by Ruth Rendell
The result had been for them to expect him and his brother to fulfill hopes that in their cases had been dashed. They must be great sportsmen or great scholars, preferably both. His brother, Carl, had gone to drama school, incurring their father’s anger and disgust. Acting wasn’t a man’s job. The only work Carl could get for a long time was modeling, more cause for outrage. Their father had died. That was when he discovered that all these years his mother had had a lover. Once her husband was dead, she had gone to Scotland to join him, leaving her sons with scarcely a good-bye. It had hurt Leo, for she had seemed never to take his illness seriously and had refused outright to be tested for tissue compatibility. Without Carl’s devotion, he hardly knew what would have become of him …
“And the rest is history. That was where you came in.”
“Yes. That was where I came in.”
“I’m afraid my mother never forgave me for failing to run a three-minute mile and get a double first. Leukemia’s not hereditary, you see. That’s known for sure now.”
She looked at him. “I’m not sure that I understand.”
“If it were, she might be able to blame herself and my father. I mean, it wouldn’t be their fault if one of them carried a faulty gene, of course it wouldn’t, but people blame themselves for handing on to their children a poor genetic inheritance. Conversely, as I’ve discovered, they like not having to blame themselves, not having the grounds for it.” He spoke not bitterly, but with amused resignation. “There’s always the suggestion there, it’s not explicit but it’s there, that somehow I must have caught it or done something I shouldn’t have to bring it on. My mother actually said once that nothing like that had ever happened to Carl.” His rueful laughter took the sting away. “Still, grown-up people shouldn’t live at home with their parents, do you think?”
“It’s not something I know much about,” she said, “but, no, you’re right.”
She was appalled by what he had told her. The mother he had not much wanted her to meet, though not much discouraged her either, she now wanted to keep away from until the time came when she and Leo …
“As soon as your time is up at Charlotte Cottage,” he said, “I’m going to want you to come and live with me. I’m giving you advance notice. Will you, in this tiny place?”
“But, Leo, we won’t have to. I’m rich—had you forgotten?”
His face, so ardent and eager, changed. “I’m afraid I had,” he said. “I wish I could.”
In the post the next morning came two letters. One, she could see by the handwriting on the envelope, was from Alistair. She opened the other first. It was from Mr. Edwards, asking her if she was in need of “funds,” as there would be no difficulty in advancing to her from her grandmother’s estate any reasonable sum. Bean arrived while she was reading the letter. He looked tired and old. She could see he had been ill. For the first time—perhaps she had previously not taken much notice—it was apparent to her that he was an old man, vigorous, well-preserved, but old.
He launched into an involved apology. It was all due to circumstances beyond his control, it wouldn’t happen again. Mary hardly understood how you could guarantee you wouldn’t get a throat infection a second time, but Bean didn’t mention his throat. He said, to her astonishment, that he hoped Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris would “never have to know.”
“What, that you were ill?”
“That I missed taking the little chap out, miss. I’d feel easier in my mind if they didn’t know.”
Pathetic, the sadness of age. “I shan’t tell them,” Mary said warmly. “I shall have forgotten it by the time they get back.”
She told Leo and they laughed about it. He had stayed the night but waited until Bean was gone before coming downstairs. Formerly, she would have waited until she was alone before opening Alistair’s letter, but no longer, not now that she and Leo were so close. She said, “Here,” and held it up. He put his arm round her and read it over her shoulder.
Alistair wanted to know why she had run away from him earlier that week. What was she afraid of? He wondered if she should be undergoing therapy, she was so strange, so unbalanced. Did she realize that in a hysterical outburst she had actually said she didn’t want to see him again? He was treating that with the indulgence he was sure she now wanted. In other words, he would forget it.
Could he arrange a therapist for her? He would be happy to do that. Meanwhile, they should meet and talk about money. Where did she want to live and what would she think a reasonable sum to spend on a flat or house, given their changed circumstances?
