End in Tears by Ruth Rendell

it was almost beyond doubt that Brand would remain with his grandfather and a stepgrandmother young and vigorous enough to have charge of his upbringing, one who would do her duty, be an efficient carer, see that he ate healthily and watched only a modicum of television. Many a natural mother does less, he thought.
    She, he found, seemed to have no more idea of where the thousand pounds came from than her husband had. Brand now in a high chair, sucking orange juice out of a bottle and eating a sliced banana, Diana Marshalson showed nearly the same degree of surprise.
    â€œWhat became of the car Amber was driving when the concrete block was dropped from the bridge in June?”
    â€œIt was a write-off.”
    â€œI see. Mrs. Marshalson, I should like to have a look at Amber’s bedroom. There’s no need for a thorough search as there would be if this were a case of a missing person, but I should like to cast my eye over it. Inspector Burden will come with me.”
    Apart from the bed that was neatly made, everything in the room was in chaos, exactly the way you would expect to find the bedroom of a teenage girl whose motherhood seemed extraneous and no natural part of her character. Clothes lay about. The two chairs were covered, enveloped, lost, in the piles of clothes and more hung from cupboard door handles on cleaners’ wire hangers. When Wexford opened one of these doors it was hard to see how they could have been put away, so crammed was the interior with miniskirts, long skirts, jeans, trousers, tops, jackets, dresses, and coats. The number of garments was matched by the quantity of cosmetics that stood about on every available surface. One drawer in the dresser refused to close, it was so stuffed full with bottles and jars, makeup brushes and tissues. From another trailed the end of a pink chiffon scarf and one leg of a pair of fishnet tights.
    â€œImagine the mayhem when Brand came in here,” said Wexford.
    Burden shrugged. “If he ever did. The child doesn’t seem to have figured large in her life.”
    â€œWell, we don’t know that yet. Maybe we don’t need to.” Wexford meant, let it stay that way so that I don’t have to wake up in the night and worry about it. Sylvia’s predicament is bad enough to be going on with. Let me have an ostrich side to my life.
    Burden was opening those drawers, one after another. No order was to be found anywhere. One, scattered with drifts of a white substance Burden said was talcum powder, also held screwed-up used tissues, balls of cotton wool, and half-used jars of cosmetics. Others were crammed with a heterogeneous mix of things to wear, things to read, cuttings (or, rather, tearings) from magazines, ballpoint pens, single socks, sunglasses, curling tongs, a hairdryer, and several hairbrushes and combs. Mixed up with them was a passport. Opening it, he looked first at Amber’s photograph, for once a passport photograph that showed its subject as beautiful, then at an inside page on which were stamps for entry to Thailand on December 7 and exit on December 21 of the previous year. He passed it to Wexford and turned his attention to those of the garments that had pockets, and after a search that revealed two squashed cigarettes, several coins of small denomination, more used tissues, and another condom, pulled out with something like triumph an envelope stuffed full of notes.
    â€œI’ll count them,” he said, “but there’s at least another thousand there, don’t you think?”
    â€œProbably. I’m mystified. Did she steal it or earn it?”
    â€œIf she earned it,” said Burden, pulling a long face, “she must have been on the game. There’s no other way she could have got that much.”
    â€œFor such a puritan,” said Wexford, “your mind steams along lurid channels.”
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    In Kingsmarkham High Street the digital clock outside the Kingsbrook Shopping Centre