A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  She took one step down, looked down and spoke Franklin’s phrase in Franklin’s menacing tone. The commanding officer bidding reluctant troops go over the top.

  * * *

  He had gone outside by the kitchen door, having turned off the dining-room light on his way.

  The courtyard that separated the house from the mews was an oblong, its entire area paved in natural limestone. On each side was a narrow border planted with a number of small silver-leaved shrubs. Teddy had not looked at it properly on his previous visit, then noticing only the manhole cover. This was roughly in the center of the courtyard, though rather nearer to the gate than the house. Now he saw that the wall which separated the area from the road on one side, the wall which divided it from the garden next door and the wall at the mews end were made of what looked, in the dim, hazardous light, like yellow brick. The height of all these walls had recently been increased and the new brick-work was a slightly different shade.

  A garden table and four chairs, cast iron painted white, stood in one of the corners at the house end and in the opposite corner was a large marble urn with a pointed tree growing in it. Something he hadn’t noticed last time was that the back of the house, like the front, was covered in those same luxuriant all-conquering leaves. More than the front, in fact, for here not a scrap of brickwork was visible and if those pinkish tendrils crept across the surface, leaves concealed them also. Only the windows, shining black rectangles, peered out, eye-like, and the barred glass doors.

  The two lamps in the mews gave enough light to show all this, but to show it in dark monochrome, black and charcoal and gray and flickers of silver on the leaves. He drew back the bolts on the gate. Then he tried to lift the cover off the manhole. This was of some sort of metal incised with the maker’s name, Paulson and Grieve, Ironsmiths of Stoke, inside a laurel wreath. He pulled at the metal ring embedded in its center but to no effect and he soon realized that no failure of his own strength was the problem but rather that something on the other side, probably a bolt, was holding the manhole cover in place. He would have to go down into the cellar from the inside.

  First he checked the Edsel and the mews. No one was about. The two parked cars were still there. Distantly, he could hear traffic in Maida Vale, crossing the hump over the canal. He went back into the house, opened the door at the top of the cellar steps and pressed the light switch.

  Nothing happened. By the light from the top of the stairs he could make out an unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling. It pleased him that it didn’t work, that the bulb was used up and had never been replaced, for it confirmed what she had said about never going into the cellar.

  He could tell that he was just tall enough to reach that bulb hanging on its six inches of lead. From a table lamp in the dining room he undid a hundred-watt bulb, took it down into the cellar and changed it for the defunct one. The light came on at once and showed him what he had come to see.

  The rest of the house was very clean, almost up to his own standard. Down here, if not exactly dirty, it was dusty and untended. Spiders’ webs hung from the ceiling and clustered in its corners. The place was empty, no more than ten feet square, its floor of rough concrete, its walls plastered and painted white. Or they had been painted white long ago, but that white had cracked and faded to gray. In the wall to the right, the one at the rear end of the house, was a door, bolted at the bottom, composed of rough wooden boards from which the white paint was peeling, and in the lower half of which was a hatch. In the days when coal was delivered from outside to fill the hole, Teddy supposed, the hatch would be raised from the inside and coal poured through. A job for some servant with bucket or scuttle. The mess it must have caused, the filth, made him shudder.

  He drew back the bolt. The space he stepped into was perhaps half the area of the cellar proper and consisted of a cuboid chamber about eight feet deep. No coal remained, but the floor was black with coal dust and a bitter carbon smell hung in the close air. He switched on his flashlight and its beam sent a spider scuttling away into a dark corner. At the top of the chamber the flashlight showed him the inside of the manhole cover. As he had expected, it was secured in place by a heavy steel bolt.

  Teddy was tall enough to reach it with his fingertips, but it would have taken a man of six feet six to be able to get sufficient purchase for the task of sliding back the bolt. He needed something to stand on and also, in case of need, a spanner and a wrench for the bolt.

