Collected Short Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  The morning had been dull and damp but after lunch it had dried up and a weak, watery sun came out. Mrs Julian put on her squirrel coat and went out into the garden, the first time she had been out for nine days.

  The compost heap had not increased much in size. Perhaps the weight of snow had flattened it down or, more likely, Mrs Upton had failed in her duty. Displeased, Mrs Julian went back into the front garden and down to the gate where she lifted the lid of her dustbin, confident of what she would find inside. But, no, she had done Mrs Upton an injustice. The dustbin was empty and quite clean. She stood by the fence and viewed the tip.

  What an eyesore it was! A considerable amount of leakage, due to careless packing and fastening, had taken place, and the wet, fetid, black hillocks were strewn all over with torn and soggy paper, cartons and packages, while in the valleys between clustered, like some evil growth, a conglomeration of decaying fruit and vegetable parings, mildewed bread, tea leaves, coffee grounds and broken glass. In one hollow there was movement. Maggots or the twitching nose of a rat? Mrs Julian shuddered and looked hastily away. She raised her eyes to take in the continued presence under the birch tree of the sack Mr Arnold had deposited there on the previous evening, the sack that was punctured by the neck of a bottle and bound with blue string.

  She returned to the house. Was she justified in keeping this knowledge of hers to herself? There was by then no doubt in her mind as to what Mr Arnold had done. After killing his wife he had run home, changed his bloodstained clothes for clean ones and, fetching in the rubbish sack from outside, inserted into it the garments he had just removed and the blunt instrument, so-called, he had used. An iron bar perhaps or a length of metal piping he had picked up in the ‘wood’. In so doing he had mislaid the wire fastener and could find no other, so he had been obliged to fasten the sack with the nearest thing to hand, a piece of string. Then across the road with it as he had been on several previous occasions, this time to deposit there a sack containing evidence that would incriminate him if found on his property. But what could be more anonymous than a black plastic sack on a council refuse tip? There it would be only one among a thousand and, he must have supposed, impossible to identify.

  Mrs Julian disliked the idea of harming her kind and thoughtful neighbour. But justice must be done. If she was in possession of knowledge the police could not otherwise acquire, it was plainly her duty to reveal it. And the more she thought of it the more convinced she was that there was the correct solution to the crime against Mrs Arnold. Would not Miss Seaton have thought so? Would not Miss Marple, having found parallels between Mr Arnold’s behaviour and that of some St Mary Mead husband, having considered and weighed the awful significance of the quarrel on Saturday night and the extraordinary circumstance of taking rubbish to a tip at nine-thirty on a wet Sunday evening, would she not have laid the whole matter before the CID?

  She hesitated for only a few minutes before fetching the telephone directory and looking up the number. By three o’clock in the afternoon she was making a call to her local police station.

  The detective sergeant and constable who came to see Mrs Julian half an hour later showed no surprise at being supplied with information by such as she. Perhaps they too read the works of the inventors of elderly lady sleuths. They treated Mrs Julian with great courtesy and after she had told them what she suspected they suggested she accompany them to the vicinity of the tip and point out the incriminating sack.

  However, it was quite possible for her to do this from the right-hand side of the bay window. The detectives nodded and wrote things in notebooks and thanked her and went away, and after a little while a van arrived and a policeman in uniform got out and removed the sack. Mrs Julian sat in the window, working away at the lacy pattern on the front of her dark blue cardigan and watching for the arrest of Mr Arnold. She watched with trepidation and fear for him and a reluctant sympathy. There were policemen about the area all day, tramping around among the rubbish sacks, investigating gardens and ringing doorbells, but none of them went to arrest Mr Arnold.

  Nothing happened at all apart from Mr Laindon calling at eight in the evening. He seemed very upset and his face looked white and drawn. He had come, he said, to ask Mrs Julian if she would care to contribute to the cost of a wreath for Mrs Arnold or would she be sending flowers personally?

  ‘I should prefer to see to my own little floral tribute,’ said Mrs Julian rather frostily.

