An Unkindness of Ravens by Ruth Rendell

Kingsmarkham Courier was a weekly and wouldn’t be out till Friday. The national dailies had given no more than a paragraph to the discovery of Rodney Williams’s body and had left out all the background details he was sure Varney had passed on to them. The Daily Telegraph merely stated that the body of a man had been found in a shallow grave and later identified as Rodney John Williams, a salesman from Kingsmarkham in Sussex. Nothing about Joy, his children, his job at Sevensmith Harding or the fact that he had been missing for two months. True, they had put him, Wexford, on TV but only on the regional bit that came after the news and then only forty-five seconds of the half-hour-long film they’d made.
    The corpses of middle-aged men weren’t news as women’s were or children’s. Women were always news. Perhaps they would cease to be when the day came that they got their equality as well as their rights. An interesting speculation and one which reminded him .. .
    ‘You were going to tell me but we were interrupted.’
    ‘It’s not that she’s anti-girls usually,’ Burden said. ‘For God’s sake, she’s a feminist. I mean, it’s not some stupid I-must-have-an-heir thing or every-woman’sgottohave-asontoprove-herself. In fact I think she secretly thinks women are better than men—I mean cleverer and more versatile, all that. She says she doesn’t understand it herself. She says she had no feelings about the child’s sex one way or the other, but when they told her, when she knew, she was—well, dismayed. That was at first. It’s got worse. It’s not just dismay now, it’s hatred.’
    ‘Why doesn’t she want a girl?’ Wexford remembered certain sentiments expressed by his daughter Sylvia, mother of two sons. ‘Is it that she feels women have a raw deal and she doesn’t want to be responsible for bringing another into the world?’ By way of apology for this crassness, he added, ‘I have heard that view put.’
    ‘She doesn’t know. She says that ever since the world began sons have been preferred over daughters and now it’s become part of race memory, what she calls the collective unconscious.’
    ‘What Jung called it.’
    Burden hesitated and then passed over that one. ‘She’s mad, you know. Pregnancy has driven her mad. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’ve given up caring about being disloyal. I’ve given up damn well caring, if you must know. Do you know what she says? She says she can’t contemplate a future with a daughter she doesn’t want. She says she can’t imagine living for twenty years, say, with someone she hates before it’s born. What’s my life going to be like with that going on?’
    ‘At the risk of uttering an old cliche, I’d say she’ll feel differently when the baby’s born.’
    ‘Oh, she will? You can be sure of that? She’ll love it when it’s put into her arms? Shall I tell you what else she says? That she never wants to see it. We’re to put it up for adoption immediately without either of us seeing it. I told you she was mad.’
    All this made Wexford feel like a drink. But he couldn’t start drinking at lunchtime with all he’d got ahead of him. Burden wasn’t going to drink either. Judging by the look of him some mornings, he saved that up for when he got home. They paid the bill and climbed up the stone steps out of the Old Cellar into a bright June sunshine that made them blink.
    ‘She’s seeing a psychiatrist. I pin my faith to that. Me of all people! I sometimes wonder what I’ve come to, saying things like that.’
    Sir Hilary Tremlett’s report of the results of the postmortem had come. To decipher the obscurer bits for Wexford, Dr Crocker came into the office as Burden was departing. They nearly passed each other in the doorway, Burden long-faced, monosyllabic. The doctor laughed.
    ‘Mike’s having a difficult pregnancy.’
    Wexford wasn’t going to enlighten him. The other chair had been pushed under the desk. He shoved it out