by Ruth Rendell
He had to sit down for a while because he felt weak. But from the moment he left the hospital in a small new-fangled kind of ambulance, he resolved he would seek out the man who they told him had found him lying on the pavement and had called for help. Marius Potter. Duncan didn’t really know him but he remembered seeing him from his window at Stuart’s party and the funeral. He took himself carefully across the road, thinking he could do with a stick but not wanting to start that, not that slippery slope to old age, that thin end of the wedge. No caretaker was about, apparently they hadn’t yet found a replacement for Wally Scurlock. Duncan rang Marius’s bell and then he rang Rose’s. Neither was answered. Unbeknown to Duncan, or any other neighbours for that matter, Rose and Marius were in St Ebba’s, getting married, their only witnesses Marius’s sister Meriel and her husband.
The vicar, who was old and quiet and short-sighted, told them they were the only couple ‘of your age’ he had ever been called upon to marry who hadn’t been married before. He found it a matter for wonderment that each had attained such seniority yet remained single. Marius and Rose smiled but said nothing. Rose wore a very ordinary summer dress and Marius wore the only suit he possessed. The ring he put on her finger had belonged to his mother. After the ceremony they walked across the cemetery to step over the hedge to Kenilworth Green, passing quite close to Olwen in her leafy nest, but not seeing her. They passed through the kissing gate and hurried back to Lichfield House because McPhee fretted if he was left alone for too long.
They were going up the steps and the doors were already opening to receive them when Duncan came across the road for the third time. Neither Marius nor Rose said anything to Duncan about being the first to congratulate them but Marius asked Duncan how he was and how he hoped he was fully recovered.
‘I want to thank you for rescuing me. Finding me on the pavement like that and calling an ambulance. Beyond the call of duty it was.’
Marius would have liked to say that he couldn’t very well have left Duncan where he lay but he only smiled and said he had rather enjoyed it. It had been a small adventure.
‘Well, now I’ve run you to earth, perhaps you can tell me what this is. Not orchid leaves, is it?’
‘It’s cannabis,’ said Marius. ‘We should tell the police.’
Deng, Tao and the two girls were having a conference in the back garden of Springmead when the police came. Or Deng was taking Tao to task, not for attacking Duncan but for not finishing him off. They could have disposed of a body but not of a living man. That Duncan was living they knew for they had seen him in his garden lying on his recliner. The girls took no part in this. They knew better than to intervene.
Deng was telling Tao to take Xue and Li-li back to the flat and leave him at Springmead to watch and wait, when there came from the front the unmistakable sound of a door being broken down.
‘To the car. Now,’ Deng said and then ran to the garage. They were out in the lane, heading for the Watford Way, when the police burst through the black curtain, got the French windows open and were in the garden. It wasn’t Blakelock and Bashir but officers of the drugs squad. Upstairs they went, through the plantations, into the tiny room where the Chinese people had slept. The heat and the ultraviolet lights were almost overpowering.
‘There are a good five hundred plants in here,’ a woman officer said. ‘They’ll have bypassed the electric meter. I wonder if they wired it to a street lamp. Could be.’
‘Yeah, but where are they?’
The four officers went out into the garden. The open back door into the garage told them how the cannabis farmers had made their escape. They went next door and Ken Lee told them all about Mr Deng and Tao and the girls he knew only as Tigerlily and ‘the other one’.
Duncan wanted no further contact with the police. He lay low inside his house, which was rapidly cooling down. He would be happy to talk to all the neighbours and had already invited all those he knew, including Rose and Marius, round for drinks at six. It was a celebration of his recovery, and, now he had learned about it, of Marius and Rose’s wedding. Coffee hardly seemed adequate on such a momentous occasion.
