The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  “Sometimes I think no one ought to go to prison for anything,” said Mary. “But that’s not very practical. Was he on drugs or drunk or what?”

  “He’d been drinking,” said Dorothea. “Talking of which, do you want me to open that for you?”

  • • •

  The traffic in the Marylebone Road speeds up at the weekends. There is less of it, less to slow it down or bring it to frequent stops. On the Sundays of mid-August less traffic uses the road than perhaps on any other days of the year and it seems like some highway in the fifties or sixties when driving was pleasurable and the air relatively pure.

  But on mid-August Saturdays, with so many people away on holiday and so many tourists car-less pedestrians, the traffic speeds along, three lanes of it, roaring up to Euston and the underpass or tearing down to Chapel Street, the Marylebone Flyover and the M40. Sometimes brakes shriek when a stop is enforced at Baker Street lights or those at Park Crescent. In the week it is a slow lumbering battering ram that plods at fifteen miles an hour, but on a late summer Saturday it becomes a swift juggernaut and therefore far more dangerous.

  Mary thought all these things as she came back from buying bread in Marylebone High Street on Saturday morning. Gushi was tucked under her arm. She had brought him with her on a supernumerary walk but he was frightened by the traffic noise and buried his face in the palm of her hand. They crossed quickly and she brought him into the friendly green of the park. He ran down the bank and drank thirstily from the lake. Already a hot vapor hung over the broad expanses of grass, bleached yellow and in places entirely bared by the drought. The water with which the flowerbeds were sprayed first thing each morning had dried by now and some plants hung their heads. She kept to the shady side of the park.

  A man on a seat was reading a paperback of The Catcher in the Rye, the woman at the other end of the bench a broadsheet newspaper with the front page headline: MP TO SUE OVER MURDER AND SEX ALLEGATIONS. Mary tried to think about her future, where she would live, what she would do. Leo, Oliver, that man whoever he was, had said, Two days after we’re married my wife will be able to come and live with me.…

  She remembered then. Today the Blackburn-Norrises were coming home. He had said that because the Blackburn-Norrises were coming home and she would be free. She looked round for Gushi. He was making friends with a Jack Russell, touching noses, wagging tails. She went back for him, put him on the lead, gently shooed the other dog away.

  “They’re coming home today,” she said to him. “Your master and mistress, your people, owners, whatever you call them. Come on, let’s get back fast.”

  So that’s what I’ve come to, she thought, talking aloud to a dog in public. Gushi licked her fingers. No, he’s not sorry for you, he doesn’t understand, she said to herself, he’s a nice dog but he’s just a dog.

  They went out into Albany Street by the Cumberland Gate and Cumberland Terrace. As they came into Park Village West the Blackburn-Norrises’ taxi was just pulling away from the gates of Charlotte Cottage.

  • • •

  He had slept that Friday night in his own flat for the sake of seeing the horror movie, How to Make a Monster. The boards, of raw beech that gave off a strong resinous smell, encased the broken windows and made of the interior a dusty kiln. There was no way of ventilating the place except by leaving the front door open and no one did that, no one dared. He’d gone through his ritual and used two rocks before the film started, then gone on to vodka, neat but with a spot of Tabasco sauce and a sprinkling of mustard. He didn’t need excuses but if he did he’d have said it was to take his mind off the stink in the flat and the heat. For his health’s sake, he nibbled at a Duchy Original biscuit, the gingered sort, with his drink.

  The telly was still on when he woke up. His watch had stopped and he didn’t know what time it was. Dark or light, it was all the same in here, or almost. A strong sun high in the sky penetrated the cracks in the beech boards and laid bright bars across the bit of filthy carpet on the floor. The smell, he realized now, was himself. He smelled like the hamburger stall outside Madame Tussaud’s that the people in the mewses between the waxworks and the park complained filled their places with the reek of onions and fatty beef. He wondered if it mattered or if he should do something about it. In the pitch dark something ran over his foot.

