Dark Corners: A Novel

by Ruth Rendell

  They drove on, through open spaces or streets, she could no longer tell. They were all out of the car and halfway up a path when she thought she had a chance of escape, but her ankles were still tied and the single hobbled step she took resulted in her sprawling. Redhead picked her up with rough hands, and once they were inside a door, slapped her face on both cheeks painfully. The scarf was pulled off and she was dragged upstairs to a single room at the top.

  Most people of Lizzie’s age would not have been able to identify the type of dwelling she was in. They would have known it was old and small and that was about it. She hardly knew why she bothered to amass all this stuff in her head. Why did she care? Perhaps she thought it might be useful to know once she got out of here. If she got out.

  She got off the bed where they had dumped her and, wide awake for the first time since she had become their prisoner, stumbled across to the window.

  She was in the kind of cottage her grandmother had lived in. Such small terraced or sometimes semi-detached houses are to be found in every London suburb, tucked away among blocks of flats, tall Victorian terraces and large single houses. A few are still occupied by a solitary elderly resident; others have been bought by young couples who have smartened them up and filled them with the latest equipment.

  This cottage, Lizzie saw, had been lived in by someone of her grandmother’s generation. She could tell by the single bed and the cover on it called an eiderdown, the two little armchairs with cushions on their seats shaped like doughnuts, and the twenty or thirty tiny ornaments on the mantelpiece: china dogs, a brass bell, two framed photographs and a number of unidentifiable objects. She thought this old lady – for it was surely a woman – must have died and left the house to a relation, perhaps Redhead or Scotty’s mother, and that was how they happened to have possession of it.

  The window was large, far too large for the cottage, and although it had been put in perhaps only ten years previously, the frame looked jerry-built and rotten. The curtains, pink roses on a blue and green background, were drawn, and Lizzie pulled them back so that she looked out on to what seemed to be a public park. She could, she realised, be anywhere south of the river Thames, a vast area of London she barely knew. Below her were tall trees, smaller trees and bushes, tennis courts, paths winding among flower beds, people strolling. Birds in the trees, English ones, and those green parakeets that were English now, having come here to live and settled down happily.

  She thought, feeling happier suddenly, tomorrow they will let me go. I know it, but I don’t know how I do. She sat down in one of the little armchairs and swung her bound legs up on to the other chair. It is almost as easy to untie a knot in a rope with cuffed hands as with free ones, and she had this one undone in seconds. Someone would be bound to come in, so she sat where she was with the rope tied loosely round her ankles and waited. Someone did come. It was Redhead, with a plate of chips and a can of Diet Coke. He didn’t speak as he took off her cuffs, allowing her to eat, and he didn’t even glance at her ankles.

  As he was leaving she said, ‘Where’s the bathroom?’

  ‘Downstairs. I’m not taking you.’

  Once she would have argued, pleaded, even cried. Not now. She thought of the old woman who had lived here, waited till Redhead had gone, and looked under the bed. It was there, a china chamber pot, as she had once heard someone call it. She would have to use it, and worse, leave it for one of them to empty. The alternative was to pour the contents out of the window. People used to do that, she had read in a social history book, in the days when there was no plumbing.

  Revelling in the fact that her hands were free for the first time in days, she used the pot and pushed it back under the bed, so as not to have to see it. Then she lay down under the eiderdown and thought about the old and the poor who not so long ago had used chamber pots and carried big pottery jugs of hot water to fill bowls for washing in. It was the first time she had thought about something other than herself and her plight. For some unaccountable reason, going to bed with an almost empty stomach on top of a pot full of urine in a stuffy room no longer seemed a dreadful fate. It would pass, she knew; it would soon end.

  It must have been four or five in the morning when the crash woke her. Outside it was getting light, and a large pane from the window in her room had been smashed. Most of it was lying in shards on her bed.

  Lizzie got up and put on her shoes before making her way to the window, glass crunching under her feet. Standing there looking down, she heard thuds and bangs as Scotty and Redhead ran downstairs. Seconds later they both appeared carrying bags and hoisting backpacks and ran up the street in search of their car. They were abandoning her.

