The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  He dropped down onto the path. It was starting to get dark, a light up on the bridge reflected in the oily water. A tubular metal rail offered some sort of security to those going too near the edge under the bridge. The light gleamed on its silvery surfaces. He was only a few yards away when he saw that the area under the brown brickwork already had an occupant. Street people, no matter what they wear, or what they started off wearing, always seem to be dressed in darkness. They are blackened, everything muted by time and dirt to the color of shadows, so that when seen from a distance a group of them look like figures in bronze.

  In his early days on the street, Roman had been no different, and this man was no different. He was an incarnation of dirt, a bundling and layering on this warm night of dark greasy rags, string-tied, his skin much the same color as the shred of cloth round his neck, as his cracked boots. His face peered out from between the knotted neck-cloth and his battered hat, a face dark as a black man’s but sickle-shaped in profile, with a long hooked nose and rough pitted skin.

  He might have spoken when he saw Roman, he might have recognized him as belonging to the same kind, but he didn’t. Roman was very aware in that moment of his own cleanness, his washed clothes, some replaced and new, his new backpack. He wanted to laugh when the man under the bridge scowled at him and made a gesture of dismissal, shaking his fist. What did he think he was? Some tourist who had lost his way? But he understood. He looked like that tourist, he had indeed lost his way, and now had only the tourist’s recourse.

  “Okay,” he said. “I won’t disturb you. Good night.”

  It was the final sign. He climbed up the bank again, over the fence into the churchyard, left by the blue gate, and set off to walk up to Camden Town where, in his new respectable guise, one of the cheap hotels would give him a bed for the night.

  25

  When it was eight-thirty and still Bean hadn’t come, she took Gushi into the park herself. It was already very warm. The grass was soaked and beaded with dew. Not a breath of wind stirred the trees, their foliage pendulous and dripping off the branches as if composed of some thick viscous fluid. The sun that was turning lawns and flowerbeds and greensward into a desert laid a burning skin on her arms and face.

  She walked across the Broad Walk, past the restaurant and over the Long Bridge. Gnats had begun their dance above the scummy brown water. Once, when she first came here, the uneven juxtaposition of the Outer and Inner Circles had confused her and she had been inclined to lose herself in the flower gardens. But now she could have drawn a plan of the park with her eyes shut. She turned left along the path opposite the back of the theater, meeting and passing a woman she had never seen before but whose dog Gushi evidently knew well.

  The scottie and he encountered each other nose to nose, tails wagging, then noses were inserted under tails. The two of them began a play fight, growling, rolling over in the grass. The woman turned back, smiling tentatively. Mary remembered that she had seen this jaunty little black dog among the others tied to the gatepost of Charlotte Cottage.

  The woman didn’t introduce herself even when Mary said who she was. “That bloody Bean has let us all down again.”

  “I thought perhaps I’d got the date wrong,” Mary said.

  “Oh, no. He was due this morning. Too nice down by the seaside, I expect. He’ll be back tomorrow with his tail between his legs.”

  The metaphor was so unconsciously appropriate that Mary wanted to giggle, but she controlled herself. She called Gushi, eventually had to drag him away, and passed on along the path without learning McBride’s owner’s name. Back in the park, on her way to the Irene Adler, it was far hotter. The blue sky was already whitening and the air was thick with humidity. The zoo animals she passed seemed to feel the heat no more than the cold but to lumber and munch placidly, bent solely on the getting of food. Up in Albert Road there was a smell of diesel and exhaust, a hot bitter stench. She could see a bevy of street people stretched out on the grass in the church gardens. They could have been taken for sunbathers except for the rags that still covered every inch of them but for stricken faces and coarsened hands.

  Dorothea said to take the whole of next week off—why not? Gordon would take over. She should have a whole free week for her wedding. But Mary remembered that Alistair was coming on Monday to bring his mysterious wedding present and she could see that changing this arrangement might lead to terrible difficulties. And she didn’t exactly have a lot of preparation to make for the wedding anyway. So she said she would take from Wednesday morning off if that was all right with Dorothea and Gordon.

