Ruth Rendell - Not in the Flesh

“You're not wanting to take my ring off me?” were almost the first words Bridget said.

“We'd just like to compare it with this one, Miss Cook,” Hannah said. She held out the ring Selina Hexham had lent Wexford on the palm of her hand.

“I don't know if it'll come off.”

Bridget struggled with the ring, twisting and pulling it, failing to move it over the swollen joint.

“Come on, love,” said Mrs. Cook in her birdlike twitter, “let me have a go. I've got just the thing. Wait a minute.”

A jar of Vaseline was produced, the finger anointed, and at last the ring began to slide. Mrs. Cook gave it a final pull over her daughter's knuckle and the two rings lay side by side. Each had a chased design of leaves, as if a laurel wreath encircled them. Hannah looked closely, lifted each one in turn up to the light while the always obliging Mrs. Cook produced a magnifying glass. “Forever” was inside Bridget's, and “Forever” inside Selina Hexham's, identical promises engraved at the same time, in the same italics.

“Let me see.” Lily Cook brandished her magnifying glass. “I can't see that even with my glasses. Oh, look, fancy that. Who's that other one belong to, Bridge?”

“I don't know,” Bridget said sadly. It was as if some assumption she had made had been destroyed at a blow.

“May I borrow it, Miss Cook?”

“I knew you'd ask.” The sadness in Bridget's tone had deepened. “I have to say yes, don't I? Tell me one thing. Did he nick it?”

In a manner of speaking, Hannah thought. “I can't tell you that,” she said, but she was touched suddenly by unusual emotion, by fellow feeling for a sister-woman. “The important thing is he gave it to you. He wanted you to wear it.”

It is surprisingly difficult to crawl on two legs and an arm, easier (but more painful) when you bend the damaged limb at the elbow and swing it back and forth. He was afraid that if he stood he might find he'd broken more than his wrist, but he tried and made it to the wall of the building, where he hung on with his left hand to a drainpipe. Not an ache but an intense burning soreness shivered through his body. In the morning he'd be a mass of bruises, but he was alive and not, he thought, much harmed. They would ask him, he knew very well, if he had lost consciousness. He wasn't sure. Had he? How was it that he didn't know? There seemed to be some missing minutes in his recall of the past ten, a black curtain coming down like a brief dropping off to sleep. Well, he'd tell them that. His phone was all right. As he began to key in the numbers a car turned in from the road and he recognized it as Raymond Akande's. It stopped before it reached him. Dr. Akande jumped out.

“Someone tried to run me over in a car,” Wexford said.

“Tried to?”

“Failed, as you see. It was more a case of me running over them. I got tossed onto the top of the car and think I've broken my wrist. Look, I've got to make a phone call.”

“No, you haven't. I'll take you to the infirmary myself.”

“Thanks but this is something else.” Akande helped him into his car and there, when the sharp pains associated with movement had subsided, he spoke to Burden. “I want you to go to Athelstan House and arrest Maeve Tredown. What for? Attempted murder. That's right. Attempted murder of me. ”

His notion that she had tried to poison him hadn't been so fantastic after all.

“Of course you have to stay in overnight if they say so,” Dora said in the mildly scolding voice she used when he was recalcitrant. She sat by the bed he had rejected in favor of the armchair next to hers. “They've got to take X-rays and things. A scan, that doctor said. And they're going to put a plaster on your arm.”

“When Jenny Burden broke her wrist they put a pin in. She didn't have a plaster. Why can't I have a pin?”

“Don't be so childish, Reg. What were you doing at the hospice, anyway?”

“Visiting Tredown. Or trying to.”

“A corporal work of mercy, as the Catholics say?” She didn't wait for his answer. “I'm reading The First Heaven. Sheila kept on saying I have to, and I must say it's not a hardship. I'm loving it.” She hesitated, then said tentatively, “Would you think I was mad if I said the only thing is he didn't write it?”

“My sentiments entirely,” said Wexford. “Here, give me your hand. Two minds with but a single thought we are. I wish they'd let me go home.”

She shook her head. “Don't get run over again, will you?” To his dismay he saw a tear in her eye, but she said brightly, “Here's Mike. You'll want to talk to him.”

“Don't go,” he said, but she was halfway across the ward. Burden kissed her cheek, came to the bedside, and stood over him. “What happened?” Wexford asked.

“Court in the morning,” Burden said. “Of course she denies it, says you walked-well, ran-out in front of her. Are there any witnesses?”

“Of course not. If there'd been anyone around she'd have postponed it till another day.”

“Sure.”

“Like I've had to postpone seeing Tredown. But she must be seriously afraid of me, don't you think? Did you have a look at the car?”

“Both of us did. I took Barry with me. There are scratches on the bonnet and a couple of scrapes made by the heel of your shoe where I guess you tried to get a purchase and both sides are scraped to hell. There's a long dent all along the nearside. But so what, Reg? She doesn't deny hitting you, she just says it wasn't her fault. And she's got the nerve to say she's not a very good driver. I don't think we've a chance of making the charge stick, other than her leaving a scene of an accident.”

“I don't think so either,” said Wexford, “but that doesn't matter all that much, seeing that we'll very shortly have her back in court on an even more serious charge, she and her henchwoman, Ricardo.”

“And will we make that stick?”

“God knows, Mike. We can only try.”

The two rings spilled out of the plastice zipper bag onto the lap of his blue-check dressing gown. One was tagged with the name “Cook,” the other “Hexham.” Hannah handed him a magnifying glass, apparently having no faith in his unaided eyesight.

“Did you notice the chasing on the Cook ring is very slightly more worn than on the Hexham?”

She hadn't. “Why d'you think that is, guv?”

Dora had called him childish on the previous day and no doubt this was the word for his unreasonable hope that none of his fellow inmates of Frobisher Ward heard the title she gave him. Still, we all have our vanities and our touchiness, he told himself, we are only human. “Because one was on someone's finger more than the other. Three years went by when Miller had the ring before he gave it to Bridget Cook and in those years no one wore it.”

The ward sister came up to them, told Hannah she would have to go as the doctors were doing their rounds. “And I expect he'll let you go home, Mr. Wexford.”

“I thought they always called people by their first names these days, guv,” whispered Hannah.

“I expect that like most of us,” said Wexford blandly, “they call them by the name they prefer.”

At home he found a reception committee of daughters and grandchildren. “I haven't been at death's door,” he told his social-worker daughter.

“They all want to write their names on your plaster,” Sylvia said. “What is it about the British that they always have to queue?”

“They learn it at their mothers' knees,” said Wexford, holding out his cast for the two boys. “I don't believe you can write, you're too little,” he said to Amy.

Shouting, “I can, I can,” she executed a bold squiggle in red felt-tip and he told her how clever she was.