Collected Short Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘You close it then and see. Go on, you do it.’

  Norman closed it. The crash awakened him at three in the morning. He got up, cursing, and went into the bathroom. Rita woke up and jumped out of bed and followed him. Norman came out of the bathroom with the pole in his hand, his face red and his eyes bulging. He shouted at Rita:

  ‘You got up after I was asleep and opened that window and closed it your way, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did what?’

  ‘Don’t deny it. You’re trying to drive me mad with that window. You won’t get the chance to do it again.’

  He raised the pole and brought it down with a crash on the side of Rita’s head. She gave a dreadful hoarse cry and put up her hands to try and ward of the rain of blows. Norman struck her five times with the pole and she was lying unconscious on the landing floor before he realized what he was doing. Norman threw the pole down the stairwell, picked Rita up in his arms and phoned for an ambulance.

  Rita didn’t die. She had a fractured skull and a broken jaw and collarbone but she would survive. When she regained consciousness and could move her jaw again she told the people at the hospital she had got up in the night and fallen over the banisters and all the way down the stairwell in the dark. The curious thing was she seemed to believe this herself.

  Alone and remorseful, Norman kept thinking how odd it was there had nearly been a second murder under this roof. He went to the estate agents and told them he wanted to put the house back on the market. Hare’s house, he always called it to himself these days, never ‘my house’ or ‘ours’. They looked grave and shook their heads but brightened up when Norman named the very low figure he intended to ask.

  Now he was going to be rid of the house Norman began to feel differently about Hare. He wouldn’t have minded knowing what Hare had done, the details, the facts. One Saturday afternoon a prospective buyer came, was in raptures over Norman’s redecorations and the tiles in the downstairs bathroom, and didn’t seem to care at all about Hare. This encouraged Norman and immediately the man had gone he went down the road to the library where he got out Murder in the Sixties. He read the account of the case after getting back from visiting Rita in hospital.

  Raymond and Diana Hare had been an apparently happy couple. One morning their cleaner arrived to find Mrs Hare beaten to death and lying in her own blood on the top landing outside the bathroom door. Hare had soon confessed. He and his wife had had a midnight dispute over a window that continually came open with a crash and in the heat of anger he had attacked her with a wooden pole. Not a very interesting or memorable murder. Robinson, in his foreword, said he had included it among his four because what linked them all was a common lack of any kind of understandable motive.

  But how could I have tried to do the same thing and for the same reason? Norman asked himself. Is Hare’s house haunted by an act, by a motiveless urge? Or can it be that the first time I looked into that book I saw and read more than my conscious mind took in but not more than was absorbed by my unconscious? A rational man must believe the latter.

  He borrowed the ladder from Roy to climb up and once more wire the window catch.

  ‘By the way,’ he said. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you. It’s not the same pole, is it?’

  ‘Your one, you mean? The same as Hare’s? Oh, no, I don’t know what became of that one. In some police museum, I expect. You’ve got ours. When we had our window done we offered ours to Mr Hare the nephew and he was very glad to accept.’

  Norman found a buyer at last. Rita was away convalescing and he was obliged to find a new home for them in her absence. Not that he had much choice, the miserable sum he got for Hare’s house. He put a deposit on one of the terraced cottages in Inverness Street, hoping poor Rita wouldn’t mind too much.

  Bribery and Corruption

  Everyone who makes a habit of dining out in London knows that Potters in Marylebone High Street is one of the most expensive of eating places. Nicholas Hawthorne, who usually dined in his rented room or in a steak house, was deceived by the humble-sounding name. When Annabel said, ‘Let’s go to Potters,’ he agreed quite happily.

  It was the first time he had taken her out. She was a small pretty girl with very little to say for herself. In her little face her eyes looked huge and appealing – a flying fox face, Nicholas thought. She suggested they take a taxi to Potters ‘because it’s difficult to find’. Seeing that it was a large building and right in the middle of Marylebone High Street, Nicholas didn’t think it would have been more difficult to find on foot than in a taxi but he said nothing.