  “Go home early this afternoon then,” Dorothea said. “Nobody’s going to come looking at corsets and crinolines on a day like this.”

  And remarkably few did. Mary was home again by four, in time for Bean’s arrival at a quarter past. But again Bean didn’t come. She waited for half an hour and then she dialed his number in York Terrace. No reply. Leo arrived just after five and they sat outside in the shade, drinking tea and then sharing a bottle of wine. The garden was full of brown and orange butterflies and little coppery-winged moths. Gushi lay under a lilac bush, puffing showily, his tongue hanging out.

  Leo remembered the name of Spots’s owner and they found her in the phone book. But Mrs. Sellers hadn’t seen Bean for a week or heard from him. Mary and Leo took Gushi out themselves when it was cooler, though it was not very cool. As they walked back, arms round each other’s waists, he asked her to come back to Edis Street with him for the night. But if she did that she wouldn’t be here for Bean in the morning, and she was sure Bean would be here in the morning. Leo didn’t argue. He kissed her and said he would be back in Charlotte Cottage before she woke up. He would come quietly into the house and if she would like that, to bed with her.

  “I’d like that,” she said, smiling.

  She overslept. She was lying sleepily in Leo’s arms, having made leisurely, half-awake love with him, their bodies naked and damp, cooled by sweat, when at last she looked at the clock. It was almost nine.

  Bean hadn’t come. He had a way of thrusting his fist at the bell and pushing with all his body weight behind it, keeping it there until someone answered. She would have heard. He would have seen to it that she had heard.

  She put on a robe and went downstairs. Leo had picked the post up from the doormat when he came in and left it on the hall table for her. The letter postmarked Cape Cod was from the Blackburn-Norrises and announced their return rather earlier than expected. They would arrive back in London on August 19.

  She made Leo tea, took it up, and showed him the letter.

  “The order of release.”

  “I thought it might be,” Leo said. “You can come and live with your husband a mere two days after we’re married.”

  For an hour or so it distracted her from the problem of Bean. But at ten-thirty she phoned Mrs. Sellers, who hadn’t seen him, and then, using the number Mrs. Sellers gave her, she phoned the actress Lisl Pring. Lisl wasn’t just annoyed, she was worried. The chocolate poodle Marietta was all right, Lisl’s boyfriend took her out twice a day trotting behind his bicycle. It was doing wonders for his figure and he didn’t mind how long it went on. But what had happened to Bean? He would never absent himself like this unless he was at death’s door. She gave Mary the names of Bean’s other clients.

  Mary and Leo took Gushi out. It was too hot to go far. Gushi drank nearly a pint of water when he got back and returned to lie under the lilac bush. After she had called Express Tikka and ordered a thali each for their lunch with pickles and naan, she phoned Erna Morosini.

  No, it wasn’t she that Mary had encountered in the park the previous morning. Her dog wasn’t a scottie.

  “Mine’s the sexy beagle,” said Mrs. Morosini. “You must know the one. My partner says I ought to have her doctored but I’m still hoping for pups one day.”

  “Bean—” Mary began, but Mrs Morosini cut her short.

  “Oh, yes, he’s disappeared, hasn’t he? H
e left me his Brighton number, I insisted, and I’ve called it and talked to his sister. She hasn’t seen hair nor hide of him. Well, she only came back herself yesterday, but there’s not a sniff of him in the place.”

  As if Bean were a terrier that had turned himself into a stray, as if he had run off and would turn up without his collar and with his ear bleeding.

  Their lunch came just before one, brought in the red and white van by the man who had removed his chef’s hat and was wearing nothing but shorts and a red and white vest. Their thalis were eaten outside in the shade of the laburnam and the Japanese cherry and all was peaceful until Leo produced their dessert of raspberries and nectarines. Then wasps drove them indoors. They put Gushi in the coolest place, on a windowseat in the north-facing bedroom. Mary hadn’t asked how they should spend the afternoon but Leo anticipated the question. He pulled her down onto the bed.

