The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  It was true. While Mrs. Jago’s husband was alive they had never set foot west of Cornwall or east of Suffolk, for Lucian Jago had a fear of flying and a tendency to seasickness. Since his death and Mary’s departure, if she had not wandered the earth, she had taken every available package tour, to India, to Tashkent and Samarkand, the rose-red city of Petra, up the Yangtse and down the Nile, California, New England. Lately, as she passed eighty, she had restricted her traveling to Europe, forsaking the travel agent’s recommendation and visiting out-of-the-way places.

  She was a small, thin, pretty woman, bird-faced with a crest of white wavy hair and her granddaughter’s green eyes, and indeed very much as Mary would one day be, her bones more apparent than her flesh, the shape of her body still uncannily like a young girl’s.

  Having arrived at Charlotte Cottage in a taxi with a gift for Mary from Lapland and a bottle of champagne, she renewed her friendship with Gushi. She had brought him a dog-chewing bar, which she assured him was made from reindeer skin, and, feeling for it in her bag, brought it out first and then an envelope.

  “I nearly forgot. This came for you.”

  Mary took it. “I was going to ask, but I thought it would be too soon.”

  “Too soon for what?” Frederica gave Gushi the chewing bar and he rolled on his back on the carpet, grasping it in his paws and growling. “What is it? More about your bone marrow man?”

  “I hope it’s his name and address.” She hesitated, as she had done with the trust’s last communication, turning the envelope in her hands, looking at the logo, the stamp, the postmark. “I shall know at last. It’s rather daunting.”

  “Don’t be daunted. Would you like me to open it?”

  “No. No, I don’t think so.”

  “My darling Mary, you don’t have to open it in my presence. I shan’t be offended. Keep it till I’ve gone.”

  Mary shook her head. “I’m going to open it now.”

  It would, after all, be only a name. An ordinary sort of name, probably, and a number and a street anywhere in the country, in a city or a town or a village. She had been told it was in the British Isles, that was all.

  There was no need, this time, for preparation, for bracing herself. Timidity was ridiculous when the contents of this envelope could not possibly contain any threat. Frederica handed her a paper knife from the desk, ivory handled, with a long thin blade. She had probably seen the Blackburn-Norrises use it. Mary slit along the top of the flap and took out the enclosure. The letter was short.

  Dear Ms. Jago,

  We note that you have not asked us to pass your own name and address on to “Oliver” and therefore assume you will do this yourself. He is now willing to be identified. His name is Leo Nash and his address Flat 24, Redferry House, Plangent Road, London NW1. I should like to take this opportunity of wishing you a pleasant and rewarding meeting with Mr. Nash.

  Yours sincerely,

  Deborah Cox

  Mary read it aloud. She said, “How very strange. Plangent Road can’t be far from here. It’s North-west One like this is.”

  “Maybe, but it’s not much like this,” Frederica said dryly. “It’s Somers Town. And you know nothing else about him? Nothing except that he’s twenty-three and male?”

  “Twenty-four by now,” said Mary. “Do you know, all these months I’ve longed to meet him, and now I can I don’t know whether I want to or not. It’s a mistake to meet people in these circumstances, isn’t it? One’s always disappointed.”

  “These circumstances aren’t within my experience, Mary. I don’t know. It’s old-fashioned to say this but I am old-fashioned. It would be unnatural if I wasn’t.”

  “Say what?”

  “I was going to say, I am saying, that it’s best to meet people through being introduced by your friends or family. Or at work perhaps, only I’ve never been to work, so I can’t say. This young man owes you a lot, he is under a great obligation to you, and that isn’t the best basis for a friendship.”

  “A friendship!” said Mary. “He may not even answer my letter. If he feels he’s under an obligation he probably won’t want to meet me.”

  “Is it true that we dislike those who have done us a service?” Frederica asked. “If so, the greater the service perhaps the greater the dislike. And it’s hard to imagine a greater service than saving someone’s life. He may feel he owes you more than he could ever repay. And then if he sees—how shall I put this? Mary, you’re very pretty and—well, graceful and sweet, you’re obviously educated and gifted and living in a lovely place, won’t that be a burden for him too? A poor, sick, deprived young man from what sounds like a council estate behind Euston Station?”

