Wolf to the Slaughter by Ruth Rendell Page A

examiner.’
    ‘I have to tell you, don’t I? I have to tell you what I did.’
    ‘Tell me what you found.’
    ‘Blood,’ Ruby said. ‘I moved back the sofa, and there it was, a great big stain. I know I ought to have come to you, Mr Wexford, but I panicked, I was dead scared. All those convictions you’ve pinned on me. They’ll get me for an accomplice or whatever it is, I thought. Then, there was him, Geoff Smith. It’s all very well you saying you’d have looked after me. You and me, we know what that amounts to. You wouldn’t have put a bodyguard on my place night and day. I was scared stiff.’ She added in a querulous whimper, ‘Still am, come to that.’
    ‘Where does Matthews come into all this?’
    ‘I was all on my own. I kept going to the window to see if I could see a little dark fellow watching the house. He’s killed one girl, I thought. The odds are he won’t think twice about finishing me off. George and me, we’d always been good friends.’ For a moment Wexford wondered who she meant. Then he recalled Monkey’s long disused Christian name. ‘I’d heard he’d come out and I found him in the Piebald Pony.’ She put her elbows on Wexford’s desk and fixed him with a long supplicating stare. ‘A woman needs a man about at a time like that. I reckon I thought he’d protect me.’
    ‘She wanted someone to protect her,’ said Monkey Matthews. ‘Can I have another fag? I hadn’t got nowhere to go, being as my wife won’t have me in the house. Mind you, Mr Burden, I don’t know as I’d have gone back with Rube if I’d known what was waiting for me.’ He banged his thin concave chest. ‘I’m no bodyguard. Got a light?’ Unashamed, no longer afraid since he had been assured that any possible resemblance between Drayton and Geoff Smith was coincidental, he sat jauntily in his chair, talking with animation.
    Burden struck a match to light the fourth cigarette he had had since his arrival and pushed an ashtray pointedly towards him.
    ‘It was blood on the carpet all right,’ Monkey said. The cigarette adhered to his lower lip and the smoke made him screw up his eyes. ‘I didn’t believe her at first. You know what women are.’
    ‘How much blood?’ Burden asked tightly as if the very effort of questioning this man hurt him.
    ‘Good deal. Nasty it was. Like as if someone had been playing silly beggars with a knife.’ He shuddered, but he cackled at the same time. The cigarette fell. When he had retrieved it, but not before it had marked the carpet, he said, ‘Rube was scared stiff of this Smith coming back, wanted to come to you. “That’s no bloody good,” I said, “not after all this time,” but not being one to flout the law when it’s a matter of real downright crime I thought I’d better give you a hint there was a body knocking about. So I wrote to you. Rube had got some paper about. She always has things nice.’
    He gave Burden an ingratiating smile, hideously distorting his face. ‘I knew you’d only need a hint to get your hands on him. Anyone who finds fault with our local police, I always say, Mr Wexford and Mr Burden, they’re real educated tip-top men. They’d be up in London at the Yard if there was any justice in this world.’
    ‘If there’s any justice in this world,’ Burden said furiously, ‘it’ll put you away for the biggest stretch you’ve ever done for this.’
    Monkey contemplated Burden’s green glass statuette as if he hoped to identify it with some known form of human or animal life. ‘Now don’t be like that,’ he said. ‘I haven’t done nothing. You could say I’d put myself out to help you. I never even set eyes on this Geoff Smith, but if he’d come back snooping around, I’d have been up the creek just the same as Rube.’ He gave a deep theatrical sigh. ‘It was a real sacrifice I made, helping you with your enquiries, and where’s it got me?’
    The question was rhetorical but Burden answered it sharply. ‘A nice