“I’d like to throw it away and not answer it.”
“But you won’t do that,” he said. “You’re too much like me. Too polite and reasonable. You’ll answer it and be firm but nice and repeat what you said about not seeing him again.” His voice took on a stronger note. “You won’t see him again, will you, Mary?”
“I won’t if I can help it.”
He held her. “Please, Mary. For me.”
• • •
The police had given him the phone book to look up solicitors. He knew the names of the man who had acted for Anthony Maddox and the man who had acted for Maurice Clitheroe, but the last thing he wanted was Marnock’s attention drawn to his late employers. He found a firm to phone in Melcombe Street and after a little while a young woman turned up. Bean began to feel a whole lot better when she started telling them they couldn’t hold his client for more than twenty-four hours without arresting him. Did they intend to arrest him? She told them firmly that they had no evidence against him.
But even Bean could see that they had. By the time the solicitor came he had already told them everything they wanted to know, all about the mugging, about Mussolini and his offer, the money and his failed attempt to meet Mussolini again. He had admitted he wanted some injury done to Clancy and, when pressed, that he hadn’t been particular as to whether this injury was serious or, indeed, fatal. He hadn’t meant to say any of those things, but they fetched it all out of him, and once begun there seemed no point in holding anything back.
What saved him, he thought afterward, was that he still had the money. He actually had it on him. Of course they could hardly know that it was the same money, but possession of it helped his cause. He was with them for a total of fourteen hours and could, in fact, have taken the dogs out the next day, was prepared to do his afternoon’s duty, only they came back for him. They had found Mussolini.
Another day passed, a day of questions, mockery, teasing, taunting and, from Marnock, outbursts of serious anger. Mussolini had told them all sorts of things about Bean, they said, which Bean was sure was untrue, for Mussolini, real name Harvey Bennett, couldn’t possibly have known them, could only have invented them. For instance, he had never said, never in his wildest dreams would have said, that he wanted Clancy killed. He had never boasted to Bennett that he had killed a man once but was now a bit past it at his age. When he was told this, the deathbed of Anthony Maddox flashed awfully across his mind, but he had never talked of it, had spoken no word of it to anyone, it was all in Bennett’s imagination.
He had never, as they insinuated, offered Bennett fifty pounds to kill Clancy with another fifty to come when the deed was done. Nor had he sought Bennett out, inquiring indiscreetly in the Globe for someone to do a job for him. His solicitor came back and got nasty with Marnock, reminding him of something called Judges’ Rules.
After he’d spent hours there in a cell they let him go. He never knew why. He wasn’t going to ask, the relief of being free was enough for him, but he felt very shaken. Still, he had his fifty pounds and he knew what he was going to do with that. Buy a new camera.
The shop where the first one had come from, purchased by Maurice Clitheroe some ten years before, was in Spring Street, Paddington. It was still there. He found it in the new phone book, gave them a ring, asked what they’d got and their prices. The shop stayed open till all hours, being bang in the middle of tourist country, so he
went over there on the tube after he’d walked his dogs, it was only two stops.
The camera, being secondhand, came to less than he’d thought. The shop manager threw in a film and Bean, doubly departing from custom, bought himself a bottle of whiskey and the evening paper. Even if it was only a piece about the release of a man who’d been “helping police with their inquiries,” he wanted to read about himself. Paddington was a lot shabbier, dirtier, and more litter-strewn than the Marylebone Road and it gratified him that he didn’t live there.
He was coming out of the wineshop when he saw the girl again, the one who used to come to the house in Maurice Clitheroe’s time that he’d made a face at in Baker Street. She was standing in the doorway of a dingy-looking video shop. He nearly missed seeing what happened and would have missed it if for some reason he hadn’t turned round from taking a photo of a Highland collie, a really smashing-looking dog, that an old woman had out with her on a lead.
