Put On By Cunning (inspector Wexford)

  • ISBN: 9780099277309
  • Author: Ruth Rendell
  • Description:
    Sir Manuel Carmargue, one of the greatest flautists of his time, was dead. Misadventure. An old man, ankle-deep in snow, he lost his foothold in the dark, slipping into the water to be trapped under a lid of ice. Only a glove remained to point to where he lay, one of its fingers rising out of the drifts. There's nothing Chief Inspector Wexford likes better than an open-and-shut case. They're so restful. And yet there are one or two niggling doubts - and the disturbing return of Carmargue's daughter, now a considerable heiress, after an absence of nineteen years. Is Wexford going to listen to that nagging inner voice of his? And if he does, what exactly does he plan to do? Excerpted from Put on by Cunning by Ruth Rendell. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 1 By the light of the moon he could see the lake quite clearly from the drawing–room window. To call it a lake was to flatter it, it was just a big pond really. It lay on the other side of the drive, down a shallow slope and ringed with willow trees and hawthorn bushes. Camargue could see that Ted, as good as his word, had been down to the pond that afternoon and broken the ice for air to get in to the fish. There were carp in the pond, some of them very large and very old. Ted’s footprints led down to the water’s edge and back up again to the drive. He had cast the ice on to the back in great grey blocks. The moon showed it all up as well as any arc lamp. Nancy’s pawprints were everywhere, and in places in the drifts there were signs of where she had plunged and rolled. He stroked her smooth brown head, drawing her against him, gently pushing her to settle down and sleep at his feet. The moon sailed in a black and shining sky from which all the heavy cloud had gone. !He opened his book, the biography of an obscure Romanian composer who had once written an etude especially for him, and read for an hour or so. When it got to half-past eight he could feel himself nodding off again, so he got up and stretched and stood in the window. To his surprise he saw it was snowing once more, snow falling out of the wrack which was drifting slowly over the clear sky and towards where the moon was. The conifers were powdered again, all but one. Then he saw the tree move. He had often thought that by night and in the half-light and through his failing eyes those trees looked like men. Now he had actually mistaken a man for a tree. Or a woman for a tree. He couldn’t tell whether it had been Ted or Muriel that he had seen, a trousered figure in a heavy coat moving up now where the path must be towards the birch copse. It must have been one of them. Camargue decided to postpone letting Nancy out for ten minutes. If Ted saw him he would take over and fuss and probably insist on giving the dog a proper walk which she didn’t need after all the exercise she had had. If Muriel saw him she would! very likely want to come in and make him cocoa. The figure in the garden had disappeared. Now the moon was no longer so bright. He couldn’t remember that he had ever seen such snow in all the years he had lived in Sussex. In his youth, in the Pyrenees, the snows had come like this with an even more bitter cold. It was remembering those days that had made him plant in this garden all the little fir tees and yews and junipers…. He could have sworn he saw another tree move. How grotesque was old age when the faculties one took for granted like trusted friends began to play on one malicious practical jokes. He called out: ‘Nancy! Time to go out.’ She was there at the head of the stairs long before he was. If he had gone first she would have knocked him over. He walked down behind her, propelling her with his toe when she looked anxiously back and up at him. At the foot of the stairs he switched on the outside light to illuminate the wide court into which the drive led. The snowflakes danced like sparks in the yellow light but when he opened the door the sharp cold of the night rushed in to meet him. Nancy bounded out into the whirling snow. Camargue took his sheepskin coat and gloves and a walking-stick from the cloaks cupboard and followed her out. She was nowhere to be seen, though her paws had ploughed a path down the slope towards the lake. He fastened his coat and pulled the woollen scarf up around his throat. Nancy, though well aware this outing was no regular walk but merely for the purpose of stimulating and answering a call of nature, nevertheless would sometimes go off. If the weather conditions were right, damp and muggy, for instance, or like this, she had been known to go off for half an hour. It would be a nuisance were she to do that tonight when he felt so tired that even on his feet, even with this icy air stinging his face, he could feel drowsiness closing in on him. ‘Nancy! Nancy, where are you?’ He could easily go back into the house and phone Ted and ask him to come over and await the dog’s return. Ted wouldn’t mind. On the other hand, wasn’t that yielding to the very helplessness he was always striving against? What business had he to be getting married, to be setting up house again, even recommencing a social life, if he couldn’t do such a little thing for himself as let a dog out before he went to bed? What he would do was return to the house and sit in the chair in the hall and wait for Nancy to come back. If he fell asleep her scraping at the front door would awaken him.
  • Pages: 208
  • Format: Paperback
  • Genre: Crime
  • Rating: Not yet rated

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About this copy: P/B 1982 Arrow Books, pgs 207. Very Good condition. ISBN 0099277301.

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