by Ruth Rendell
Maureen was only comfortable in her own home. She always looked uneasy in other people’s houses. She didn’t take off her coat. It was the same straight, up-and-down fawn raincoat she nearly always wore. She had flat brown shoes on and the hem of the raincoat came halfway down her thin calves. Her hair looked, Barry thought, as if she put her head under the tap, dragged the hair back as tight as it would go with a rubber band and let it dry that way. Although she wasn’t a speedy person but rather slow and deliberate in her movements, she seemed unable to relax and wandered about the room picking things up as if looking for dust under them. She picked up Dave’s photograph and studied it. You would have thought she had never seen it before.
Her voice had no rise and fall in it. It was low and lifeless.
‘Why didn’t you have an abortion?’ she said to Carol.
Carol looked at her and asked her what she meant, her tone the slow dangerous one Barry knew he would hate if it were ever directed against himself.
‘You told me when Dave was alive you didn’t want any more kids. You could have had an abortion.’
‘She was scared,’ said Iris with the air of someone giving what seems the most reasonable explanation while knowing it is not the true one. ‘You don’t want to have those anaesthetics if you can avoid it.’
It was the tranquillizers, Barry thought, that stopped Carol flaring at Maureen. She had been looking at the paper in a listless way and now she laid it down.
‘I’m going back to work tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go back sometime. It’s no good hanging about here moping.’
‘That’s true,’ Iris said. ‘That won’t bring Jason back.’ Barry, in the recesses of his mind, feared Jason was dead and he knew Carol felt the same but Iris spoke as if he were dead beyond a doubt. She even looked cheerfully matter-of-fact about it. She lit a cigarette.
‘Work will take my mind off things,’ said Carol.
It came as a shock to Barry. Somehow he had thought of her never going back. They would find Jason, dead or alive, and she would either have to stay home getting over it or stay home to look after him. An awful, groundless, quite irrational thought came to him that perhaps they would never find Jason at all.
He didn’t want Carol back in that wine bar with those men. But he wasn’t her husband, he had no rights, he hadn’t even a right to an opinion. How did those other, older, men deal with this kind of thing, how did they handle jealousy? How had Dave handled it? He liked her better made up and with her nails painted and wearing the stolen black and white dress but so would those others like her better. She was safer, more securely his, in the old grey jumper.
They watched television after Iris and Maureen had gone, sitting side by side on the settee. He took her hand and she let him hold it. The programme wasn’t very compelling and his thoughts drifted away to Jason. He thought a lot about Jason, where he might be and what could have happened to him. Maureen’s question had shocked him, though it was one he had sometimes dared to think about himself. Why hadn’t Carol had an abortion? Was it because she had loved Jason’s father?
He and Ken were working in the new office block just off Finchley High Road. It was a piece of luck they wanted the managing director’s office panelled out in sapele wood and an even greater piece of luck that Ken had got the job. It was no more than half an hour after they started that the police came for him. Not Treddick this time but Detective Inspector Leatham and another man called Sergeant Dowson. Ken didn’t say anything when they said they’d come to take Barry away for a bit to help them with a line of investigation but he looked incredulous.
In the car, no one said anything. Barry noticed that the driver took a route to the police station by way of Delphi Road and Rudyard Gardens, though it would have been easier and quicker to go straight down Lordship Avenue. Barry never used Rudyard Gardens. It was a depressing place, row after row of houses with their windows and doors sealed off under corrugated metal – a quite reasonable method of ensuring that squatters and meths drinkers and glue sniffers didn’t get in but sinister to look at for all that. And there was no chance of Jason or Jason’s body being inside one of them. The previous weekend each one had been opened, the metal removed from back doors like lids from cans and the squat, damp, mould-smelling rooms searched. The street had been cordoned off section by section for the search to be carried out, and Barry, who had been shopping in Lordship Avenue for Carol, joined the crowd that was watching.
‘What would you say, Barry,’ Dowson said when they were in one of the interview rooms, ‘if I told you a young chap answering your description was seen in Rudyard Gardens last Wednesday afternoon?’
It was the first time they had called him by his first name. It was possible though that this was just Dowson’s technique. Barry was astonished by the question. Who had seen him?
‘It wasn’t me. I never go down Rudyard Gardens. In the car just now was the first time since I started living here.’
Leatham pounced on that.
‘You know where it is all right then?’
Of course he did. Didn’t it turn out of Lordship Avenue directly opposite Winterside Down? Hadn’t he been there with Carol and the police and found Jason’s lamb?
‘What’s wrong with it then that you don’t use it? Rudyard Gardens would be your shortest way through to Green Lanes.’
Barry knew why he didn’t use it, because those boarded-up houses depressed him. Delphi Road or the canal bank, even though that passed nothing much but factories and warehouses and dumps, were more cheerful, but he didn’t know how you explained that to men like Leatham and Dowson. They were both looking at him with impassive interested eyes. How to tell them Rudyard Gardens was a dead street, lined with the corpses of houses, all with blinded eyes? They’ll think I’ve been watching too many horror films, thought Barry, too much TV.
‘It’s depressing,’ he said. ‘No one about, nothing to look at. I like a bit of life.’
‘A bit of life?’ Leatham made the phrase sound extreme and distasteful. Barry shrank awkwardly under his gaze, though he had nothing to feel awkward or guilty about.