  ‘Just as you like, of course. I’m really going round asking people to give myself something to do. I feel absolutely bowled over by this business. They were wonderful to me, the Arnolds, you know. You couldn’t have better friends. I was feeling pretty grim when I first came here – my divorce and all that – and the Arnolds, well, they looked after me like a brother, never let me be on my own, even insisted I go out with them. And now a terrible thing like this has to happen and to a wonderful person like that . . .’

  Mrs Julian had no wish to listen to this sort of thing. No doubt, there were some gullible enough to believe it. She went to bed wondering if the arrest would take place during the night, discreetly, so that the neighbours should not witness it.

  The paintbox houses looked just the same in the morning. But of course they would. The arrest of Mr Arnold would hardly affect their appearance. The phone rang at 9.30 and Mrs Upton took the call. She came into the morning room where Mrs Julian was finishing her breakfast.

  ‘The police want to come round and see you again. I said I’d ask. I said you mightn’t be up to it, not being so young as you used to be.’

  ‘Neither are you or they,’ said Mrs Julian and then she spoke to the police herself and told them to come whenever it suited them.

  During the next half hour some not disagreeable fantasies went round in Mrs Julian’s head. Such is often the outcome of identifying with characters in fiction. She imagined herself congratulated on her acumen and even, on a future occasion when some other baffling crime had taken place, consulted by policemen of high rank. Mrs Upton had served her well on the whole, as well as could be expected in these trying times. Perhaps one day, when it came to the question of Stewart’s promotion, a word from her in the right place . . .

  The doorbell rang. It was the same detective sergeant and detective constable. Mrs Julian was a little disappointed, she thought she rated an inspector now. They greeted her with jovial smiles and invited her into her own kitchen where they said they had something to show her. Between them they were lugging a large canvas bag.

  The sergeant asked Mrs Upton if she could find them a sheet of newspaper, and before Mrs Julian could say that they had burnt all the newspapers, Saturday’s Daily Telegraph was produced from where it had been secreted. Then, to Mrs Julian’s amazement, he pulled out of the canvas bag the black plastic rubbish sack, punctured on one side and secured at the top with blue string, which she had seen Mr Arnold deposit on the tip on Sunday evening.

  ‘I hope you won’t find it too distasteful, madam,’ he said, ‘just to cast your eyes over some of the contents of this bag.’

  Mrs Julian was astounded that he should ask such a thing of someone of her age. But she indicated with a faint nod and wave of her hand that she would comply, while inwardly she braced herself for the sight of some hideous bludgeon, perhaps encrusted with blood and hair, and for the emergence from the depths of the sack of a bloodstained jacket and pair of trousers. She would not faint or cry out, she was determined on that, whatever she might see.

  It was the constable who untied the string and spread open the neck of the sack. With care, the sergeant began to remove its contents and to drop them on the newspaper Mrs Upton had laid on the floor. He dropped them, in so far as he could, in small separate heaps: a quantity of orange peel, a few lengths of dark blue two-ply knitting wool, innumerable Earl Grey tea bags, potato peelings, cabbage leaves, a lamb chop bone, the sherry bottle whose neck had pierced the side of the sack, and seven copies of the Daily Telegraph with one of the Observer, all with
‘Julian, i Abelard Avenue’ scrawled above the masthead . . .

  Mrs Julian surveyed her kitchen floor. She looked at the sergeant and the constable and at the yard or so of dark blue two-ply knitting wool which he still held in his hand and which he had unwound from the neck of the sack.

  ‘I fail to understand,’ she said.

  ‘I’m afraid this sack would appear to contain waste from your own household, Mrs Julian,’ said the sergeant. ‘In other words to have been yours and been disposed of from your premises.’

  Mrs Julian sat down. She sat down rather heavily on one of the bentwood chairs and fixed her eyes on the opposite wall and felt a strange tingling hot sensation in her face that she hadn’t experienced for some sixty years. She was blushing.

  ‘I see,’ she said.

  The constable began stuffing the garbage back into the sack. Mrs Upton watched him, giggling.

