana wanting Amber and Brand to stay because she wanted Brand. And Amber wanting to go because a flat in London meant freedom and life and excitement.

“So Diana paid Ross to pay Rick to kill Amber so that she could keep Brand, whom she loved,” said Wexford. He walked behind his desk and sat down, resisted the temptation to put his head in his hands, spoke the final words of his explanation. “Love doesn't excuse everything. It doesn't excuse anything. This was the worst and the wickedest motive—and I mean wicked in its old true sense, Damon—for murder I have ever known. This was what evil is. Look no further.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Since her first novel,
From Doon with Death,
published in
1964
, Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for
1976
's best crime novel for
A Demon in My View,
and the Arts Council National Book Award, genre fiction, for
The Lake of Darkness
in
1980
.

In
1985
, Ruth Rendell received the Silver Dagger for
The Tree of Hands,
and in
1987
, writing as Barbara Vine, won her third Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for
A Dark-Adapted Eye.

She won the Gold Dagger for
Live Flesh
in
1986
and, as Barbara Vine, for
A Fatal Inversion
in
1987
and for
King Solomon's Carpet
in
1991
.

Ruth Rendell won the
Sunday Times
Literary Award in
1990
, and in
1991
she was awarded the Crime Writers' Assocation Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding contribution to the genre. In
1996
she was awarded the CBE, and in
1997
was made a Life Peer.

Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages.

Ruth Rendell has a son and two grandsons, and lives in London.

Also by Ruth Rendell

CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS

From Doon with Death

Sins of the Father

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 Forever

A Sleeping Life

Death Notes

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 Woods

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

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

The Fallen Curtain

Means of Evil

The Fever Tree

The New Girl Friend

The Copper Peacock

Blood Lines

Piranha to Scurfy

NOVELLA

Heartstones

NONFICTION

Ruth Rendell's Suffolk

The Reason Why

BY RUTH RENDELL WRITING AS BARBARA VINE

A Dark-Adapted Eye

A Fatal Inversion

The House of Stairs

Gallowglass

King Solomon's Carpet

Anna's Book

No Night Is Too Long

The Brimstone Wedding

The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Grasshopper

The Blood Doctor

The Minotaur

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2007

Copyright © 2005 by Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.anchorbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rendell, Ruth.

End in tears: a Wexford novel / Ruth Rendell. 1. Wexford, Inspector (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Teenage girls—Crimes against—Fiction. 3. Police—England—Sussex—Fiction. 4. Sussex (England)—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6068.E63E53 2005

823'.914—dc22                                                      2005026619

eISBN: 978-0-307-38636-6

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