Tree of Hands

by Ruth Rendell

  Coming home, he remembered. He remembered because, as a matter of course, he called in on Iris or Beatie’s to collect him. On Thursdays Carol did a split shift at the wine bar, eleven-till-three and five-till-eleven – long awful hours that Barry hated to think of her having to work.

  ‘You hadn’t seen the boy,’ Superintendent Treddick said to him, ‘for what? A day and a night and half a day? You hadn’t seen him since about eight on the Wednesday morning?’

  ‘We knew where he was.’ Barry realized what a stupid answer this was as soon as he had made it.

  ‘That’s just what you didn’t know.’

  Iris lived in the bottom third of a very down-at-heel yellow brick Victorian house. There were three rooms and a kitchen with a bath in it, concealed most of the time by a wooden cover that doubled as a counter. Carol and Maureen had been born and brought up there. There they had been punched and kicked and scarred with belt buckles, and Maureen, who cried a lot, had had her arm broken. Barry had occasionally wondered what Iris had been doing while all this went on. Watching TV probably, smoking, calculating that it couldn’t go on for ever and thankful at least that it wasn’t her taking the brunt of Knapwell’s violence.

  It was Jerry who had come to the door.

  ‘Jason?’ he said as if he had never heard the name before, as if it were a foreign name he might not be pronouncing properly.

  Iris screeched from inside somewhere: ‘Who’s that at the door, Jerry?’ She came out, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. ‘Oh, no, Barry, you’ve made a mistake there. Come to the wrong shop. Those blackies have got him. I haven’t had sight nor sound of him since – when was it? – Monday. Don’t know ourselves, do we, Jerry, we’ve been so quiet.’

  Before he got to the Isadoros, Barry remembered being up in Highgate the night before and Carol saying she had phoned Beatie and Beatie saying Jason was with Iris. But he went to the double house just the same. Carol could have made that up to keep him quiet. She wasn’t untruthful but she wasn’t above telling a white lie so as not to spoil his evening. He thought of her fondly, of those small human weaknesses that made her more lovable.

  ‘Jason’s with his nan, Barry.’ Beatie herself had come heavily to the door herself, the baby Kelly settled on her flabby hip as in a beanbag chair. ‘Karen handed him over to his nan like half-three yesterday.’

  That was when Barry had his first sensation of alarm. ‘She hasn’t got him; I’ve just been there.’

  ‘Then he’ll be with his auntie Maureen. Maybe that’s what Karen did say, that he went to his auntie Maureen.’

  Jason had never stayed a night at Maureen’s. Maureen didn’t like children. She liked her home and presumably her husband Ivan to whom, though only twenty-six, she had been married for nine years. In those nine years, she had turned her three-storey terraced house in Winterside Road into a little palace. She and Carol didn’t look alike but you could see they were sisters. There was something similar in the roundness of face and the way their hair grew at their temples. But Maureen’s hair was straight mouse and she was dowdy and flat-chested. She reminded Barry of a gerbil he had once seen in a children’s zoo while taking Tanya and Ryan out one weekend.

  ‘Carol shouldn’t bloody have kids if she can’t keep tabs on where they are,’ she said. She had been ironing and the place smelt of spray-on starch, breath-catching, too scented. ‘It’s kids like hers get murdered, you see it on TV all the time.’

  ‘For God’s sake . . .’

  ‘Someone’s got him, that’s for sure. He’s not taken a bedsit somewhere on his own.’

  After that he had phoned Carol at the wine bar.

  ‘I can’t tell the fuzz I haven’t seen him since yesterday morning. I can’t do that, Barry. What’ll they say to me? You know what a bunch of shits they are. I can’t stick my neck out like that. What’ll they do to me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Barry, feeling young and useless.

  ‘Oh, Dave, Dave,’ Carol shouted. ‘What did you have to die for? Why did you leave me all alone? Why aren’t you here to look after me?’

  Barry put his arms round her. ‘I’ll look after you.’