  ‘If you haven’t consumed all our stock of sherry, Mrs Upton,’ said Mrs Julian, ‘perhaps we might offer these two gentlemen a glass.’

  The policemen, though on duty – which Mrs Julian had formerly supposed put the consumption of alcohol out of the question – took two glasses apiece. They were not at a loss for words and chatted away with Mrs Upton, possibly on the subject of the past and future exploits of Stewart. Mrs Julian scarcely listened and said nothing. She understood perfectly what had happened, Mr Arnold changing his clothes because they were wet, deciding to empty his rubbish that night because he had forgotten or failed to do so on the Saturday morning, gathering up his own and very likely Mr Laindon’s too. At that point she had left the window to go to the telephone. In the few minutes during which she had been talking to her nephew, Mr Arnold had passed her gate with his barrow, lifted the lid of her dustbin and, finding a full sack within, taken it with him. It was this sack, her own, that she had seen him disposing of on the tip when she had next looked out.

  No wonder the boiler had hardly ever been alight, no wonder the compost heap had scarcely grown. Once the snow and frost began and she knew her employer meant to remain indoors, Mrs Upton had abandoned the hygiene regimen and reverted to sack and dustbin. And this was what it had led to.

  The two policemen left, obligingly discarding the sack on to the tip as they passed it. Mrs Upton looked at Mrs Julian and Mrs Julian looked at Mrs Upton and Mrs Upton said very brightly: ‘Well, I wonder what all that was about then?’

  Mrs Julian longed and longed for the old days when she would have given her notice on the spot, but that was impossible now. Where would she find a replacement? So all she said was, knowing it to be incomprehensible: ‘A faux pas, Mrs Upton, that’s what it was,’ and walked slowly off and into the living room where she picked up her knitting from the chair by the window and carried it into the furthest corner of the room.

  As a detective she was a failure. Yet, ironically, it was directly due to her efforts that Mrs Arnold’s murderer was brought to justice. Mrs Julian could not long keep away from her window and when she returned to it the next day it was to see the council men dismantling the tip and removing the sacks to some distant disposal unit or incinerator. As her newspaper had told her, the strike was over. But the hunt for the murder weapon was not. There was more room to manoeuvre and investigate now the rubbish was gone. By nightfall the weapon had been found and twenty-four hours later the young out-of-work mechanic who had struck Mrs Arnold down for the contents of her handbag had been arrested and charged.

  They traced him through the spanner with which he had killed her and which, passing Mrs Julian’s garden fence, he had thrust into the depths of her compost heap.

  The Wrong Category

  There hadn’t been a killing now for a week. The evening paper’s front page was devoted instead to the economic situation and an earthquake in Turkey. But page three kept up the interest in this series of murders. On it were photographs of the six victims all recognizably belonging to the same type. There, in every case although details of feature naturally varied, were the same large liquid eyes, full soft mouth, and long dark hair.

  Barry’s mother looked up from the paper. ‘I don’t like you going out at night.’

  ‘What, me?’ said Barry.

  ‘Yes, you. All these murders happened round here. I don’t like you going out after dark. It’s not as if you had to, it’s not as if it was for work.’ She got up and began to clear the table but continued to speak in a low whining tone. ‘I wouldn’t say a word if you were a big chap. If you were the size of your cousin Ronnie I wouldn’t say a word. A fellow your size doesn’t stand a chance against that maniac.’

  ‘I see,’ said Barry. ‘And whose fault is it I’m only five feet two? I might just point out that a woman of five feet that marries a bloke only two inches more can’t expect to have giants for kids. Right?’

  ‘I sometimes think you only go roving about at night, doing what you want, to prove you’re as big a man as your cousin Ronnie.’

  Barry thrust his face close up to hers. ‘Look, leave off, will you?’ He waved the paper at her. ‘I may not have the height but I’m not in the right category. Has that occurred to you? Has it?’

  ‘All right, all right. I wish you wouldn’t be always shouting.’

