by Ruth Rendell
Olwen was drinking the last of her last bottle of gin when Sophie rang her bell. She made her way to the door, forced now to call out that she was coming because all movement took her so long. It also caused her pain, in her back and especially in her knees. Her legs were so swollen that, without her usual opaque stockings, they looked like shiny red bolsters. A wheelchair was what she needed, she thought, but how to get one, who to ask and where to go – always supposing she could go anywhere – all that was beyond her. She got to the door and opened it.
Sophie, young and fit, looked at her in horror. She had been afraid outside St Ebba’s but this was another kind of fright – the fear of madness. Olwen reminded her of a woman in a film she had once seen about the female inmates of what they called a lunatic asylum. She had the same misshapen body, the same straggling grey hair, and her clothes had almost become rags. As for her legs and feet, Sophie took one look and that was enough.
Inside, handing over the two bags, she said what she hadn’t meant to say, what she had intended to put off saying for at least another two weeks when Olwen’s money would come in. ‘I can’t do this for you any more. There’s no more cash in your account.’
Olwen said nothing.
‘You can hear me, Olwen, can’t you? I’m not going shopping for you any more. I’ve not got the time and, anyway, like I said, there’s no more money.’ Sophie thought of the money, now amounting to £70, she had drawn from her own account. ‘I’m spending my own,’ she said, ‘because you haven’t any more. Do you understand?’
‘Not really’ would have done for a reply to this but Olwen didn’t say it. Six months before, when she was still able to fetch her own drink from Wicked Wine, she had had a good idea of how much money she had and how much went in at the end of each month. Now her ability to make such calculations and retain some idea of them by a simple subtraction had gone. Working out how much drink she could afford had gone too. She stared at Sophie and, holding on to the back of the only chair in the place, slowly raised her head and lowered it, a single nod.
‘OK, so long as you know.’
The nod came again.
Sophie had once had the sad task of bringing the news to a friend that her beloved dog had been run over. Her friend’s initial reaction had been the same as Olwen’s, a single nod, as if she were stunned. The dog’s owner had soon burst into sobs and Sophie expected something like this from Olwen, but nothing came. Awkwardly, she stood there for a moment, not knowing what to do. Then she opened the door and let herself out, saying, ‘You take care.’
Alone again, Olwen drank some of the gin straight from the bottle. With difficulty she screwed the cap on again before falling backwards into the soft cushions of the sofa.
There were no lights on Kenilworth Green but a gibbous moon had risen behind the squat outline of St Ebba’s nave and its small square tower. It shed a pale, faintly glowing light on to the grass and the fallen petals. Michael Constantine, out for an evening walk with Katie, saw in the distance a patch of whiteness on the green. He asked Katie if she could see anything lying on the ground.
‘Only the flowers on the grass. Shall we take a walk round?’
‘I’d rather go home to bed,’ said Michael. ‘I’m feeling a bit low. Depressed, I suppose. Maybe I’ll do my next piece on depression.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Duncan Yeardon’s angry reproof had shaken Wally more than he realised at the time. For the rest of the day and half the night he had dwelt on the things Duncan had said. Only half believing them did nothing to take away his unease. As a fat man, worried about his weight, eats chips and chocolate for comfort, so Wally went up to Kenilworth County Primary to be consoled by the sight of innocent unharmed children. Rather, he went to St Ebba’s churchyard with his usual bag of tools, reaching there as Kenilworth Avenue was filling up with the cars of mothers unloading their young. School opened at eight thirty in the morning and the children ran around in the playground until the bell rang to call them in at nine.
Wally looked his fill, undetected by any parents. When the bell rang and they began to go in, he crossed to the other grave he ostensibly tended, the one close up against the Kenilworth Green hedge. There was no one on the green. No children would be there until after three thirty when school came out, but Wally found he liked looking at the swings and the seesaw and the carousel. The association they had with those little girls fired his imagination and he could almost see them there, their skirts flying up in the breeze. Something else he could also see and he came closer to the fence.