  What had caused the crash? Had someone fired a gun at the window? Had something exploded? Scotty and Redhead evidently thought so. Lizzie knew she must leave as quickly as she could in spite of the early hour, in spite of Stacey’s soiled black and white dress. She opened the door of the wardrobe – on the off chance, her grandmother would have said. Nothing was inside but a padded jacket, shiny, purple but not dirty. It could have belonged to anyone, but no matter. She put it on.

  It was only at this point that she remembered she had no money, no bus or tube pass, no credit card. But she didn’t care. Freedom was the main thing, and she had freedom. She went downstairs. The front door was open, and out in the street there was no one but a young man pulling a case on wheels along a path in the park. It didn’t matter which way she walked, though it made sense to go in the opposite direction from Scotty and Redhead.

  She saw what must have caused her smashed window. The biggest pigeon she had ever seen had flown straight into the glass and lay dead, a shining mass of blue and green and gold and brown feathers, on the pavement.

  ‘Oh, poor bird,’ said Lizzie aloud, tears in her eyes. She bent down and picked up the dead pigeon and laid it on the grass just inside the park gate, covering it as best she could with leaves.

  She walked along painfully in Stacey’s ridiculous high heels, and read on a street name the postcode SE13. Where that was, beyond its being south-east London, she had no idea. There might be a tube station, though, and there would certainly be buses, but neither would be of any use to her with no pass and no cards and no money.

  What she could do came to her quite suddenly, and she thought what a fool she had been not to have thought of it before. The sole form of transport you paid for only at the end of the journey was a taxi.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  TOM AND DOT were still trying not to feel anxious about Lizzie.

  It was Dot’s belief that she must be somewhere on holiday. Cornwall was a likely choice, because Lizzie knew someone whose parents lived there. Tom fixed on Barcelona. It was very popular with young people; indeed, he’d read that visitor numbers – formerly about a million a year – had increased sevenfold in recent years. But another day had come and brought no Lizzie with it.

  They got up an hour or so later than usual on weekend mornings, having always done so when Tom worked, so Dot happened to be standing at their bedroom window at twenty past eight on Sunday morning, drawing back the curtains, when a black cab pulled up outside their gate. A girl she didn’t at first recognise got out of it and ran up the path. She was young, with straggly caramel-blonde hair, and a short black and white dress covered by a cheap shiny padded jacket probably bought from a market stall. Even from this distance she looked dirty, very dirty.

  It was Lizzie.

  Tom was sitting up in bed, drinking the tea Dot had brought him. ‘Our daughter is at the front door,’ Dot told him. And then, using a phrase popular with her own mother, ‘She looks as if she’s been pulled through a hedge backwards.’

  The door was opened to admit a Lizzie even dirtier than she had looked from upstairs. ‘Mum, can you pay the man?’ she said. ‘It’s a terrible lot but I haven’t any money.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Thirty-five pounds.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Dot, wh
o did.

  In the house, Lizzie said she’d pay her back but was first going to have a bath and wash her hair. Dot didn’t ask her where she had been or why she was dirty and without money. As for Lizzie, she wasn’t sure what she would tell her parents about what had happened to her.

  Lying in the bath, she came to a decision. If she told her parents the truth, they would only make a fuss. Without a doubt, they would want to inform the police. She would be asked awkward questions that she might struggle to answer, like why was she living in Stacey’s flat, drinking her drink, wearing her clothes? She couldn’t also help feeling a little complicit in her own abduction: had she not wanted people to believe she was someone else; someone a lot wealthier than she actually was? Now, she just wanted to be left in peace to live her own life and forget the whole awful episode.

  In the steaming hot bathroom she shuddered, ducked her head under the water and massaged in the shampoo. No, what she wanted most to do was dry her hair and put on some make-up. She knew that her mum had kept some of her old clothes, so she should be able to find something clean to wear. She’d go out and enjoy her freedom, maybe go for a walk around Willesden, or follow her father’s example and have a bus ride.