  For a moment he forgot where he had left Keith’s toolbag. Had he taken it outside? He came up the cellar stairs again, carefully brushing coal dust off his shoes before entering the hall. The idea of dirtying this exquisite place was very distasteful to him. The door into the hall was one of those that slam shut at the least pressure.

  Then he remembered. He had left the toolbag just inside the back door when he went out to unbolt the gate. Now to find a pair of steps or failing that—and it almost certainly would be failing that—a chair or stool.

  Nothing suitable in the kitchen. He doubted if he could have brought himself to stand on one of those beautiful gilded chairs from the dining-room. A cast-iron chair from the courtyard would do. He fetched one of these. It was heavy, it must weigh twenty-five pounds. Carrying the chair and with the toolbag in his other hand, he returned the way he had come to hear a woman’s shrill voice say, “Don’t move. Stay right where you are. I am armed,” and end with an hysterical giggle.

  25

  For a moment he doubted it was a real voice. It must be coming from the radio or the television. Or the device that set lights to go on after a cunning delay could be programmed to switch on a tape. He thought that, but he came on, out into the hall, stepping softly on the thick carpet. The silence and then the sound of an indrawn breath told him it was a real woman who had spoken. It was she, Harriet.

  He saw her. She was wearing shoes with heels of an extravagant height, shoes for a teenage model on a catwalk, stiletto heels four inches high. At the top of the stairs she stood, looking down, her back to him, wobbling on those spiky heels, some sort of stick or staff in her hand. It was immediately clear that she thought he was down there. Wherever she had been in the house, and perhaps she had been here when he first entered it, she had heard the cellar door close and believed it had closed behind him as he went down the stairs.

  He stood absolutely still. The Edsel was in the mews, the gate unbolted. If she summoned help, if she called the police, he would be taken away, the car taken. He closed his hands tightly around the leg of the chair he held, the handle of the toolbag.

  She said, “Come out, you fool. What the hell are you doing?”

  Adrenaline poured into his blood. He felt it zing in his head. She knew who it was, she was insulting him again. He drew in his breath and let it out in a roar, “Turn around!”

  Never before had he seen anyone jump. Heard of it happening, yes, but never seen it. The start galvanized her, he could have sworn her feet left the ground. She spun to face him, cried out, “You!” and at that he threw the toolbag at her.

  He hurled it with his left hand and the chair with his right. The bag caught her in the chest, the chair across her legs. She fell backward and turned over and over, somersaulting down the cellar stairs, her hands grappling with the empty air. A wailing cry came from her and the pole she was holding flew out of her hand, wheeling in an arc out of his sight. He heard the clatter as it fell to the floor and the softer smash of her body.

  That it was a body and not the living woman, injured but alive, he hardly knew until he went down there. He even had a momentary anxiety—what to do if she was alive. But she had struck her head a violent blow on the floor, rather as if she had dived from a height into the sea, unaware that the water was shallow and the bottom unyielding rock.

  His first thought after that was a strange one. He need not touch her now. If anything were to stop him killing it would be the necessity of touching your victim first. Two people had died at his hands without his touching them
. He smiled, the idea was so peculiar and so unexpected.

  He picked up the chair. Paint had chipped off it, but otherwise it was intact. Nothing had happened to the toolbag except that a screwdriver and a pair of pincers had fallen out of it. He looked at the body dispassionately, the dark-red blood on her dark-red hair, the waxen white of her face under the makeup. What had brought her home? It looked as if she had been away for just two nights. Two big suitcases for two nights away? Maybe, for a woman like that. Probably that was where she had been when he first opened the front door, upstairs at the back out of earshot, unpacking those two cases.

  Satisfied with his solution, he carried the chair into the coal hole, got up on to it and, using the pincers, wrenched back the bolt. It felt as if it had been rammed into that position years before and never touched since. The steadiness of his hands pleased him. He was almost unshaken. So much the better. He pushed against the manhole cover and it rose quite easily.