  “Let’s not go downstairs again.”

  • • •

  When the gates had been open only for an hour and before the heat mounted, they took the dog into the park. A marathon was being run. Round the Outer Circle, in at Chester Road, round a segment of the Inner Circle, out at York Bridge, and round the Outer Circle again. Then repeat—twice? Three times? The runners were all male, all thin, their faces contorted with effort or agony. Their T-shirts, clinging to bony chests, were as wet as when taken dripping from the wash.

  Leo said they made him feel tired. They made him feel ill.

  She looked anxiously into his face. “You’re all right, aren’t you? All this walking isn’t too much for you?”

  “It’s vicarious,” he laughed. “I’m feeling it for them.”

  But as they walked back, arms round each other, hip to hip, she thought back to the transplant and had the strange feeling that it was ongoing, continuous, that when they were together like this or in bed side by side, the flow of strength from her still proceeded into him, like an injection of some serum into a permanently open vein. She leaned across and kissed his cheek and felt the arm around her tighten and his hand caress her waist.

  “If Bean comes now we shall have to send him away empty-handed,” Leo said when they were back in the house and Gushi was stretched out exhausted on the kitchen floor. “But I don’t think he will come, do you?”

  “No, I don’t. You know, Leo, he could be in that house of his, collapsed, dead. I don’t suppose anyone has gone to see. He’s an old man, older than he looks.”

  “He’s a bit over seventy.”

  Mary stared at him. “How do you know?”

  “How do I know? Let’s see—he must have told me that night he came here for the reference. Look at me, Mary. Do you like Bean?”

  “Like him? I haven’t thought about it. No, as a matter of fact I don’t. I don’t like him a bit.”

  “That’s all right then. You can stop worrying about him. Forget him.”

  Leo went out to buy the Sunday papers. They looked through the property pages for likely houses in St. John’s Wood and Hampstead and Leo even called one of the numbers given in the small ads, but no one answered the phone. Bean hadn’t come. Just before lunch Lisl Pring phoned, enthusing about a new dog-walker she had found. A woman called Amelia Walker—Walker the walker, wasn’t that hilarious? Mary thanked her but said she could hardly entrust Gushi to the care of someone unknown to his owners. For the time being she would go on taking him out herself. Leo said it was too hot to do anything but rest and the bed was more comfortable than the Blackburn-Norrises’ sofa. The temperature climbed to ninety degrees.

  “Why do they always give shade temperatures?” he wanted to know. “It’s so cautious and petty. Why not what it is in the sun? It’ll be a hundred and five in the sun.”

  “I suppose because the sun isn’t always shining.”

  “My love, you sound so sad—don’t be sad.”

  “All right,” she said. “All right, I won’t.”

  They made slippery love, their bodies closing together and withdrawing from each other with soft sucking sounds. Sweat became another amorous secretion, thinner and colder, strongly saline. She tasted his salt on her tongue and the faint sting of it in her eyes. They fell lightly asleep, wet palms clasped against the wet skin of belly and shoulder. A river flowed between her breasts.

  The windows were wide open but no wind moved the heavily hanging drawn curtains. A bumblebee’s throbbing buzz, alternately terrified and reassured, woke her. She lay watching it until at last it found a way to freedom through where the curtains met. Leo slept on. She got up, had a shower, and came back into the bedroom wrapped in a bathtowel. What she saw made her gasp. Tears were running down Leo’s sleeping face. They were not perspiration but real tears. He was crying in his sleep.

  She knew she must tell him about this, must ask him, but she postponed asking him. He seemed so happy when he got up, suggesting they go out to eat somewhere when it was late, when the warm dusk was giving way to dark. What about that little Italian restaurant they had gone to the first time, the day after they first met?

  In the meantime Gushi must be walked. It was too hot to go far. The people in the park were mostly prone, sprawled on the yellowed grass.

