Wolf to the Slaughter by Ruth Rendell

your time.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got a very slack morning, haven’t we, Drayton? We can sit here till lunchtime for all I care. We can sit here till tomorrow.’
    Again she said nothing and in the renewal of silence shuffling footsteps were heard outside in the passage. The door opened cautiously and Drayton saw a little man with thin grey hair. The face was the face he had seen at the window. With its prognathous jaw, its many furrows in dark brown skin, and its bulbous nose and mouth, it was not prepossessing. The terrified expression had undergone a change. The eyes were fixed on Drayton just as they had been previously, but the agony of fear had been replaced by a kind of gloating horror comparable to that of a man shown a five-legged sheep or a bearded lady.
    Burden got up and, because the newcomer seemed inclined to make a bolt for it, closed his hand over the doorknob.
    ‘Well, if it isn’t Mr Matthews,’ he said, ‘Can’t say I think much of your coming-out togs. I thought they made them to measure these days.’
    The man called Matthews said in a feeble grating voice, ‘Hallo, Mr Burden,’ and then automatically, as if he always did say it, just as other men say, ‘How are things?’ or ‘Nice day’, ‘I haven’t done nothing.’
    ‘When I was at school,’ said Burden, ‘they taught me that a double negative makes an affirmative. So we know where we are, don’t we? Sit down, join the gathering. There aren’t any more of you, are there?’
    Monkey Matthews skirted the room carefully, finally sitting down as far as possible from Drayton. For a moment nobody said anything. Matthews looked from Burden to Ruby and then, as if unwillingly compelled, back again at Drayton.
    ‘Is that Geoff Smith?’ he asked at last.
    ‘You see,’ said Ruby Branch, ‘he never saw them. Well, come to that, I never saw the girl.’
    Wexford shook his head in exasperation. His whole body had shaken with fury when Burden first told him, but now his anger had begun to abate, leaving a sour disgust. Four days had passed since Tuesday, four days of doubt and disbelief. Half a dozen men had been wasting their time, working in the dark and perhaps asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. And all because a silly woman had been afraid to go to the police lest the police stop a racket that promised to be lucrative. Now she sat in his office snivelling into a handkerchief, a scrap of cotton and lace streaked with make-up that the tears had washed away.
    ‘This Geoff Smith,’ Wexford said, ‘when was the first time you saw him?’
    Ruby rolled the handkerchief into a ball and gave a deep choking sigh. ‘Last Saturday, Saturday the third. The day after I put the advert in. It was in the morning, about twelve. There was a knock at the door and there was this young chap wanting the room for Tuesday night. He was dark and ever so nice-looking and he spoke nice. How was I to know he was a killer?’ She shifted in Wexford’s yellow chair and crossed her legs. ‘ “My name’s Geoff Smith”, he said. Proud of it, he was. I didn’t ask him for his name. Well, he said eight till eleven and I said that’d cost him five pounds. He didn’t argue so I saw him off the premises and he got into his black car.
    ‘On Tuesday he came back like he said, at eight sharp. But I never saw any car this time and I never saw his girl. He give my five pounds and said he’d be gone by eleven and when I came back he had gone. Now, I’d left the room like a new pin, as good as a hotel it was . . .’
    ‘I doubt if the court will look on that as a mitigating circumstance,’ Wexford put in coldly.
    At this hint of the revenge society intended to take on her, Ruby gave another loud sniff. ‘Well,’ she gulped, ‘they’d messed it up a bit, moved the furniture, and of course I started putting the room to rights . . .’
    ‘D’you mind sparing me all these asides? I’m a detective, not a domestic science