  In his bedroom Barry put on his new velvet jacket and dabbed cologne on his wrists and neck. He looked spruce and dapper. His mother gave him an apprehensive glance as he passed her on his way to the back door, and returned to her contemplation of the pictures in the newspaper. Six of them in two months. The girlish faces, doe-eyed, diffident, looked back at her or looked aside or stared at distant unknown objects. After a while she folded the paper and switched on the television. Barry, after all, was not in the right category, and that must be her comfort.

  He liked to go and look at the places where the bodies of the victims had been found. It brought him a thrill of danger and a sense of satisfaction. The first of them had been strangled very near his home on a path which first passed between draggled allotments, then became an alley plunging between the high brown wall of a convent and the lower red brick wall of a school.

  Barry took this route to the livelier part of the town, walking rapidly but without fear and pausing at the point – a puddle of darkness between lamps – where the one they called Pat Leston had died. It seemed to him, as he stood there, that the very atmosphere, damp, dismal, and silent, breathed evil and the horror of the act. He appreciated it, inhaled it, and then passed on to seek, on the waste ground, the common, in a deserted back street of condemned houses, those other murder scenes. After the last killing they had closed the underpass, and Barry found to his disappointment that it was still closed.

  He had walked a couple of miles and had hardly seen a soul. People stayed at home. There was even some kind of panic, he had noticed, when it got to six and the light was fading and the buses and tube trains were emptying themselves of the last commuters. In pairs they scurried. They left the town as depopulated as if a plague had scourded it.

  Entering the high street, walking its length, Barry saw no one, apart from those protected by the metal and glass of motor vehicles, but an old woman hunched on a step. Bundled in dirty clothes, a scarf over her head and a bottle in her hand, she was as safe as he – as far, or farther, from the right category.

  But he was still on the watch. Next to viewing the spots where the six had died, he best enjoyed singling out the next victim. No one, for all the boasts of the newspapers and the policemen, knew the type as well as he did. Slight and small-boned, long-legged, sway-backed, with huge eyes, pointed features, and long dark hair. He was almost sure he had selected the Italian one as a potential victim some two weeks before the event, though he could never be certain.

  So far today he had seen no one likely, in spite of watching with fascination the exit from the tube on his own way home. But now, as he entered the Red Lion and approached the bar, his eye fell on a candidate who corresponded to the type more completely than anyone he had yet singled out. Excitement sti
rred in him. But it was unwise, with everyone so alert and nervous, to be caught staring. The barman’s eyes were on him. He asked for a half of lager, paid for it, tasted it, and, as the barman returned to rinsing glasses, turned slowly to appreciate to the full that slenderness, that soulful timid look, those big expressive eyes, and that mane of black hair.

  But things had changed during the few seconds his back had been turned. Previously he hadn’t noticed that there were two people in the room, another as well as the candidate, and now they were sitting together. From intuition, at which Barry fancied himself as adept, he was sure the girl had picked the man up. There was something in the way she spoke as she lifted her full glass which convinced him, something in her look, shy yet provocative.

  He heard her say, ‘Well, thank you, but I didn’t mean to . . .’ and her voice trailed away, drowned by the other’s brashness.

  ‘Catch my eye? Think nothing of it, love. My pleasure. Your fella one of the unpunctual sort, is he?’

  She made no reply. Barry was fascinated, compelled to stare, by the resemblance to Pat Leston, by more than that, by seeing in this face what seemed a quintessence, a gathering together and a concentrating here of every quality variously apparent in each of the six. And what gave it a particular piquancy was to see it side by side with such brutal ugliness. He wondered at the girl’s nerve, her daring to make overtures. And now she was making them afresh, actually laying a hand on his sleeve.

  ‘I suppose you’ve got a date yourself?’ she said.

  The man laughed. ‘Afraid I have, love. I was just whiling away ten minutes.’ He started to get up.

  ‘Let me buy you a drink.’

  His answer was only another harsh laugh. Without looking at the girl again, he walked away and through the swing doors out into the street. That people could expose themselves to such danger in the present climate of feeling intrigued Barry, his eyes now on the girl who was also leaving the pub. In a few seconds it was deserted, the only clients likely to visit it during that evening all gone.