by Ruth Rendell
Onto this space fell a shadow.
It was like a crab or part of a crab or perhaps it was like a paw, the extended limb of a frog. He looked up. The body hung like a sack in clothes or a guy, limp and slack, and its hanging hand had a trail of blood dried between the fingers.
24
Dill and the beagle were sitting on one of the seats on the southwest side of the lake, watching an old woman in a tracksuit feeding the geese. There were not so many geese as a year ago and the story was that the street sleepers were catching them to kill and roast over fires on the canal bank. Dill always talked to the beagle as if it were a person. He said that much as he’d like to taste roast goose, for he never had tasted it, he wouldn’t know how to go about catching a goose, let alone killing it. And how would you get the feathers out? And the innards? He was talking like this about a goose to stop himself shaking with fear about the dead man.
The beagle’s tail started to wag, thumping on the slats of the seat. Roman patted its head, stroked it, sat down next to Dill and Dill told him the goose story just as he had told it to the beagle a moment before. But it no longer had the power to stop Dill shivering.
“What’s wrong?” Roman said. “There’s been another, hasn’t there? Is that it?”
“The fuzz had me in, mate. They had me look at him.”
“To identify him?”
Dill nodded. He held on to the beagle’s collar to steady his hands. “They said they’d seen me with him but they never had.” He looked up, turning his head in a crooked cautious way. His Oriental eyes were puffy as if he had been crying.
“They was okay,” he said. “They didn’t hurt me.”
“What happened?”
“I went in this place.” He wrinkled up his nose. “There was this geezer lifted up a sheet and showed me what was under. It was just a dead face, mate, you couldn’t see no cuts. I didn’t know him, I’d never seen him before. They said was I sure and then the geezer put the sheet back. They was okay. There was one geezer give the beagle a bun.”
“Maybe it was one of the jacks men,” said Roman.
“I don’t reckon. I don’t know what to think, mate. I reckoned I knew every geezer up here. You ever seen a dead person, Rome?”
“My mother.” Sally and his children, but he didn’t mention them. Daniel’s face had been cut to pieces. “I saw my mother.”
“Do they always look like they’re made of wax? Like they’ve never been alive?”
“I don’t know. You’re sleeping at St. Anthony’s, aren’t you, Dill?”
“They won’t let me take the beagle. What am I supposed to do about the beagle?”
Roman walked on toward the Clarence Gate. The flowerbeds and the grass here were covered in a soft gray quilt of goose down. Goose feathers floated onto the petals of flowers. He bought a paper at a newsagent’s at the top of Baker Street. The front page and four inside pages were devoted to the murder and the two previous murders. On the front page was a four-column-spread photograph of a stretch of railings, purporting to be but perhaps not those on which the body had been found, black spiked railings with grass behind and trees shapeless in the thinning mist. Inside were more photographs, Cahill’s and Clancy’s, more pictures of park railings, and one of a group of jacks men sitting or standing about on the canal bank.
The body was understood to be that of a man in “late middle age,” whatever that meant, of no fixed address. He had not yet been identified. The pockets of his jeans and cardigan were empty. His feet had been bare. The police wanted help from the public in their inquiries.…
Roman decided not to go away this time. He would stay and sooner or later they would question him. They would question every dosser in the vicinity of the park, in the whole of London probably. He would stay, do his best to answer their questions, be a good citizen. It was all part of the way his life was changing, turning back on itself, turning him back into something like what he once was.
• • •
Blue and white tape printed with the words “Police Do Not Cross” made a flimsy but deterrent boundary around the sturdy column and its crest of spikes. Kent Terrace looked livelier than usual, most of its windows wide open and from time to time heads poking out. But if there had ever been a crowd waiting and hoping for new sights as when Pharaoh’s body was found, there was none here. A uniformed policeman strolled about on the forecourt.
In Park Road the traffic kept up its customary steady roar. Veiled women, men in pairs, snowy-shirted, chatting animatedly to each other, never to the women, made their way up to the mosque. Roman had come up there because he was interested by descriptions of the column he kept hearing about but which he had never yet seen.
A dark trickle, the color of burnt umber, ran tearlike down the cream stucco from the roots of the spikes.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” the policeman said. “It’s rust.”
“Some strength was needed to hoist a body up there. Was he on the top?”
“It’s all been in the papers, mate,” said the policeman, and he turned away, discreet or perhaps only bored.
The next day, by chance, they asked him to come to the police station and talked to him exhaustively about the inhabitants of the park environs, growing more and more mystified, he thought, by his manner and his accent.
When they asked him if he would accompany them to the mortuary and attempt to identify the latest murder victim, he said, “Certainly. If you wish it.”
The sergeant—he didn’t merit an officer of higher rank—gave him a look and the detective constable with him a look, and if he didn’t quite cast up his eyes he sketched the gesture. Roman was taken to the mortuary by car. He could tell the two policemen expected him to smell, were all prepared to go through pantomimes of flinching, shifting their seats and opening windows, and when they found him inoffensive were almost disappointed.