  Mary looked at her. She felt stricken by a small panic. “I wish you hadn’t been away,” she said. “I wish we could have had this conversation before I asked for his address.”

  “And if I’d advised you, would you have taken my advice? Of course you wouldn’t.”

  “It isn’t too late,” Mary said slowly. “I haven’t been in touch with him. I just know his name and where he lives. What would your advice be?”

  Frederica laughed. “Are you passing the buck? Laying the responsibility on me?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps. I’m in the habit of doing that. Or I used to be. Advise me.”

  “Tear the letter up, give me the pieces, and on my way home I’ll drop them in a litter bin.”

  “So that I couldn’t get them out and piece them together again? It wouldn’t be any use, I’m afraid. I know his name now. I have the address by heart. Wouldn’t I always regret it if I didn’t write to him? But perhaps he won’t answer.”

  Frederica laughed. “He’ll answer.”

  • • •

  On the front doorstep in Albany Street, Edwina Goldsworthy gave Bean formal notice that she would be going away on holiday in ten days’ time and McBride would be taking up residence in kennels. Bean disapproved of kennels and his manner became chilly. But he had to go inside for the necessary paperwork, having first tied his dogs up to a lamppost, and this delayed him.

  “Don’t be surprised if he loses weight in there, madam,” he said, and he cast a critical eye over Mrs. Goldsworthy’s bulky form before adding, “Pining does more than diets, as I always say.”

  She was dependent on him, she couldn’t say much, none of them could. They were in his power. Without him they would have to leave their beds an hour earlier, sacrifice their cocktail hour, get up off their arses and muddy their shoes. Bean smiled to himself. Power was not something he had personally experienced in his years as the late Anthony Maddox’s and then the late Maurice Clitheroe’s servant, but now he was making up for lost time. Absolute reliability, “sirs” and “madams” sprinkled among his remarks, a genuine love of dogs, punctilious punctuality, all this made him indispensable. He disliked being even five minutes late, for this detracted from his power, and he quickened his pace as he and the dogs made for Cumberland Terrace, home of Marietta, the chocolate poodle.

  The actress Lisl Pring hadn’t noticed the time. She kissed Marietta and had her makeup licked off. Bean had never seen anyone as thin as this woman, except in famine photos. They said telly made a person look fatter, which was no doubt the reason. He wondered how she did it, lived on salad, no doubt, or maybe she was like that model he’d read about who had nothing in her fridge but a lemon.

  He reminded her of his seven-days-notice-of-holidays rule and she shrieked something about never having a moment to go anywhere, darling. If it wasn’t shooting it was rehearsals from five A.M. till midnight, believe it or not. Bean nodded. He didn’t really believe it. She must be rich. Up here in the hinterland of the terrace was like being in some Georgian spa, Leamington or Cheltenham, all mellow stone and ivy, blossom coming out and ferns uncurling, a smell like the country, green and sharp. Bean thought he wouldn’t half mind living here himself, only he’d never afford it the way things were. He must put his power to wider use.

  The bag lady with
the green plastic bundles was meandering slowly up the Outer Circle as he came out of Cumberland Terrace. Her name, he knew, was Effie but in his mind Bean called her a horrible cow. Boris and Charlie and the rest of them always wanted to sniff her. This propensity of theirs, sometimes seeming to prefer people who smelled nasty to people who smelled nice, was his only objection to dogs. He tugged the leashes away with an artificial shudder. The bag lady told him to fuck off and gave him instructions about the kind of sexual activity he and his dogs might mutually engage in. Bean thought it a pity that the cleaning up of London, begun some three years before, had not included purging the streets of dossers, beggars, and foul-mouthed slags.

  Before returning him to Mr. and Mrs. Barker-Pryce in St. Andrew’s Place, Bean took a photograph of Charlie the golden retriever. He was a handsome dog and made quite a picture standing there, head raised, tail up, in the sunshine. Charlie’s owner answered the door himself, cigar in hand. Mr. Barker-Pryce was a Member of Parliament for some London constituency and it was a wonder how he managed in the House of Commons chamber, having to go without his cigars for maybe a whole two hours. Bean and the borzoi proceeded on alone to Park Square. Here Bean used his key to let himself into the gardens in the center of the square.

