The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  The tall dosser with the beard and the Oxbridge accent passed him as he walked up Albany Street. This, at least, was one that didn’t smell. Caught short one morning, Bean had tied his dogs up to the railings and popped into the public convenience just off the Broad Walk. The tall one had been in there, strip-washing himself and drying his hair under one of the hand dryers. Bean hadn’t spoken to him and he didn’t now. He looked the other way. These people were a health hazard. Who knew why he’d been washing?

  The young lady that was house-sitting Charlotte Cottage looked a bit peaky this afternoon. She was wearing black, which meant little on its own, but she had someone in there Bean recognized as one of the undertakers from a firm in the Marylebone Road. His curiosity, always active, quickened.

  As he took Gushi from her, he said in his most respectful tone, “No bad news of Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris, I hope, miss?”

  She wasn’t the sort to pin your ears back and he despised her for her gentleness.

  “Oh, no, no,” she said in a sad abstracted way. “I’m sure they’re fine. I had a card from Costa Rica.”

  Bean decided not to pursue it. He wasn’t interested in her personal tragedies. He hustled the dogs up to the Gloucester Gate and let them off on the broad expanses beyond the Parsi’s fountain. The park was as crowded as he had expected, young people lying about on the grass in various stages of undress, though the weather was far from hot and the sun kept going in. Charlie was the most friendly and uninhibited of the dogs and it brought Bean a good deal of amusement to see him bound up to some of those cuddling couples and poke his nose into their crotches and bottoms. They shrieked and cursed him. Gushi and Marietta found a picnic party and Marietta ran off into the bushes with half a Swiss roll. Usually, Bean preferred the park to be deserted, but this was the next best thing, a real crowd, most of whom seemed irritated and incommoded by the activities of dogs.

  Even the sight of the woman walker with her orderly troop strolling the long path that bisects the park couldn’t entirely dispel his mood of cheerfulness. It was payday. He would collect from everyone on the way back, as he always did on Saturdays.

  The undertaker had left by the time he took Gushi back. The young lady’s eyes were red. Either she’d been crying or it was conjunctivitis. He reminded her he needed paying, and she actually apologized to him when she handed over the notes. With one hand Mrs. Goldsworthy pulled McBride into the house and with the other thrust his money at him. It sounded as if she had a drinks party on the go, which Bean thought decadent at five-fifteen on a summer afternoon. He’d have bared his teeth at Lisl Pring if he hadn’t relied on her custom, her goodwill, and the money she owed him. She came to the door in shorts and a halter top, skinny midriff bare as the day she was born, and a fellow behind her also in shorts with his arms round her waist.

  Mr. Barker-Pryce stank of cigars so badly that even the dog flinched. He counted out Bean’s money very slowly and then, like a bank cashier, did it all over again. Bean had to tug at the notes to extract them from the nicotine-stained fingers.

  He said, “Thank you very much, sir,” and the door was shut smartly in his face.

  Digging out the key from under the new wads of money, he let himself into the gardens of Park Square. A squirrel ran across the path no more than three feet from him and Ruby the beagle gave a great tug on the leash in pursuit of it. She nearly pulled Bean over. The borzoi growled at her and curled back his lips in much the same way as Bean did when displeased by the sight of someone or something.

  In spite of the number of keys to the gardens that must be in circulation, the lawns and walks were deserted and the seats were empty. The wind had dropped, or had dropped in here in the sunlit space between tall trees. Flowers, unidentifiable by Bean, scented the air and almost masked the stench of fumes from the Marylebone Road. A blackbird sang.

  The grass was not worn away by many feet and there was no litter to disfigure the walks or overflow from bins.

  A pity dogs were not allowed to run free in here. If they were he’d never go into the park again. He made his way down the steep walled path to the tunnel, Boris and Ruby padding side by side ahead of him.

