Put on by Cunning by Ruth Rendell

do-bring-your-husband-in-for-a-drink lines. Many would have spoken of the dead and have mentioned the coming memorial service. Natalie behaved exactly as if Mrs Murray-Burgess were not there. She shook hands with Wexford, thanking him warmly while increasing the pressure of her fingers. Burden was as prettily thanked and given an alluring smile. They were ushered to the door, the Zoffanys following, everyone coming out into the crisp cold air and the bright sunlight. Mrs Murray-Burgess, left stranded in the dinning room with Ted Hicks, emerged in offended bewilderment a moment or two later.
    Wexford, no doubt impressing everyone with his frown and preoccupied air, was observing the extent of the double glazing and making rough calculations as to the size of the grounds. Getting at last into their car, he remarked to Burden – apropos of what the inspector had no idea – that sometimes these cogitations still amazed the troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

5
    The owner of the van was quickly traced through its registration number. He was a television engineer called Robert Clifford who said he had lent the van to a fellow-tenant of his in Finsbury Park, north London, a man of thirty-six called John Cooper. Cooper, who was unemployed, admitted the break-in after the spoons had been found in his possession. He said he had read in the papers about the death of Camargue and accounts of the arrangements at Sterries.
    ‘It was an invite to do the place,’ he said impudently. ‘All that stuff about valuable paintings and china, and then that the housekeeper didn’t sleep in the house. She didn’t either, the first time I went.’
    When had that been?
    ‘Tuesday night,’ said Cooper. He meant Tuesday the 29th, two days after Camargue’s death. When he returned to break in. ‘I didn’t know which was the old man’s room,’ he said. ‘How would I? The papers don’t give you a plan of the bloody place.’ He had parked the van outside that window simply because it seemed the most convenient spot and couldn’t be seen from the road. ‘It gave me a shock when the light came on.’ He sounded aggrieved, as if he had been wantonly interrupted while about some legitimate task. His was a middle-class accent. Perhaps, like Burden’s little villain, he was a pathological kleptomaniac with personality-scarring. Cooper appeared before the Kingsmarkham magistrates and was remanded in custody until the case could be heard at Myringham Crown Court.
    Wexford was able to give Sheila a favourable report on Camargue’s house, but she seemed to have lost interest in the place. (One’s children had a way of behaving like this, he had noticed.) Andrew’s house in Keats Grove was really very nice, and he did have the cottage in Dorset. If they lived in Sussex they would have to keep a flat in town as well. She couldn’t go all the way back to Kingsmarkham after an evening performance, could she? The estate agents had found a buyer for her own flat in St John’s Wood and they were getting an amazing price for it. Had Mother been to hear her banns called for the second time? Mother had.
    The day of the memorial service was bright and sunny. Alpine weather, Wexford called it, the frozen snow sparkling, melting a little in the sun, only to freeze glass-hard again when the sun went down. Returning from his visit to Sewingbury Comprehensive School – where there was an alarming incidence of glue-sniffing among fourteen-year-olds – he passed St Peter’s churchas the mourners were leaving. The uniform men wear disguises them. Inside black overcoat and black Homburg might breathe equally Sir Manuel’s accompanist or Sir Manuel’s wine merchant. But he was pretty sure he had spotted James Galway, and he stood to gaze like any lion-hunting sightseer.
    Sheila, making her escape with Dinah Sternhold to a hire car, was attracting as much attention as anyone – a warning, her father thought, of what they might expect in a fortnight’s