by Ruth Rendell
The heat was worst of all up here. Of course it would be, for heat rises. Slowly he got up and went downstairs where it was infinitesimally cooler.
He hooked the ring on which his keys hung on to the little finger of his left hand, took a torch from the hall cupboard – Springmead looked to be in total darkness – and left the house by the front door. Now he was in the front garden he could tell the house was empty. Blinds covered all the front windows but they were the slatted kind through which slits of brightness would show if lights were on inside. If there had been a letter box he could have looked through it. Perhaps that was the reason there wasn’t one. He walked round the side, turned the handle on the side gate and, somewhat to his surprise, it opened. More blinds at the windows here. He came into the back garden, a place he had often looked at from his rear windows, but he had never seen or noticed what a barren place it was, the lawn unmown but green with the moss which overgrew it, not a flower, only weed shrubs, elders and brambles. The great ash tree overshadowed everything. Duncan went across the grass and on to the steps of the summer house.
But on this mild summer night, the moon gliding out of clouds into clear patches of sky, his torch was barely needed. Feeling very daring, feeling almost sick, he climbed the steps, opened the door of the summer house and stepped inside. It was furnished with floor cushions and pillows, and although no one would have called it cold, it was a good ten degrees cooler than the interior of his house. They came here to get cool, he thought, to escape the heat of Springmead, a heat which must necessarily be much hotter than his own home.
Behind the summer house, opening on to the lane behind, was the garage where Mr Deng must keep his Audi. Duncan went down the steps and into the garage by its rear door. He shone his torch round it but needlessly. There was nothing to see. What he had really come to see, he reminded himself, was the interior of Springmead, as much as he could even if the rear windows were hung with blinds.
They were not. Or if they were the blinds hadn’t been pulled down. He could see through the French windows which corresponded to his own or he would have been able to if there was any light. But the whole place was in absolute darkness. He switched on his torch and shone it on to the glass, expecting to see plant pots, those royal orchids he had been told about, maybe twenty or thirty of them. What he saw instead was a thick black curtain hanging some six inches from the window and the half-raised blind. It covered the rear wall and French windows from floor to ceiling.
It was only a curtain but it frightened him. He had to stop himself from actually running home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Blakelock knew Freddy Livorno would refuse to let them search his house without a warrant, and he would probably refuse for no more reason than to annoy. He would know that they could easily get one. It was simply a matter of time, of delay. So Blakelock didn’t bother to ask Freddy, he got his warrant and, armed with it, went along to Aurelia Grove. Claudia was at home and she made a fuss, but beyond shouting and stamping there was nothing she could do. Bashir told her to calm down and eventually she did. They refused to tell her what they were looking for.
Nor did they tell her, when the search was completed, that they had failed to find Stuart Font’s blue leather suitcase.
‘I thought,’ said Claudia, trying to use police language, ‘that you’d eliminated my husband from your inquiries.’
‘Did you, madam?’
‘You let him go.’ She added, keeping in the mode, ‘Without a stain on his character.’
‘If you say so,’ said Blakelock. ‘No doubt we shall want to see him again.’
The Scurlocks’ flat in the basement of Lichfield House remained much as it had been when Wally and Richenda lived there. Richenda had no interest in any of the old furnishings and had equipped her new place entirely from Ikea. Run to earth while vacuuming a flat in Hereford House, she told DC Bashir that they could search her old home as much as they liked. What were they looking for?
They hadn’t told Claudia but they happily told Richenda.
‘That little blue suitcase of Stuart’s? I’ll be very surprised if you find anything like that. I’ve brought all the luggage we’ve got with me.’
And again they searched in vain.
The Springmead people’s electricity bill would be enormous, Duncan thought. Or perhaps it was gas they used for heating. Their business must be highly lucrative. No wonder they could all afford to go away on holiday. He wondered where they had gone. The Maldives maybe or perhaps, being from South-East Asia themselves, somewhere in Europe. Monte Carlo? Athens?