  These gardens, nothing to look at from the street, a wire fence, a scrubby (but impenetrable) hedge, the tops of trees, are a park themselves when you get inside. They might be the grounds of some great country house with their green lawns, curved flowerbeds, tall trees and flowering shrubs, lovely in their peace and tranquillity. Bean never noticed the beauty but he liked the exclusivity. He liked anything that put him among an elite, permitted privileges and pleasures few might enjoy. Here was an opportunity for another shot, a red blaze of flowering shrub that might serve for someone’s Christmas card. The path to the Nursemaids’ Tunnel descends in a shallow sloping curve between brick walls to the portico, which is the tunnel entrance. It gave Bean a bit of a shock to find himself not alone in the tunnel. There was someone in there, far up ahead. He would have thought nothing of this if the figure had been on the move, striding toward him or away from him, but whoever it was was leaning against the wall on the left-hand side at the Park Crescent end, holding a bottle to his lips. A street sleeper. Another of Effie’s ilk. Like most people, Bean was afraid of the street people, and particularly afraid when with one in a confined space. He was a small man, far from young, and borzois, though large dogs, bred to hunt the wolf, are fine-boned and seldom aggressive.

  Bean could have turned back. He could have gone back and crossed the Marylebone Road at the lights by Regent’s Park tube station. But he didn’t want the man with the bottle to see this happen, to see him turn tail and of course understand perfectly why he had retreated. For he, Bean, was a man of power and if he turned he would have yielded power into the hands of this dirty reject, this piece of flotsam fit for nothing but a city’s sewers. He imagined broken drunken laughter echoing down the passage, reverberating off the damp walls.

  He hadn’t much money on him but he didn’t want to lose his camera. It was a Pentax and, like so much in Bean’s possession, had once belonged to Maurice Clitheroe. If he’d only thought of it five minutes before he could have slipped the camera inside his jacket.

  How had the man got in here? They were careful with their keys, the Crown Estates. In order to obtain one you had to be a resident of the Square or the Crescent, or the adjacent terraces and mewses. He touched the camera like someone fingering an amulet, and quickly drew his hand away. He walked on, somewhat more slowly than he would have done if the man with the bottle hadn’t been there, but not so slowly as to show his fear. The borzoi took its normal delicate steps, loping on tiptoe, but very steady in its progress.

  The light at the end showed Bean a gaunt thin figure with long black hair and a beard stained blue. A momentary flashback took him sixty years into the past and a village school in Hampshire, the teacher telling them how in the distant past the inhabitants of these islands had painted their bodies with woad. Maybe the blue stuff on this roughneck’s beard was woad. Bean determined not to look as he passed him, to walk past at a steady pace as if the man wasn’t there or as if for some reason he hadn’t noticed that he was there. He pulled the leash tight so that Boris was close up to him on his right side. This was the kind of thug that wouldn’t think twice about kicking a dog.

  The man turned his head to stare when Bean was about two yards from him. And Bean had to look, he had to return that stare for a single second before jerking his eyes away. In that second he received an impression of metal, of glitter, as of the man being covered in slivers of metal. It reminded him, unpleasantly but irresistibly, of Maurice Clitheroe’s indulgence in S and M—Bean had no idea what those initials stood for, but he knew what it was all right—and of some of those who came to the flat in Mr. Clitheroe’s time. Leather, zip fasteners, body piercing, there had been a lot of that, and a great deal of metal in many shapes and forms, most of it sharp.

  Thinking of all this got Bean past the man, and the dog past the man, up the steps and out into the light. His mind had been distracted at exactly the right time. Safe, unmolested, his camera safe, he indulged himself in a spot of what the late Anthony Maddox called l’esprit de l’escalier and thought what he might, ought to, have said. Like, “What authority do you have to use this tunnel?” or “By whose permission are you in this private foot passage?”

