A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  He had got to Notting Hill late in the afternoon, waited for Chuck for what seemed like hours in a pub called the Sun in Splendour, and eventually gone to Chuck’s flat which was the basement of a house in Arundel Gardens. Chuck was displeased to see him, had forgotten their arrangement, and kept saying it looked bad to have a stream of people arriving at his door at all hours. Rufus, naturally, couldn’t have cared less. He got his Colombian and his charas, fifty sodium amytal capsules for good measure, paid for them, and set off back to Nunes.

  If he had had any money left, any real money instead of just enough to buy petrol and ten cigarettes, Rufus would have stayed in London much later and found something interesting to do with his evening. He had occasionally thought of that since, how everything would have been changed, whole lives would have been changed, including his own, if he had had twenty pounds in his pocket instead of two pounds fifty. For if he had left London at eleven, say, instead of seven-thirty, Zosie would not have been waiting outside the station at Colchester to hitch a lift to Nunes.

  “Some great brute of a truck driver would have picked you up,” he had said to her a couple of days later, “and maybe raped and murdered you and left your body in a ditch.”

  “Well, you raped me,” said Zosie.

  “I what?”

  “I only did it to get my lift and a bed for the night. I only did it for sanctuary, and that’s rape really.”

  It was never policy with Rufus to recall ego-defacing rejoinders of that sort. He allowed himself to remember instead how from the first she had known it was Nunes she wanted to go to. She had never been there but she knew it was where she was heading. Home is where you go to, someone had written, and they have to take you in.

  She looked about twelve until you got up close to her. Then, even in the dark, in the greenish lamplight, you could see she was more than that. Her hair was like a little cap of fawn satin. He hadn’t said that, Adam had, Adam the wordsmith. She had a face like all the drawings there had ever been of fairy girls on birthday cards and illustrated children’s books. Adam had said that too. Rufus saw only a small, slender, finely made girl in jeans and a T-shirt with a backpack that looked as if it hadn’t much in it. And a face of despair or desperation that expressed itself in a big-eyed stare.

  He drew up a few yards ahead of her and she ran up to the van.

  “Where do you want to go to?”

  “Anywhere!”

  “Come on, give me a better idea than that.”

  She hesitated fractionally. “Nunes.”

  “Surprise, surprise. By an amazing coincidence I’m going there myself.”

  Frankly, and he had been quite frank about it to himself at the time, he had picked her up because he thought there might be a chance of sex and he had had no sex since Mary went (the encounter with the barmaid’s friend not having amounted to much, he being too drunk at the time). At first she had not seemed particularly attractive. Zosie was like that. Her attractions made themselves felt slowly and then they grabbed you by the throat. She looked impossibly young.

  “Could I have a cigarette?”

  “I’ve only got six.”

  “You could buy some in that pub.”

  “I could if I had any money. I just bought a gallon of petrol. It was either that or a long night’s smoke on the side of the road. Have you any money?”

  “Of course I haven’t.”

  She couldn’t have sounded more astonished, more sullenly astonished, if he had asked her if she had a mink coat in her backpack.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Zosie.”

  “Zoe?”

  “Not Zoe and not Sophie. Zosie. What’s yours?”

  “Rufus.”

  “Woof-woof,” said Zosie.

  He gave her a cigarette and he had one. He pulled Goblander off the road onto a car track down one of the lanes leading to Boxted and they smoked their cigarettes and he remembered the packet of marijuana in the pocket of the door. So he took one of his four remaining cigarettes to pieces and rolled a joint and they smoked it, moving gradually closer and closer together, touching each other’s faces and lips with fingertips and each other’s bodies with hands, until it was time to climb into the back of the van… .

  It was the quickest sexual encounter of Rufus’s life, with the least preamble, the least working up to. Almost as easy as when you are married, Rufus thought now. He did not ask himself if she had liked it, had wanted to do it. She had moved in the right way and made the right noises and the expression he saw briefly on her face, blank yet wild, was probably indicative of pleasure.