His time was mostly passed outside and he congratulated himself on the purchase of that swing recliner. Two nights after his adventure in the Springmead garden he slept outdoors. Even in the night-time, even in the small hours, it remained warm. The air swarmed with insects, mostly moths, their big soft wings brushing against his face. Something less pleasant stung him on the cheek, leaving a red swollen lump.
There was no sound or sign from next door. It occurred to Duncan that plants needed looking after. Watering? Feeding? And how long did they plan to leave the heating on? No doubt they had paid someone to come in and do whatever had to be done. Trying to resist scratching his swollen cheek, he put his rubbish and his recycling out in the lane and tried to see into the Springmead garage. An up-and-over door was of course closed but he was able to see through a very narrow crack between its wooden boards. Something was inside the garage. He was nearly certain he could see Mr Deng’s black Audi inside. Perhaps one or some or all of them came back from wherever they were staying to attend to the plants. It must be because they, like him, could barely stand the excessive temperature. If the heat hadn’t been such a problem, Duncan thought, this investigation of his – for this was what it was becoming – would be quite exciting. He had found himself an occupation.
He hardly knew why he needed to know what was going on next door. It wasn’t just a matter of the excessive heat. He was consumed with curiosity so that he could think of little else. In the evening he went back to the lane, telling himself that this was just to bring back his bins. But he had another look through the crack in the boards of the garage door and this time the car had gone. Or, rather, whatever had obstructed his view of the rear window and door of the garage had been removed. Maybe it hadn’t been the Audi but something else stored in the garage and now removed.
He passed the night in the garden and next morning the temperature had dropped a little. A light drizzle was falling. But it seemed too much to hope that the heatwave might be over. The house was still very hot inside but, with all the windows open, not unbearable. The Pembers came in for a coffee and Kathy asked him what he had done to his face.
‘An insect bit me.’
‘Americans don’t say insects, they say bugs,’ said Kathy irrelevantly. ‘We saw you sleeping in the garden. If that was because of the heat you must come and stay with us. Our spare room is like a fridge.’
Duncan said, no, thank you very much, he did appreciate their kindness but he intended to have it out with the Springmead people that day. He’d tell them that if they didn’t turn their heating down he would have to report them to the council.
Would he actually do that? It was one thing to say so, another thing to carry out this threat. Meanwhile, he would continue his surveillance, and to that end he brought a chair and table into the front garden and sat there reading the paper and watching for the Audi. The lovebirds came out, holding hands quite amicably this time. Rose Preston-Jones emerged, without that teacher chap for once and without her dog. He watched her go into the Bel Esprit Centre – of course they wouldn’t allow the dog in there and quite right too – and just as he was thinking he had better go indoors and start thinking about his lunch, the Audi arrived. Duncan hurried indoors and watched from the bay window.
Mr Deng, that he had once called Mr Wu, had come and his son with him. No sign of Tigerlily and the other girl. The two men went into the house and closed
the front door behind them. Now was his chance to ring that front door bell and complain about the heat coming from their house through the walls into his house. But what if Mr Deng simply denied it?
What he would really like to do, if he could do so without putting himself in danger, was get into that house and see for himself, even locate the source of the heat – and turn it off. He wondered if he would have the nerve to do that. They would know someone had done it, that it hadn’t gone off of its own accord. But at least he would discover if it was hotter in there than here in his own house. He could find the boiler or the various heaters. He would have liked to see their electricity bill but that of course was impossible.
The Audi had gone. That meant nothing. Mr Deng would have put it into the garage. The mist had cleared from the air, the sun was coming out and it was warming up again. Duncan took his sandwiches and glass of orange juice out into the back garden and sat on the recliner. He realised that he had never heard any sounds from next door, but he hadn’t ever listened, hadn’t put his ear to the dividing wall. When he had finished his lunch, he took the tray to the kitchen and in the hallway pressed his right ear – his good one – to the white-painted wall. Nothing. Silence.