  Dennis Gordon, the man who drove trucks across Europe, had brought her home. When he wasn’t in Turkey or Yugoslavia or somewhere or in the big house he had out Mill Hill way, he was generally to be found in the wine bar. Barry caught a glimpse of his car, a metallic-finish blue Rolls, an amazing car, but he hadn’t come in. Carol had gone very pale. She kept licking her lips until most of the lipstick had come off. It took him a while to persuade her to go to the police – they had to go, what else? – but in the end she agreed, making a face, clenching her fists. She went upstairs to change and came down dressed in a grey flannel skirt and black sweater with a fawn-coloured mac Barry hadn’t seen before. It made her look older and, at the same time, more like Maureen’s sister.

  He hoped she would tell the police he was her fiancé but instead she said what she said to the neighbours at Winterside Down, that he rented her spare room. Barry didn’t let himself be hurt by it. It was natural that Carol who had had a hard life and a struggle should want to appear respectable. No one believed her anyway, Barry thought tenderly. What man, looking at Carol, would believe she hadn’t got a lover?

  The search for Jason had begun that night. He had gone out with the search party himself. The police had questioned them all – him, Carol, Iris, Beatie, Karen, and all the kids, everyone on the estate for all he knew. And sometime on the Friday morning, around eleven, Carol and he and Inspector Leatham and a young constable, a whole party of them, had stood in Rudyard Gardens at the Lordship Avenue end and been shown something lying among the rubble and rubbish and litter that filled a narrow strip of front garden behind a low wall. Barry recognized it at once. He had washed it himself the previous week after Maureen had said, looking at it in Jason’s hand, ‘It’s a disgrace, Carol, that animal, whatever it is. I reckon you ought to have that painlessly destroyed.’

  A woolly lamb but made of nylon. A Christmas present from Kostas’s wife Alkmini. Carol looked at the grey shapeless object and started screaming.

  ‘His lamb! That’s Jason’s lamb! He’d never have gone off on his own without his lamb!’

  So they had known then, they had known for sure.

  Superintendent Treddick didn’t come back and nor did Inspector Leatham. They sent a sergeant in. The sergeant told Barry he could go now if he liked and Barry walked home. Neither he nor Carol had been back to work yet. They had hardly been alone either. Iris and Jerry had been there most of the weekend and then there had been Maureen and Ivan and one neighbour after another. Carol had never got on with the Spicers next door, the people who kept the Old English rabbits Jason liked to look at through the fence, but Kath Spicer had been in and Carol had cried on her shoulder.

  When he turned into Summerskill Road, he saw Dennis Gordon’s Rolls parked outside the house, half-a-dozen children round it and one of them, a Kupar not an Isadoro, with a sharp-pointed nail at the ready. They looked at Barry in silence as if Barry might tell them off but he didn’t say anything, it was no business of his if Dennis Gordon was daft enough to leave his flash car unattended on council estates.

  Dennis Gordon was in the house with Carol, and Kostas with them. Gordon had brought Carol an armful of red roses tied up in cellophane and silver ribbon. Kostas had brought her two bottles of Riesling. Though no more than forty, Kostas had a face like an old brown leather bag. His hair was jet-black, he had a brigand-like moustache and he always wore very pale-coloured suits. Today he was wearing a pale yellow one with a black shirt. Dennis Gordon, whom Barry had often heard about but never seen before, was a big dark man with a very long chin and hooded eyes. He wore a signet ring that looked as if hewn out of a nugget of silver – though more probably a nugget of platinum or white gold. It was a knuckle-duster of a ring, an ever-ready weapon, and Barry remembered Carol talking admiringly of his violent ways. He had the look of a thug, a gangster. Th
ere was some story that he had shot his first wife, only luckily for him she hadn’t died of it but just divorced him.

  When he saw Barry, Kostas acknowledged him by raising his dirty-looking hand an inch or two off his knee. Dennis Gordon looked round and away again. He was asking Carol if there was anything he could do for her, anything that was in his power he’d do, she only had to name it. It broke his heart thinking of her all alone.

  Carol had probably told him that tale about having a lodger. ‘She’s not alone,’ Barry said. ‘She’s got me.’

