Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  Beautiful countryside, green woods, dark red earth where the harvested fields had already been plowed, a sparkling river that splashed over stones. He saw the cattle before he saw the house, cream-colored elegant beasts, bony and mournful-eyed, hock-deep in the lush grass. Hundreds of them—well, scores. If he said “scores” to Emma and Andrew they wouldn’t know what he was talking about. On a gatepost, lettered in black on a white board, he read: MINGLE VALLEY FARM, THE MOULTRY JERSEY HERD and under that, TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

  He left the car. Beyond the gate was only a path, winding away between flowery grass verges and tall trees. A pheasant made him jump, uttering its harsh rattling cry and taking off on clumsy wings. The path took a turn to the left, the woodland ended abruptly, and there ahead of him stretched lawns and, beyond them, the house. It was a sprawling half-timbered place, very picturesque, with diamond-paned windows. On the lawn rabbits cropped the grass.

  He had counted fifteen rabbits when a man came out from behind the house. Even from this distance Walter could tell he was an old man. He could see too that this old man was carrying a gun. Six decades fell away, and instead of a green Devon lawn,Walter saw a sluggish river on the outskirts of London, willow trees, a kingfisher. He did as he had done then and clapped his hands.

  The rabbits scattered. Walter heard the sharp crack of the shotgun, expected to see a rabbit fall but fell himself instead. Rolled over as pain stabbed his leg. It was his left leg this time, but the pain was much the same as it had been when he was seven. He sat up, groaning, blood all over his trousers. A man was standing over him with a mobile phone in one hand and the gun bent over in the middle—broken, did they call it?—in the other. Walter would have known that resentful glare anywhere, even after sixty-five years.

  In the hospital they took the shot out and for good measure—“Might as well while you’re in here”—extracted the pellet from his right leg. With luck, the doctor said, he’d be as good as new.

  “Remember, we’re none of us getting any younger.”

  “Really?” said Walter. “I thought I was.”

  Moultry didn’t come to see him in the hospital. He told Barbara her father was lucky not to have been prosecuted for trespassing.

  THE PROFESSIONAL

  THE GIRLS HAD THE BEST OF IT. Dressed in models from the Designer Room, they disposed themselves in one of the windows that fronted onto the High Street, one in a hammock m House & Garden, another in an armchair from Beautiful Interiors, holding best-sellers from the book department and pretending to read them. Small crowds gathered and stared at them, as if they were caged exotic animals.

  The boys had seats inside, between Men’s Leisurewear and Perfumery, facing the escalators. Anyone coming down the escalators was obliged to look straight at them. They sat surrounded by the materials of their craft, ten pairs of brushes each, thirty kinds of polishes and creams and sprays, innumerable soft cloths, all of different colors, all used just once, then discarded. Customers had comfortable leather chairs to sit in and padded leather footrests for their feet. A big notice said: LET OUR PROFESSIONALS CLEAN YOUR SHOES TO AN UNRIVALED HIGH STANDARD, £2.50.

  It was a lot harder work than what the girls did. Nigel resented the girls, lounging about doing bugger all, getting to wear the sort of kit they’d never afford in their wildest dreams. But Ross pointed out to him that the boys would do better out of it in the long run. After all, it was a load of rubbish Karen and Fiona thinking this was the first step to a modeling career. As if it were Paris (or even London), as if they were on the catwalk instead of in a department-store window in a city that had one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country.

  Besides, he and Nigel were trained. They’d both had two weeks of intensive training. When he had been at his pitch at the foot of the escalator a week, Ross’s parents came in to see how he was getting on. Ross hadn’t much liked that; it was embarrassing, especially as his father thought he could get his shoes cleaned for free. But his mother understood.

  “Professional,” she said, nudging his father, “you see that.That’s what it says, ‘our professionals.’ You always wanted him to get some real training and now he’s got it. For a profession.”