They hadn’t gone to Monte Carlo or wherever. They were still here, staying somewhere, perhaps with relatives. Duncan imagined a brother or even an uncle of Mr Deng who ran a Chinese restaurant but whose home was a fine house in Totteridge. It would have air conditioning and maybe a pool in the grounds. Naturally, they wouldn’t want to spend more time than they had to down here when they could be in a beautiful garden, perhaps with a Chinese pagoda in it, a smaller version of the one at Kew. Duncan had his mid-afternoon coffee sitting in the front garden. He saw Richenda go out on a bicycle with a big basket on its front for her shopping and marvelled how anyone could dare to ride a bike in heels that high and a skirt that short. A woman he thought might be an estate agent arrived with a couple to look over Rose Preston-Jones’s flat. Through her front window he saw them walking about the interior. But he saw no activity at Springmead. Some vandal had thrown an empty crisp packet over the fence into its front garden, which wasn’t really a garden but a paved and pebbled area with a few dispirited shrubs. Duncan watched the breeze blow it about until it attached itself to the spiky top of a small cypress tree.
The presence of that crisp packet irritated him and after a while he let himself into the Springmead front garden and removed it. Carrying it into his own house to dispose of it, he realised that he had nothing for his supper. It was cooler than it had been but still too hot to walk all the way to the Tesco. He listened again at the hallway wall and again heard nothing. What he was planning to do later brought his heart into his mouth – it really felt like that, as if he had a blockage in his throat that half stopped him breathing. You haven’t got the nerve, he said to himself, you know they’ll guess who it was. But yes, maybe you have got the nerve … How dare they make it impossible for someone to live next door to them? And wasn’t it, anyway, against planning restrictions to use a private house for a commercial purpose, even though they might be renowned orchid growers?
Slowly, he walked up to Mr Ali’s, carrying a Tesco bag for the sake of the environment, though he knew that Mr Ali scrutinised the bags his customers brought in and disapproved of any from the big supermarket chains. He seemed to think that those who bought anything from his shop should exclusively shop with him. Duncan bought a chicken breast and some frozen peas and they were slipped into a brand-new plastic bag before he could produce his Tesco one. Mr Ali often seemed to read customers’ thoughts.
‘Why bother with this environment business,’ he asked rhetorically, ‘when Chinese are building a new power station each single day?’
Could this be true? Duncan didn’t know if it was but the remark reminded him of Springmead and its inhabitants. Those girls would be swimming in their uncle’s pool now, Mr Deng smoking a cigar with his brother on a shady patio, or enjoying a sake in the pagoda. He walked up to the end of Kenilworth Parade, crossed Kenilworth Avenue and turned into the lane. If the Audi had been there it was gone now and the up-and-over door was wide open. Because Mr Deng meant to come back? At any rate no one was there now. Duncan looked longingly at Springmead but what he contemplated doing must wait until dark.
*
Margaret was visiting her friend next door. These days she went there more and more and stayed longer and longer. When Olwen remained in her bedroom her stepdaughter stayed at home but the moment she appeared in the living room, Margaret was off to see Helen, murmuring that she would ‘just pop next door for five minutes’. Olwen didn’t mind. She was accustomed to being no one’s favourite person, in fact accustomed to being generally disliked and avoided. It was many years now that she had come to terms with the truth that she was first in no one’s world or, come to that, second or third.
Now it was simply a matter of choosing her time for what she meant to do. Afternoon would be best and immediately after Margaret had gone to have tea or coffee or something stronger with Helen. It brought Olwen a small amount of grim amusement to listen to Margaret’s sanctimonious comments on alcohol consumption stories in the Evening Standard while the smell of gin was apparent on her breath.
‘Do you know that it says here the British drink more wine than the French and Italians put together?’ Or, ‘It says here that binge drinking has doubled in the past five years.’
