Dark Corners: A Novel

by Ruth Rendell

  He carried the heavy bag up to the railings and set it down on the pavement. Things happened fast after that. He was a little way away from it, back at the bus stop reading the timetable up on the post, when there came a huge blinding flash and a roar as the sinister black bag exploded.

  When Tom came to, he was lying on the pavement and a woman and a small boy were beside him, both prone. The woman was bleeding, Tom couldn’t see where from, only that she was alive. The boy struggled to sit up, then get to his feet. Blood was pouring from his left arm.

  Tom felt for his mobile phone, but it wasn’t needed; he could see three other people on their phones. Somewhere a siren was braying. It seemed to belong to an ambulance that roared to a halt at the bus stop. The paramedics tumbled out. Tom was amazed by the speed with which they had got there, and then by the arrival of a second ambulance, and one police car after another. Holding on to the bus stop pole for the support he suddenly needed, he watched the police holding the uninjured people back from the place where the bomb had gone off; the place where he’d put it. The woman and the boy with the bleeding arm were already being loaded on to stretchers. He looked away as another woman on a stretcher was covered with a white sheet that meant death.

  A paramedic was telling him he must get into the proffered wheelchair and be taken to hospital when a policeman interrupted them and asked him if he had seen what had happened.

  ‘He’s a hero,’ said the woman who’d been with the small boy. ‘I saw him carry that bomb thing off the bus. He saved all the people on the bus.’

  Tom was dreadfully embarrassed.

  ‘Is that a fact, sir?’ said the policeman.

  ‘Well, yes. I suppose so,’ said Tom. ‘I’m not a hero, though. I’m going to get on the next bus.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said a paramedic. ‘Your leg is bleeding and your right arm doesn’t look too good. Come along, into the chair and we’ll get you seen to.’

  So the wheelchair was unfolded and Tom was put into it much against his will. Sitting down, he could see a wound in his knee and blood leaking from his arm. The paramedic, pushing him to the second ambulance, said, ‘You were very brave. If that had gone off a couple of minutes sooner, it’d have blown you to kingdom come.’

  Lifted into the ambulance, Tom looked back at the scene. Most of the people had been picked up from the pavement, but signs of them remained, blood lying in shallow pools. He wanted to go home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ‘ONE GOOD THING has come out of it, though,’ said Dot Milsom on the phone. ‘This ghastly bomb has put an end to all his junketing about on buses.’

  ‘You ought to be proud of him.’ Lizzie was still at an age to enjoy setting her parents against one another. ‘He was amazing. A hero – that’s what people are saying about him. Where is he now?’

  ‘He was brought home last night. I suppose you’ll come over and see him?’

  ‘I will tomorrow. I have a dinner date tonight. Say hello to him for me.’

  ‘I know it’s trendy to say that, but wouldn’t it be a lot nicer to send your love?’ But Lizzie had put the phone down.

  Adam Yates, her Basenji date from the clinic, had been to the Iverson Road flat several times by now. He said he liked it, and that she was lucky to have a self-contained place of her own. He himself owned a flat in Tufnell Park, and although he made little of it, he couldn’t disguise its considerable size and pleasant leafy location. This evening, she thought, he would come back with her, and this time – would he stay?

  In half an hour’s time he was calling for her and they were going to the Tricycle Theatre, just down the road really. You didn’t dress up for the Tricycle, but it wasn’t jeans and Primark T-shirt wear either, so Lizzie put on her best black trousers and a white shirt with a cardigan. Reviewing her conversation with her mother, she liked the idea of inviting Adam to one of her family dinners, but first she must take all that stuff belonging to Dermot McKinnon to his old flat in Falcon Mews. Perhaps she could do it one night next week, before she went to visit her parents?

  The front doorbell rang absolutely on time. No previous boyfriend had ever been so punctual. The trouble was that she still felt fearful when someone rang the bell, after what had happened with Redhead and Scotty.

  As she went to answer the door, she thought, I’ll tell Adam how I feel and then tell him the whole story. He won’t be like Gervaise Weatherspoon; he’ll believe me.