  The W. S. Marsh Partnership got a subsidy for taking them on. Sixty pounds a week per head, someone had told him. And a lot of praise and a framed certificate from the Chamber of Commerce for their “distinguished contribution to alleviating youth unemployment.” The certificate hung up on the wall at the entrance to Men’s Leisurewear, which Ross privately thought rather too close for comfort. Still, it was a job and a job for which he was trained. He was twenty and it was the first employment he’d had since he left school, four years before.

  At school, when he was young and didn’t know any better, he was ambitious. He thought he could be a pilot or something in the media.

  “Yeah, or a brain surgeon,” said Nigel.

  But of course it turned out that any one of those was as unlikely as the others. His aims were lower now, but at least he could have aims. The job with the W. S. Marsh Partnership had made that possible. He’d set his sights on the footwear trade. Manager of a shoeshop. How to get there he didn’t know, because he didn’t know how managers of shoeshops got started, but still, he thought he had set his foot on the lowest rung of the ladder. While he cleaned shoes he imagined himself fitting on shoes or, better still, calling to an assistant to serve this customer or that. In these daydreams of his the assistant was always Karen, obliged to do his bidding, no longer favoring him with disdainful glances as he walked by her window on his way to lunch. Karen, though, not Fiona. Fiona sometimes lifted her head and smiled.

  The customers—Nigel called them “punters”—mostly treated him as if he didn’t exist. Once they’d paid, that is, and said what they wanted done. But no, that wasn’t quite right. Not as if he didn’t exist—more as if he were a machine. They sat down, put their feet on the footrest, and nodded at him. They kept their shoes on. Women always took their shoes off, passed him the shoes, and left their slender and delicate stockinged feet dangling. They talked to him, mostly about shoes, but they talked. The women were nicer than the men.

  “Yeah, well, you know what they’re after, don’t you?” said Nigel.

  It was a good idea, but Ross didn’t think it was true. If he had asked any of those pretty women who showed off their legs in front of him what they were doing that evening or did they fancy a movie, he’d have expected to get his face smacked. Or be reported. Be reported and probably sacked. The floor manager disliked them anyway. He was known to disapprove of anything that seemed designed to waylay or entrap customers. No assistants stood about in Perfumery spraying passing customers with scent. Mr. Costello wouldn’t allow it. He even discouraged assistants from asking customers if they might help them. He believed in the total freedom of everyone who entered W. S. Marsh’s doors. Short of shoplifting, that is.

  Every morning, when Ross and Nigel took up their positions facing the escalators ten minutes before the store opened at nine, Mr. Costello arrived to move them back against the wall, to try to reduce their allotted space, and to examine both of them closely, checking that they were properly dressed, that their hair was short enough and their hands clean. Mr. Costello himself was a model of elegance, six feet tall, slender, strongly resembling Linford Christie, if you could imagine Linford Christie dressed in a black suit, ice-white shirt, and satin tie. When he spoke he usually extended one long—preternaturally long—well-manicured sepia forefinger in either Nigel’s direction or Ross’s and wagged it as if beating time to music.

  “You do not speak to the customers until they speak to you. You do not say ‘hi,’ you do not say ‘cheers.’ ” Here the unsmiling glance was turned on Nigel and the finger wagged. “‘Cheers’ is no substitute for ‘thank you.’ You do not attract attention to yourselves. Above all, you do not catch customers’ eyes or seem to be trying to attract their attention. Customers of the W. S. Marsh Partnership mu
st be free to pay untrammeled visits to this store.”

  Mr. Costello had a degree in business studies, and “untrammeled” was one of his favorite words. Neither Ross nor Nigel knew what it meant. But they both understood that Mr. Costello would prefer them not to be there. He would have liked an excuse to be rid of them. Once or twice he had been heard to say that no one had paid an employer to take him on when he was twenty; he had been obliged to take an evening job to make ends meet at college. Any little thing would be an excuse, Ross thought, any stepping out of line in the presence of a customer.

