A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  The sweeping up had begun at eight. He had been listening for it from first light, the first glimmer of dawn to show itself through that distant window to the world. By the time it began enough light showed for him to see the time by his watch.

  He was neither hungry nor thirsty and this obscurely troubled him, the fact that he thought about it, for it seemed an indication that soon he would be very very thirsty. The prospect of hunger seemed to matter less. Perhaps, if it rained, he could catch the drops on his tongue. But what was he thinking of? He wouldn’t be down here long enough for that.

  The street cleaner announced its arrival with a clatter followed by a roaring sucking sound. This was accompanied by a siren-like moaning, which rose and fell, and he realized that instead of brooms and brushes a giant vacuum cleaner was at work up there. Only one man would be using that, he calculated, and he wouldn’t have steps with him or a rope. He stood up and started shouting just the same, calling out hello the first few times, then, “Help me! Help me!”

  He soon understood that he wasn’t able to make himself heard above the roar and whine of the vacuum cleaner, and after a little while the sound of it began to fade, as it made its slow progress along the mews. He went on calling out and hammered on the wall with his fists and the skylight pole.

  Nothing happened. No one came. Until now he had never thought about the house next door, number seven Orcadia Place, had scarcely glanced at it in his comings and goings, but gradually, as the moan of the vacuum cleaner dwindled into silence, the conviction came to him that it must be mostly empty, that its occupants perhaps had a country home as well and generally lived there. Lights came on in it in the evenings, but that meant only that a timer regulated them at prescribed hours, as one did in Harriet’s house.

  Other people would come, surely, sooner or later. Delivery men, a milkman, someone bringing newspapers? But not this way, not this back way. And, in any case, he had bolted the gate on the inside. He knew what he must do. At all costs he had to survive. If his rescuers smelled the smell and found the two who were down here with him, so be it. Maybe he could deny knowing anything about them, maybe they wouldn’t find out his connection with Keith, or even discover who Keith was. And if they did and worse came to worst, prison was preferable to death.

  He paced back and forth in the coal hole. At least in this narrow cell the air was still fresh and sweet. Just being able to see the light of day was comforting, a pale, flickering sunshine that made a little spot of light on the brick wall.

  Sooner or later, perhaps not till nearly lunchtime, someone would come into the mews to fetch a car. He would hear their footsteps. And then he would begin shouting for help. He would start yelling as loud as he could and beating on the wall with the pole. The vacuum cleaner man hadn’t heard him because of the noise the machine made. But in the silence he would be heard. Now that he had decided to risk the discovery of those two it was only a matter of waiting till someone came.

  Wrapping himself in the blanket once more, he sat on the floor with his back toward the wall. Resting his head on it, he began thinking up a story which would be a defense against any accusations that might be brought. Doing a job for Harriet, that was how he would account for being there. She couldn’t deny it, she was dead. He had slipped and fallen down the hole. Cellar? He didn’t even know there was a cellar. This coal hole was all he knew.

  These thoughts were soothing and they sent him to sleep. He hadn’t slept all night, but he could sleep now, secure in the knowledge that he would soon get out of here, be free, an innocent victim of a trap made from wet leaves.

  * * *

  The expression on Mildred’s face had remained with Franklin while he explored the house. There was no doubt she knew something. He reexamined the pile of cushions, studied the feather boa as if there might be a clue among its scarlet fronds and, giving up further speculation, went out to call on Mildred.

  They had not been friends, never more than neighbors passing the time of day, though he believed she had once been in the house for coffee with Harriet—a drink, more likely, knowing Harriet—but she welcomed him with open arms.

  “I’m not at all surprised,” she said when he told her of his wife’s absence, and she repeated it three times more. She gave him a coy sideways glance. “Her young friend has been here with her for—oh, at least two weeks.”

  “Her young friend?” said Franklin, barely able to keep from smiling.

  “Keith Hill, he’s called. Very good-looking. He has this amazing old American car and when that disappeared from the mews I thought—well, I couldn’t help thinking …”

  “That he and Harriet had done a moonlight flit,” said Franklin, grinning.

  Mildred thought smiling inappropriate. She was almost shocked. “Tony and I saw him here last night. I expect they were just about to leave. Surely she left you a note?”

  “Just a feather boa,” said Franklin.

  He walked back to Orcadia Cottage, for he had one task left to perform before taking the glad news to Anthea. For the first time he noticed that the back door was unlocked and the key missing. That sort of carelessness was typical of Harriet. It might be wise for him to have the locks changed.

  Out in the yard, walking with care to avoid slipping on the sticky paste the leaves made, Franklin lifted up the manhole cover. He was strong for his age and it presented him with no problem to lug it the necessary couple of feet and insert it quietly into the opening. Then he trod on it a couple of times to make sure it was airtight and watertight.

  * * *

  Teddy slept. He dreamed of the wooden mansion, but this time he was inside it, making his way through its timbered chambers, smelling its aromatic resinous scent. He must have grown very small, for this, after all, was the sideboard he had dismembered. The towers he stood beneath, looking up through their hollow spires, were the finials that ornamented its shelves, and the galleries he climbed so laboriously, its drawers. Its pillars had become flying buttresses and now he emerged into a high, dark cloister, which was the double row of railings that ran around its tabletop.