It was a low hedge, composed of thornless shrubs, mostly privet and box, and easily climbed over. Wally climbed over it, fearfully approaching what lay on the grass between the see-saw and the carousel. The body of a man lay face downwards. It wore a blue denim jacket and black silk trousers and in the middle of its back was a wide uneven bloodstain, more than a stain, a dried pool of blood. Wally recoiled but not perhaps as much as anyone with a different history might have done. The days when he had worked as a hospital porter, no more than a few weeks, stood him in good stead. He had seen bodies before, he had even moved them out of the wards where they had died. So, because curiosity was getting the better of him and he wanted to see the dead man’s face, he knelt down on the still-dewy grass and turned him over.
It was still a handsome face, though now apparently composed of parchment-coloured wax. Stuart Font’s cerulean eyes, dulled now, stared sightless back at him. Wally had not expected to be shocked but he was shocked. He even felt a little sick, something he never had in the wards. He should go home now, get away from here, maybe never come again. The green was still deserted but, as he got to his feet, he saw someone come in through the kissing gate. Whoever it was had a dog on a lead. Rose Preston-Jones? Wally was beginning to think of Rose as the bane of his life, his nemesis or the opposite of a guardian angel. But it wasn’t Rose, it was a much larger woman and the dog was much larger than McPhee. Wally turned, clambered over the hedge and ran out of the churchyard.
When Molly had begun taking over Richenda’s duties, she had begged Stuart for a key to his flat and eventually he had given her one. This key she used to let herself in on Thursday morning at eight. It was so early because, after she had made hot chocolate and breakfast toast, tidied the kitchen and dusted the living room, she intended to go to college. Of course she had rung the bell first, rung it twice. She supposed he was still in bed and she tiptoed into his bedroom. Once or twice, when she had arrived early, this had happened and she had stood by his bed, doing what she loved to do, watching him sleep. But this morning he wasn’t in bed. He wasn’t in the flat at all.
She remembered what he had said to her the evening before, that he had a hot date. He must have spent the night with this woman, this Claudia, whose husband had crashed into the party and made all those threats.
‘I hope he’s OK,’ Molly said aloud to the empty flat. ‘Oh, I do hope nothing’s happened to him.’
‘I wouldn’t want to give up my days at the Bel Esprit Centre,’ said Rose. ‘I get more clients there than I do at home and it’s much more lucrative.’
Marius took the hand that wasn’t holding McPhee’s lead. ‘And I wouldn’t like to give up tutoring those Mill Hill kids. Well, I would like but I couldn’t afford it.’
As they walked up Kenilworth Avenue towards the roundabout, they were discussing the possible location of the house they intended to buy, whether it should be near here or further out, perhaps Barnet or Totteridge if those areas weren’t too expensive. The day was pale grey and still, warmer than it had been. The trees had shed most of their blossom but gardens and window boxes were full of flowers.
‘I’d like a garden,’ said Rose. ‘I’ve always wanted one but never did because I’ve always lived in flats.’
‘Darling Rose, you shall have your garden whatever else we don’t have. Now that Latin is coming back as a GCSE subject I shall get rich.’
They had come to the green and the ki
ssing gate. McPhee was already inside, running free on the grass. Rose and Marius followed him slowly, staring at the far corner where the children’s swings were. The whole area was cordoned off with blue-and-white police crime tape.
‘Oh, what’s happened? Do you think some child has had an accident? Sometimes they swing those swings much higher than they should.’
‘The police wouldn’t put up crime tape for that,’ said Marius. ‘I did notice several police cars and a van parked in Kenilworth Avenue.’
‘I’ll put McPhee on his lead again. They won’t like him running about free.’
‘I don’t think we’d better come in here at all.’
So, much to the little dog’s chagrin, they walked back the way they had come. In their absence, two police cars had arrived and were parked outside. The automatic doors opened to receive them.
‘Your place or mine?’ asked Marius.
It was a joke they had. For the past week they had been spending one day and night in her flat and then one day and night in his. Since that visit of Rose’s to Marius’s flat, his confession and hers, they had barely been apart.