  He was already wondering what this meal was going to cost. Potters was a grand and imposing restaurant. The windows were of that very clear but slightly warped glass that bespeaks age, and the doors of a dark red wood that looked as if it had been polished every day for fifty years. Because the curtains were drawn and the interior not visible, it appeared as if they were approaching some private residence, perhaps a rich man’s town house.

  Immediately inside the doors was a bar where three couples sat about in black leather chairs. A waiter took Annabel’s coat and they were conducted to a table in the restaurant. Nicholas, though young, was perceptive. He had expected Annabel to be made as shy and awkward by this place as he was himself but she seemed to have shed her diffidence with her coat. And when waiters approached with menus and the wine list she said boldly that she would start with a Pernod.

  What was it all going to cost? Nicholas looked unhappily at the prices and was thankful he had his newly acquired credit card with him. Live now, pay later – but, oh God, he would still have to pay.

  Annabel chose asparagus for her first course and roast grouse for her second. The grouse was the most expensive item on the menu. Nicholas selected vegetable soup and a pork chop. He asked her if she would like red or white wine and she said one bottle wouldn’t be enough, would it, so why not have one of each?

  She didn’t speak at all while they ate. He remembered reading in some poem or other how the poet marvelled of a schoolmaster that one small head could carry all he knew. Nicholas wondered how one small body could carry all Annabel ate. She devoured roast potatoes with her grouse and red cabbage and runner beans, and when she heard the waiter recommending braised artichokes to the people at the next table she said she would have some of those too. He prayed she wouldn’t want another course. But that fawning insinuating waiter had to come up with the sweet trolley.

  ‘We have fresh strawberries, madam.’

  ‘In November?’ said Annabel, breaking her silence. ‘How lovely.’

  Naturally she would have them. Drinking the dregs of his wine, Nicholas watched her eat the strawberries and cream and then call for a slice of chocolate roulade. He ordered coffee. Did sir and madam wish for a liqueur? Nicholas shook his head vehemently. Annabel said she would have a green chartreuse. Nicholas knew that this was of all liqueurs the pearl – and necessarily the most expensive.

  By now he was so frightened about the bill and so repelled by her concentrated guzzling that he needed briefly to get away from her. It was plain she had come out with him only to stuff and drink herself into a stupor. He excused himself and went off in the direction of the men’s room.

  In order to reach it he had to pass across one end of the bar. The place was still half-empty but during the past hour – it was now nine o’clock – another couple had come in and were sitting at a table in the centre of the floor. The man was middle-aged with thick silver hair and a lightly tanned taut-skinned face. His right arm was round the shoulder of his companion, a very young, very pretty blonde girl, and he was whispering something in her ear. Nicholas recognized him at once as the chairman of the company for which his own father had been sales manager until two years before when he had been made redundant on some specious pretext. The company was called Sorensen-McGill and the silver-haired man was Julius Sorensen.

  With all the fervour of a young man loyal to a beloved parent, Nicholas hated him. But Nichol
as was a very young man and it was beyond his strength to cut Sorensen. He muttered a stiff good evening and plunged for the men’s room where he turned out his pockets, counted the notes in his wallet and tried to calculate what he already owed to the credit card company. If necessary he would have to borrow from his father, though he would hate to do that, knowing as he did that his father had been living on a reduced income ever since that beast Sorensen fired him. Borrow from his father, try and put off paying the rent for a month if he could, cut down on his smoking, maybe give up altogether . . .

  When he came out, feeling almost sick, Sorensen and the girl had moved farther apart from each other. They didn’t look at him and Nicholas too looked the other way. Annabel was on her second green chartreuse and gobbling up petit fours. He had thought her face was like that of a flying fox and now he remembered that flying fox is only a pretty name for a fruit bat. Eating a marzipan orange, she looked just like a rapacious little fruit bat. And she was very drunk.

  ‘I feel ever so sleepy and strange,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ve got one of those viruses. Could you pay the bill?’