  He never came down this path without a frisson of tension. His muscles always flexed and he had to keep his hands from tightening into clenched fists. But there was no sign of the key man; the tunnel was empty as it almost always was. And it was never dark at this hour, even in the middle, but invariably quite adequately lit with natural light from both ends. A momentary nasty idea came then, that the key man might be waiting at the other end, outside, just round the corner, and would step out, glittering and clinking, to fill the tunnel mouth as he reached it.

  But he gave no thought to what might be behind him and was almost at the other end, having heard no footfalls, no indrawn breath, when something struck him on the crown of his head. It was like hitting his head on the beams of a low ceiling or the lintel of a door. But rather worse, for he staggered and fell over, first to his knees, then sprawled on his back. There was a moment of darkness with dazzlement, a seeing of stars, tailed comets and satellites whizzing across a black sky, and in it he must have relinquished his hold on the leash.

  Bean thought he felt a hand fumbling in the pocket of his bomber jacket. He groaned and made feeble movements. Then he did hear footsteps, running away, back into Park Square. He sat up. His baseball cap had fallen off, but it had been on his head when he was struck, and Bean had no doubt it had saved him from worse damage. Gingerly, he felt his scalp and looked at his fingers. There was no blood. He hated the idea of falling and wondered if he could have broken something. Osteoporosis was not confined to elderly ladies, he had read in a health magazine.

  His camera! It was gone. For a moment he thought that perhaps for once he had left it at home, but he knew its strap had been round his neck when he took the money from Barker-Pryce. As for his keys … They had been in his jeans pocket, the key to York Terrace, the keys to Charlotte Cottage and Lisl Pring’s and the one to these gardens. He ran his hand down the side of his leg, feeling for the ridges of metal, then thrust his hand inside. The keys were all there, but the pocket of his bomber jacket was empty. The wad of notes from four of his clients was gone and with it the best part of two weeks’ retirement pension. Bean’s stomach turned over. It was just as if his stomach had dropped onto the floor and done a somersault, turned itself over its heels.

  At any rate he could get up. His legs were all in one piece. And he could see. The blow hadn’t detached his retinas, which was another thing his extensive medical reading had told him could happen. The two dogs were gone. Bean told himself they couldn’t get out of the gardens and dismissed wild imaginings of the two of them under the wheels of container lorries in the Marylebone Road. In vain he called them, his voice weak and reedy.

  Of course he had to go looking for them himself. Boris he found rolling on the rotting corpse of a pigeon and Ruby, still attached to Boris by the leash, was running round in angry circles. Wearily he picked up the leash, his head throbbing.

  One thing was for sure, he refused to go down the steps. When the Cornells’ housekeeper appeared in the area he shouted at her that if she didn’t open the front door he would leave Boris tied to the railings.

  “What’s got into you?” she said.

  “I’ve been mugged, that’s what’s got into me. Open the front door, Valerie. I’m not feeling at all well. I’ve probably got concussion.” After rather a long while the front door was opened. Bean saw white carpet, gilded furniture, and red lilies in a Venetian glass bowl. He unclipped the leash and Boris entered the house, as if he always went that way, padding silently, to push a door open with his long nose.

  “I don’t have to remind you my remuneration is due, do I, Valerie?”

  It was appalling to think of the sum that had been taken from him. He would have to plunder his savings. And the camera. Why had he never thought to insure the camera? He put up one hand to massage the lump
that was swelling up on his scalp. The housekeeper came back with his money in an envelope. She seemed to be keying herself up to say something unpleasant.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” said Bean.

  “And when you do, I’ll thank you to call me Miss Conway!”

  She had gone red in the face with the effort of it. Bean shrugged, pocketed the envelope, and walked home to York Terrace. If you lost consciousness, however briefly, it was concussion and you were supposed to go to the doctor. But had he lost consciousness? On the whole he thought not. As soon as he was inside he phoned the police and told them he had been assaulted and all his money stolen. An officer would call, they said. Meanwhile he should see a doctor.

  “I know who my assailant is,” said Bean.

  “You saw him?”