  Dennis Gordon put his fist up to his mouth and bit on the great platinum lump. He ground his teeth on it for a bit. ‘I saw you on the TV,’ he said to Carol. ‘You were a real little cracker.’

  ‘D’you reckon?’ Carol said, looking pleased.

  ‘You’ve got what it takes, you’re photogenic. They ought to give you a job at the studios.’

  Barry went out into the kitchen, looking for something to eat. He made himself a cup of tea but he didn’t take it into the living room. Somehow you couldn’t imagine those two drinking tea in a million years. Dennis Gordon looked the sort who’d subsist on undiluted brandy. When he went back in, they had gone and Iris had arrived. Iris never drank tea either. They opened the Riesling.

  ‘They’ve started dragging the canal, I see,’ said Iris.

  Carol looked at her wide-eyed. She clapped a hand up over her mouth. Barry could have killed Iris.

  ‘It’s routine,’ he said. ‘They told me it was just routine.’

  Iris lit a cigarette. Her fingers were yellow with nicotine, her eyebrows and the front bit of her hair were yellow with it. She showed her yellowed teeth when she stuck out her tongue to take a shred of tobacco off it. ‘There’s swans sometimes on that canal. He was a little monkey, he used to want to get down to them swans.’

  She spoke as if Jason were dead. Barry sometimes wondered if she had any feelings, any affection or interest even, or sorrow or anxiety. Perhaps all that sort of thing had been wrung out of her years ago in her married life. Carol took one of her cigarettes and lit it, and a little colour came into her face. She hadn’t bothered to put any make-up on and Barry knew that was a sign of how she must be feeling. Her anxiety for Jason had distanced her from him, he felt, and they hadn’t made love since that Wednesday night. She sat hunched up in the armchair in jeans and the grey sweater he didn’t like, her arms wrapped round her knees. She looked about fifteen. They hadn’t had a single photograph of Jason for the police. Carol had looked Leatham straight in the eye and said, ‘I haven’t got money to spend on cameras,’ but the newspapers had made up for that by printing pictures they took of her. She had been on the front page of a couple of papers, looking like she looked now, young and unhappy and beautiful. Barry had kept those two front pages for the sake of the photos; he thought he would keep them for ever.

  Perhaps it would sound unfeeling. The truth was he was upset about Jason, but his anxiety was for Carol. He couldn’t honestly say he loved Jason, he wasn’t gut-worried like he would have been if he was Jason’s own father. It was for Carol’s sake he wanted him back. Looking from Iris to Carol and then at smiling Dave in his frame on the radiator shelf, Barry thought for the first time about Jason’s father. He had to have a father, somebody had to be his father, he hadn’t been made in a test tube by some anonymous donor and planted in Carol.

  While Jason was with them, he had never thought about who his father might be, but now he was gone it had begun to weigh on his mind. Somehow the identity of his father mattered more now. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, that man, whoever he was, would re-enter Carol’s life because Jason was lost and Jason was his son as well as Carol’s.

  Barry made up his mind that he would ask Carol straight out who Jason’s father was. He longed for Iris to go so that he could be alone with her.

  9

  MOPSA WAS PROUD of herself. ‘I took his pushchair too. I folded it up and put it in the boot of the car.’

  ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘My goodness, it must still be there!’

  ‘You really thought any child would do for me. I’d lost mine so any child would do for a substitute. Just get a new one. Like when your dog dies and you go out and buy a puppy.’

  ‘It wasn’t any child,’ Mopsa protested. ‘I found you a little boy. I found you a fair-haired boy.’

  Benet said in a stifled faint voice, ‘A puppy of the same breed . . .’

  Jason came over to her for her to take his coat off. James’s coat. They were almost the same size as well as the same sex, the same type. Two Anglo-Saxon boys. She thought of Gregory’s dictum – not Angles but angels. Mopsa, driving by, had found him on a wall . . .