  It took Nicholas a long time to catch the waiter’s eye. When he did the man merely homed in on them with the coffee pot. Nicholas surprised himself with his own firmness.

  ‘I’d like the bill,’ he said in the tone of one who declares to higher authority that he who is about to die salutes thee.

  In half a minute the waiter was back. Would Nicholas be so good as to come with him and speak to the maître d’hôtel? Nicholas nodded, dumbfounded. What had happened? What had he done wrong? Annabel was slouching back in her chair, her big eyes half-closed, a trickle of something orange dribbling out of the corner of her mouth. They were going to tell him to remove her, that she had disgraced the place, not to come here again. He followed the waiter, his hands clenched.

  A huge man spoke to him, a man with the beak and plumage of a king penguin. ‘Your bill has been paid, sir.’

  Nicholas stared. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Your father paid it, sir. Those were my instructions, to tell you your father had settled your bill.’

  The relief was tremendous. He seemed to grow tall again and light and free. It was as if someone had made him a present of – well, what would it have been? Sixty pounds? Seventy? And he understood at once. Sorensen had paid his bill and said he was his father. It was a little bit of compensation for what Sorensen had done in dismissing his father. He had paid out sixty pounds to show he meant well, to show that he wanted, in a small way, to make up for injustice.

  Tall and free and masterful, Nicholas said, ‘Call me a cab, please,’ and then he went and shook Annabel awake in quite a lordly way.

  His euphoria lasted for nearly an hour, long after he had pushed the somnolent Annabel through her own front door, then climbed the stairs up to the furnished room he rented and settled down to the crossword in the evening paper. Things would have turned out very differently if he hadn’t started that crossword. ‘Twelve across: Bone in mixed byre goes with corruption. (7 letters)’ The I and the Y were already in. He got the answer after a few seconds – ‘Bribery’. ‘Rib’ in an anagram of ‘byre’. ‘Bribery’.

  He laid down the paper and looked at the opposite wall. That which goes with corruption. How could he ever have been such a fool, such a naive innocent fool, as to suppose a man like Sorensen cared about injustice or ever gave a thought to wrongful dismissal or even believed for a moment he could have been wrong? Of course Sorensen hadn’t been trying to make restitution, of course he hadn’t paid that bill out of kindness and remorse. He had paid it as a bribe.

  He had paid the bribe to shut Nicholas’s mouth because he didn’t want anyone to know he had been out drinking with a girl, embracing a girl, who wasn’t his wife. It was bribery, the bribery that went with corruption.

  Once, about three years before, Nicholas had been with his parents to a party Sorensen had given for his staff and Mrs Sorensen had been the hostess. A brown-haired mousey little woman, he remembered her, and all of forty-five which seemed like old age to Nicholas. Sorensen had paid that bill because he didn’t want his wife to find out he had a girlfriend young enough to be his daughter.

  He had bought him, Nicholas thought, bribed and corrupted him – or tried to. Because he wasn’t going to succeed. He needn’t think he could kick the Hawthorne family around any more. Once was enough.

  It had been nice thinking that he hadn’t after all wasted more than half a week’s wages on that horrible girl but honour was more important. Honour, surely, meant sacrificing material things for a principle. Nicholas had a bad night because he kept waking up and thinking of all the material things he would have to go short of during the next few weeks on account of his honour. Nevertheless, by the morning his resolve was fixed. Making sure he had his cheque book with him, he went off to work.

  Several hours passed before he could get the courage together to phone Sorensen-McGill. What was he going to do if Sorensen refused to see him? If only he had a nice fat bank account with five hundred pounds in it he could make the grand gesture and send Sorensen a blank cheque accompanied by a curt and contemptuous letter.

  The telephonist who used to answer in the days when he sometimes phoned his father at work answered now.

  ‘Sorensen-McGill. Can I help you?’

  His voice rather hoarse, Nicholas asked if he could have an appointment with Mr Sorensen that day on a matter of urgency. He was put through to Sorensen’s secretary. There was a delay. Bells rang and switches clicked. The girl came back to the phone and Nicholas was sure she was going to say no.

