Means Of Evil And Other Stories

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.

The new Chief Inspector Wexford novel, 
Monster in the Box
, is out in hardback.

Reissued by Arrow Books in 2010

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Means of Evil
(
The Case of the Shaggy Caps
)  © Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd 1977;

Achilles Heel
(
Inspector Wexford on Holiday
) © Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd 1978;

Old Wives' Tales, When the Wedding Was Over
and
Ginger and the Kingsmarkham Chalk Circle
 © Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd 1979

Ruth Rendell has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
   

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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ISBN 9780099534921

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To Jane Bakerman

Author's Note

Of these five stories, four appeared in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
previous to this collection being published in 1979. Only
Ginger and the Kingsmarkham Chalk Circle
was specially written for this collection.

   Each story is a case for Chief Inspector Wexford and each is intended as part of the chronicles of Kingsmarkham. the events related in the personal lives of Wexford and Burden and their families are as 'true' as any circumstances in the Wexford novels. The stories should be read as if each was a little novel in the series.

Contents

Means of Evil

Old Wives' Tales

Ginger and the Kingsmarkham Chalk Circle

Achilles Heel

When the Wedding Was Over

   Means of Evil

"Blewits," said Inspector Burden, "parasols, horns of plenty, morels and boletus. Mean anything to you?"

   Chief Inspector Wexford shrugged. "Sounds like one of those magazine quizzes. What have these in common? I'll make a guess and say they're Crustacea. Or sea anemones. How about that?"

   "They are edible fungi," said Burden.

   "Are they now? And what have edible fungi to do with Mrs. Hannah Kingman throwing herself off, or being pushed off, a balcony?"

   The two men were sitting in Wexford's office at the police station, Kingsmarkham, in the County of Sussex. The month was November, but Wexford had only just returned from his holiday. And while he had been away, enjoying in Cornwall an end of October that had been more summery than the summer, Hannah Kingman had committed suicide. Or so Burden had thought at first. Now he was in a dilemma, and as soon as Wexford had walked in that Monday morning, Burden had begun to tell the whole story to his chief.

   Wexford, getting on for sixty, was a tall, ungainly, rather ugly man who had once been fat to the point of obesity but had slimmed to gauntness for reasons of health. Nearly twenty years his junior, Burden had the slenderness of a man who has always been thin. His face was ascetic, handsome in a frosty way. The older man, who had a good wife who looked after him devotedly, nevertheless always looked as if his clothes came off the peg from the War on Want Shop, while the younger, a widower, was sartorially immaculate. A tramp and a Beau Brummell, they seemed to be, but the dandy relied on the tramp, trusted him, understood his powers and his perception. In secret he almost worshipped him.

   Without his chief he had felt a little at sea in this case. Everything had pointed at first to Hannah Kingman's having killed herself. She had been a manic-depressive, with a strong sense of her own inadequacy; apparently her marriage, though not of long duration, had been unhappy, and her previous marriage had failed. Even in the absence of a suicide note or suicide threats, Burden would have taken her death for self-destruction —if her brother hadn't come along and told him about the edible fungi. And Wexford hadn't been there to do what he always could do, sort out sheep from goats and wheat from chaff.

   "The thing is," Burden said across the desk, "we're not looking for proof of murder so much as proof of
attempted
murder. Axel Kingman could have pushed his wife off that balcony——he has no alibi for the time in question——but I had no reason to think he had done so until I was told of an attempt to murder her some two weeks before."

   "Which attempt has something to do with edible fungi?"

   Burden nodded. "Say with administering to her some noxious substance in a stew made from edible fungi. Though if he did it, God knows how he did it, because three other people, including himself, ate the stew without ill effects. I think I'd better tell you about it from the beginning."

   "I think you had," said Wexford.

   "The facts," Burden began, very like a Prosecuting Counsel, "are as follows. Axel Kingman is thirty-five years old and he keeps a health-food shop here in the High Street called Harvest Home. Know it?" When Wexford signified by a nod that he did, Burden went on, "He used to be a teacher in Myringham, and for about seven years before he came here he'd been living with a woman named Corinne Last. He left her, gave up his job, put all the capital he had into this shop, and married a Mrs. Hannah Nicholson."

   "He's some sort of food freak, I take it," said Wexford.

   Burden wrinkled his nose. "Lot of affected nonsense," he said. "Have you ever noticed what thin pale weeds these health-food people are? While the folks who live on roast beef and suet and whisky and plum cake are full of beans and rarin' to go."

   "Is Kingman a thin pale weed?"

   "A feeble——what's the word?——aesthete, if you ask me. Anyway, he and Hannah opened this shop and took a flat in the high-rise tower our planning geniuses have been pleased to raise over the top of it. The fifth floor. Corinne Last, according to her and according to Kingman, accepted the situation after a while and they all remained friends."