‘It’s your turn.’ Rose headed for the stairs. To her surprise Marius summoned the lift. ‘But you’ve got a phobia,’ she said.
‘I had a phobia. Or I deceived myself into thinking I had. But since you and I – well, it’s gone. You’ve banished it, darling Rose.’
The large detective sergeant with the moon face and the big belly and his sidekick DC Bashir had found no one at home but Noor who was awakened from a deep sleep after four or five attempts on the doorbell. They asked her some questions but she knew nothing. She hadn’t seen Stuart since the party, she had never been to Kenilworth Green. She had been in a club with her boyfriend until the place closed at 4 a.m. Could she please go back to bed now? Detective Sergeant Blakelock thought Olwen’s flat was also empty. They went back to Flat 4 and this time they got an answer from Marius Potter. He invited them in and introduced them to his fiancée, a word he hated using because he found it ridiculous in someone of his age – but ‘girlfriend’ would have been worse.
Neither of them knew much about Stuart Font, both of them aware that, while he had seemed perfectly amiable and pleasant, he wasn’t the kind of person they would want to make a friend of, just as he had shown no desire to be friends with them. But he had, along with the rest of the Lichfield House residents, invited them to his party. Marius remembered that party very well, he remembered the irruption into it of that man and the threats he had made. After the police had gone, having learned nothing from them, he said to Rose, ‘I phoned the police. Do you remember?’
‘Yes, I think so. I suppose so.’
‘What was that chap’s name?’
‘Freddy something.’
‘Do you think I should have told them? Should I have told them he threatened to kill Stuart Font?’
‘Oh dear,’ said Rose, ‘I don’t know. Someone else who was there will tell them.’
‘I would if I knew his name. He never told us his name, did he?’
‘I’m sure he didn’t,’ said Rose.
*
Michael Constantine had given up the depression idea and was writing the culminating vitriolic sentence in his denunciation of cranberry juice as a remedy for cystitis, when the police came. His only previous encounters with the law had been when he was stopped for driving his father’s car at excessive speed and when, as a long-haired, nose- and lip-pierced teenager, he had been stopped and searched. How pleasant it was to be questioned by them when conscious of his perfect innocence! He and Katie told them they had seen a white shape lying on the grass at nine thirty the previous evening. It might have been poor Stuart Font but on the other hand it might have been a heap of tree blossom.
Someone was in the hallway when they got out of the lift. He looked to Blakelock as if he was trying to make himself scarce by heading for the stairs, but Bashir stopped him with an ‘Excuse me!’ Bashir had a very loud resonant voice.
Plain-clothes policemen think they look like other members of the public but they don’t. Something about the way they dress, their manner, their self-consciously imposed ‘ordinariness’, makes them immediately recognised by those with a guilty conscience. Wally knew there was no escape for him. He turned round, smiling pleasantly, and said that he was the caretaker, name of Walter Scurlock. No, he knew nothing about Mr Font, he said, no idea what time he went out the day before.
‘You want to talk to my wife,’ he said, passing the buck. ‘She cleaned for Mr Font. That is, until he got the young lady from Flat 5 to do it for free. I’ll get my wife to give you a bell, shall I?’
‘We’ll come back here when your wife’s in,’ said Bashir, sensing that there was no need to call this fellow ‘sir’. ‘What time would that be?’
Wally didn’t want them in the flat. ‘I tell you what. She’s over in Ludlow House now. Flat 2. Just ring the bell.’
Before going there, they called on Duncan Yeardon and the people at Springmead. Duncan was very helpful. He invited them in for a coffee, which was accepted, though it was 3.30 p.m. by then. Oh yes, he had known Stuart well, he was ‘inexpressibly shocked’ to hear he had been murdered.
‘It was murder, wasn’t it?’
Bashier said they were treating it as an unexplained death. ‘I heard someone had stabbed him in the back,’ said Duncan.
He decided he owed loyalty to Stuart’s memory and said nothing to them about how attracted he had been by Tigerlily or how much he had liked coming over and watching her over the fence. ‘He had a party,’ he said. ‘Kind of house-warming affair. Or flat-warming, maybe I should say. There was this chap burst in, made threats, said he’d kill him for – well, I won’t say the word – doing something he shouldn’t with his wife.’