  “They look dead,” said Leo. “They look like bodies after the battle is over.”

  It was an opportunity. She spoke gently, lovingly. “Why do you cry in your sleep, Leo? Your face was wet with tears.”

  “Wet with sweat,” he said lightly and quickly.

  If he had been a frightened child her voice could hardly have been more tender. “It was tears, my love. You were crying. Really.”

  “I had a bad dream. We all do sometimes.”

  “It must have been a very unhappy dream.”

  He refused to say any more but began instead to talk about people who lay in the sun, about sunbathing being a mid-twentieth-century fad that would disappear as fast as it had become fashionable. They put Gushi on the lead and walked back, past the children’s playground to the Gloucester Gate.

  A police car was parked outside Charlotte Cottage. The officers had left the car and sought the shade of the porch. When Mary and Leo came up to the door the elder of them produced a warrant card.

  “Detective Inspector Marnock.”

  The other man, the sergeant, muttered a name Mary couldn’t catch. “May we come in?”

  It was Leo who said, “What’s this about?”

  “And you are, sir?”

  “Leo Nash.”

  “Well, Mr. Nash, it’s about Leslie Bean. You know a man called Leslie Bean?”

  Mary’s hand tightened on Leo’s arm. “What’s happened to him?”

  They were all in the living room. Gushi, a hot bundle of fur, jumped for the sergeant’s lap and lay there, gazing into a not very prepossessing face with slavish worship.

  “Can you tell us what’s happened to him?” Leo said.

  “Perhaps. With your help. And yours, Miss Jago. I understand you knew him. He walked your dog. You saw him frequently?”

  “Yes. Every day.”

  “So you would recognize him?”

  “Of course I would.”

  She had the feeling that Marnock was struggling with an inhibition on saying too much to the public. It would be ingrained in him to say, “That I am not at liberty to tell you” or “We can’t answer that,” but he was plainly making up his mind how much he could reveal without total indiscretion, and how much he must reveal in order to gain their compliance.

  “A Miss Bean has contacted us to report her brother as a missing person. He has not been seen since the evening of Friday the fourth.”

  “And?” Leo said sharply.

  “On Saturday the fifth the body of an unidentified man was found in the vicinity of the Kent Terrace.…”

  “But that was one of the street people,” Mary said.

  “We thought so at first. We haven’t for some days. You don’t want to believe everything you read in the papers. Nor do we think this was the work of the man the ta
bloid press calls The Impaler.”

  “But why not?”

  “That,” said the sergeant when Marnock hesitated, “we are not at liberty to tell you.” Evidently a dog lover, he fondled Gushi’s ears.

  “The clothes on the body weren’t his own. They were put on him after he was dead.”

  “As some sort of joke, no doubt,” said Marnock. “Psychopaths can have an unfortunate sense of humor. Now, Miss Jago, Mr. Nash, we’ve been unprecedentedly frank and open with you. For a reason, of course. We want you to do us a favor. Mr. Bean’s other lady clients feel a natural distaste …”

  “For what?” said Leo.

  “For identifying the body, sir.”

  Horrified, Mary said, “Surely his sister could do that!”

  “She’s eighty years old,” said the sergeant. “Besides, she hasn’t seen him in twenty-five years.” Suddenly more confiding, he gave a little laugh. “Oh, yes, we know it’s peculiar, it’s that all right. He stopped in her house while she was away and left before she got back. Every year. Year in and year out. They’d not set eyes on each other for as you might say a quarter of a century.”

  • • •

  They both went.

  Inside the mortuary it was cold and there was a strong icy smell. Mary thought it must be the smell of death, of decomposition impossible to mask, but Leo told her it was formaldehyde.

  She was there to identify, if she could, the body, Leo to support and comfort her. He had only once seen Bean, and that briefly, in the evening, by artificial light.

  The bodies were in drawers, green metal, like filing cabinets. It seemed to her a dreadful depository of a man’s life, even though it was not a final resting place. One of the drawers was pulled open and a plastic sheet lifted.