  Hob yelled. He jumped up, smashed the light on with the flat of his hand, and saw the mice flee, scurrying for the honeycombed skirting board. It was only mice, that was all it was. They had been feasting on Duchy Original crumbs. He staggered to the bathroom and urinated copiously. His half-brother had told him blow made you pee a lot and he was right. The bath was full of dirty dishes, the washing up of weeks. He had long used up every piece of crockery he had, and it lay piled there, dusty by this time, coated with the little waxy white pellets like seeds that were fly eggs. Hob thought he saw things moving between a plate and a glass and he turned away. That was funny because he’d never hallucinated, he’d never been interested in acid, microdot, shrooms, or any of that stuff.

  He decided against a bath. Where would he put the dishes? He went back and turned the telly off. He turned the light off too and lay on the settee. For some reason he started thinking about his brother-in-law that used to be before his sister divorced him. Hob had rather liked him, had felt sorry for him because when he was a teenager he’d done acid, just the once, and he’d been left years later with these visions of rats. They’d come at any time and crawl all over him. Hob’s ex-brother-in-law had been dead scared of rats, had a phobia about them, so it was a miserable existence he led. Shame, Hob thought. But he never thought about anything or anyone for long. Like alcoholics with drink, he thought about, talked to himself about, considered, wondered at, the substances he used. He would have talked to others about them, only there was no one to talk to.

  The mice were back. He could hear them scuttering. Someone on the floor below had told him she’d woken up in the night and heard this trundling noise and when she shone her torch under the bed she’d seen this mouse rolling a Smartie she’d dropped toward a hole in the wall, pushing it with its nose. You had to laugh. He saw a thread of light appear on the floor, then another. It must be morning.

  Sometime today he was due to work over a bloke up in Agar Grove who’d done something that got up Lew’s nose—though not what he liked up there. Promised to take a bag of smack along with his dope and had reneged (Lew’s word) on the deal. Hob was getting a hundred for putting the shyster out of action for a couple of weeks and four rocks over the odds. His thoughts drifted to those rocks but he’d only got two left in the flat, so when thinking instead of using got too much, he wandered off looking for what he’d brought in the evening before. The red velvet bag, the stuff was with the bag, maybe in the kitchen.

  He found it and poured the powder into a foil bag that had once held some adjunct, sensitive to light, of a photocopier. Like much of his paraphernalia, Hob had found it in a wastebin in one of the more prosperous parts. He slit open the bottom of the bag and held it over the powder in one of the saucers from the bath, screwed up the open top, and put his mouth over the resulting aperture. It wasn’t as clever or as satisfying as his watering can rose but it would do for now. Better than one of your ordinary stems, anyway. He lit the powder with a match.

  It was angel dust, or phencyclidine, out of fashion and therefore relatively cheap. Hob had seen on telly that it was basically the stuff they shot into rhinos and elephants on darts to put them under when they moved them away from ivory hunters or whatever. PCP was a change and, anyway, he liked it because it made him feel unreal, like he was a person in that How to Make a Monster movie, living inside the telly and watched by millions, or else invisible and not watched at all. Both sensations were pleasant enough.

  Sweat began to break out all over him. That was the effect of the dust, as was this floating sensation. He got up and walked about, took a few dancing steps, feeling suddenly like a tall thin man with a small head and a
ballet dancer’s feet. Maybe he’d get out of here and go and do the shyster over before the day had really begun.

  He could feel his heart beating. The idea that you couldn’t always feel your heart beating amused him and he laughed as he danced about the flat, picking up what he needed. Unthinkable to go out without the red velvet bag, without something to keep him well, without something else to bring him down if the heartbeat got so strong it was painful. All ideas of having a bath or changing his clothes had receded. Who needed that shit?

  His heart had stopped. For a moment he was transfixed with terror, for he had forgotten what had just made him laugh, that a beating heart cannot normally be felt. He pranced again, punching the air, and into his ears, squeezing up through his body, came the tick-tick-tick of his heart. Laughing again, he thumped himself on the chest, on the place where, under the skin and ribs, the ticking clock pumped.