  James Barker-Pryce CMG, MP would have done that, so would Bertram Cornell. They had the right accent, they had been to the kind of school where they taught you to think of yourself as a king of the earth. Money did that for you too. As Bean walked out of the gardens and crossed the road to the Park Crescent pavement, he realized what those metal things were. They were keys. The man had keys hanging off him everywhere and no doubt one of them was the key to this garden. Something would have to be done.

  Boris’s home was not the house where the blue plaque testified to Marie Tempest’s having once lived there, but a few doors along. The Cornells’ housekeeper did what she always did and opened the basement door in the area. What was wrong with the front door? If she didn’t know it, his days of being treated like a servant were over. Her attitude, meant he had to go round the corner into Portland Place and all the way down the iron staircase.

  The borzoi trotted in, ignoring the housekeeper, leaving Bean without the least sign of affection, without a backward glance. It pushed a door open with its long nose and disappeared into the room beyond, a cold dog with no feelings.

  “It’s Russian, you see,” said the housekeeper as if that explained everything.

  Bean nodded. “Mr. and Mrs. Cornell away, Valerie?”

  The housekeeper said her employers were in France, coming back tomorrow. Even they called her Miss Conway. Apart from her friends, only Bean took upon himself the right to call her by her given name. She was getting up her nerve to tell him not to, but she hadn’t got it up yet. Her revenge was to make him walk down those steps and necessarily, of course, up them again. She told him there had been another burglary in the Crescent, two in fact, one of them only next door.

  “That must make you nervous being here on your own,” said Bean.

  It did. But she disliked being reminded of it. “I’ve got the dog.”

  Bean laughed lightly, shaking his head. “More of a pussy cat, that one,” he said. “There are some rough characters about. I just saw something barely human in the tunnel, more like an alien. You don’t want to open your front door to no one.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” said Valerie.

  She slammed the door. Bean winced a little to show his sensitivity for the benefit of any passersby who might be watching. He favored the statue with a passing glance, Queen Victoria’s father, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, standing on a plinth at the end of the gardens and looking down Portland Place. Someone had once told Bean he was the spitting image of the duke, and after that he had never passed the bronze figure without giving it a loo
k.

  He lived a little way away in York Terrace East. Normally, he would have gone back by way of the tunnel but he didn’t want to encounter the key man again. Better brave the Marylebone Road, wait a good two minutes for those lights to change, then belt across before they changed back again. It was easier without dogs pulling him like in some chariot race.

  He let himself into his flat. Neat as a pin, spotlessly clean, it was furnished exactly as it had been in the days of Maurice Clitheroe, its former owner, with heavy, highly polished late-nineteenth-century pieces, red and blue Turkey rugs, and in the living room a newish three-piece suite covered in tan-colored hide. This and the huge television and VCR reflected Bean’s own taste. His kitchen was carefully geared for the freezer–microwave culture. There was no oven and there were no pans. The lot had gone on the day of Mr. Clitheroe’s memorial service, along with the piano, the whip and gun collection, and the pictures of two saints undergoing particularly revolting forms of martyrdom.

  Maurice Clitheroe had left Bean his duplex in recognition of services rendered. These had sometimes been onerous, particularly in the area of punishment, though here he had always been the executant, never the recipient. He had known where to draw the line, as for example in refusing to gratify Mr. Clitheroe’s demand that both of them should wear spiked dog collars while at home alone. And in spite of this setting of limits, the flat had still been left to him according to a promise frequently made but never entirely taken seriously.

  In relation to the flat he loved—he called it a maisonette—and in which he now settled down contentedly to microwave a Linda McCartney vegetarian platter, Bean had only one regret. He had no opportunity to impress his clients with his address, no chance of presenting them with invoices on paper headed York Terrace, NW1. For since the owners of his dogs were unable to claim income tax relief on what they paid him, every penny he received was black money, money in the back pocket, handed over in cash. His earnings from Mr. Clitheroe had never reached the tax floor, for all was found for him, his board, his lodging, even his clothes. The Inland Revenue probably thought he was dead or, more likely, had never been born.