  Carl slept well that night but awoke next morning to a weight of dread that shaped itself into sickness. He could eat nothing, drink nothing, not even coffee. He waited for Sybil’s footsteps on the stairs, holding his breath. They sounded, a heavy clumping, and then came the front door banging with more of a crash than usual.

  Nicola went to work. She’d told him she would be late home because she was going out in the evening with two of her old flatmates, and the boyfriend of one of them. Carl had been asked but he had said no, he was sorry but he didn’t feel up to it. She said goodbye to him that morning with more than usual tenderness and love, and he was sure this was due to that convincing lie he had told. Perhaps he should lie to her more? But no, there were only a few hours left if he did what he meant to do. And he must.

  Sybil was asking to die as Dermot had. This was another thing the two had in common: a propensity to invite their own deaths. But this death couldn’t come from the stairs or from a fall from a window. Instead, some impulse sent him up to the bathroom and the store of alternative medicine his father had accumulated.

  The fifty capsules of the DNP that Stacey had not purchased were there in the front of the cabinet, and there too, behind them, was the powder-to-liquid variety in sachets. It said on the box that the sachets should be dissolved in water and then drunk down. This was what Carl was looking for. Offering Sybil the DNP powder would be no more murder than selling DNP to Stacey had been. The last thing he had wanted was to kill Stacey, but he wanted this concoction to kill Sybil.

  But had Sybil read the coroner’s report in the newspaper? Would she know about DNP? Probably not. Sybil didn’t impress Carl as the type who would read much of any newspapers, including the tabloids.

  Carl took the box of sachets down to the kitchen, opened one and dropped the contents into a glass of water. It turned bright yellow. This, he told himself, was just a trial run: now he knew how it reacted. He found a leaflet inside the box which stated that DNP was for rapid weight loss. That it was a dangerous drug, likely to cause death if taken in large quantities, was mentioned at the end in very small print. The only difficulty now, he thought, was how to get Sybil to take it.

  If Nicola came upon it, she would know what it was. She must never see it. But she wouldn’t be home this evening before about ten, and by that time the deed could be done. Sybil would arrive home between five thirty and six and he must catch her in the hallway and make some friendly overture to her, using Nicola’s absence as his reason for such unlikely behaviour on his part.

  At lunchtime he went out. Nicola had left him some money, a twenty-pound note, and although he knew she had meant it for food, he spent it on two bottles of wine and fed himself from the fridge, bread that he toasted and the end of a piece of cheese. Before Sybil was due home, he placed a couple of DNP sachets on the hall table on top of the leaflet on which he stood the glass he had used. She came in at ten minutes to six, and ten minutes later he found her standing over the table, reading the leaflet. His heart thumped.

  ‘I’m glad I’ve caught you,’ he said. ‘I wanted to ask you in for a drink; it doesn’t have to be alcohol. Nicola’s away for the evening, you see, and I wanted some company.’

  She looked him in the face, puzzled. ‘Well, OK, I don’t mind.’

  ‘I thought it would be a good idea for us to try to be friends. I know we haven’t been on very good terms, but that ought to change, don’t you think?’

  Astonishingly, she seemed to believe him. ‘I’ll just go up and leave my stuff,’ she said.

  He went
back into the living room, but came out after a minute to see if she had taken the sachets on the table. She hadn’t. Would she ask him about them? He could only wait and see.

  She returned more quickly than he expected, having changed her T-shirt and cardigan for a fussy pink blouse with a frill round the neck and her boots for court shoes from which her feet bulged. Was she trying to look attractive for him? He found that disgusting. He offered her Nicola’s breakfast orange juice; it was all he had of the soft-drink kind.

  ‘You’re having wine, aren’t you? I’ll have some of that,’ she said, evidently not as abstemious as Dermot had been.

  Carl handed her a glass of the Pinot Grigio he had bought that afternoon. She took it without a word, then said, ‘Haven’t you got any nibbles?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘You want to get some in. I shouldn’t have them, though. I don’t want to put on any more weight.’