  She took Jason’s hand and went downstairs. Mopsa crept down after them. She really did creep, treading stealthily, as if to make one false move, one jarring noise, would bring Benet’s wrath down upon her. She tip-toed across the kitchen, watching Benet out of the corner of her eye. Her face had a lopsided look today as if she had Bell’s palsy or were purposely holding the cheek nearest to Benet rigid. Jason found his drawing things and a clean sheet of paper. Police over the whole country are searching for him, Benet thought, they suspect the worst, they think he’s been assaulted, injured, murdered. And all the time he’s been quietly here, drawing pictures, going for walks, watching television – watching his own mother on television and trying desperately to make the set disgorge her!

  A timid hand was laid on her arm. Mopsa twisted her head round until it was touching her shoulder and looked up into Benet’s face. It was a grotesque parody of a small child’s appealing attitude. Mopsa’s eyes were blurred and absolutely out of focus.

  ‘I did it for you, Brigitte.’

  ‘I know. You said so.’ Benet tried to keep her voice gentle and even. I must not hate my mother . . . ‘The question is whether I ring up the police and ask them to come and fetch him or whether I put him in the car and drive him down to the police station in Rosslyn Hill. The latter, I suppose. Explaining on the phone will be difficult, to say the least.’

  ‘You mustn’t do that,’ Mopsa said. ‘You won’t do that, will you?’

  ‘Which? Not phone them or not take him?’

  ‘You mustn’t go to them at all. You know what they’ll say, Brigitte.’ A look of ineffable foxy cunning spread over Mopsa’s face. When she strained her face into these expressions, the tensed nostrils went white. She made her way over to Jason who was sitting on the floor drawing and pounced on him. She snatched him up in her arms, drawing paper and pen and all. He flinched as if he expected a blow. Mopsa clutched him, sitting him on her knee and holding him as if he were some sort of prop she needed for her act. ‘You know what they’ll say, don’t you? They’ll say you stole him to make up for losing your own boy. It’s a well-known thing, it’s what bereaved women do. I’ve often seen about it in the papers. And you’re famous – well, you’re well known, people have heard of you. It’ll be all over the papers that you kidnapped him.’

  Jason struggled off her lap. He made his escape, first to the door and then he started up the stairs. Back to make another attempt on the television, Benet guessed.

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t,’ she said. ‘You did.’

  ‘They won’t believe that.’

  ‘Of course they will. I shall tell them. I’m sorry but I haven’t any choice. I shall have to tell them you have a – a history of mental illness and you took him.’

  What happened next made Benet glad Jason wasn’t in the room to see it. Though he must have heard Mopsa’s screams, he wasn’t present. Mopsa simply opened her mouth as wide as it would go and let out screams of terrific volume. She stood there screaming into Benet’s face. Benet had never seen or heard anything like it and for a moment, beyond putting her hands up ineffectually to cover her ears, she couldn’t move. She knew the prescribed thing was to strike a hysterical person in the face but she couldn’t bring herself to do this; her arm felt as weak as when one attempts
to strike a blow in a dream.

  ‘Mother, stop. Please stop . . .’

  Mopsa went on screaming. She fell on her knees and put her arms round Benet’s legs, hugging her legs and screaming, breathily and hoarsely now as she exhausted herself. She crouched on the floor, scrabbling at Benet’s shoes.

  ‘Mother, I can’t stand this. Please stop.’

  For a moment she had been afraid. The skin on the back of her neck had crept and she had felt the hairs standing erect on gooseflesh. She had been frightened of pathetic, crazed Mopsa. She bent down and got hold of Mopsa’s shoulders and shook her, though without much result. Mopsa slithered out of her grasp and drummed her fists on the floor and shouted: ‘They’ll commit me, they’ll make you commit me, I’ll be certified, I’ll never come out, I’ll die in there!’

  ‘Of course they won’t. I won’t let them.’

  ‘You can’t stop them if you tell. The court will do it. I’ll be up in court and the court will make an order to put me away and I’ll never come out again!’

  Her voice rose once more to a scream. It was true too. She knew all about it. What fool was it had said the mad don’t know they’re mad? She knew all right and she knew what could happen. If she were convicted of abducting Jason Stratford, the court might well make a hospital order that she be detained for treatment and then restrict her later discharge.

  ‘Please stop shouting, Mother.’