A New Lease of Death by Ruth Rendell Page A

Knowing Mrs Crilling, I’d say you might again be called upon in your professional capacity and then, who knows?’
    Archery frowned as they walked on. ‘I’d rather it was all above-board. I don’t want to do anything underhand.’
    ‘Look, sir,’ said Wexford in a burst of impatience, ‘if you’re coming in on this lark you’ll have to be underhand. You’ve no real authority to ask questions of innocent people and if they complain I can’t protect you.’
    ‘I’ll explain everything frankly to her. May I talk to her?’
    Wexford cleared his throat. ‘Are you familiar with
Henry the Fourth
, Part One, sir?’
    Slightly puzzled, Archery nodded. Wexford stopped under the arch that led to the coaching yard of The Olive and Dove. ‘The quotation I had in mind is Hotspur’s reply to Mortimer when he says he can call spirits from the vasty deep.’ Startled by Wexford’s deep voice, a little cloud of pigeons flew out from the beams, fluttering rusty grey wings. ‘I’ve found that reply very useful to me in my work when I’ve been a bit too optimistic.’ He cleared his throat and quoted, ‘“And so can I and so can any man. But will they come when you do call to them?” Good night, sir. I hope you find The Olive comfortable.’

7
    Into how high a dignity … ye are called, that is to say to be Messengers, Watchmen and Stewards …
    The Ordering of Priests
    TWO PEOPLE SAT in the public gallery of Kingsmarkham court, Archery and a woman with sharp, wasted features. Her long grey hair, oddly fashionable through carelessness rather than intent, and the cape she wore gave her a medieval look. Presumably she was the mother of this girl who had just been charged with manslaughter, the girl whom the clerk had named as Elizabeth Anthea Crilling, of 24A Glebe Road, Kingsmarkham in the County of Sussex. She had a look of her mother and they kept glancing at each other, Mrs Crilling’s eyes flicking over her daughter’s string-thin body or coming to rest with maudlin watery affection on the girl’s face. It was a well-made face, though gaunt but for the full mouth. Sometimes it seemed to become all staring dark eyes as a word or a telling phrase awakened emotion, sometimes blank and shuttered like that of a retarded child with an inner life of goblins and things that reach out in the dark. An invisible thread held mother and daughter together but whether it was composed of love or hatred Archery could not tell. Both were ill-dressed, dirty-looking, a prey, he felt, to cheap emotion, but there was some quality each had – passion? Imagination? Seething memory? – that set them apart and dwarfed the other occupants of the court.
    He had just enough knowledge of the law to know that this court could do no more than commit the girl to the Assizes for trial. The evidence that was being laboriously taken down on a typewriter was all against her. Elizabeth Crilling, according to the licensee of The Swan at Flagford, had been drinking in his saloon bar since six-thirty. He had served her with seven double whiskies and when he had refused to let her have another, she had abused him until he had threatened to call the police.
    ‘No alternative but to commit you for trial at the Assizes at Lewes,’ the chairman was saying ‘… Nothing to hope for from any promise of favour, and nothing to fear from any threat which may be …’
    A shriek came from the public gallery. ‘What are you going to do to her?’ Mrs Crilling had sprung up, the tent-like cape she wore billowing out and making a breeze run through the court. ‘You’re not going to put her in prison?’
    Hardly knowing why he did so, Archery moved swiftly along the form until he was at her side. At the same time Sergeant Martin took half a dozen rapid strides towards her, glaring at the clergyman.
    ‘Now, madam, you’d far better come outside.’
    She flung herself away from him, pulling the cape around her as if it were cold instead of suffocatingly