  Again he felt that thump of the heart. Should he mention the sachets and the leaflet in the hall? Better not. ‘Snacks between meals aren’t a good idea.’ He could hardly believe he had uttered such a sentence. ‘Are you on a diet?’ was the nearest he would get to touching on the substance and the directions in the hallway.

  ‘I like my food too much for that,’ she said. She drank a long draught of her wine. ‘Does wine put weight on you?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sybil.’

  ‘Give me a fill-up, will you?’

  He did, willingly, now that he could sense the question that was coming. ‘What’s that stuff out in the hallway?’

  He wouldn’t offer it to her. ‘I don’t know. Nicola left it there.’

  ‘I’d better go up now. I’ve got my tea to get.’

  Not dinner or supper, but tea. Nicola would call him a snob, and maybe he was. He stood up to see her out, then went back into the room and listened. She had come back down the stairs and was just outside the door. He heard a little sound, a click as of glass tapping on a hard surface, then footsteps on the stairs again.

  Waiting for the footfalls to fade up the stairs was the longest he had ever waited for anything in his life, yet it could only have endured for a minute at the most. Then he went outside.

  The sachets, leaflet and glass had gone from the table.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THAT NIGHT, CARL made himself scrambled egg on one slice of toast and a can of baked beans on the other. Another bottle of wine remained and a small amount in the bottle he and Sybil had been drinking from. He sat there and listened, though for what he didn’t know. A scream? A groan? A stumbling down the stairs? There was silence, a silence that endured for long, slow minutes that seemed like hours. Just before ten, Nicola came home. It occurred to him that he shouldn’t have told Sybil that it was Nicola who had put the sachets and the leaflet in the hallway. But surely Sybil wouldn’t mention this to Nicola. She never spoke to her. Still, it was a small, niggling worry.

  Next day, Sybil went to work, and Carl realised that while he’d been tormenting himself the previous evening, speculating about her brewing up that yellow drink and suffering, perhaps on the verge of death, she had been passing a pleasant few hours.

  Her morning departure coincided with Nicola’s, and they set off together, sharing an umbrella. They might have been friends, once schoolfellows, chatting away and smiling. Is she telling Nic now? Carl thought. Is she explaining how she took the sachets without permission, just picked them up from the hall table? Why had he been such a fool as to give Sybil that explanation for their presence?

  He had still done nothing about a job, so in an effort to put that right and to put Sybil out of his mind, he went into the delicatessen, which was advertising for an assistant. When the manager heard he had no training and no experience, he said he was afraid not. Carl went into the hand car wash, which hadn’t advertised, and asked if they wanted anyone. They told him they might in November; men didn’t want to work outside in the winter months, so he could come back then. He had plundered Nicola’s housekeeping tin so had enough for coffee and even for a very sparse lunch.

  Sybil came home at five, which was early for her. Watching her from the ground-floor window, he seemed to see purpose in her heavy tread, as if, on her journey home, she had decided on some particular step to take. She was lost to his sight as she let herself into the house.

  Nothing happened. Carl made himself a cup of tea, which if taken without milk was the cheapest thing he could drink. Why had Sybil come home early? Perhaps she’d said she wasn’t well. A girl behind the checkout at Lidl couldn’t just take a couple of hours off by making an excuse about a delivery or someone reading the meter. But it didn’t matter: she was home, and it must be to take the DNP.

  It occurred to Carl then how significant DNP had been in his life, first leading to Dermot’s behaviour, his blackmail and his death; now ridding him, he hoped, of Dermot’s blackmailing girlfriend. He sat downstairs on Dad’s sofa, listening, though for what he didn’t know. All he heard was his phone ringing. Nicola.

  ‘A girl I know at work has two tickets for the cinema,’ she told him. ‘Her friend who was going with her can’t, so she’s offered it to me. It’s for Before I Go to Sleep. I won’t be late.’