  ‘Never explain’ was a good way to live, she decided, getting out of the bath. It would be far easier for all concerned if no one knew where she had been these past few days.

  Picking up the disgusting black and white dress, she rolled it into a ball, determined to drop it into the first litter bin she came to.

  He wouldn’t tell anyone, Carl decided, falling asleep as soon as he got into bed and sleeping soundly all night.

  No dreams came, there were no sudden awakenings to horrid realisation, no remembering in the warm darkness what had happened. When he’d got in the previous night, Nicola had brought him a glass of water and some sort of hot drink, but he hadn’t touched either of them. When he woke, he had no idea of the time except that it must be morning, maybe very early morning, though it might have been light for hours.

  The silence was broken by the ringing of the doorbell, Dermot’s bell, as audible down here as in the upstairs flat. He wouldn’t answer it; he was sure he couldn’t speak of Dermot, might never speak of him again. The bell rang once more, and this time Nicola went to the door. She had left the bedroom door open, so he could hear what she said.

  ‘He lives in the top flat. You should go upstairs and ring at the door that’s facing you.’

  It must be the police. Of course. Someone had found Dermot’s body, established where he lived, and had come here to ask about him, to tell his wife or girlfriend or parents or whichever of his people lived in Falcon Mews. Carl heard their feet on the stairs, then Dermot’s doorbell ringing, and turned over to bury his face in the pillow. He remembered a favourite saying of Dermot’s that was supposed to be funny: ‘No answer was the stern reply.’

  Nicola had a very clear, rather beautiful speaking voice, and he heard her telling the police officers that Dermot might have gone early to work, told them about the pet clinic and where it was. There was some conversation, Nicola said, ‘Oh, no!’ and he knew they must have told her Dermot was dead.

  They left. He heard the front door close, and Nicola came into the bedroom.

  ‘I heard,’ he said, his voice sounding dulled and broken as anyone would say it should have done.

  ‘They don’t know how it happened. Or they didn’t say. They didn’t say anything about foul play. That’s the term, isn’t it?’

  ‘Newspapers’ term, I expect.’

  ‘He was found in Jerome Crescent. It’s a shock, I must say. Sudden death is always a shock, isn’t it, even if you didn’t much like the dead person. I must go to work now, but I expect they’ll come back, they’ll want to search the place, or they will if his death was suspicious. You’ll talk to them? You know more about Dermot than anyone, I should think.’

  He listened to her going, her high heels on the stairs, the pause while she picked up her bag, the creak the front door made and the click as she closed it as softly as she could behind her.

  It must be Monday morning, Carl supposed. He got up and walked into the shower, not waiting for the water to heat up but stepping into it and shivering at its cold touch. Jeans, sweatshirt, trainers. All much as usual, though it wasn’t as usual, was it? Eating was impossible. He would never eat anything again. Stretched out on his father’s sofa, he wondered why he always thought of this piece of furniture as Dad’s. Almost everything in the house had been his father’s, yet he never thought of the tables and chairs and beds as his, only this sofa. The police would know by now that Dermot had been killed, that his death had not been an accident. ‘Murdered’ why don’t you say? he thought. You mustn’t say it, though, when they come and talk to you. You must just answer what they ask.

  His throat was parched and his mouth dry, no matter how much water he drank. There must be some reason for that but he didn’t know what it was. He waited a long time for the police. Perhaps they would never come. Perhaps they thought Dermot had been killed in a road accident and they were searching for the driver of the car that hit him. Such a thing could hardly happen in narrow, bendy Jerome Crescent.

  The police arrived at ten to one, when Carl had almost given them up. He had to tell himself as he was walking towards the front door not to speak to them unless they spoke to him, not to express any opinions about Dermot, not to ask questions; above all, not to speak of murder, or of Dermot as ‘the murdered man’.