  But they had few customers. After those early days when he and Nigel had been a novelty, business ceased to boom. Having your shoes cleaned at W. S. Marsh was expensive. Out in the High Street you could get it done for a pound, and guests in the hotels used the electric shoe polisher for nothing. Mostly it was the regulars who came to them, businessmen from the big office blocks, women who had nothing to do but go shopping and had time on their hands. This worried Ross, especially since in Mr. Costello’s opinion, sixty pounds a week or no sixty pounds, no commercial concern was going to keep them on in idleness.

  “It’s not as if you are an ornament to the place,” he’d said with an unpleasant smile.

  And they were often idle. After the half dozen who came first thing in the morning, there’d be a lull until, one by one and infrequently, the women appeared. It was typical of the women to stand and look at them, to consider, maybe discuss the matter with a companion, smile at them, and pass on into Perfumery. Ross sat on his stool, gazing up the escalator. If you did what Nigel did and stared at the customers at ground level, if you happened to eye the girls’ legs, you got a reprimand. Mr. Costello walked round the ground floor all day, passing the foot of the escalators once an hour, observing everything with his Black & Decker drill eyes. When there was nothing to do Ross watched the people going up the escalator on the right-hand side and coming down the escalator on the left. And he watched them with his face fixed into a polite expression, careful to catch no eyes.

  Karen and Fiona seldom came to get their shoes cleaned. After all, they only wore their own shoes to come in and go home in. But sometimes, on wet days, at lunchtime, one or the other of them would present herself to Ross to have a pair of damp or muddy loafers polished. They didn’t like the way Nigel looked at them, and both preferred Ross.

  Karen didn’t open her mouth while he cleaned her suede boots. Her eyes roved round the store as if she were expecting to see someone she knew. Fiona talked, but still he couldn’t believe his luck when, extending a slim foot and handing him a green leather brogue, she asked him if he’d like to go for a drink on the way home. He nodded—he couldn’t speak—and looked deep into her large turquoise eyes. Then she went, her shoes sparkling, turning once to flash him a smile. Nigel pretended he hadn’t heard, but a flush turned his face a mottled red. Ross, his heart thudding, gazed away to where he always gazed, the ascending and descending escalators.

  He was getting somewhere. He was trained, a professional. It could only lead onward and to better things. Fiona, of the kingfisher eyes and the cobweb-fine feet, was going to have a drink with him. He gazed upward, dreaming, seeing his future as the escalator that ceaselessly and endlessly climbed. Then he saw something else.

  At the top of the escalator stood a woman. She was holding on to the rail and looking back over one shoulder toward the man who came up behind her. Ross recognized the man; he had once or twice cleaned his shoes and actually been talked to and smiled at and thanked. And once he had seen him outside, giving a passing glance at Fiona and Karen’s window. He was about forty but the woman was older, a thin, frail woman in a very short skirt that showed most of her long bony legs. She had bright hair, the color of the yellow hammock Fiona reclined in. As she turned her head to look down the escalator, as she stepped onto it, Ross saw the man put out one hand and give her a hard push in the middle of her back.

  Everything happened very fast. She fell with a loud protracted scream. She fell forward, just like someone diving into deep water, but it wasn’t water—it was moving metal, and halfway down as her head caught against one of the steps she rolled over in a perfect somersault. All the time she was screaming.

  The man behind her was shouting as he ran down. People at the top of the escalator shrank back from it as the man went down alone. Ross and Nigel had sprung to their feet. The screaming had fetched assistants and customers running from Perfumery and Men’s Leisurewear, but it had stopped. It had split the air as an earthquake splits rock, but now it had stopped and for a moment there was utter silence.

  In that moment Ross saw her, lying spread at the foot of the escalator. A funny thought came to him, that he’d never seen anyone look so relaxed. Then he understood she looked relaxed because she was dead. He made a sound, a kind of whimper. He could no longer see her—she was surrounded by people—but he could see the man who had pushed her. He was so tall, he towered above everyone, even above Mr. Costello.

  Nigel said, “Did you see her shoes? Five-inch heels, at least five-inch. She must have caught her heel.”

  “She didn’t catch her heel,” Ross said.

