by Ruth Rendell
His obsequious manner always embarrassed her. But now it was accompanied by the kind of leer only to be expected from a much younger man. He looked her up and down, as if making some kind of assessment or calculation. She went quickly into the house.
It was too hot to eat, or too hot for human beings. Gushi had recovered enough to wolf down a can of Cesar and she picked at bread and cheese and salad. When the time came to leave she would miss the little dog. Perhaps she and Leo could have a shih tzu of their own. She wrote a letter to Judith in Guildford, inviting her to the wedding, and another to Anne Symonds, who had been at college with her; and then with Gushi on the lead she went out to post her letters.
The pillar box on the corner was out of use, the two slots sealed up. The only other one she knew of was under the main arch of Cumberland Terrace. It was still very warm at nearly nine, the kind of evening that comes only after a day of exceptional heat. A few days before, in a sudden high wind, there had been a premature falling of leaves, plane leaves turning yellow and dropping onto the pavements. Or perhaps it was not premature but a normal happening that occurred always at this time of the year, an early warning of autumn. The leaves, dried and shriveled, crackled under her feet. She walked through the passage at the Cumberland Terrace.
A haze hung over the park, soft and mysterious. The trees had become purplish-gray shapes, utterly still. The air smelled of diesel and lavender, a curious combination. Few people were about. They would all be at café tables on pavements, in the gardens of pubs. She posted her letters, watched the locking of the park gates. The park police went in, it was said, and rounded up the dossers who tried to spend the night in the shelter of the restaurants and pavilions, but some always escaped their vigilance, sleeping among the bushes or under the lee of the zoo. That reminded her of the man she had seen asleep that afternoon, and carrying Gushi now—“You are just a baby,” she murmured into his fur—she made her way back into Albany Street at the Gloucester Bridge.
Mosquitos danced in swarms above the water of the pools. The air was crowded with wheeling insects, moths with dusty wings, gnats, blue flies. They seemed not to bother him. He sat among the rocks, resting on a rolled-up sleeping bag, reading his book. It came back to her that once, to herself, she had called him Nikolai, because she had seen him reading Gogol. When he saw her he got up, just as a man might when a woman comes into the room.
“Good evening,” she said.
He smiled. “Good evening.”
It was an opportunity. He had come a little way up the slope and was looking at her with what she interpreted as concern, though it couldn’t be. She could go down there and sit with him and talk. But what about and why? It was an absurd idea. Besides, Leo was coming, would be there in ten minutes. Even more absurd was what she said, in the light of what she had just said.
“Good night.”
He nodded, as if confirming something he had suspected. He had very blue eyes, intelligent and kind.
“Good night,” he said.
She remembered as she walked away that she had intended to give him money, but she had had none on her and now, anyway, it seemed an absurd idea, insensitive and wrong.
• • •
It was a man’s voice on the phone and somehow he had expected a woman. Well, he hadn’t really expected ever to hear another word about it. Not from that Lisl Pring, that butterfly brain. The funny thing was that he’d been watching her on television. Eastenders was a favorite program of his and he never missed an episode. Lisl Pring had been doing her stuff, looking quite different from in the flesh, if that was the term for someone as bony as she, looking fatter for one thing, quite well-covered and shapely, and the credit titles were coming up, when the phone rang. If the program hadn’t been more or less over he wouldn’t have answered it.
The voice said what its owner was called, or he supposed it did, and then something about a dog.
“Are you a friend of Miss Pring?” he had said because he hadn’t caught the name.
“I just said. It’s really urgent. I’d like to see you as soon as possible.”
Bean hadn’t cared for the tone. “I shall want to see you,” he had said, “and the dog. I’m not sure I’m prepared to take on a lively young spaniel. It is a spaniel, right, and a puppy?”
“Not a puppy. He’s two years old and he’s been to dog-training with me.”
“Well, I’ll see,” Bean said grudgingly. “She said Gloucester Avenue.” Or had she said Gloucester Terrace? “That’s seriously out of my way, you know.”
“As a matter of fact, it’s Gloucester Place, the top end.”