He watched for the police to go. Someone had now arrived to put crime tape all round the front of Springmead. The police were in number 7, talking to Ken and Moira. That suited Duncan very well. He could have told them about Tigerlily and Stuart, about how keen Stuart had been on her and, though Duncan didn’t really know, he could guess there had been more to it than that. Maybe her uncle Mr Deng had resented their relationship. He wouldn’t be surprised if … But no, he wasn’t telling the police that. Ever since Marius had told him that the leaves he had found came off cannabis plants, he had been afraid the police would find out he had illegally entered Springmead. He hadn’t broken in, that was true, but he had – ‘effected an entry’ was the term. They might prosecute him, they wouldn’t just let it slide. He would say nothing more.
The drugs squad, if that was what they were, left as Duncan was eating his lunch. Then the crime-tape men left. It had begun to rain, the first rain for weeks. Duncan lay down on his sofa, pulled a blanket over him because it was starting to feel chilly – quite an enjoyable sensation – and fell asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Sophie often listened outside Olwen’s door but heard nothing. Though she asked everyone at Lichfield House and those she knew in the other blocks, no one could tell her what had become of Olwen. Helping herself from Olwen’s bank account had seemed an enormity at first. But when no retribution had come and the source showed no sign of drying up, she had worried less and begun to take it for granted that when she needed money she would help herself to it with Olwen’s card and Olwen’s pin number. She knew better than to make excessive demands on the account and had learned that money came into it on the 24th of the month. When it was raining and she didn’t feel like walking all the way to the Tube station she took a taxi to college; when she saw something to wear that she liked in a shop window she usually went in and bought it, and she had her hair cut and blonde streaks put into it.
She had resented Noor and Molly having boyfriends when she didn’t, but now that she had smartened up her appearance and walked with more confidence, standing up straight and wearing one of her new bras, things had changed. The university was up for the summer, she wasn’t going home to Purley unless she absolutely had to, she had met a boy in the Kenilworth Arms and was meeting him again this evening.
‘You want to come to a party with me? It’s an old guy called Duncan but there’ll be food and drink and we could go on somewhere afterwards.’
‘How old?’ said Joshua.
‘Oh, come on. We don’t have to stay long.’
They encountered Marius and Rose in the lobby. Rose was carrying a bottle of wine in one of Mr Ali’s bags.
‘Maybe we should have brought one,’ said Sophie.
Joshua looked at her as if she had suggested bringing champagne and caviar. ‘Give me a break,’ he said. ‘We don’t do that stuff, not like at our age.’
They all went across the road together. The crime tape was still strung over the front of Springmead. Molly, who had followed them up Duncan’s front path, said she’d heard the whole house would have to be sprayed with chemicals, if not gutted. Moira and Ken and the Pembers were already out in the garden, drinking wine and eating snacks from Marks & Spencer’s. Jock Pember claimed to know all about the raid on what he called the ‘pot house’, information he said he had got from his friend who was a detective sergeant based at Paddington Green. Mr Deng wasn’t the boss, he said, but only the one in charge of the Springmead enterprise and the two girls and the boy no more than slaves.
‘That’s what my friend says. Slaves, he called them. Illegal immigrants, of course, brought over here to work on cannabis cultivation. Given all sorts of promises of the kind of work they’d have to do and you can bet your life it wasn’t growing pot plants. Pot plants, that’s funny, isn’t it, when you come to think of it?’
‘No one knows. And they won’t. It’s the underlings who have to carry the can, that’s always the way. The police found them all in a flat in Edgware, the two girls, Xue and Li-li, and the boy that’s called Tao. He’s the one that hit you on the head, Dunc. What did you want to go in there for? – that what’s my friend said. He should have called us. He’s lucky to be alive, he said, the silly sod.’
Duncan thought it was a bit much, a neighbour coming in here and saying these things about him while drinking his wine and eating his canapés. And he was pondering a crushing remark when Noor arrived with her Indian prince or sultan or whatever he was, a very handsome young man dressed all in white. Carl came next, carrying two cans of lager.
‘It got to six thirty,’ said Molly, ‘and I got fed up of waiting for you. No one’s going to drink beer, you know. It’s not a middle-class thing.’