  With the red velvet bag in his jacket pocket, he left the flat and came out onto the concrete walkway. A cannibalized van stood tireless on what was left of the grass and broken glass littered the empty aisles of the car park, thick as flints on a beach. Around here they used spray paint for the graffiti and the kind they used was red, like blood. For all that, the morning was beautiful, the sky translucent like a blue pearl, the air as yet cool and almost fresh, as if some breath of it had wafted this way from the park in the night. Hob noticed only the emptiness, the absence of anyone. This was only so in the very early hours and his watch told him it was not quite half past six.

  He went down the concrete stairs and tried to think about getting to Agar Grove, but for some reason his inner eye could only see the railway line running across the Euston wasteland, the visual part of his mind throwing up bridges and flyovers and cranes with necks like Meccano dinosaurs. He’d have to come down, he needed something to bring him down. Yellow Jackets or V’s—what had he got? He palmed two Nembutal, swallowing them in his own saliva.

  The place still had an appearance of emptiness when the police came looking for him half an hour later. It was still only seven. The police car crunched over the broken glass and stopped by the mutilated van. Marnock had a sergeant with him and a man in uniform, the one who was driving. They saw the boarded-up windows, looked at each other and shrugged. There was no doorbell. The sergeant banged on the knocker. He did that twice, then shouted through the letter box, “Police, open up!”

  No one did, so they broke the door down, no difficult task. It yielded after two shoulder charges and a thump from the driver’s boot. The smell that came out to meet them was so bad that at first they thought there must be a dead body inside.

  29

  It was Marnock himself who found Hob.

  They had been searching for him since morning in all his known haunts. The latest sighting came from a man in Agar Grove who, from his hospital bed, was able to name his assailant. He had lost four teeth, had two cracked ribs and a broken collarbone, but he was anxious to talk about Harvey Owen Bennett.

  It was his opinion that Bennett was the Impaler, Bennett was guilty of the street people killings. Marnock disagreed but didn’t say so. He thought the Agar Grove man entitled to sling mud and make wild accusations. For the time being. He was no angel, had a string of convictions as long as the Broad Walk, which Marnock would later make longer. It was his belief the Agar Grove man was responsible for the mugging of Bean in the Nursemaids’ Tunnel.

  He was always made happy by villains gassing. It gave him hope for the future. Harvey Owen Bennett, for instance. Bennett had killed Bean and stuck him on that five-pointed iron tree, but someone had paid him to do it and Marnock now hoped Bennett would tell him who. The Agar Grove man had created a happy precedent.

  Marnock called that day on every member of Bennett’s extended family. They weren’t truthful people, but this time, with misgivings, he believed them when they said they hadn’t seen him. His mother said she hadn’t seen him for six months and this amused Marnock in the light of what she had told him back in June—that at the time of Pharaoh’s murder Hob had been among guests at an all-night silver wedding party in the Holloway Road.

  They scoured the park for him. Marnock thought of the Grotto as the abode, more or less reserved, of the toffee-nosed dosser with the Oxbridge accent, and he nearly didn’t look. It was a drinking straw, spiraled with red like a barber’s pole and stuck up in the branches of a tree, that caught his eye from his seat in the back of the car. The ritual that served Harvey Bennett’s habit required drinking straws.…

  He was lying half in, half out of the dirty little pond. They heard his breathing long before they reached him and that was how they knew he was alive. Marnock’s sergeant was on his mobile calling an ambulance before they had laid a finger on Hob.

  “He’s young,” Marnock’s sergeant said. “Well, youngish. But I reckon he’s had a stroke.”

  The ambulance man, getting Hob onto a stretcher, said superfluously that he wasn’t a doctor. Then he said that in his opinion Hob had had a stroke.

  “Or several,” said Marnock. “I once knew a bloke, only a year or two older than him, same taste for substances, had twenty strokes in quick succession.”

  “Bloody hell,” said the ambulance driver. “Did it kill him?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Marnock. “After a couple of weeks they switched off the machine.”

  • • •

  Be angry, Mary said to herself, you must be angry. You must walk on past him, pretend he’s not there. Or stand your ground and tell him what you think of him. She held her fists tightly clenched. He was in front of her now.

