by Ruth Rendell
That was the first time she had ever seen a man’s naked body. Strange that the first one she had seen should be a dead man’s. Dead, Guy looked very young, a boy. Beatrix screamed once, then fell on her knees and the crying and muttering began. She clapped both hands over her mouth. Ismay looked and then looked away, trembling, shaking all over. She stumbled back into her mother’s bedroom and fell on the unmade bed. Beatrix came in and silent Heather with her. That was how it had been. Ismay returned to the tape recorder.
“My mother asked Heather what had happened and Heather said she didn’t know. Then she asked her what made her go into the bathroom. Neither of us ever went into that bathroom. The last thing Heather would have done was go in there where Guy would have been naked. But she had. It didn’t occur to me for a while that Heather might have had something to do with that death. Heather said nothing in answer to my mother’s question. Then my mother asked her if she’d been in her own bedroom when Guy got up. ‘I went into the bathroom,’ Heather said. ‘I was in there a bit and he was dead. He was like he is now.’ My mother screamed aloud when Heather said that, and she clutched at me. She said to me, ‘Phone a doctor. No, phone for an ambulance. Dial nine-nine-nine.’
“I couldn’t. I’d lost my voice. After a bit my mother phoned Pam and Pam came. I think it was she who phoned for an ambulance. The police came eventually. I don’t know who sent for them. It was evening by then. There was a detective inspector and a detective constable, I think. The inspector had a name like a bird, Sparrow or Peacock but not one of those. I can’t remember anything about the constable except that he was young.
“An ambulance came with two paramedics and they took Guy’s body away. Or it may not have been an ambulance. There may have been a doctor. I don’t remember. Before the police came Mum said to Heather, ‘These people who are coming will ask. The police will have to come and they will ask.’ Heather didn’t say anything. I think she was terrified. Mum thought for a moment and then she said, ‘You were out with us. All three of us were shopping. You complained about Issy taking so long trying on clothes.’ Heather gave her such a strange look. She looked like an old, old woman for a moment. ‘Did I?’ she said.
“It was like a game. I got into the spirit of it, me, aged fifteen. I said, ‘You were fed up because they hadn’t got a blazer in your size.’ ‘All right,’ she said. Mum said, ‘No, Heather, it wasn’t like Issy says. You came with us but you didn’t come into the shop. You waited outside while Issy tried things on.’ Heather shrugged; she said, ‘I was with you. It’s simpler that way, isn’t it?’ And that was all. That was all she said and all she’s ever said. The inspector with the bird name and the other one came and said there would be an inquest. They believed everything we said, the nice and sensible but distraught widow, her well-behaved teenage daughters. We said what we’d rehearsed saying.
“My mother and I knew we should tell the police the truth—what we both thought, that is—but we couldn’t. This was Heather, her daughter, my sister. My mother had lost her husband, a man she’d loved, at any rate when they were first married she’d loved him, but Heather was more important to her. Far more. We both understood by then why she had done it. My mother said she half knew, she guessed, about Guy and me. She had seen things. ‘You should have told me,’ she said and she sounded very angry. I said nothing. What could I have said to his wife? She had considered separating herself from Guy, but she hadn’t yet said a word to him and now it was too late. If she’d left him—or turned him out; it was her house after all—if she’d done that he’d be alive and Heather not guilty of anything. We never told anyone. We agonized over it, separately and together. We wept together. If it’s possible for grief and horror to turn someone’s brain, and all those old dramas and operas and whatever said it was, this turned my mother’s.”
She stopped there. All this wasn’t necessary. He only had to know, if it ever came to this, the basics of what Heather had done. No need to tell him about the inquest and the verdict of accidental death, the bruises on Guy’s ankles dismissed as due to some other cause. No one but Guy, after all, had been in the house at the time. Beatrix had been out shopping with her two daughters. They had all returned home together.