His own crushing remark overtaken by Molly’s, Duncan fetched another bottle of wine from indoors. ‘I’ll open that.’ Jock proceeded to do so and refilled his own glass first. ‘So the thousand-dollar question is,’ he went on, ‘was it Deng who stabbed poor old Stuart Font?’
‘Why would he?’ Molly asked.
‘Ah, well, that girl Xue, or Sue as I prefer to say, seems to have been going about asking people to get her a passport.’
‘What d’you mean, people?’ said Noor.
‘I know for a fact she asked Ali at the corner shop and the guy who has the paper shop at the roundabout. She asked him while Deng was waiting for her in the car. Ali told me himself. Deng’d have done anything to stop that.’
Noor laughed in a scathing way. ‘Stuart couldn’t have got anyone a passport. He didn’t work for the Home Office or anything like that. He didn’t work at all. The fact is Stuart just wasn’t very bright. In other words, thick.’
Molly’s shout made everyone jump. ‘What does that mean? Not very bright? You didn’t know him. You only met him once when you went to his party to get a free drink.’
‘That was enough,’ said Noor, turning her back on Molly. ‘Hey, look, Carl’s getting over your fence, Duncan.’
‘You can’t go in there,’ Duncan shouted.
But Carl was already in the Springmead garden, raising his glass to the guests he had left behind. He bounded down to the summer house, opened the pink door and jumped inside. Molly stood close up against the fence, hesitating, but only for a moment. She set her glass down on Duncan’s lawn and began to climb over. Joshua followed her, ignoring his host’s shouts.
‘Stop that! You can’t go in there. You’re trespassing.’
‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t all go in,’ said Jock. ‘I can make it all right with my pal.’ Noor and the prince were already half over the fence, each with a bottle tucked under their arms. As Kathy scrambled over, fell but picked herself up, dusting off leaves and earth, Jock rallied those who remained behind. ‘You’ll be all right with me, only we’ll go in by the back lane, not being quite as agile as these kids and my lady wife.’
Calling to Moira to bring a couple of bottles with her, he led the way out through Duncan’s back gate and into the next-door garden. Leaving the summer-house door open, Carl, followed by the whole troop, headed for the French windows. Ken Lee, his head thrown back, was drinking wine out of a bottle from which he had unscrewed the cap. Aghast, watching his party disintegrate, Duncan was begging Marius and Rose not to follow them – something they had no intention of doing – when Michael and Katie turned up. They had brought two bottles of rather good red wine which Michael said was a farewell gift because they were soon moving, and had just stepped out on to Duncan’s patio when someone – it was Joshua – smashed a pane in the Springmead French windows with a brick.
Duncan gave a piteous cry. ‘Don’t have anything to do with it! They’re all going to get into terrible trouble. That’s breaking and entering, that is.’
He shooed his four remaining guests indoors like someone driving a flock of geese and shut the French windows so that the shrieks of the explorers could no longer be heard. The heatwave had come to an end, anyway, and it was growing chilly. For the first time the house felt cold and a little of that unwanted heat of the past months would have been welcome. They sat talking rather awkwardly and at Michael’s news fell silent. He didn’t say that the newspaper he worked for had terminated his contract as a result of the latest piece he had written, an article on delirium tremens which got most of the facts about this condition wrong. He said nothing about that but told them he had defaulted on his mortgage and the building society were going to foreclose and repossess number 4.
No one knew what to say. Marius and Rose had intended to make conversation by talking about the house they were buying in Finchley but this was of course impossible now. Duncan was making an effort at sympathy and had just said something about every cloud having a silver lining when the silence from next door was broken by shrieks and yells and roars and pounding feet.
‘They’ve all gone mad,’ said Duncan.
For a moment the four visitors sat silent, listening to the tumult, to breaking glass and peals of laughter, eldritch howls and a noise like someone tobogganing down the stairs on a tray. Then, as one, they got to their feet, thanked Duncan for a ‘lovely party’ and left.