  “I didn’t exactly see him but I know him. He’s a vagrant, a down-and-out, goes about all covered with keys.”

  “Your own keys are missing?”

  Bean admitted they were not, but he was tired of this officer sounding so bored and indifferent, and said he would come down to the police station himself.

  12

  Mary had thought people would take the loss of a grandmother less seriously than, say, the death of a parent, but it had not turned out like that. Dorothea’s husband had a week’s holiday due to him and he took over her job. The Trattons in Crete saw to the arrangements for returning Frederica Jago’s body. The undertakers were helpful if grimly lugubrious. Alistair arrived and shepherded her to the registering of the death, the ordering of flowers, the passing on of the news to solicitors.

  “It’s just the same as if you’d lost your mother,” he said, his attitude quite changed from what it had been that evening the news came. “It’s the same kind of grief. We do wrong when we judge the bereaved person’s feelings by some level of kinship.”

  This man was the same one that only a week before had told her she should be thankful not to have had to nurse her grandmother through a lingering end. Alistair had not mentioned money or the disposal of the house in Belsize Park. He had not mentioned sex either, or staying overnight. And nothing had been said about the transplant or the Harvest Trust.

  There had been nothing from Leo. She had met him only three times but she missed him. “Desperately” was the word that came to mind. She told herself not to be so extreme, hysterical almost. How could she feel an intense longing for the company of someone she hardly knew? She had begun to dream about him, once in an erotic and romantic scenario that shocked her awake.

  Flesh of my flesh, she remembered, bone of my bone. Those words of his had been the high point of an emotional moment when she had felt briefly that years of intimacy lay behind them. Was it unnatural or presumptuous to have believed then that years of closeness lay ahead of them?

  He had disappeared into nothingness. The day after the dream in which he held her, kissed and caressed her, she had the strange feeling that if she never saw him again, if he had gone from her life as swiftly as he had entered it, those few hours they had spent together would remain with her always.

  Sorrow at her grandmother’s death competed with the emotions Leo had aroused, but it failed to drive him from her mind. If he had come to her she could have talked to him about Frederica Jago. He would have listened, would have wanted to hear. Alistair cut short her reminiscences. Memories and recollections weren’t to his taste.

  “I did know your grandmother, darling. I knew her a lot better than I know my own relations.”

  And Dorothea said dwelling on the past was upsetting. Once the funeral was over she should put all that behind her.

  “I don’t agree with all this talking things through. It just makes it worse. Look at all those people who talked things through and discovered they’d been abused as kids. Wouldn’t they have been better off not knowing?”

  “It isn’t that kind of talking I mean. I don’t want a therapist.”

  “You want to live in the present,” said Dorothea.

  Leo, Mary somehow guessed, would have listened and asked all the right questions, would have been patient with her, spent hours if necessary hearing about the grandmother who had been a mother and friend and a great consolation for the trials of life and whom no one could replace. But she was half-afraid now that she would never see Leo again.

  She went back to work before the funeral. It was better to be at the Irene Adler than in Charlotte Cottage alone. An evening talking to Celia Tratton, who had come back from Crete the day before, made her feel calmer, more able to accept. The number of tourists visiting the museum had fallen off since the murder had ceased to be a talking point and no longer had its place in newspapers, and Mary used a half hour when no one came to try to phone Leo.

  It had taken a good deal of self-persuasion to get her to this point. She had reminded herself of all the things he had said to her, the kind and flattering things, how almost everything he had said at that first meeting and on the Friday had indicated that he wanted them to be friends. His last words, tinged with impatience, she tried to put from her mind. She did her best to banish the picture she had of his abrupt departure. Something had happened to prevent his getting in touch, perhaps something to do with his brother. Or it might be that he had tried to phone her but had given up because the line had been so frequently engaged since her grandmother’s death. Reminding herself of that, she had on the previous evening three times attempted to phone at his brother’s number, but there had been no reply.