And Heather? How had she and her mother confronted Heather? The answer was that they hadn’t. Beatrix manifested signs of schizophrenia after a year had passed and slipped away into madness. Ismay never again mentioned the way Guy had died, already afraid that Heather might come out with it and tell her the truth. Much as she wanted to know, she was afraid of Heather telling her. She couldn’t imagine a situation in which she asked Heather straight out and Heather said, yes, she had. Yes, she’d drowned Guy. To save Ismay from being raped by Guy. Not so much from dislike, hatred even, but to save her beloved sister from her stepfather.
And Heather seemed just the same afterward as she had been before—but perhaps not quite the same. Calmer, quieter, steadier, the kind of person you would tell your fears to and know they would be safe with her and stay hidden. Not a gorgon, as Andrew described her, but a quiet, reposeful woman who seemed older than her years, the woman Edmund loved so much.
Chapter Seven
The temporary hiding place Ismay found for the tape was in the bottom of a ceramic pot under the dry roots of a cactus. The cactus had vicious thorns instead of prickles and putting the tape in there made her fingers bleed. She scratched them again two days later when she decided the hiding place wasn’t safe, moved it out, and put it inside a case that had originally contained a cartridge of Indian classical music. It wasn’t long sinnce she’d been mad about the sitar and the tabla, but most of her collection was on CDs. This tape was Aashish Khan’s Rainy Season Ragas, which no one in this flat was remotely likely to want to listen to. She put it on the shelf where all the other tapes were, between Mozart’s Flute and Harp Concerto, and the Spice Girls.
Skipping home from work, Marion found Fowler in the flat. He was always losing things and moaned about the way everything just jumped out of his pockets.
“It’s funny,” she said crossly, “how you manage never to lose my key.”
Fowler was a very thin man of forty, his hair the faded reddish-gold hers had been before she started tinting it, his face like an old handbag, an amalgam of pockets and dents and bloated pores, his teeth brown as tree bark and the stubble on chin and cheeks as white as an old man’s. That afternoon he was wearing the kind of clothes that are immediately recognizable as having previously belonged to someone else, each garment perhaps to several former owners. He was sitting in her living room, smoking a cigarette he must have scrounged from somewhere, his decaying sneakers smelling like Gorgonzola cheese.
He didn’t greet her. He seldom did but went straight into whatever came into his head. “When you got the money from that old woman, I don’t know why you didn’t get a bigger flat. I mean, with two bedrooms. Then I could have stayed here properly and not had to doss down on the sofa.”
“That’s why,” said Marion.
Fowler showed no resentment. Her reply was precisely what he had anticipated. “I wish you’d get married. If you married someone with a bit of money you could move into his place and leave this for me. When we were little kids, or you were a big kid and I was a little one, you said something to me I’ve never forgotten. It was so touching, it was so nice. You said, ‘I love you, Fowler. I’ll always take care of you.’ You were about eight and I was four.”
“You say things like that when you’re eight,” said Marion. “Besides, you were a nice-looking little boy. You had curls, not exactly golden, but curls. You were sweet. You’re not very sweet now.”
Fowler was silent, thinking of his misfortunes and how the world always owed him a living. He couldn’t remember when he had ever had any money. Real money, that is. If he had even a small amount he usually managed to lose it. Only today he’d asked a woman for fifty pence to get himself a cup of tea and she’d given it to him. She’d actually given him fifty pence. Bu
t somewhere between Edgware Road tube station and the La Marquise café it had fallen through a hole in his pocket.
“Is there anything to eat?” he asked.
“Only sardines,” said his sister, “and some Brussels sprouts, but they’re a week old. I haven’t had time to go shopping. Some of us work, you know.”
Fowler stared glumly into space, scratching his head. “People like you don’t seem to realize that begging is work. Very hard work. You’re outdoors in all weathers, you can never relax, you never take a break. You’ve got to be polite all the time, you’ve got to be humble. If you speak your mind you’re done for. And there’s nothing of what you’d call job satisfaction. Even in Piccadilly or Bond Street you can stand about for three or four hours and those rich bitches’ll walk past you on their way into jewelry shops. And then the Prime Minister has the nerve to tell people not to give to beggars. As if they needed telling. I think I’ll make myself sardines on toast.”