Maybe the top end wouldn’t be so bad. He was starting to say so, not sounding too enthusiastic, when the voice said, “But I’m moving. I’m moving to Upper Harley Street in a month’s time.”
Just exactly where he wanted another dog, halfway between Ruby and Spots.
“I could look in tomorrow,” Bean said. “About this time tomorrow?”
“Make it half an hour later.”
He’d enjoy himself all the more in Brighton if he knew he’d got six dogs to come back to. Six was a good round number, a number he should make a point of sticking with.
“Say nine o’clock then?”
“Nine will do very well.”
Bean switched off the television and went back to his packing. He always packed a little bit every night for a week before he went away and so made sure of not forgetting anything. But he left out the red baseball cap and the elephant T-shirt. He’d travel in those.
22
Another job for the old dog man. Putting it like that made Hob laugh. It didn’t take much to make him laugh these days. And this would be the biggest job ever. The money on offer made him feel dizzy just to contemplate it. He saw it as putting an end forever to all states, with such a huge sum states could be kept at bay indefinitely, he would always be as he had until now hardly ever been, the happy dancing joker, the Power Ranger, the laid-back man, the laughing man.
He’d come down very low, waited outside the women’s toilet at Chester Road and when he’d seen a woman go in and had made sure she was alone in there, gone after her, found her washing her hands. While she screamed he’d taken her handbag. Seventy pounds in cash. Everything else he’d left in the bag, and he’d left the bag on one of the seats so she’d be sure to find it. Coming home, the cash converted into crack, he’d unlocked his front door and stumbled into the hot darkness. Strips of light lay across the floorboards looking as if someone had drawn on them with orange chalk. At first he hadn’t seen the note. It was a folded piece of paper, lying on the floor just inside the front door. An envelope was with it. Hob wasn’t much good at reading. Somehow he’d never got the hang of it and he was worse when in a state, as now. The note and the envelope on the floor beside him, he crumbled up one of his rocks and dropped it through the mouth of the watering can rose, then came the cap, the straws, the tin lid, finally the lighter applied to the perforations. He breathed in, a long hauling breath, as if his lungs were engines for dragging and tugging. The smoke in his windpipe felt like the first time he’d tasted ice cream.
Happy as the day is long, he was at his reading best. The envelope had a letter in it from the council, something about putting new windows in at nine A.M. on the fifteenth and to be sure to be in to admit the operatives. Or that’s what he thought it said. The note was from Carl, harder to read because it was in handwriting. He was to go up that evening and Carl might have something for him.
It was a long time since Hob had seen either Carl or Leo. He thought Leo had left and he wouldn’t have been surprised if Carl had gone too, though where he couldn’t begin to guess. No doubt he came back from time to time. Leo was going to die, you didn’t have to be a doctor or have Carl’s brains to know that. Hob got up and did a little dance, punched the air, sang one of his mum’s nan’s funny old songs, and then he sang “I’ll Be Your Sweetheart” and “Night Train to Memphis” because he wasn’t going to die,
whatever might happen to Leo. The mice must sleep in the daytime. He pictured them asleep behind the skirting board, looking like Jerry in the Tom and Jerry cartoon, or Mickey Mouse on his cushions, but furry and soft too. Maybe there were hundreds of them, curled up and cuddling each other. All that boarding up made the place airless, but the kitchen smelled fresher than the rest of the flat. He took two Weetabix out of the packet and crumbled them up on the living room floor in front of the telly. The crumbling made him giggle because maybe the Weetabix was for the mice like crack was for him. Then he went upstairs.
It would have been too much to expect the lift to be working still. It wasn’t. The stairs were nothing to him when he was well and he pranced lightly up the seven flights, making a noise about it presumably, because Carl must have heard him. He was standing there, holding the door open, looking as miserable as sin and his face as pale as Leo’s.
“How’s Leo doing, then?” Hob said, which he never would have if he hadn’t been fit and raring to go.
Carl didn’t answer, just shrugged and looked away. “I’m going out,” he said. “This won’t take long. You can make two K out of it, which is the entire extent of my resources, all I’ve got till the week after next, rather.”