  A doctor had appeared. There was always a doctor out shopping, which was the reason the National Health Service was in such a mess, Ross’s mother said. The main doors burst open and an ambulance crew came running in. Mr. Costello cleared a path among the onlookers to let them through and then he tried to get people back to work or shopping or whatever they’d been doing. But before he had got very far a voice came over the public-address system telling customers the south escalators would be out of service for the day and Perfumery and Men’s Leisurewear closed.

  “What d’you mean, she didn’t catch her heel?” said Nigel.

  Ross ought to have said then.This was his first chance to tell. He nearly told Nigel what he’d seen. But then he got separated from him by the ambulance men carrying the woman out on a stretcher, pushing Nigel to one side and him to the other, the tall man walking behind them, his face white, his head bowed. Mr. Costello came up to them.

  “I suppose you thought you could skive off for the rest of the day,” he said. “Sorry to disappoint you. We’re making you a new pitch upstairs in Ladies’ Shoes.”

  This was his second chance. Mr. Costello stood there while they packed their materials into the cases. Nigel carried the notice board that said LET OUR PROFESSIONALS CLEAN YOUR SHOES TO AN UNRIVALED HIGH STANDARD, £2.50. The escalators had stopped running, so they followed Mr. Costello to the lifts and Ross pressed the button and they waited. Now was the time to tell Mr. Costello what he had seen. He should tell Mr. Costello and through Mr. Costello the top management and through them, or maybe before they were brought into it, the police.

  “I saw the man that was with her push her down the escalator.”

  He didn’t say it. The lift came and took them up to the second floor. The departmental manager, a woman, showed them their new pitch, and they laid out their things. No one had their shoes cleaned, but a girl Nigel knew who worked in the stockroom came over and told them that the woman who fell down the escalator was a Mrs. Russell, the tall man with her was her husband, and they had a big house up on The Mount, which was the best part of town, where all the nobs lived. They were good customers of the Marsh Partnership and were often in the store; Mrs. Russell had an account there and a Marsh Partnership Customer Card. Ross went off for his lunch, and when he returned Nigel went off for his, coming back to add more details that he had picked up in the cafeteria. Mr. and Mrs. Russell had only been married a year.They were devoted to each other.

  “Mr. Russell is devastated,” said Nigel. “They’re keeping him under sedation.”

  When the departmental manager came along to see how they were getting on, Ross knew that this was his third chance and perhaps his last. She told them everything would be back to normal next day, they’d be back at the foot of the escalator between Perfumery and Men’s Leisurewear, and now he should tel
l her what he had seen. But he didn’t and he wouldn’t. He knew that now because he saw very clearly what would happen if he told.

  He would attract attention to himself. In fact, it was hard to think of any way to attract more attention to himself. He would have to describe what he had seen, identify Mr. Russell—a customer, a good customer!— and say he had seen Mr. Russell put his hand in the middle of his wife’s back and push her down the escalator. He alone had seen it. Not Nigel, not the customers, but himself alone.They wouldn’t believe him; he’d get the sack. He had had this job just six weeks and he would get the sack.

  So he wouldn’t tell. At least, he wouldn’t tell Mr. Costello. There was only one person he really wanted to tell, and that was Fiona, but when they met and had their drink and talked and had another drink and she said she’d see him again the next night, he didn’t say anything about Mr. Russell. He didn’t want to spoil things, have her think he was a nut or maybe a liar. Once he was at home he thought about telling his mother. Not his father—his father would just get on to the police—but his mother, who sometimes had glimmerings of understanding. But she had gone to bed, and the next morning he wasn’t in the mood for talking about it.

  Something strange had happened in the night. He was no longer quite sure of his facts. He had begun to doubt. Had he really seen that rich and powerful man, that tall middle-aged man, one of the few men who had ever talked to him while he had his shoes cleaned, had he really seen that man push his wife down the escalator? Was it reasonable? Was it possible? What motive could he have had? He was rich, he had only recently married, he was known for being devoted to his wife.