A red Mercedes had pulled into the curb and the girl was bending down to talk to the driver. Her clothes were a whole lot more upmarket than the previous time he’d seen her: red sequined top, tight white mini, white stilettos. Whore’s gear but not cheap. Then Bean saw the driver. It was James Barker-Pryce MP and his red whiskery face, for once without the clamped-in cigar, was framed in the window. Bean took a photograph. He took two shots. The car door was pushed open from the inside and the girl got in.
Bean went home and read the paper. There was nothing in it about him, only a long piece by a psychiatrist the paper called famous, though Bean had never heard of him, about crazy street people and Clancy in particular. The psychiatrist said theories had been put forward as to why the dead man collected keys, some suggesting this was for the purposes of robbery, others that they constituted an armor against possible attack. The truth was that in Clancy’s disturbed mind these were the keys to dream homes. Having no home, he had collected keys to the homes of others, keys being the symbol of home-ownership, of possession and of the privacy he could no longer enjoy.
Bean had never read such rubbish. While looking through his collection of dog photographs and selecting negatives for enlargement, he drank rather too much of his whiskey and woke with a hangover. Putting on his baseball cap and a T-shirt patterned all over with pictures of endangered species, he was on tenterhooks lest the police come back for him. After all, they had been two days running, why not today? But no one came and he got to Erna Morosini’s five minutes ahead of time.
She was rather short with him, not asking if he was better but moaning about how exhausted she was, having to walk Ruby herself. It was easy to see the beagle hadn’t been using up enough energy. Like a team of sprightly carriage horses, she pulled Bean up to Park Crescent, puffing and lunging. He exchanged a glance with the Duke of Kent, who didn’t look the kind of man to be intimidated by policemen, before Ruby pulled him on. Valerie Conway appeared at the area door with Boris.
“A Mr. Barker-Something phoned me yesterday to ask what I thought you were playing at. He said he hadn’t had a word out of you and not to put yourself out to come when you did get back. He’s making other arrangements.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He says there’s school-leavers round here panting to do the job for a fraction of what you charge. There was one girl said she’d take Charlie out for free, he’s so lovely.”
Boris padded up the steps, his claws making a patter like the sound of hailstones on the metal treads. Waiting at the top, tied to the railings, Ruby fell amorously upon him, not much deterred by Boris’s low growl and lips peeled back to show yellow teeth. Pity there was no market for dog pornography, Bean thought. He took them into the gardens and through the tunnel under the Marylebone Road. Now Pharaoh was dead, he could do that, and never again feel that trepidation, that tightening of the muscles and tensing of nerves.
In the park Marietta was uneasy, missing Charlie, not inclined to run by herself, but wandering aimlessly and stopping for a scratch. Bean got a shot of her standing on the rings of cobblestones round the Parsi’s fountain, looking soulful. It would be a good picture and it somewhat calmed him. He had been boiling with anger and the injustice of it ever since Valerie Conway told him of Barker-Pryce’s decision. The nerve, after what he’d seen in Paddington!
Two can play at that game, thought Bean.
18
The police coming took Hob by surprise. Not their coming, he expected that, but their reason. He must be getting soft in his old age. He’d had a birthday the day before, his thirty-second, or he thought it was his thirty-second, but he couldn’t be sure, it might have been his thirty-third. He’d asked his mum and she didn’t know either. All she’d said was that he was a few years younger than her but not all that many because she’d been just a kid when he was born.
But he was old enough to be losing his grip because he thought the police came on account of the riot. He thought they’d come to apologize for all his windows getting knocked out in the mini-riot of the night before. That came of living on the first floor, he’d have been safe higher up. He still didn’t know the cause but there’d been these boys, kids of thirteen or fourteen, running up and down the walkways armed with car jacks and milk bottles, and then it had turned nasty, one of their dads coming out with a crossbow and someone else with what looked like a shotgun.
