An Unkindness of Ravens Read Online Free PDF Page A

Dirty now, streaked with rain, it sat on its brick supports, looking as if it might after all be the property of the teenager opposite.
    He still did nothing about it, though he knew by now that it was there all the time. It wasn’t driven there in the morning and taken away in the evening. For a week now it hadn’t been drivable. It took the smashing of a rear window to get him to do something.
    The rear window had been broken, the front doors opened and the interior stripped. The radio had been removed, the headrests taken off the front seats, and something dug out of the dashboard, a clock perhaps. Though the boot was open, the thieves hadn’t thought it worth their while to help themselves to the snow shovel inside. Gee phoned the police.
     There was no need for the police to go through the procedure of tracing the driver through the Vehicle Licensing Department in Swansea, for the vehicle registration document was in the Granada’s glove compartment along with a road map of southern England, a ballpoint pen and a pair of sunglasses.
    Vehicle registration documents have named on them the ‘keeper’ of the vehicle, not its owner, a fact which was also of assistance to the police. This one listed the keeper as Rodney John Williams of 31 Alverbury Road, Kingsmarkham.
     Why had Williams dumped the car in Arnold Road when Sevensmith Harding’s own car park was less than a quarter of a mile away behind the company’s High Street offices? That car park was never locked. It had no gates, only an opening in the fence and on the fence a notice requesting ‘unauthorized personnel’ not to park there.
    ‘I don’t understand it,’ Miles Gardner said. ‘Frankly, we’ve been wondering what to do about recovering the car but we don’t know where Williams is. He didn’t mention the car in his letter of resignation. Apparently, wherever he was when he first left, he’s no longer with his wife, otherwise we would have tackled her. He’s disappeared into thin air. It’s a bit much really, isn’t it? I gather the car’s in a state, not much more than a shell?’
    ‘The engine’s still there,’ said Wexford.
    Gardner made a face. They were in his rather gloomy though luxurious office, a room not so much panelled as lined with oak, the decor dating from those between-wars days when hardwood was plentiful. None of your Sevenstar matt emulsion here, Wexford thought to himself.
    There were more framed photographs than in the average elderly couple’s living room. On Gardner’s desk, placed to catch his eye every time he looked up, was a big one of tall Mrs Gardner and her three girls, all affectionate nestling and entwined arms. The walls were reserved for various groups and gatherings of men at company functions or on sporting occasions. One was of a cricket match with a tall gangling man going in to bat. Rodney Williams. The high forehead, slight concavity of features that would no doubt show more clearly in profile, the thin mouth stretched in a grin, were unmistakable.
    Gardner looked at it dolefully.
    ‘He was a lot younger then,’ he said. ‘The company had a crack team in those days.’ He made as if to take the photograph down, angered no doubt by the sight of the permanently grinning Williams, but seemed to change his mind. ‘The whole thing’s extraordinary. He was very keen on cars, you know, one of those car men. You don’t think anything’s happened to him, do you?’
    The euphemism that always signified death .. .
    ‘If you mean some sort of accident, I don’t know but I don’t think so. It’s more what has he been up to, isn’t it?’
    Gardner looked mystified.
    ‘It looks to me as if he may have been up to something he shouldn’t have been, he’s been on the fiddle. Either he decided he’d made enough out of it and was going to call it a day or else something happened to make him think discovery was imminent. Now, the most likely place for him to have been cooking the books is here. Do