“Two K? You mean, two grand?”
“It’s no use haggling because, as I said, it’s all I’ve got.”
“I’m not haggling,” said Hob.
“And five hundred grams of E, so long as you’ll take the yellows.”
“That’s fine by me, Carl.”
• • •
Sweat was pouring off him. The medical book he’d been reading told him your sweat didn’t smell so much when you got older, but Bean wasn’t taking any chances. He’d had a horror of it all his life, but his repugnance had increased after those beating sessions and the house was filled with the meaty, oniony stench, the result of wildly expended energy.
He had a shower, his second of the day, sprayed himself with deodorant, and put on clean clothes, nicely pressed jeans, the elephant T-shirt, and his red baseball cap. The T-shirt he’d give a quick rinse to when he got back and it would be dry by the morning, ready for the train.
They closed the park at nine in August. That would just about allow him to walk to the top of Gloucester Place by way of the lake and the Kent Gate. He left home at eight-thirty. It was as warm and as humid as Florida, thought Bean, who had never been there.
The other route would have been shorter but there would have been all those roads to cross and all that traffic. The park was peaceful and quiet, the lake glassy and the air thickening. When he looked up, the darkening blue of the sky was fading under a veil of mist. A moon had risen, a pale oval, blurred and fuzzy, like the corpse of something that had long lain in muddy water.
All the birds had gone to roost. From a distance a black swan, sleeping on one leg with the other and its neck tucked into the plumage of its back, looked like a monstrous mushroom. Green- and chestnut-feathered ducks curled themselves up into silk cushions at the water’s edge. But the coming dusk was robbing everything of color, the grass turning gray, the water like black glass, the trees shapes and shadows rather than living things.
A beggar wandered toward him. He fancied it was the one who had asked him for money the day before, but now that there was no one else about, they were alone, passing each other on the lake path, Bean looked the other way, pretending not to see him. You could never tell these days who would turn out violent. Most vehicles were banned from the park, but a Royal Parks Constabulary police car went slowly past, the kind they called a lettuce sandwich because it was white with a dark green and light green stripe along its side.
To the left of him the Turkish domes of Sussex Place gleamed like an encampment of tents at dawn. The boats were all tied up to the island in the middle of the Hanover pond, bobbing gently on the water. He glanced up that way because he could never pass it without remembering Mussolini, so when he turned back and began to cross the grass toward the gate and saw Mussolini approaching him under the trees, he refused to believe his eyes. He actually rubbed his eyes, as if stimulating them to see straight.
It was as if Mussolini had been waiting for him. He wasn’t going anywhere, he’d just been standing there, what the police called loitering. Bean could see the street lamps in the Outer Circle. There were people walking up there, traffic heading up to the Macclesfield Bridge. He turned his eyes on Mussolini, making out his pudgy features, skinny body, and filthy old clothes in the warm gloom.
“You took your time,” Bean said.
Mussolini was wrapped up for such a hot night, wearing the sort of layers, dark matted rags, favored by the beggars. He was chewing something and Bean didn’t think it was gum.
Whatever it was, he eased it into the corner of his mouth, pushing it with his tongue.
“You was late,” he said. “You dropped me in the shit.”
“That may be, but it’s you that’s too late now. The job I wanted, someone else did it. And a bit more thoroughly than what I bargained for.”
“Could be another job,” said Mussolini. “There’s always jobs folks want doing.”
Bean shrugged. He had lingered for a moment, but now he began walking on toward the gate, a wide gate with maybe twenty-five spikes on its railings. Mussolini had got into step beside him and Bean was quickly aware of his smell. Not the cooking smell of fresh sweat but of dirt ingrained, unwashed clothes, the excrement of vermin, the acrid coldness of chemicals. He tried to draw himself aside, but Mussolini was close now, his head bent down to Bean’s lesser height, peering at Bean’s chest.
“Dig your elephants,” he said, and then he said, “Jumbo, jumbo,” and started laughing. “Jumbo, jumbo.”