The body was in a sort of drawer with a green sheet covering it. Roman remembered what Dill had said about waxiness. He thought of carvings he had seen out of soapstone or white jade. The face could have belonged to a man of any age over, say, forty. It was somewhat Hanoverian with small mouth and full cheeks, and although he could not identify it, he thought he had seen this man somewhere before.
That was all he could tell the sergeant.
“You know him but you don’t know who he is?”
“I wouldn’t say I knew him, but I’ve seen him before.”
“Where would that be?”
“In the park, I expect. I spend my life in the park.”
The sergeant finally asked him what a man like him was doing on the street.
“I prefer it,” Roman said, not wanting to go into the events of his private life. “It suits me.”
“Some sort of eccentric, are you?”
“Perhaps.”
He resisted asking permission to go but sat in the open-plan office waiting while the sergeant fiddled with papers, giving him from time to time meaningful looks. Once, in such a place, Roman would have been tense and self-conscious, searching his mind for minor motoring offenses he might have committed, but now he felt nothing beyond a mild boredom.
The sergeant said, “That’s it, then. You can go,” and he added, perhaps unable to resist, “You want to get yourself together, pull your socks up, put a roof over your head. The street’s no place for your sort, as you must know.”
Roman nodded. He walked out and no one tried to stop him. The Grotto, where he returned, had been scoured clean of litter by the police. They had done a better job than he had ever been able to do, taking away every scrap of paper and shred of rag in their search for evidence. His barrow had gone, stolen probably, not taken by them.
It was hot and close, the abode of flying insects. They swarmed above the pool in which the water was no longer clear and fresh but coated in scum. He sat down on the dry ground in the dusty shade. Soon he would have to go out, up into Camden Town, and replace the contents of the barrow. Buy secondhand
clothes, another groundsheet, more blankets, a water bottle, and a host of other things. It seemed to him a foolish exercise, absurd, because he could buy them, he could within reason buy anything he wanted.
The sergeant’s comments only reiterated what he had himself been thinking. What he had done had served its purpose but had now become artificial, a quixotic slumming, and to continue it was self-indulgence.
The real courage would lie in returning to the world.
• • •
Leo spent every evening with her but not the nights. He gave as his reason the one they had used before, that Charlotte Cottage was the Blackburn-Norrises’ home. So in the mornings she was alone and she took Gushi out alone. He missed his companions and, spoiled baby that he was, often plumped down on the grass like a cushion of chrysanthemums and refused to move. She carried him home, a furry muff in the August heat.
But in the evenings, when Leo came, they walked him together. Leo’s mood alternated between a kind of sorrowful brooding and an almost manic brightness. He was going to turn these obligatory walks into adventures, he said, and announced his intention of running to earth Mrs. Sellers and Spots.
He even went up to one woman exercising a spotted dog of dubious provenance. “Did my fiancée give your dalmatian a reference?” he asked her.
She looked panic-stricken and backed away. Another dog owner, faced with the same inquiry, pointed toward the Inner Circle and asked Leo if he knew there was a police station down there. Mary was amused, then embarrassed. On their way back to Park Village she again asked him what was wrong. “Are you worried about getting married?”
“That’s the last thing I’m worried about. Marrying you is what I want more than anything in the world.”
“Then what is the first thing you’re worried about?” she asked him gently.
“Death,” he said and burst into shrill laughter.
Once they were inside the house he began kissing her. He kissed her mouth and her throat and, drawing open her shirt, kissed her breasts. She was not used to passion from Leo, rather to something more controlled and gentle, but she responded eagerly. It was as if this was what had always been missing between them.
He whispered, “Not upstairs, in here,” and pulling her into the living room, kicked the door shut behind him.
Once before, in here, he had held her, both of them kneeling, and asked her to marry him. Now he began to make love to her as if it were the first time. Her whole body seemed to melt into a warm languid liquefaction. He was no longer light and phantomlike but strong and urgent, his mouth holding hers and his arms wound tightly round her. The phone ringing made her cry out in protest at a cruel interruption.
Leo cursed. “Leave it. Don’t answer it.”
She simply shook her head, unable to speak. The ringing went on interminably. They listened to it, stilled and motionless. When it stopped, Leo stroked her hair, her shoulders, turned her on her side, and entered her like that, a hand clasping each breast. She gave a clear cry of pleasure, arching her back as he let out a long sigh.
A little before ten he left her to go home to Primrose Hill. They had sat for the rest of the evening with their arms round each other, talking about the future, where they would live. His earlier wildness had been displaced by calm and, she thought, hope. After he had gone she took Gushi onto her lap and fondled him, doing her best not to resent the little dog whose presence stopped her returning with Leo. Bean would be back from his holiday and in the morning would be at the door as usual at eight-fifteen.
The phone rang again as she was watching ITN’s ten-o’clock news. She turned off the television and picked up the receiver. Alistair’s baritone sounded deeper and smoother than usual. The sound of it made her brace herself, her body tensing after the long relaxation of the evening.
“I phoned you earlier,” he said and his tone was accusing, admonitory.
She and Leo had sometimes laughed together about those people who apparently expect you to be sitting close by the phone all day, waiting for their call. She decided not to placate him.
“Yes, I heard it ring. I didn’t answer it. I was—occupied.”