  “I’ve been here since eight this morning,” he said, “waiting for you.”

  “I didn’t come into the park this morning,” she said.

  “It was so hot. I brought a bottle of water, but it got warm. I tried to keep awake but I fell asleep and when I woke up I thought I’d missed you.”

  “What do you want?” She knew he had never heard that note in her voice before.

  “I suppose that’s how you think of me, as always wanting something, as doing everything I do for what I can get out of it.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a true picture?”

  “Not entirely.”

  She walked into the shade of the trees, put her hands against the rough cool bark of a tree, and bowed her head. “I thought I’d never see you again. I hoped not. I know what you did, I’ve thought about it these past days, I haven’t had anything else to think about, and there can’t be anything you can say to me in extenuation.” She turned to look at him, half look at him, and remembered then what she hadn’t thought of for perhaps an hour or two: their lovemaking. It came back and brought hot angry blood into her face. He must see that burning color and know. “It won’t mean anything to you if I say it was the worst betrayal I’ve ever known.”

  Alistair’s small misdemeanors, what were they compared with his offense?

  “Would you—could we—is it possible to ask you if we could go back to the house?”

  “The Blackburn-Norrises have come home.”

  “Then will you sit down here with me or on a seat or somewhere and talk to me?”

  Her head bowed again. She found she was shaking it from side to side. The words came out hoarsely.

  “What is your name?”

  “What?”

  “I asked you what your name is. I can’t call you Leo. You aren’t called Leo.”

  “My name is Carl,” he said. “Carl Nash. Leo was my brother.”

  She sat down. He dropped onto the grass beside her but moved when she indicated by a pushing movement with her hands that he was too close. She looked at him properly for the first time, a gaze of deepest scorn, and saw that his eyes were full of tears.

  • • •

  “I brought Leo up. He was more than ten years younger than I. Oh, yes, of course I’m not twenty-four, I’m older than you, Mary, not younger, I’m thirty-five.”

  “We believe what people tell us
,” Mary said. “Or I do. I believed what you told me. And I saw your birth certificate.”

  “You saw his. When the leukemia was diagnosed and they said he needed a transplant I thought there wouldn’t be a problem. There was our mother—not that she’d taken a scrap of notice of Leo since he was ten, she’d left that to me—and there was myself, a couple of half-sisters somewhere about. None of us was compatible. Can you imagine that?”

  “You’ve already told me. Except that you suggested it was you and not your brother who needed the transplant. If you’re going to explain you should …”

  “Tell you why I posed as Leo?”

  “It was for my money,” she said bitterly.

  He lifted his shoulders, not denying. “I was an actor once. Only there was no work. Then I was a schoolteacher. Funny, isn’t it? Then I made a bit of money,” he said. “Dealing, mostly.”

  She knew she was innocent but not what she was innocent of. The look in his eyes told her he wasn’t talking about scrap metal or antiques.

  “Drugs,” he said impatiently. “I’d needed funds to find a donor for Leo. That was before the Harvest Trust. I thought maybe I’d have to go to some Third World country and buy a donor. Then you came along.”

  “I wasn’t rich then,” she said. “I’d been living in a one-bedroom flat in Willesden and earning twelve thousand a year. What made you think I was rich?”

  He said simply, “The heading on your writing paper. The address. Charlotte Cottage, Park Village West.”

  Briefly she closed her eyes. Unseeing, she sensed he had come closer to her and she drew away. She looked at him.

  “And when you found out I didn’t live there you dropped me, you meant never to see me again. That was what happened. You weren’t ill, you were never ill.”

  “True,” he said. “It was a bitter disappointment.” She looked incredulously at his wry smile. He had aged in the past few minutes. He might be forty, forty-five. The smile creased his pale face into lines and ridges. “I did need money, you see. I knew Leo would get ill again, I could see the signs, I’d made myself an expert in his illness.” All the ironic amusement died out of his face. “I loved him so much. Believe me, if you can believe anything I say, believe me, I’m not trying for your sympathy, your compassion, but I’d like you not to think me a total monster. I loved him as if he were my own child. Or I think so, I’ve never had a child.”