  ‘Mr Sorensen asks if one o’clock will suit you?’

  In his lunch hour? Of course it would. But what on earth could have induced Sorensen to have sacrificed one of those fat expense account lunches just to see him? Nicholas set off for Berkeley Square, wondering what had made the man so forthcoming. A weak hopeful little voice inside him began once again putting up those arguments which on the previous evening the voice of a common sense had so decisively refuted.

  Perhaps Sorensen really meant well and when Nicholas got there would tell him the paying of the bill had been no bribery but a way of making a present to the son of a once-valued employee. The pretty girl could have been Sorensen’s daughter. Nicholas had no idea if the man had children. It was possible he had a daughter. No corruption then, no betrayal of his honour, no need to give up cigarettes or abase himself before his landlord.

  They knew him at Sorensen-McGill. He had been there with his father and, besides, he looked like his father. The pretty blonde girl hadn’t looked in the least like Sorensen. A secretary showed him into the chairman’s office. Sorensen was sitting in a yellow leather chair behind a rosewood desk with an inlaid yellow leather top. There were Modigliani-like murals on the wall behind him and on the desk a dark green jade ashtray, stacked with stubs, which the secretary replaced with a clean one of pale green jade.

  ‘Hallo, Nicholas,’ said Sorensen. He didn’t smile. ‘Sit down.’

  The only other chair in the room was one of those hi-tech low-slung affairs made of leather hung on a metal frame. Beside it was a black glass coffee table with a black leather padded rim and on the glass lay a magazine open at the centrefold of a nude girl. There are some people who know how to put others at their ease and there are those who know how to put others in difficulties. Nicholas sat down, right down – about three inches from the floor.

  Sorensen lit a cigarette. He didn’t offer the box. He looked at Nicholas and moved his head slowly from side to side. At last he said:

  ‘I suppose I should have expected this.’

  Nicholas opened his mouth to speak but Sorensen held up his hand. ‘No, you can have your say in a minute.’ His tone became hard and brisk. ‘The girl you saw me with last night was someone – not to put too fine a point on it – I picked up in a bar. I have never seen her before, I shall never see her again. She is not, in any sense of the word
s, a girlfriend or mistress. Wait,’ he said as Nicholas again tried to interrupt. ‘Let me finish. My wife is not a well woman. Were she to find out where I was last night and whom I was with she would doubtless be very distressed. She would very likely become ill again. I refer, of course, to mental illness, to an emotional sickness, but . . .’

  He drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘But all this being so and whatever the consequences, I shall not on any account allow myself to be blackmailed. Is that understood? I paid for your dinner last night and that is enough. I do not want my wife told what you saw, but you may tell her and publish it to the world before I pay you another penny.’

  At the word blackmail Nicholas’s heart had begun to pound. The blood rushed into his face. He had come to vindicate his honour and his motive had been foully misunderstood. In a choked voice he stuttered:

  ‘You’ve no business – it wasn’t – why do you say things like that to me?’

  ‘It’s not a nice word, is it? But to call it anything else would merely be semantics. You came, didn’t you, to ask for more?’

  Nicholas jumped up. ‘I came to give you your money back!’

  ‘Aah!’ It was a strange sound Sorensen made, old and urbane, cynical yet wondering. He crushed out his cigarette. ‘I see. Youth is moralistic. Inexperience is puritanical. You’ll tell her anyway because you can’t be bought, is that it?’

  ‘No, I can’t be bought.’ Nicholas was trembling. He put his hands down flat on Sorensen’s desk but still they shook. ‘I shall never tell anyone what I saw, I promise you that. But I can’t let you pay for my dinner – and pretend to be my father!’ Tears were pricking the backs of his eyes.

  ‘Oh, sit down, sit down. If you aren’t trying to blackmail me and your lips are sealed, what the hell did you come here for? A social call? A man-to-man chat about the ladies you and I took out last night? Your family aren’t exactly my favourite companions, you know.’