  Back in the front, driving on, his left hand on her knee, moving in a vaguely affectionate way, he asked her where in Nunes she wanted to go to.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To my friend’s place. Maybe you know it? Wyvis Hall, a rather handsome Georgian house with a lot of land.”

  “I’ve never been to Nunes. This friend of yours—is it his parents’ place?”

  “No, it’s his. He owns it. Just he and I live there.”

  “Rufus,” she said, and her voice was very small, very young, “can I go there with you? Just for a little while? Just for the night?”

  “Why not?” said Rufus, and then he said, “Where had you been meaning to go?”

  She said nothing for a moment or two.

  “Okay, you don’t have to tell me. That’s your business.”

  “I was just hoping something would turn up,” she said.

  “Haven’t you really got any money?”

  She said fiercely, “What d’you want me to do? Pay you for it?”

  “Okay, sorry. I just wondered how you expected to get very far without money.”

  “I’ve got fifty p.” She fished in her backpack for some coins to show him. The pack was half empty. There was a gray knitted sweater in it, a black leather belt with studs, a copy of Honey magazine, and a half-eaten chocolate bar. Zosie pulled the shawl around her shoulders and sat hugging herself. “I’d have gone home,” she said.

  He could tell she didn’t like being questioned, so he hadn’t asked where home was. By then they were going along the road from which the lane led up to Nunes and the church and the village green. She stared out of the window, into the white moonlight, the dark spaces. He noticed she was shaking, though it was warm.

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  “I’m tired,” she said. “Christ, I’m tired.”

  She sat back and closed her eyes. He drove past the Mill on the Pytle, not a light showing in the house, not a light anywhere, and turned down Adam’s drift. When Goblander stopped she woke up, whimpering like a child.

  “Here we are,” said Rufus.

  She got out, stretching herself, pushing her fists into her eyes.

  “I’ll carry that,” said Rufus, taking the backpack from her.

  Yawning hugely, she looked up at Wyvis Hall, at the pillared porch, at the lemony glow of the dining room window through which the chandelier could be seen above the pool of light it made on the surface of the oval mahogany table.

  “This friend of yours, it all belongs to him? I mean, just him?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How old is he then?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “That’s amazing,” said Zosie.

  She wanted to know if she could go straight to bed. By then they were in the house and Adam had come in from the terrace. Rufus couldn’t be sure how Adam felt about Zosie’s arrival. He was looking at her speculatively, seemed indeed unable to keep his eyes off her. It was different somehow, this picking up of Zosie, from when they had brought the two girls, the barmaid and her married friend, home with them from Sudbury. Adam said: “I’ll show you where you’ll sleep.”

  Rufus didn’t object. He had decided to open a bottle of wine.

  Their footsteps could be heard overhead, which meant Adam must be showing her into his, Rufus’s, room, the Centaur Room, and that was all he cared
about. He stood on the terrace with the wineglass in his hand, looking at the waters of the lake in which the white reflection of the moon lay like a disc of marble. He and Zosie had smoked all the cigarettes and Rufus had never liked getting through the night without a cigarette in the house… . He screwed his eyes tightly shut, opened them again to look at the Players packet on his desk. It was slipped into the top drawer as the receptionist announced his next patient.

  When Adam approached home after they had expelled themselves from Ecalpemos he felt, for the first time in his life, the wish to die. Alternatively he had the feeling man attributes to sick animals, that of needing to find a hole far away from the herd to creep into and hide. And he had hoped, after Rufus had left him and he had uttered with ridiculous drama Cassius’s farewell to Brutus, that he would at least be able to get into the house unobserved and go up to his bedroom and be alone. But this was not allowed him.

  His father stood in the front garden with a pair of clippers in his hand. When he saw Adam he did not greet him but spoke in what Adam thought was a very strange way for someone who has not seen his only son for nearly three months.