Mostly all this just bored Olwen. However much of a hypocrite Margaret might be, however much drink she consumed on her own or in her conspiracy with Helen, she wasn’t and would never be in Olwen’s league. Although it was many weeks since anything alcoholic had passed her lips, now that the best of it was past, she felt a strange pride in the consumption she had achieved over what was only a few months. She hadn’t been a drinker, she had been a drunk, and as a drunk she meant to die. One afternoon, when Margaret, poor pathetic thing that she was, had gone next door to visit Helen, then it should be done.
In Margaret’s absence she once more opened the drinks cupboard and looked at the bottles. Her throat opened and she gasped, yearning, even placing a hand on the neck of the blue bottle and the brown bottle and clutching their necks, but she went no further than that and she closed the cupboard door again.
At about nine in the evening when it was still quite light, Duncan went out of his gate into the lane. The Springmead garage door was still raised and the Audi was missing. Duncan returned to his recliner, scratching his insect bite, the remains of his chicken, peas and chips supper still on the table. Mr Deng and the boy would be back in Totteridge, possibly sitting by the pool and eating a delicious meal of butterfly-prawn delight and lemon chicken and luxury fried rice. Or they had all gone out in the Bentley to Mr Deng’s brother’s restaurant – would he also be called Deng or didn’t it work that way?
He carried the tray indoors and opened the kitchen drawer where he kept his house keys. There was a different key for every room as well as a spare front-door key and a back-door key. The houses, his and Deng’s, were identical. It seemed likely that one of these keys would open Deng’s back door or the French windows – well, not likely but possible. They all looked alike but for some minute difference in the bit of the key that went into the lock that Duncan didn’t know the name of. He put all the keys into his pocket, returned to the recliner and lay there, sleepless but calm. At one point he dozed off and when he awoke he saw that it was almost one thirty in the morning.
He got up and then he did something quite alien to him. It was seldom he drank anything alcoholic. He didn’t much like the taste. But now he needed courage and he poured himself a small whisky. Shuddering, he drank it down neat. Almost immediately it galvanised him, charging him with energy.
The torch might be needed. He put a new battery in it to be on the safe side. Better enter their garden by the gate into the lane. Would it be locked and if it was would one of his keys unlock it? He checked that they were still in his pocket. The
night was dark, moonless and overcast. Duncan made his way down the garden, slapping at the insects which homed in on him. The air was heavy with heat and humidity and utterly still. He let himself out into the lane and tried the next-door gate. It was locked. He began trying his keys, one after another. The fourth one turned in the lock and the gate opened. Duncan saw it as a good omen. It surely meant that one of the other keys would open the back door.
As he had expected the house was in absolute darkness. He approached the back door and paused, telling himself that he was about to commit a felony. Not breaking and entering, there would be none of that, not the breaking anyway, but entering was what he intended to do. He found himself almost hoping that none of the keys would work. At first it looked as if none would; none at least unlocked the back door. He moved along to the French windows and started again. This time the last key he tried turned in the lock. He was pleased but angry too. It wasn’t right that they would do that, make keys for people which opened neighbours’ doors. He didn’t ask himself who ‘they’ were.
With his hand grasping the knob but not turning it, he stood there, assailed now by doubts. That black curtain will be inside, he thought, and I shall have to draw it back. I shall have to find what’s on the other side and it may be something dreadful. Don’t talk rubbish, he muttered to himself, don’t be stupid … Why am I doing this? I’m not really going to turn off their heating, am I? Go back, go home, complain to the council …
But he didn’t go home. He stood there in the warm humid stillness, stood for a minute or two. Then, drawing in his breath, he turned the knob, stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He was between the window and the curtain. It was hot and dark, stuffy and airless, and he could see nothing but thick black cloth. Carefully, in the dark, he felt along the curtain until he came to its left-hand side. Switching on the torch, he held it in his left hand, and with his right drew the curtain aside. It slid easily as on rungs, rattling slightly, an alarming sound in the silence.