‘Whose wife?’
‘The chap’s wife.’
Bashir started writing things down in his notebook. ‘Do you know the man’s name?’
‘I can’t say I do,’ said Duncan. ‘Not to say, know his name. A big burly sort of chap with a reddish face. Mind you, everybody was there, all the people in the flats. One of them could tell you.’
Springmead was next. But here the ugly face of racism poked up in Blakelock’s mind. The man who answered the door – or didn’t answer the door but came round the side of the house when they rang the bell – was plainly from South-East Asia. China? Malaysia? Singapore? Bashir couldn’t tell any more than Blakelock could but Blakelock knew he had to be careful. There was something in the man’s wary yet aggressive expression that told him this short, stocky, black-haired, copper-skinned individual would be on the phone complaining if one of them stepped an inch out of line. This was where a ‘sir’ was definitely required.
‘Can I help you?’ was all the man said but it was enough to send out a warning signal.
‘Just to ask you, sir, if you’ve heard of the unexplained death last night of Mr Stuart Font from Lichfield House?’
‘Never met him,’ said the South-East Asian man.
‘Don’t know him or any of them.’ From somewhere he had picked up a useful phrase. ‘We keep ourself to ourself in our home.’
‘Nothing doing there,’ said Blakelock when they were back in the road. ‘Now for Mrs Scurlock.’
Richenda had finished work at Flat 2 Ludlow House and moved on to Flat 4. The first thing she did wherever she started work was turn on the radio. Stations were unimportant to her, it could be a game show or a comedian or a play or classical music or an economist talking, it mattered not at all so long as she had background sound. Silence made her uneasy. So when Blakelock and Bashir finally tracked her down, a gardening programme was on, a fluting upper-class voice telling listeners they were wrong if they thought nothing was to be done in the flower beds in May.
In her usual costume of miniskirt, high-heeled sandals and tight low-cut top, Richenda caused some eye-bulging in the detective sergeant and a small recoil in the Muslim constable. She no more go
t a ‘madam’ than her husband had a ‘sir’.
‘I knew him well,’ she began. ‘I can tell you all about him. His relationship with that blonde woman, for starters. They was having a hot affair. Claudia’s her name.’
Blakelock, realising few questions would be needed here, sat down in one of the armchairs and prepared to listen. No, Richenda didn’t know Claudia’s surname or what she did for a living, if anything. A man who said she was his wife had burst into Stuart Font’s party, attacked him, broken his arm and threatened to kill him. It was much the same as what Duncan had told them but he hadn’t mentioned the broken arm.
‘Mind you,’ said Richenda, ‘Stuart was a bit of a sex maniac. He got rid of me so that one of those girls from Flat 5 could come and clean for him. Not that there’d have been much cleaning done.’
With no need to enquire but purely out of fascination, Bashir asked her if Stuart had ever made any advances to her.
‘Oh, all the time,’ said Richenda.
Police had been searching the Kenilworth Green area for several hours, looking for the weapon, but no knife had been found. The evening was still light but they worked on till nine. Half an hour before that they moved into the churchyard. There, leaning against a gravestone not far from the fence, was a large canvas bag, containing a pair of garden shears, a trowel and a small garden fork. They placed it in a plastic bag and took it to the murder room which had been set up in the Bel Esprit Centre.
There, Darren Blakelock examined the bag and its contents, wearing gloves to handle them gingerly. The tools were fingerprinted. Someone had printed WS in felt pen on the outside of the bag. Blakelock couldn’t immediately connect those initials with anyone he had yet talked to and soon after looking at them, and looking at them again and again with no result, he went home to bed.
He woke up in the small hours and thought: Walter Scurlock. Visualising the bearer of that name, he saw a medium-sized man with an enlarged belly, balding head, unmemorable features – to himself he called them ‘ordinary’ – a nervous man. What had he got to be nervous about? And what had he been doing in St Ebba’s churchyard?