Marion followed him into the kitchen, not to help with the preparation of his meal but to stop him raiding her liquor supplies.
“Do you remember when we were kids you used to have to open sardine tins with a key stuck through that ring thing? And the key always broke and you had to put something stronger into the ring. I used the poker. I bashed myself in the mouth and knocked one of my front teeth out. You must remember.”
“You were always accident prone.”
“Can I have a drink?”
“No, you can’t.”
“Come on, Marion. Don’t be like that. I tell you what. If I can have a drink and a couple of aspirins—well, four, say—I’ll have my sardines and a bit of that Christmas pudding I saw in the fridge, if I can have that I won’t stay. I’ll go straight after. Come on, be a sport. A gin—well, a double—and a few aspirins and I’ll make myself scarce.”
“All right,” said Marion, relieved she wouldn’t have him sleeping on her sofa. Mystified as always by his choice of narcotics, she poured the gin herself, carefully calculating the amount in a measuring glass. She was more generous with the aspirins, dropping six strong ones into a saucer. She ate nothing herself, having made an arrangement to rabbit-sit for Avice Conroy. She’d pop in again on Mr. Hussein before she went to Pinner. Avice was so grateful. As well as paying her, she always left her a Marks and Spencer ready meal and half a bottle of wine. Marion looked forward to it. While she was in her bedroom, changing into her coral tracksuit, Fowler spotted her handbag on top of the fridge. Go easy, Fowler, he cautioned himself. If you don’t take more than a tenner the chances are she won’t notice. He took a ten-pound note and two pound coins, called out to her that he was leaving, and closed the front door gently behind him. Be careful not to lose those oncers, Fowler, like you did the fifty pence, he told himself. In his inner monologue he always addressed himself as Fowler. He was proud of his given name. It had been his mother’s before she married and, when he was feeling low, he reflected that it was the only distinguished thing about him.
The evening was mild and he was in no hurry. He strolled down the Finchley Road, disappointed because the gin and aspirins had had little effect. The twelve pounds he had stolen from his sister he had originally intended to spend on a slap-up greasy spoon meal, the sardines being inadequate, but the rival claims of lager or skunk competed, and of the two he could get more drink for his money. Three pubs later, with not quite his bus fare left, he set off unsteadily on foot for the dossers’ hostel, known to its denizens as Jimbo’s, in Queens Park. It closed its doors at eleven sharp. If you don’t make it in time, Fowler, he said to himself, you’ll find yourself sleeping in a doorway. It wouldn’t be the first time.
In spite of his dislike of the women who frequented it, Fowler was again in Bond Street three days later, loitering outside Lalique’s doorway and wishing he had a dog or, better still, a baby. That was a brilliant idea. It was always women who begged with babies, but there seemed no reason why a man shouldn’t do it. Could he borrow a baby? More feasibly, could Marion?
Rooting through the rubbish bins of Bond Street and Piccadilly was part of what he told Marion was his day’s work. Not every day, of course, but three times a week. If, as occasionally happened, he saw someone else with his hand plunged up to the elbow in, for instance, the one in Piccadilly outside the Ritz, he took it as a personal affront. If there were a dossers’ union and he were a shop steward, it was the kind of thing he’d bring the workforce out on strike over.
The sort of bins you found in the less salubrious suburbs contained too much perishable food waste, burger remains, curry containers, and chicken bones. Fowler wasn’t fastidious but he disliked bad smells apart from his own, and the bins of Harlesden were a bit much. Mayfair was something else. There was a bin in Piccadilly, outside the Royal Academy, in which he had once found a pink satin toilet bag full of freebie cosmetic samples he’d given to Marion for Christmas and on another occasion a watch that only needed a new battery. The bin outside the Ritz had yielded a jar of Fortnum’s marmalade—why?—and an umbrella with a Mickey Mouse face on it, while another in Bond Street gave him two stalls tickets for Phantom of the Opera for that evening. The watch and umbrella he had sold in Church Street market, the tickets outside the theater; and he’d eaten the marmalade.