  He went upstairs again and into the hall, looked about him and, seeing her handbag on the small table just inside the front door, put it in the toolbag. To be on the safe side in case a cleaner or someone else with a key came into the house. He returned to the backyard, opened the gate and went out into the mews.

  One of the parked cars had gone. Most likely, it had belonged to someone visiting friends in a flat or house higher up the mews. He knew very little about dinner parties or any social calls, come to that, but he calculated that this was about the right time to be leaving a place you had visited in the evening.

  Now for the grand secret. Who used to say that? He had surprised himself with the words that rose unbidden in his mind. His grandmother perhaps, or his long-dead grandfather. Now for the grand secret. A sight for sore eyes. Or a sight to damage healthy eyes? He lifted the Edsel’s boot lid, shut his eyes, opened them. With both hands he gripped the top of the big plastic bag that was Keith’s shroud, grasped it just below where the masking tape secured it and lifted it.

  A smell there was, but not a strong, terrible, fetid odor, nothing like that. If the plastic were to be punctured, it would be a different story, he knew that. To tear it would be fatal, a disaster. He heaved the bag and its contents over the lip of the boot and down on to the flagstones. When it was out, no longer in that boot but on the ground, and the bag was still intact, he knew the worst was over.

  He dragged it through the gateway and up to the manhole. Then he went back to close the boot lid and shut the gate. The presence of a man and a woman in the mews, appearing it seemed from nowhere, suddenly materializing, gave him a shock. They were walking in the direction of the remaining parked car.

  How much had they seen? Probably nothing. He was sure they hadn’t been anywhere in the vicinity while he was dragging that bag. And their behavior seemed to confirm this, for as he unlocked his car the man called out to him, “Lovely night!”

  Teddy nodded. He never knew how to answer remarks like that

  “Good night, then.”

  “Good night,” said Teddy.

  He closed the boot lid. He tried to behave as a householder would who lived in a place like this. Check the interior of the garage, make sure the car was all right—there was no car, which didn’t surprise him—examine the stack of bricks in there which must be left over from raising the height of the walls. Retreat through the gateway with a confident tread, born of years of practice of going in and out of here at midnight. But he was unable to resist looking over his shoulder as the car passed. The woman in the passenger seat rewarded him with a friendly wave.

  The gate shut and bolted, he raised the manhole cover, lifted it out and laid it on the flagstones. His principal worry now was that the bag might split as he lowered it down through that aperture. Still, it was hardly the end of the world if it did, only it would be—unpleasant. The end of the world had been averted and the worst of everything was past.

  He shoved and heaved the bag to the manhole. The deadbody hole, he thought. He pushed it through, feet end first, holding on to the head-and-shoulders end. Letting go wasn’t an option until he could feel the feet end at least graze the stone floor down there. Holding on, breathing deeply, he hung over the edge, his arms stretched to a sense of bursting, until he felt the weight lessen, the tension slacken. The bottom of the bag was on the ground.

  He let go and there was a slithering, shuddering thump. For a brief second he thought he was going with it, but he managed to keep a grip on the flagstones with the muscles of his chest and thighs. He had left the iron chair down there and the bag fell across it and subsided, as if the body in its slippery shroud had sat down. He shivered.

  A strong press-up brought him to his feet. He replaced the manhole cover, checked that everything in the backyard was as he had found it and went back into the house.

  A sheet or a tablecloth, something like that was what he needed. Upstairs, in a cupboard on the landing outside the bedroom she had taken him into, he found both in abundance. The clean, crisply ironed white sheets pleased him. He would like linen like that for his own bed, his and Francine’s, fresh on every day. And why not? The work needed to ensure that was nothing compared with the benefits.

  A blanket might be better for his purpose, though. There were several, blue and white, fluffy, spotless, on the bottom shelf. He pulled out a blue one and descended into the cellar once more. There was no more blood, it had stopped flowing, as he thought he had heard it did when you were dead. Unfortunately, quite a lot of blood had got on to the floor. No doubt it would also stain this lovely clean blanket. But he had no choice. He laid the blanket on the ground and rolled Harriet’s body up in it, not a difficult task, she must have been less than half Keith’s weight.