His laughter made an eerie manic sound in the silence of the park.
23
Park Road runs northward on the western side of the park from the top of Baker Street to the junction of St. John’s Wood Road and Prince Albert Road and communicates with the Outer Circle by means of the Hanover Gate and Kent Passage. The London Mosque is in Park Road. So are the Rudolph Steiner House, a defunct pub called the Windsor Castle, Dillon’s Business Bookshop, and a number of Indian restaurants. There are sandwich bars and a wine bar and a fur shop where no one ever seems to buy anything.
The bookshop is so situated for its proximity to the London School of Business Studies, a graduate school housed in Decimus Burton’s most spectacular of all the park terraces, at Sussex Place. This is on the Outer Circle, an amazing range of Corinthian columns, polygonal bays, and cuboid domes, so light and airy that they might be tents of silk rather than towers of stone. Graduate students in need of books need not walk all the way down to Baker Street and up Park Road to reach the shop but may turn left out of the terrace and find the opening to an alley called Kent Passage.
The passage is narrow and long and absolutely straight, tree-shaded and confined by high hedges behind chain-link fencing, not railings. On the southern side it is overshadowed by the pale brick walls of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The trees and shrubs that grow along its length are planes and sumacs, snowberries and the rose of Sharon. Near the Park Road end the passage opens out into an oval shape, closes again, and the pavement of the wider thoroughfare is reached. The bookshop is a few paces to the left while on the right lies the Kent Terrace.
This is the only terrace not to face onto the Outer Circle, a plain range of buildings with Ionic columns. Anthony Maddox once told Bean that the terrace had been built in 1827 and named for George IV’s brother, the Duke of Kent, but the duke, as well as being the parent of the heir presumptive to the throne, was long dead by then, so there was no need for too much grandeur or originality. Bean thought this was said spitefully, for his resemblance to the duke’s statue had already been pointed out, but he never passed the terrace without thinking of what had been said and wondering if malice was intended.
Kent Terrace, however, has one peculiarity. As well as the usual b
lack iron railings, a feature of the place is the spikes adorning the top of the pillars in its grounds.
A pair of these pillars flanks the gate that leads into Kent Passage and the steps down into Kent Passage. These are man-height, cuboid and very solid, and from the tops of both sprout five iron branches in a cluster, each one terminating in five spikes. They look rather like bunches of thorn twigs, but ugly and menacing too, and it would be hard to say what purpose they were intended for or what was in the designer’s mind.
A man’s body was impaled on these iron thorns.
It was so arranged as to be invisible from Kent Passage unless you happened to be looking at the sky, and visible from the terrace only if you peered behind the pillar. Besides, a heavy mist had hung over the park and its environs since dawn, obscuring even those objects that were near at hand in swathes of white vapor.
The body was supported in its position by the splayed spikes penetrating its chest, head lolling forward, arms dangling, legs hanging. Barefoot, dressed in jeans with ragged hems and missing knees, torn gray T-shirt with washed-out black logo and a dark red cardigan that was stiff with foodstains and blood, it had once been a smallish man. The legs and arms were thin, the white feet pathetic. No doubt its total weight amounted to no more than 130 pounds. Even so, to lift it up so high must have taken considerable strength.
A great many people passed it during the morning. None of them looked up to the height of the pillar. Even after the mist had gone and the sun came out, the body was not discovered until noon. A police officer on the beat entered the passage from the Outer Circle. First he had walked round the pond where the pleasure boats were moored, crossed the yellowing balding grass, and had left the park by the Hanover Gate. His eye had been on a dosser in camouflage pants and gray vest who was fumbling in a litter bin suspiciously close to a parked car whose windows had been left open.
The policeman lingered, watching until the dosser, having found the remains of a take-away in the bin, shambled off northward toward the Macclesfield Bridge. Then he stepped into the passage and strolled slowly along it. Someone shook a duster out of one of the high windows in the building on the left. The passage was in deep shade for three-quarters of its length and there the sun came through the leaves, making a dappled pattern, before there were no more leaves but only a sunlit space.