Fowler regarded the bins of Piccadilly, Jermyn Street, and Regent Street with Bond Street and its offshoots as his manor, his golden square mile. He particularly disliked seeing anyone else investigating them and made himself unpleasant if there were confrontations. This evening he had caught a more than usually filthy dosser at the Bond Street one in flagrante delicto, so to speak. It was no wonder his own probings into that particular bin had been disappointing. The harvest he had gleaned was merely a single badly bruised cigarette in an otherwise empty packet and a condom. To be fair, it was an unused condom still in its pack but an article for which Fowler had no possible use. If he tried to sell it, potential buyers would think he’d stuck a pin through it first out of malice. He had smoked the cigarette in Lalique’s doorway, thought a bit more about the baby plan, and sat down with half a cardboard carton, once containing porridge oats, beside him on the marble step, hoping for what he had once heard grandly called “eleemosynary alms.”
It was there that Edmund passed him on his way to buy Heather a birthday present in the Burlington Arcade. Knowing Marion had a brother but never having seen him, he merely felt that slight pang of guilt we all feel when passing a beggar. But on his way back, carrying the newly gift-wrapped pale-blue cashmere sweater, he saw the man still sitting there with an empty carton beside him and felt in his pocket for change. He had spent so much already that another couple of quid would make no difference.
Fowler said, “Thank you very much, sir. You’re a gent.”
Ashamed of his warm feeling of righteousness, Edmund went on up the hill and turned into Brook Street, heading for Bond Street tube station. It was just after seven on a Thursday, late-night shopping evening, dark but brilliantly lit. Ahead of Edmund a taxi coming from the direction of Berkeley Square pulled up to the curb and stopped. Two people got out and one of them was Andrew. Edmund had ample time to make sure it was Andrew, watching him pay the taxi driver from the pavement. His companion, who he at first thought must be Ismay, was a different girl, fairer than she, just as slender, wearing shoes with golden heels of an impossible height and a fur wrap. And apparently not much else, thought Edmund. They didn’t see him, being too engrossed in each other, Andrew’s arm around the girl’s shoulders as they disappeared down the exquisitely cobbled entrance to Lancashire Court.
Sitting in the train, he thought about what he had seen. There was no doubt about it. The girl couldn’t have been Andrew’s sister (if he had a sister) unless they were committing incest, which, when you came to think of it, also amounted to infidelity. What should he do, if anything? Nothing, of course. Telling Ismay wasn’t to be considered. But tell Heather? He thought not. It would only upset her. He had long since perceived how close Hea
ther and Ismay were, how deeply his fiancée loved her sister. She would no more tell Ismay than he would, but she might make some sort of row with Andrew, have it out with him. It sometimes amused him to see how much she disliked Andrew. Better tell himself it wasn’t his business and try to forget it. He was already learning that his future wife could be fierce and direct as well as calm.
He got to Clapham just before eight. The girls were having champagne to celebrate Heather’s birthday. He handed over the sweater and it was rapturously received. It hardly seemed fair that Heather should cook her own birthday dinner, but she seemed to like doing it and she was, naturally, a very good cook.
“When we’re married,” Heather said, smiling at him, “Edmund’s going to do all the cooking forevermore because I’ll be doing it at work.”
He thought he saw a kind of shadow pass across Ismay’s face or perhaps it was more a stiffening, a setting, of the muscles into a fixed smile. He had experienced his own face doing that when something painful or embarrassing had been said (usually by his mother). It was accompanied, in his case, by an inward sensation that was close to nausea but not quite that. Was that how Ismay was feeling and why? Was it possible she knew about Andrew’s defection?
Within a few moments it appeared not, for she was expecting him to phone her. She remarked on this omission with surprise. He wasn’t coming around, she said. He had had to work late. But he had promised to phone. Just before Heather put their starter on the table, Ismay phoned him. Or tried to.
“His mobile’s switched off,” she said.