  “An afternoon is all it takes me to get this place shipshape, the whole lot weeded and tidied up. It’s not as if I had a decent-sized garden, a few acres, something you could call a garden.”

  Adam said nothing but stood there feeling hopeless and helpless.

  Lewis Verne-Smith said, “That’s my old uncle’s golf bag you’ve got there.” He seemed to recollect that the bag must now, however unfairly, however productive of resentment, belong to Adam. “You can imagine how my uncle treasured that. He used to take care of his things. I don’t suppose you can understand that. I expect it’s just an old golf bag to you, something to be thrown about any old how.”

  “I’m not going to throw it anywhere,” Adam said.

  He went around the side of the house to the kitchen door, aware that his father was following him. He was beginning to think his father was going a bit mad. The loss of Wyvis Hall and brooding on that loss had unhinged him.

  “So you’ve been to Greece,” he said.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Is that all you can say?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “If I had had the incredible good fortune at your age to be permitted to have ten weeks holiday in Greece, I should have had a good deal more than ‘mmm-hmm’ to say about it, I can tell you.”

  By then they were in the kitchen. His mother and Bridget were nowhere around.

  “I don’t imagine you’ve been near your inheritance all these weeks. It might have been broken into, set fire to, razed to the ground for all you know.” His father had worked himself into one of his rages. “You’re totally irresponsible, do you know that? No one knew where you were, nobody could have gotten in touch with you. We might all have died, that glorious house you don’t give a damn for might have been razed to the ground—and where were you? Swanning around the Aegean.”

  Adam went upstairs, carrying his stuff with him, and entered his bedroom and locked the door. He was glad now that he had let his father believe he had on that day returned from Greece. Later on, he remembered, his father had commented on his tan with ancillary remarks about dolce far niente and lotus eaters. But all he had been able to think of at the time was that phrase of his father’s, “swanning around the Aegean,” and before his eyes as he climbed the stairs, as he entered his room and sat down on the bed, he had had a sort of vision of a dark blue sea dotted with little green islands, the sun shining and the sky blue, and a team of white swans with golden collars around their necks and golden harness pulling a magic boat, a boat that was shaped rather like a gondola, in which he sat like some hero of antiquity, robed in white and trailing one graceful hand in the water.

  The vision was so beautiful and reality so awful that he had lain on the bed and to his horror and shame burst out crying. He stuffed bedclothes into his mouth to muffle the sounds in case his father were standing outside the door. He had not cried for long. After a while he had got up and made himself undo the golf bag and remove the shotgun, the twelve-bore. He wrapped a dirty T-shirt around his left hand and held the gun with it and then he wiped the gun with a dirty sock. The golf bag with the gun in it he put under his bed.

  Hadn’t he been afraid his father might come poking around and find it? Adam made it a rule to keep his bedroom door locked always, but that is not the kind of rule which one keeps and he often forgot. Still, if his father had found the gun, he had never said and Adam had never moved it. He left it there when he went back to university a month later and it remained there until a year later when he moved out and into a house of his own that he bought with the money he got from the sale of Ecalpemos.

  The gun was no longer in the golf bag but in a cupboard in the smaller spare bedroom upstairs. Adam did not have a license for it. But although made nervous by the arrival of the policemen, he was not in a panic, he was not in a state to believe that on this initial visit they would search his house. Their attitude to him was impersonal—that and incredulous. No, not quite incredulous, this was the wrong word, signifying as it did an astonished overt disbelief. They were not like that. They behaved rather as if as a matter of course they never believed protestations of innocence but would all too readily accept admissions of guilt. And yet none of it was as explicit as this. He also had the impression that what they were doing was mere routine, boring to them even, something to be gotten over. But instead of comforting him, this served rather to increase his anxiety because he felt that important questions were being saved up, were postponed until the time when certain evidence and certain remarks of his had been sifted and studied. Then the policemen would come back and the subsequent interview would be very different in kind.