  The cloister ended at something like a cliff edge. He stood on the dark, shiny ridge looking down an immense distance into a darkness in which paler vapors swirled. For some reason he expected an emergence from those depths, not Francine, but someone from the distant past. Mr. Chance, perhaps. As he stood there, gazing, longing for a sign, a glimmer of life and light, it came to him that of all the people he had ever known—Francine didn’t count, Francine was different—Mr. Chance was the only one he had really liked.

  But he turned away, knowing he was to be disappointed, and walked back the way he had come, along the wooden passages, through the wooden chambers, into the heart of the sideboard mansion, until he found himself in a tiny dark cell. With the closing of the door behind him he woke up.

  Rather, he was unsure whether he woke or still slept. He had been in a cell and was now in another and in an even deeper darkness. Blackness was absolute, dense as the inside of a cloth bag. And his breathing was shallow, the air—or some scarcely breathable atmosphere—pressed around him, thick and foul-smelling. There was too little of it to permit of struggling or thought or activity, so he pulled the blanket over his head once more and fell back into sleep.

  The sleep from which there’s no awakening.

  39

  Jonathan Nicholson was a fifty-five-year-old civil servant who lived in Dawes Road, Fulham, with a wife and three teenage children. It was his wife’s nephew, not he, who was the owner of a red sports car. The nephew was called Darren Curlew, he lived in Chiswick and had a girlfriend in Ealing. Darren Curlew was taken to the police station at five in the morning and was still there when the sun rose, the light came and the day’s business began.

  Silenced and retreating into her inner world, Francine was not unhappy. She had a sense of the bad things in her life all being past, that soon there would be a new beginning. Her speechlessness troubled her chiefly because it brou
ght her father so much distress and because she couldn’t phone Teddy. Something told her, some deep certainty and faith in herself, that if she remained calm and tranquil—and she had no inclination to be otherwise—the power of speech would come back to her and never depart again.

  To Teddy she wrote several letters, not to Orcadia Cottage, where she was increasingly sure he should never have been, but to his own home. No answers came, though she had told him he could phone her and her father would speak for her. He was angry with her, she thought rather sadly, for not going back to him when she had promised. But his silence was really only what she had expected and it brought her nothing more than ruefulness. Things would never have worked out for them, they were quite wrong for each other, and had been drawn together in the first place only by their youth and their looks.

  She slept a lot, she read, she thought about the past. Holly, back from Sulawesi, came to see her and talked for hours, expecting no answers. Miranda came back from Apia and Isabel down from Cambridge and they sat with her and told her of their adventurous lives. She and her father spent Christmas quietly at home, and Flora came to see them with her new husband and their little boy aged two.

  A silent woman, yet one who was able to ride on the tube and use a ticket machine—if she was spoken to and made no reply, the inquirer took her for a foreign tourist—she went in the first week of January up to Teddy’s house in Neasden. With her she took the diamond-and-sapphire ring, wrapped in a tissue and sealed in an envelope. Before leaving home she had dialed his number, unable to speak to him, but just for an indication as to whether he was at home or not. There had been no reply.

  And there was no reply when she rang his doorbell. That was a relief, for she couldn’t explain, she couldn’t defend herself, she could only be passive and silent. So she put the envelope through the letter-box and made her way home again.

  Victor in the second contest between herself and Harriet, Anthea could afford to be generous. In her opinion Franklin should do his best to find his wife, even though she might be living happily somewhere with Keith Hill. Franklin said she would find him soon enough. As soon as she was in need, and that wouldn’t be long delayed, she would be in touch. Meanwhile, he put Orcadia Cottage on the market. After all, it belonged to him. He bought a house in South Kensington because Anthea had always wanted to live there. Considering its location, it had quite a large garden, which he could tend and De Valera run about in. Even before contracts were exchanged he moved the best of the furniture out of Orcadia Cottage, including the four-poster bed and the new mirror.

  Darren Curlew and Jonathan Nicholson were soon dismissed from the police inquiries and they were no further in finding who was responsible for Julia’s death. Her burial took place at last, in the second week of January.

  The Edsel was first clamped, then removed. Eventually its ownership was traced to Keith Brex. But, according to Nigel Hewlett and Marguerite Palmer, occupants of the house next door, he hadn’t lived there for months, nearly a year by now. They told the police he had moved to Liphook, though they had no address for him. Teddy, his nephew, would know. Teddy had shared the house with him, but he too had not been seen for a long time.

  “October, wasn’t it, Nige?” said Marguerite Palmer. “No, I tell a lie, it was November. Early November, because your mum was over here for her birthday, and she said, ‘Where’s that car then,’ and I said he’d taken it out the week before and not been back.”

  “And he never came back,” said Nigel Hewlett. “His grandma’s been in and out, but it’s no good you asking her, she doesn’t know his whereabouts either.”