  Had she ever told him precisely where she worked? He had told her only that he was employed by his brother and had a part-time job. Whether that was at home or in some office he hadn’t said. There was no mystery about it, of that she was sure, there simply had been no occasion to go into details about the job.

  By now she was beginning to ask herself what she would say if he did answer. Why haven’t I heard from you? Can we meet? I would like to see you again? All were impossible for someone like her. She wanted an explanation but knew she was incapable of asking a man she had only met three times why he had dropped her. He could hardly be put into the category of an inconstant lover. Perhaps she could just ask him how he was, make some bland, empty inquiry. She dialed the number and again there was no reply.

  It rained on the day of the funeral. Alistair took time off work and was there to hold an umbrella over her. The man she had met at Frederica’s dinner and who had asked her to the cinema with him came to the church with a woman who was clearly a girlfriend. The elderly friends were there, all but the Blackburn-Norrises. Mary made a mental note to phone their hotel in Acapulco and break the news gently to them. Frederica’s solicitor, who had also been at that dinner with his wife, sat in a front pew, and when it was all over, and the dismal gathering afterward in Belsize Park was all over, he stayed behind.

  Mary wondered why, vaguely thinking that perhaps she had done something wrong in inviting mourners to a place that was not hers, or not yet legally hers. But she had supposed it would be even more heinous to hold any sort of party in Charlotte Cottage. However, Mr. Edwards had remained behind for a very different reason and one that Alistair, refilling his sherry glass, seemed to know all about. Suddenly a staginess took over from the funereal atmosphere. Mr. Edwards whispered something to Alistair and Alistair said, “I am sure my fiancée is quite up to hearing it now.”

  The two of them retired with measured tread to Frederica’s dining room. Mary was so indignant at being called Alistair’s fiancée that she hardly noticed the door had closed and they were in there together. It opened after a few seconds; Alistair put his head out and he asked Mary in a low, very serious voice if she would come in and join them.

  Mr. Edwards had seated himself at the head of the table. Alistair sat at the foot. But when Mary came in he got up, held a chair out for her, and stood behind it. He went on standing behind it after she had sat down, like a husband in a Victorian wedding photograph, she thought.

  “Mr. Edwards is going to tell you the con
tents of your grandmother’s will, my dear.”

  “My dear” was another departure. The two of them were taking her over in a patronizing, paternalistic sort of way, and the idea came to her that if only Leo were there he would stop this happening. But she restrained herself, nodded to Mr. Edwards, and told him please to go ahead.

  With a small deprecatory cough, he told her what she knew already, that this house was now hers, and told her too what she had never dreamed of, that her grandmother had left her everything she possessed, just under two million pounds.

  • • •

  If Mary had for a moment thought that somehow—she couldn’t begin to guess how—Alistair had known, that he and the solicitor had been in cahoots, one look over her shoulder at his face dispelled that. It was like someone else’s face, someone she had never known, for it had crumpled and grown soft, his eyes very wide open, his mouth slack. He pulled out the chair next to hers and sat down on it. She half expected him to throw his arms across the table and lay his head on them, but he remained quite still, staring at a picture on the opposite wall.

  Mr. Edwards was talking about small bequests, little sums to little charities. She scarcely heard him. She was asking herself why it was she had never guessed her grandmother had had so much. He stopped talking quite suddenly and turned on her a bright, almost gleeful smile, as if he had not, some two hours before, attended the funeral of an old and valued friend and client.

  “Thank you,” Mary said.

  Alistair took hold of her hand and held it hard. She saw Mr. Edwards looking at them benevolently, as at a young couple on the threshold of their married life, made happy by a windfall of gargantuan proportions. They could hardly realize it yet, he must be thinking, the joyful shock had half stunned them, but in a few moments …

  Even the tone of his voice had changed as he began talking about probate, the law’s delays. Mary nodded. Alistair found the tongue that she thought must have been cleaving to his palate and said, “Yes, absolutely. My fiancée is in no immediate need. And afterward—well, I am in banking as no doubt you know, and I can take care of all that.”