As he drank a fourth glass of wine, Duncan realised that for a half-hearted drinker like himself it was one too many and he would likely feel ill next day. One thing was for certain, he would never have anything more to do with those Pembers.
It may have been Molly’s remark about going to Stuart’s party only for a free drink, or Joshua’s breaking one of the panes in the Springmead French windows in order to get into the house, one or the other, which resulted in Noor’s announcement. She, Sophie and Molly with Joshua, Carl and the prince were all out in Kenilworth Avenue and it was ten thirty. Duncan’s older guests had gone home and Springmead was once more empty.
‘I may as well tell you,’ said Noor, ‘that my dad’s putting Flat 5 on the market. There’s no point in keeping it now I’ve moved in with Nasr. You two’ll have to find somewhere else to live.’
‘I wouldn’t stop there if you paid me,’ said Molly.
‘And that’s not very likely, is it?’
‘You can come to my place, sweetheart,’ said Carl. ‘Don’t you waste your time arguing with her.’
Sophie noticed that Joshua didn’t follow his example and offer her accommodation. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d just said he’d see her later – which could mean tomorrow or never – and gone off to the Tube. But he took her hand and reminded her that they had made a tentative arrangement to go up to the disco in the basement of the Kenilworth Arms. Hand in hand, they walked towards the roundabout. The prince’s driver had fallen asleep waiting for him at the wheel of the white Lexus but woke up smartly as his employer and Noor appeared. It wasn’t too late to go to the Wolseley for supper as Nasr was such a good customer.
Molly didn’t want to spend the night in Carl’s room in Cricklewood and since Noor’s notice of eviction wasn’t going to come into effect immediately, she took him back with her to Lichfield House. It looked as if she might be spending the next couple of years in that room of his, if not the rest of her life.
About to enter the Kenilworth Arms, Joshua said that he hadn’t any money. With very little experience of male companionship, Sophie had nevertheless thought that a boyfriend – could Joshua yet be called her boyfriend? – ought at least to pay his share of the expenses. But she didn’t like to raise the subject so early in their relationship and she said that was all right because she would draw out some cash at the hole in the wall. Her own bank card she only used these days when she had exhausted Olwen’s supply. As it happened, Olwen’s pension or whatever it was would come in next day, so she felt quite happy about inserting the card and keying in Olwen’s pin number to draw out a modest sum. Joshua stood behind her, standing very close, and as sh
e picked up the five ten-pound notes, he kissed the back of her neck.
After that, the first real show of affection, he was quite loving, moving cheek to cheek with her like the people in Strictly Come Dancing while everyone else was leaping about and swinging around. They left at two and walked back through Kenilworth Green, passing quite close to the tombstone and the little hedge inside which Olwen lay, but too occupied with each other to notice the leg and the shoe dew-covered in the long grass.
It was the first cold night for weeks. Midsummer was past and the temperature should have held up high if the weather forecast had been accurate. But it dropped down to less than ten degrees. It was a woman walking a dog but not Rose with McPhee, who found Olwen, coming out at seven in the morning. The dog homed in on her, whimpering at the brown leather brogue and the legs in tracksuit bottoms. If you are not prepared for a shock, it is almost impossible to repress some sort of cry. The dog’s owner was prepared for nothing but a chilly morning, a decaying churchyard and an ill-tended green space. She let out a scream and clapped her hand over her mouth.
She thought Olwen was dead but the paramedics who came knew better. They wrapped her up and took her to one of the hospitals she had visited before. Olwen had hypothermia and her liver was almost destroyed. There was very little to be done and she died that night.
It was nearly forty-eight hours since Olwen had left her house in a taxi and Margaret had not noticed her absence until twenty-four of those hours had gone by, assuming that Olwen was in her room as she often was for long periods of time. Even then she supposed Olwen would come back of her own accord. She had seemed so much better in the past week. She reported her as a missing person only when her husband said she must.
Was it necessary to arrange a funeral? The undertaker said no, they would see to everything. Presumably, Margaret would want cremation. Margaret would. Now that had been settled she need think no more about it.