  The dry cleaners in Notting Hill Gate pursued their usual policy with uncollected cleaning, kept it for three months, then put it on sale. Harriet’s Versace and Lacroix hung on a clothes rack out on the pavement alongside blouses from C & A and trousers from Littlewoods. The only concession the shop made was to offer her suits at five pounds apiece instead of the usual one pound fifty. Even at the higher price they were soon snapped up.

  * * *

  Immersed in his new troubles, Richard had almost forgotten that strange interview he had had with a Detective Superintendent and a Detective Inspector a few days before Julia’s death. He might never have reverted to it but for the idea that came into his head one midnight when, as was often the case with him, he couldn’t sleep. Suppose the same man had killed both his wives? Suppose the murderer was someone not primarily intent on destroying them but himself?

  It was a dreadful thought, yet there was a gleam of light in that darkness. For if personal hatred of him had been the motive, it could not have been confusion between the two Dr. Hills which had brought the killer to the house.

  In the morning he phoned the police. They said, not with contempt but with patience, that this theory had early on occurred to them. But they had almost immediately dismissed it.

  “Why?” Richard asked.

  “We’d like to see you, Dr. Hill.” He winced at that “Dr.,” as he always did, yet they were only trying to be polite. The policeman mentioned the Inspector Richard had talked to before. “He’s got something to tell you. We were about to give you a ring.”

  “Why?” Richard asked again when he was sitting in the Inspector’s office. “Since you haven’t found anyone for either of these murders how can you be so sure the same man wasn’t responsible for both?”

  “We have found someone for the murder of Mrs. Jennifer Hill.”

  We often react very differently to such revelations from the way we think we will. Richard didn’t know why he should blush when told his first wife’s killer had been found; he would have expected to shiver. But the hot blood poured into his face and he felt a sprinkling of sweat on his upper lip. “You’ve made an arrest?” he said.

  A shake of the head, a mildly embarrassed look—was he imagining it? “There have been considerable advances in techniques of DNA testing since your wife’s death, Dr. Hill. Had these been available to the investigation at the time, the perpetrator would have been found within days of the murder. There is no doubt about that.”

  Bewildered, Richard said nothing.

  “These things are painful to talk about, even after so long, I know that. Hairs were found on your wife’s clothing, apart from her own, short, light brown hairs. The DNA in them has now been matched.”

  “But why? How?”

  “Dr. Hill …”

  “For God’s sake don’t call me that!” Richard had never explained his feelings to the police, had spoken of them only to David Stanark and to Julia, but now he did. “It is because I called myself ‘Doctor’ in the phone book that my wife was killed. My house was mistaken for the home of another Dr. Hill.”

  “No, no, that’s not the case. That was the view taken at the time, but it was mistaken. I am sorry to have to tell you this, Dr.—er, Mr. Hill, but your wife was involved with another man and it was he who killed her. He killed her because she wanted to end the relationship. After he had shot her he went upstairs to look for the letters he had written her, and presumably he found them, because we never did.”

  And now Richard began to react as he had anticipated in dreams and fantasies; he shivered and his hands trembled. But he found a voice and managed questions. “Why now? How do you know all this now? Out of the blue …”

  “Because the man is dead. He confessed some of this to his wife before he died. It was too much for her to take and she left him. I think, if it is any consolation to you, that his remorse was very great for many years. And not only for the murder …”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Let’s say for deceiving you, not just with your wife, but afterward, for giving himself an alibi by providing you with one. For establishing himself as your friend—for presuming to—well, counsel you.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Richard said, meaning as people often do when they say this, that they believe it all too well.

  “Your daughter recognized the top of his head when h
e came to the door.”

  “My daughter recognized, or thought she recognized, the tops of several men’s heads when they came to the door.”

  “In the case of David Stanark,” said the Inspector, “she was right.”

  The shock of knowing the truth brought back Francine’s voice. Richard had hesitated about telling her, but at last he reasoned that it would be wrong to keep the truth from her. It would have been a different matter if she had not been in the house at the time, not been taken to that lineup, not been made to suffer so long for the consequences of the crime, as he too had been.

  One load of guilt had been shed. The last thing he wanted was to assume another, that of deceiving Francine and keeping up the deception for the rest of his life.

  She astounded him. “I found the letters,” she said. “They were in the wig cupboard. I brought them here and hid them.”

  He felt a pang as if someone had struck him in the chest. His voice was hoarse. “Did you read them?”

  “I couldn’t read joined-up writing.” She managed a smile. “Cursive script. By the time I could I was afraid to read them. I think that even then I knew they were things no one should read.”

  “You kept them?”

  “I threw them away. In the bin in the school playground.”

  They said no more about it. Richard felt it improper and humiliating to discuss with his eighteen-year-old daughter her mother’s love affair; Francine thought humbly that as yet she knew too little about love and sex to make judgments or even to comment. Perhaps if she had shown the letters to her father her life would have been very different. On the other hand, poor Julia had been a woman who in any circumstances would have found some pretext for imprisoning and protecting her.

  But she did use the advantage she seemed to have gained to ask her father if she could go with Holly on the trip charting the progress of Trinidadian land crabs and when they returned, share her flat until they both went up to Oxford. Asking was perhaps not quite what she did; she told him of her intention, though so gently that he believed she was asking permission. He gave it gladly.