  They told him rather baldly what had happened. They asked only one question, and that was whether they could go into Dermot’s flat. No reason was given. If he were an innocent man, nothing more than Dermot’s landlord, would he ask if they had seen Miss Soames? Did they know he had a fiancée? Did she know what had happened? Oh yes, they would take care of notifying her, said the older man. Carl gave them a key and they went upstairs.

  Carl hadn’t given a thought to Sybil until now. Picturing her hearing the news, understanding that the man she was going to marry had been killed in the street, more or less outside her own home, would be what the newspapers would call ‘a devastating blow’. Poor Sybil. Perhaps she had loved Dermot, been in love with him, and now this had happened. Don’t be a fool, Carl told himself. Pull yourself together.

  The police came back downstairs. The younger one was carrying a briefcase, and it seemed to Carl to have more in it than when they had gone up. Papers, certificates, records of something or other? Of no interest to him, nothing to do with him, nothing to incriminate him. The older one said it might be helpful to have his phone number in case they needed to get in touch, and Carl gave it to him. He saw them out, went into the living room and sat down. From what he had read and seen, he might have expected them to ask where he had been the previous evening, but they hadn’t asked. They must believe that the only connection between him and Dermot was the usual relationship between landlord and tenant: remote, a matter of business – one paid the rent, the other received it. Of course it hadn’t been like that, but how would they know?

  Lying on the sofa in the living room, he had nothing to do, almost nothing to think about. But after a time, his mind filled with scenes of the previous evening, of the dark waters of the canal and his backpack floating, then sinking with that queer sucking sound, and of the fat, round goose as green as the grass and the oak leaves, sitting on the hall table, quietly mocking him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  NICOLA CAME HOME early, just after five, bringing with her the Evening Standard. Carl had no desire to read the details, but he looked at the picture of Dermot – when he was alive, of course; there was no picture of him dead – and read the story to please Nicola.

  She wanted to talk about what had happened, as more or less everyone in Maida Vale would now be discussing the case. Why would anyone kill Dermot? Money was the general consensus, or even to steal his phone. Was his phone missing? The newspaper didn’t say. Someone with a lively imagination suggested t
hat a former lover of Sybil Soames, jealous of this new fiancé, had done it. Several residents of Falcon Mews who had never spoken to Carl before approached him in the street when he and Nicola went out to eat, to express their amazement, disgust, horror or disbelief. What a shock it must have been for him and the young lady, said Mr Kaleejah, walking his dog for the third time that day. Nothing like this had ever happened before in the vicinity of Elgin Avenue, said someone else. That it hadn’t been anywhere near Elgin Avenue, Carl didn’t say. He smiled and nodded. Nicola shook her head and thanked them for their concern.

  They walked to the Canal Café on the Edgware Road and ate fish and chips and drank lager. Soon, thought Carl, when I find a new tenant, I’ll have money to pay for things myself.

  Two days passed and the police didn’t return. Nor did they phone. The only caller was Sybil. Carl wasn’t particularly surprised by this visit, though he hadn’t exactly expected to see her. What astonished him was her appearance. She was dressed in deep mourning: long black skirt, big black shoulder bag, high-necked black blouse and black jacket, her head wrapped in a black scarf like a Muslim woman. He knew he ought to say how sorry he was for her loss, and he did say it, hesitating over the words, almost stammering.

  She came into the hallway, saying, ‘Yes, it’s been terrible for me. I shall never get over it.’

  He thought he should ask her to sit down, offer her something to drink, remembering that she wouldn’t touch alcohol. But the need to offer her a seat and a glass of orange juice failed to arise as she walked straight upstairs and, with the key Dermot must have given her, let herself into the top flat. She had come for some of her things she had left behind, Carl supposed. Nothing could be more likely, seeing that she had spent day after day here with Dermot. And sure enough, after about ten minutes she came back down the stairs, the black bag stuffed with what appeared to be heavy objects. Opening the door, she said to him – oddly, he thought – that he hadn’t seen the last of her.