Ruth Rendell: The Best Man To Die

‘You seem very well-informed,’ said Mrs Fanshawe, pleased because she had succeeded so well in pulling herself together. ‘Perhaps you can tell me why my daughter doesn’t come to see me? Haven’t they told her I’m here? Nora would want to know. She’d come home.’

‘Oh, Mrs Fanshawe…’ The policewoman sounded very wretched, almost distraught, and catching her eye, Sergeant Camb gave her a sharp reproving glance. Better leave it, the look said. Maybe it’s more merciful this way. Let her learn about it by degrees. The mind has its own way of softening blows, he thought sententiously.

‘Now back to the – er, accident,’ he said. ‘Just try and see if you can tell me what happened when you left Eastover. It was getting dark and there wasn’t much traffic on the road, it being a Monday. It had been raining and the road was wet. Now, Mrs Fanshawe?’

‘My husband was driving,’ she began and she wondered why the man’s face wore such a sloppy expression. Perhaps he had noticed her rings. She slid them up and down her fingers, suddenly remembering that the five of them were worth nearly twenty thousand pounds. ‘Jerome was driving…’ What a silly name it was. Like Three Men in a Boat. That made her giggle, although the sound came out like a harsh cackle. ‘I sat beside him, of course, and I was knitting. I must have been knitting. I always do when Jerome drives. He drives so fast,’ she said querulously. ‘Much too fast and he never takes any notice when I tell him to go slower, so I do my knitting. To keep my mind off it, you know.’

Mean and selfish Jerome was. A man of fifty-five hadn’t any business to drive like a crazy teenager. She had told him that, but he had ignored her like he ignored everything else she ever said. Still, she was used to being ignored. Nora never took any notice of what she said either. When she came to think of it, the only thing she and Jerome had ever agreed about was what a difficult, trying and utterly maddening creature Nora was. It was exactly like her to go away and not get in touch with her parents. Jerome would have something to say about that… Then there swam pleasantly into her muddled mind the recollection that Jerome would never have anything to say about anything again, never drive at eighty-five or pick on Nora or do those other terrible and humiliating things. Tonight, when she felt better, she would write to Nora and tell her her father was dead. With Jerome out of the way and all that money for them selves, she felt they would have a much happier relationship…

‘I was knitting a jumper for Nora,’ she said. What a marvellous constitution she must have to remember that after all she’d been through! ‘Not that she deserved it, the naughty girl.’ Now, why had she said that? Nora had been naughty much naughtier than ever before, but for the life of her Dorothy Fanshawe couldn’t remember of what that naughtiness had consisted. She wished the policeman or whoever he was would wipe that mawkish sheeplike expression off his face. There was no need for anyone to feel sorry for her, Dorothy Fanshawe, of Astbury Mews, Upper Grosvenor Street, W. 1. She was a merry widow now, rich in her own right, soon to be well again, the mother of a good-looking talented only daughter. ‘I don’t remember what we talked about,’ she said, ‘my late husband and I. Nothing, probably. The road was wet and I kept telling him to go slower.’

‘Your daughter was in the back seat, Mrs Fanshawe?’

Oh! really, how absurd the man was! ‘Nora was not in the car. I keep telling you. Nora went back to Germany. No doubt she is in Germany now.’

To the sergeant the jerky bumbling words sounded like the raving of a madwoman. In spite of what the doctors said, it seemed to him probable that the accident had irremediably damaged her brain. He didn’t dare take it upon himself to enlighten her further. God knew what harm he might do! Sooner or later, if she ever got her reason back, she would realize that her daughter had resigned from this German job six weeks before the accident, that she hadn’t breathed a word to her aunt or her friends about the possibility of her returning to Europe. The girl’s body had been identified by her aunt, Mrs Browne. She was dead and buried.

‘I expect she is,’ he said soothingly. ‘No doubt she is. What made your husband swerve, Mrs Fanshawe?’

‘I was knitting.’

‘Did you hit something, did a tire burst?’

‘I told you, I didn’t look. I was knitting.’

‘Did your husband cry out, say anything?’

‘I think he said “My God”,’ said Mrs Fanshawe. She couldn’t really remember anything, only that she had been knitting and then she had woken up in this bed with her nosy, bossy sister sitting beside her. But Jerome was always saying ‘My God’ or even ‘My Christ’. He had a limited vocabulary and she had stopped telling him not to be blasphemous twenty years ago. ‘I don’t remember anything else,’ she said. That was all they were going to get out of her. She wasn’t going to waste her strength. She needed it for the letter she was going to write in a minute to Nora.

Camb looked compassionately at the quivering febrile mouth and the long unfiled nails that played with those rings. Mrs Fanshawe had told him nothing. Perhaps he ought to have realized it was too soon, or his superiors ought to have realized. They would have to go now anyway. The young lady doctor had said ten minutes, but they must have been here twenty. Here was the nurse coming now. Funny uniforms they wear these days, he thought, eyeing the girl’s navy-blue nylon overall and hat like a white forage cap. Poor Mrs Fanshawe was staring at her desperately. No wonder, exhausted and broken-hearted as she was.

No, it wasn’t Nora. Just for a split second Mrs Fanshawe thought it was. But Nora never wore an overall, she despised housework – and this girl was wearing an overall, not the rather smart dress for which Mrs Fanshawe had first taken it. She had a cap on her head too. Was it possible that her sister had taken on a new maid for the Fanshawes’ flat and not said anything about it? More than possible, considering how interfering her sister was. Interfering but irresponsible. A responsible person would have sent for Nora by now.

‘What’s your name?’ Mrs Fanshawe said sharply.

‘Rose, Mrs Fanshawe. Nurse Rose. I’ve come to make you more comfy and bring you your tea. You could drink a nice cup of tea, couldn’t you? I’m afraid you’ll have to run along now Sergeant. I can’t allow my patient any setbacks, you know.’

Very talkative, thought Mrs Fanshawe. Takes a lot upon herself. She tried to sit up.

‘Rose,’ she said, ‘I want to write a letter to my daughter, my daughter in Germany. Will you fetch me writing paper and a pen, please?’

She doesn’t know, Camb thought, she’s new. Nobody’s told her. Just as well. He intercepted the policewoman’s glance and crushed it with a frown.

‘We are getting better, aren’t we?’ said the nurse skittishly. ‘Writing letters! Well, I don’t know, I’m sure. I’m certain you haven’t got any paper of your own. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll just pop down the corridor and borrow some from Mrs Goodwin in number four. Then I’ll post your letter when I go off duty, shall I?’

‘That will be very kind of you,’ said Mrs Fanshawe austerely. ‘Then you can bring the tea.’

A pert girl and probably untrainable, she thought. Time would show. At any rate, Jerome wouldn’t be there to upset this one, catch her in corners and smack her bottom like he had the Danish au pair. Jerome was dead. She’d always said he’d kill himself driving like that and now he had. Why hadn’t he killed her too? What good fortune had decreed that she be saved and be sitting here in her own bed in her own flat?