“Don’t you think it rather irresponsible not to answer the phone? It could be something serious. It could be an accident to someone close to you.”
“Now that my grandmother is dead,” she said quietly, “I have no one close to me except Leo, and he was with me.” It was true and her solitariness struck her forcibly as she said it. Dorothea and her cousin she was fond of, but really there was only Leo. She breathed in. “You got my letter, Alistair?”
“That, of course, is why I am phoning. At last, you might say. I’ve taken my time, haven’t I? It was a blow, Mary, it was a heavy blow.”
What could she say? Not that she was sorry, certainly not that. “Sooner or later there was bound to be someone. There will be for you.”
He didn’t like that. “In your case it was rather sooner than later, wasn’t it? As to someone for me, as you put it in your romantic way, don’t imagine I’ve been celibate since you left. I’m hardly that kind of man.”
She didn’t believe him. She didn’t care. He made it impossible to resist some kind of apology. “I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you.”
It was as if she hadn’t spoken. “I had better get to my reason for phoning. You’ve rather distracted me from the point. As a civilized man, I wanted to congratulate you. I hope you’ll be very happy.”
“Thank you. That’s very nice of you, Alistair.”
“And to tell you that I’ve got something for you. A wedding present.”
She was astonished. “You’re giving me a wedding present?”
“Is that so strange? Didn’t you say to me a few weeks ago before you so inexplicably ran away from me that in the time-honored cliché you hoped we could be friends?”
“Of course I hope that. I didn’t think you wanted it.”
“Mary,” he said, “I have a wedding present for you. Don’t tell me to send it, please. I want to put it into your hands.”
She found herself passionately not wanting to see him, to have him come there, spoil her weekend with Leo. Just waiting for his arrival, fearing what he might do, would make her apprehensive for hours. She remembered that evening when Bean had arrived unexpectedly and before Leo answered the door she had assumed it was Alistair.
“Monday,” she said reluctantly. “Would Monday be all right?” Not here, though. “Would you come to the museum on your way home from work? We could have tea or a drink.”
“You won’t run away from me again, will you?”
It was chilling the amount of venom he could put into those innocuous words. Her usual urge to be conciliatory came, departed, driven away by rising anger.
“I’ve said I’ll meet you, Alistair. It will be the last time.”
• • •
His barrow gone, the Grotto trampled by police and no longer a desirable home, Roman set off to find another place in which to spend the night. All his possessions were in a rucksack he had bought, blue plastic, very cheap, but still plainly new and costing money. Every step he now took seemed to be leading him inexorably back into the world.
Some people were having a party on one of the houseboats in Cumberland Basin. He paused on the bridge and looked down at them. They were young, one of the men was naked to the waist, a woman was holding up a frothing bottle of champagne, another had a guitar from which she plucked dull reverberating notes. A young girl, holding her glass out to be filled, saw him and waved. Nothing could have made him so certain that his shedding of the street was apparent.
St. Mark’s Church in Albert Road on the fringe of Primrose Hill was a grim neo-Gothic place, the kind of building that made him wonder why the Victorians wanted to revive in their places of worship the creepy and sinister elements of medieval architecture. Its gate and its doors were painted sky blue, an incongruous color perhaps used to soften the grim effect. A garden rather than a graveyard surrounded it, a pl
ace of late-summer-blooming shrubs and fluff-headed thistles. He crossed the road over the water, for here the canal turned northward in its passage up to Camden Lock. The place where he stood was called the Water Meeting Bridge.
A green rectangle on the bridge contained a gold shield bearing the legend, WITH WISDOM AND COURAGE. These were qualities he needed and would have liked to have. And perhaps he had more of them now than ever in the past. On the parapet he looked along the canal to the next bridge. Between the two bridges grass and weeds reached to the edge of the towpath and the churchyard trees overhung it.
He turned into St. Mark’s Square, then into Regent’s Park Road where the other bridge was. It was with a little thrill of dismay that he noted the row of spiked railings at the chancel end of the church, another set serving as balusters up the steps to what was perhaps a vestry door. Someone had tied a bunch of colored balloons to one of the spikes. There must have been a children’s party. Thinking of Daniel, who had liked balloons but hated the noise they made when burst, he opened the gate into the garden and walked along the path.
White Japanese anemones gleamed in the dusk. The place was alive with mosquitos and all those cousins of mosquitos that are smaller but sometimes fiercer, midges, gnats. They danced on the warm air. A bat swooped, then another. He remembered Sally’s fear of bats, her curious superstition, the only one she had, that bats had a predilection to get in women’s hair and bite their scalps. He didn’t mind bats but the mosquitos in their dense concentration would be unbearable.
There were no gravestones. He wondered why not. Where they might have been were green garden seats, enough to seat a dozen people. Nothing lay below him but the trees and snowberry bushes and long grass descending to meet the path and the dark yellow water. Chain-link fencing made a formidable barrier between the fringes of the garden and the canal bank, but it was climbable. He scrambled over, his sights set on the other bridge, a sheltered place. Street sleepers traditionally made their beds under bridges—wasn’t there a song about it? A Merle Haggard song about making a kingdom under the bridges?