  He was glad she wouldn’t be there. There might just be silence. On the other hand, there might be shouting or screaming. Sybil might come down complaining of pain or crying. The first symptom would be sweating. Her temperature could go up to 46 degrees. She wouldn’t have taken the stuff upstairs with her if she didn’t mean at least to try it, he thought. And you couldn’t just try DNP; it was all or nothing. He must wait.

  Feeling the way he did, tense, slightly sick, screwed up, he couldn’t contemplate eating anything. Drink, yes, and there was a whole bottle of wine awaiting him. Screw your courage to the sticking place, he thought, and we’ll not fail. That was Macbeth, Macbeth who was going to do murder. Like him. He fetched the wine, opened it, and drank a whole glass straight down.

  There was still no sound from upstairs.

  Lizzie was sitting outside a restaurant in Clifton Road, reading the Evening Standard. Its front page featured what it called the Bus Bomb, and her father’s part in it.

  Like all the other newspapers of the day, the Standard was also calling him a hero, the brave man who had carried a ticking bomb off the 55 bus to comparative safety. None of the other papers had mentioned ticking, but all ran the photo of the now famous Thomas Milsom, described (inaccurately) as a press photographer. The ‘happily married bus rider’ and his ‘beautiful daughter Elizabeth’ lived (again inaccurately) in a ‘fine detached home’ in north-west London. Mr Milsom, known to his many friends as Tom, would certainly receive an award for bravery, and possibly an OBE from the Queen. On an inside page was another photo of Tom, with Lizzie and Dot this time, and a picture of the roadway where the bomb had gone off and of the injured being taken away on stretchers.

  Feeling pleased for her dad, and even more pleased with her own coverage, Lizzie drank her coffee and ate the chocolate biscuit that came with it. She picked up the large plastic carrier containing the late Dermot McKinnon’s property and hoisted its straps on to her shoulder. It was ten to seven. Leaving the Evening Standard on the table, she went inside to pay.

  The girl behind the till also had a Standard, and did a double take. ‘That’s you! That’s your dad! You must be so proud of him.’

  It felt to Lizzie quite a long walk to Falcon Mews, especially as she was carrying a heavy bag and wearing high heels. Adam phoned when she was in Castellain Road. He’d finished the work he was doing and said he would come and meet her. ‘Amazing about your dad. It’s been all over the papers. There’s a picture of you, too.’

  Lizzie said she’d seen it, and told him the number of the mews house where she’d be.

  Five minutes later, she was ringing the doorbell.

  Carl put the television on and caught the bus bomb story. He seemed to remember that man Milsom from years ago; he’d been at
school with his daughter, he thought. Impossible to concentrate, though. He switched it off and went back to where he had been sitting for the past half-hour, almost at the top of the upper flight of stairs, as near as he could to the top flat. And he had been rewarded by sounds. Not very loud sounds; in fact sounds that could hardly be identified, grunts really, and sighs, nothing more than that. He noticed that Sybil’s front door was slightly open.

  The doorbell ringing shocked him; it made him furiously angry. It seldom happened, and when it did, it was like an insult, an intrusion and an assault. Who dared come here, and now? It rang again.

  He ran downstairs to answer it. He needed to get rid of whoever it was. He opened the door, flinging it back.

  ‘Yes? What is it?’

  A girl stood outside, a girl who seemed vaguely familiar. ‘Hi, Carl. Long time no see,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought some stuff from the pet clinic that belonged to Dermot McKinnon. I believe he lived in the top flat? We didn’t know where else to take it.’ She stepped in, swinging a large bag, before he could stop her

  ‘You can’t go up!’ he shouted.

  But she was already on the stairs, and he could only have stopped her now by seizing hold of her. A shrill cry came from behind the half-open door on the top floor, followed by a hoarse sobbing.

  Lizzie ran up another four or five steps, stopped and called, ‘What’s that? What’s going on up there?’

  ‘Not your business,’ Carl said, adding, absurdly, ‘You’re trespassing!’

  Lizzie dropped the bag and flung open the door. A girl of about her own age was rolling on the floor, sweating so much that her face and arms looked as if they’d been dipped in water. Vomit splashed the rug and soaked the armchair she had tumbled out of.