Hob watched from his window. He’d got some E’s, the yellow tabs, from Lew but he knew he’d get so excited if he took one now he’d be down there with the rioters. They were shouting out something about a boy they said the police had beaten up in his cell, some mate of theirs accused of dropping a concrete block off the top floor onto an old man’s head. Hob didn’t want to get involved.
The first of his windows went while he was out in the kitchen getting himself a vodka as a starter before his main meal of the blow he’d got for the weekend. It was bricks they were throwing now. Hob picked the brick up off the floor and thought about throwing it back but didn’t. It must have come off that pile the council builders left behind when they built a wall round that raised flowerbed at the entrance to the car park. Pointless really because all the flowers had been torn out overnight and someone had started dismantling the wall. He took a swig of his vodka and wandered toward the settee.
Before he’d even sat down he heard a brick or bottle go through the bedroom window. Someone must have dialed 999, for two police cars screamed in while he was pushing broken glass about with his toe and kicking it into the corner. The police had riot shields. Hob could hardly believe it. Riot shields for a crossbow and a few bricks! He wasn’t in a state but the vodka made him a bit rocky. He smiled at his pun, his joke, and went to his jacket pocket for the red velvet bag.
There was a terrible noise going on out there now. All his windows at the front had gone—good thing the weather was getting so warm. He didn’t care much. He set to work on his ritual, cutting the straw in half, crumbling up the jumbo, screwing on the Imperial Russian Court cap, drawing in at last the life-giving smoke.
It might have been an hour after that that the police came or a lot longer. He couldn’t tell. He’d danced about the room a bit, done some Power Ranger exercises, air punching and karate kicks, and then he’d built a pyramid out of the three bricks that had come through the windows and the broken glass and cut himself in the process but not so’s you’d notice. He must have gone to sleep at one point, for the scratching woke him up. Mice. He lay there listening to the mice and thinking it was a nice sound, nice and peaceful, not like rats, he’d never heard of any disease you could catch from mice, when there came a sound that wasn’t nice at all, a great pounding on the front door.
He looked out of the broken window and saw their car down there. Unmarked, of course, but still recognizable to him as a police car. They knocked again and he let them in, all smiles, certain this was a routine visit, nothing to worry about, sir, all cleared up now, sorry you’ve been inconvenienced.
They didn’t say any of th
at, but pushed past him into the flat, looking about them with their noses pinched as if it were a sewer they’d come into. They asked him if he was Harvey Owen Bennett and where had he been on June the something, the night Cahill was killed?
“Here,” said Hob. “On me tod. Where else?”
They pressed him for more than that and he tried to think. A Thursday it was. It was years since he’d had much of a memory. Maybe that was the day he’d talked to his mum on Leo’s phone and asked how old he was and she’d said that about him being younger than her and she’d have to go on account of her and his stepfather going down the boozer for this party they were having for her silver wedding. What silver wedding, he’d said, on account of her only being married for about five minutes, and she’d said, so what, it would have been her silver wedding if she’d not got divorced and the whole family was coming including his dad.
“No, I tell a lie,” he said. “I was at my mum and dad’s silver wedding.”
He hadn’t a scrap of faith in it as an alibi, but he had to say something. They weren’t going to leave him alone to get to a phone, they took him with them. On the way out he saw that the flowerbed was entirely gone, not a brick left, not a handful of earth. Maybe they’d learn now.
It was like a miracle what happened. People who knocked families ought to think before they spoke. His family was one in a million, solid as a rock, supportive was the word he was looking for. He didn’t have to ask them, he didn’t have to say a word—well, he couldn’t, he was in that police car with the driver glaring at him—they came out with it all without hesitation, his stepfather told him on the phone afterward. Of course Hob had been at the party, there from nine till they packed in when the extension ended at one-thirty and he slept the night at their place. Two of his half-brothers and his stepsister’s ex and the ex’s girlfriend, they all backed him up, and his stepsister’s ex who had an imagination said he’d done a beautiful rendering of “I’ll Be Your Sweetheart” while they were cutting the cake.