  The inspector’s name was Winder, the Detective Constable’s name was Stretton, the former a bit older than himself, the latter a bit younger. They looked like his neighbors or the people he worked with. He offered them a drink but this they refused. What Adam found a bit upsetting was the way neither of them, though politely acknowledging Anne, took the slightest notice of Abigail. Of course Anne took Abigail away to bed almost immediately after Winder and Stretton arrived, but even so Adam thought it strange that neither of them said good night to her as she was carried from the room or commented upon her after she had gone.

  Winder started by asking him if he had ever lived at Wyvis Hall and Adam replied, well, not lived, stayed there for a few days just to check on the place. He had been short of money and while there he was afraid he had sold some of the contents of the house, ornaments rather than pieces of furniture.

  “It was yours, wasn’t it?” said Winder in his dull neutral voice.

  “Yes, it was mine. I had a right to sell it.”

  “How long did you live there, Mr. Verne-Smith?”

  “Stay there? A week or two. I don’t remember exactly.” Adam waited to be asked if he had stayed there alone but he was not asked. Neither man was writing any of this down and this gave Adam a small amount of confidence. He did not like the impersonal, breezy, almost automatonlike tone of Winder’s voice, but it might be natural to him; it might be that he always talked like this, even to his wife and children.

  “And after you left at the end of the week or two, did you ever go back?”

  “Not to live there,” said Adam.

  “You never lived there in the first place, did you? Did you ever stay there again?”

  “No.”

  “You put Wyvis Hall on the market, is that correct? Your father has told us you put it on the market in the autumn of 1976 and then withdrew it from sale in the spring, when you had had no acceptable offers. You offered it again in the autumn of 1977, finally selling it to Mr. Langan.”

  None of this was being written down, but this time Adam told the strict truth.

  “I didn’t offer it for sale at all until the late summer of 1977.”

  “So your father is mistake
n?”

  “He must be.” Anticipating a fairly obvious question, Adam said, “I was in my last year at university. I had my finals coming up. I didn’t want the bother of selling property. Besides, I was told that if I hung on to it, it would go up in value and it did.”

  This seemed to satisfy them. Stretton asked him what he had been dreading but knew must come, the first of a series of questions that would lead up to the matter of the animal cemetery and the contents of the grave.

  “Did you know there was an area on your property where family pets had been buried?”

  “I used to go there when I was a child, you know. I think I must have been shown it then.”

  “You think, Mr. Verne-Smith?”

  “I don’t remember,” Adam said. “I knew there was an animal cemetery there somewhere but I don’t remember when I first saw it.”

  “You didn’t, for instance, go up to look at it while you stayed at Wyvis Hall in June 1976 or again before you offered the property for sale in August 1977?”

  “I don’t think so. Not that I recall.”

  “You are aware, of course, of what was found buried in the animal cemetery a couple of weeks ago?”

  “I think so.”

  “The skeletons of a young woman and a baby. Death occurred between nine and twelve years ago—which really means most probably ten or eleven years ago? Would you agree?”

  Adam wasn’t at all sure if he would. That is, he would not in general agree to an assumption of that sort and he was quite sure a court would not. On the other hand, he knew very well when death had occurred—ten years and two months ago.

  “The young woman met a violent death. The child, too, possibly. Suicide is a possibility in the woman’s case but she didn’t kill herself and dig her own grave. She didn’t bury herself.”

  Adam nodded. A rueful smile would have been in order but he could not smile. Winder had said “kill” and not “shoot,” which meant they did not know a gun had been used, they didn’t know about the pump action twelve-bore. Nor, perhaps, had they found the lady’s gun, buried in the Little Wood. He had thought that if you shot something—for up till then he had shot only birds and few of them—the victim staggered, fell, and died. Like on the screen, like on television. He had not anticipated the flying blood, the fountains of blood, as the ball bearings struck arteries, great and small blood vessels. So it had been. So it must have been for Sebastian up in the Pincushion Room, the arrows summoning forth spouts of blood instead of the flesh receiving them passively as it might so many acupuncture needles… .