  At this point an idea came to him, a wonderful plan. It was simple and beautiful, it solved everything. Rather than put Harriet’s body in the coal hole with Keith’s he would bring Keith’s out here. Thus, the coal hole would be empty, a safety measure in case anyone ever lifted the manhole cover, and as for the cellar.… Could he? He was sure he could. The thought made him smile, then laugh out loud. His laughter echoed in that subterranean place.

  First he pulled out the iron chair. He kept his eyes shut while he did it, but he couldn’t shut his ears to the squelching sound of the body sliding to the floor. This was the last time he would ever drag it, though, this was the end. There had been some considerable disturbance of those contents and anyone would have been able to smell it now. He stood and smelled it. Horrible, really. How disgusting human beings were, in life, in dying and in death …

  He closed the coal-hole door and fastened the bolts. Harriet’s blood made an almost black sticky patch on the cellar floor. He considered fetching water and scrubbing brush and cleaning it up, it was very much in his nature to clean up after himself whatever might be the task he had performed, but finally he decided against it. He was dirty enough already. As it was, he felt begrimed from all the energy he had expended and from coal dust and spiders’ webs. He could smell himself, a powerful oniony stink. It was more distasteful than if he had smelled it on somebody else.

  Why not do what he longed to do? He was alone, everything was done, the Edsel awaited him, his car, a strange car that attracted curious glances, but only a car and one that could now bear the scrutiny of any authority. So why not go upstairs and have a bath?

  He had a choice. A bathroom en suite with her bedroom, another opening out from the landing. Hers had a claw-footed tub standing on a tiled dais, the other a sunken bath of blue-green marble, and that was the one he chose, filling it with steaming, foaming water into which he poured a stream of orange-scented essence. He used a loofah to scrub himself—it was the first of its kind he had ever seen—and soap that smelled like a basket of citrus fruits. The towel was pale orange, fluffy on one side and velvety on the other. When he was dry he dried the bath and rubbed a facecloth over the taps to polish them.

  When he had noted the time, ten past one, and checked that her handbag contained a key to
the house, he left by the front door and walked around to the mews where the Edsel was waiting.

  26

  There was much more in that small quilted leather handbag than a key to the house. The bunch of credit cards might be of use to him. He would have to think about it. But he also found in the wallet nearly a hundred pounds in notes and a small leather-bound address book, as well as the usual women’s stuff, pressed powder, lipstick, a vial of perfume.

  The handbag itself he tried to imagine Francine using, but the image he conjured up was all wrong. High heels went with it and a mincing step, red nails and slave bracelets. Shuddering, he put the handbag in his waste bin. The day gone by and the night seemed like a dream to him now, and so surreal was the memory of it, so bizarre the events, that he had to go outside as soon as he woke up and check that the Edsel’s boot really was empty.

  It looked innocent and ordinary—if anything about the Edsel was ordinary—a clean, empty space that seemed as if it had never held anything more sinister than a suitcase. Of the thing that had been inside it for nine months there was no sign or hint. Any smell there was had gone with Keith into the cellar.

  Inside that garage, he remembered, had been a stack of bricks. To someone who knew about these things it was clear what had happened. The rear wall had been considered too low and at some point, recently, a further two feet had been built on to it. The calculations had allowed for more bricks than were needed and hence the pile in the garage. He would need some ready-mixed cement and maybe a flagstone. Stone, he knew, was very expensive but perhaps there was an alternative …

  He closed the boot lid, stepped back and viewed the car. Would it help to clean it once more before he took it to Miracle Motors?

  Megsie appeared suddenly on the far side of the fence, seeming to materialize as if she had sprung from a trapdoor in the ground. “I’ve never seen you open that boot before,” she remarked conversationally. “I said to Nige, I’ve never seen him open that boot before, and he said, neither have I, never.”