‘A bit of excitement then,’ he said and had the feeling he had made matters worse.
They wouldn’t leave it. They refused to understand. Barry’s mother had labelled him ‘too sensitive’ years ago and he knew he had a lot of imagination, a lot of sensitivity to atmosphere. He knew too that an ordinary working man isn’t supposed to be sensitive. That was for the middle class or for women. They kept on asking him about Rudyard Gardens. How did he know it was depressing if he never went down it? Had he ever tried? Just once or twice maybe? It got to lunchtime, and he thought they would let him go but they only took him into another interview room where they left him with another detective constable who didn’t speak a word to him but sat behind a desk filling in forms. After about half an hour, someone came in with lunch for him on a tray – a Cornish pasty, some biscuits and a bit of cheese in a packet and a plastic cup of coffee.
Leatham returned with Dowson just when Barry was plucking up courage to tell the DC he was going, he couldn’t hang about there all day.
‘You were saying how you liked a bit of excitement,’ Leatham said as if there had been no break in the talk, as if a couple of hours hadn’t passed by. ‘There can’t have been much excitement living with Mrs Stratford with a little kid about.’
‘He’s a good kid,’ Barry said. They had been on this tack before. ‘He wasn’t much trouble.’
‘Come on, Barry. A kid of under two not much trouble? I’ve got one of my own that age and I know just what trouble they are. And I’m used to it.’
Barry said, ‘We couldn’t have gone out in the evenings anyway. My – Carol – Mrs Stratford works evenings.’
‘Thought she’d got herself a nice little unpaid nursemaid when she picked you, didn’t she?’
Barry felt his face colour. It was one of those blushes you feel rising in a tide, turning your face brick red. He touc
hed his burning cheek. Leatham didn’t seem to expect an answer. He was satisfied with Barry’s blush. He sat back and folded his arms.
Dowson said, ‘I’ll put my cards on the table, Barry. We’re not trying to trick you. Honesty is the best policy, don’t you think?’
It was at this point, Barry always remembered, that the penny dropped. At this moment, for the first time, he understood that they thought he had murdered Jason. All these questions, these and the questions they had asked him on previous occasions, were not to establish Jason’s movements or learn where he might have gone or what he might have done, but to make him, Barry Mahon, confess to the murder of Carol’s child. A sweat broke out on his body and turned cold on his skin. He was not afraid, only horribly shaken and indignant. He found he was gripping the table edge in front of him in the way a man might when he intends to overturn it.
They thought he had murdered Jason. He stared at the policemen in dazed silence.
‘We haven’t found Jason’s body,’ Dowson was saying. ‘Maybe we never shall. Maybe when we do find it it’ll be too – well, let’s just say it’ll be too late in the day for us to see what we know is on that body. Marks, Barry, bruises, scars.’
Beatie Isadoro. Was that what she had meant when he and Carol met her in the street?
‘Now Mr Leatham just called you a nursemaid and I’m not going to press that, I’m not in this game to make you look a fool, but just for the convenience of the word, let’s say you were a nurse to young Jason over the past five or six months. Nurses get aggravated sometimes, don’t they? It gets too much for them like it does for anyone else and that’s when they have to lash out.’
‘I never laid a finger on him,’ said Barry. ‘I never touched him.’ And nor had anyone else. He thought of Carol’s sufferings at the hands of Knapwell. As if, after that, she would dream . . . ‘He used to fall about and hurt himself,’ he said. ‘He was always falling over and he fell off things. He gave himself a black eye back in the summer walking into a key sticking out of a door lock.’ Carol had told him that. He could remember the circumstances clearly, a heatwave it had been and he and Carol going swimming up the council pool. He’d gone up the road to get milk and beefburgers and baps to make their lunch and when he’d got back Jason had had this swollen eye starting to go black even by then.
‘Funny how some kids are accident-prone and some aren’t,’ said Leatham. ‘Very funny. It’s always the kids that get taken into care, they’re the accident-prone ones, they’re the ones that are a mess of cuts and bruises, not to mention broken limbs. Now I don’t think either of my boys has ever had even a minor accident. Funny, isn’t it. It makes you think.’
It didn’t make Barry think. He hadn’t the faintest idea what Leatham was on about. He was smarting, burning, at the unspoken accusation against him. Dowson began asking again about his movements on the Wednesday afternoon and, truculently now, Barry told him all over again how he had been to the cinema to see The Dark Crystal. He was prepared to tell them the plot of The Dark Crystal but they didn’t want to know, they said he could have got that from seeing it the day before or the day after. Had he kept the half of his ticket?
‘I didn’t keep it. Why would I?’
‘You tell us, Barry. It’d make a difference if you’d kept it.’
Barry didn’t answer.
‘The way things are,’ said Leatham, ‘it looks a lot more likely you never went near the cinema. You walked home down Rudyard Gardens and found Jason sitting on that wall. It wasn’t the first time he’d been dumped in the street, was it? Dumped in the street waiting for some hit-or-miss arrangement for picking him up. It looks like you found him and put him in that chariot of his and wheeled him off somewhere. Home maybe. Or maybe you took him into Lordship Park or out on the Marshes. What did he do, Barry? Go too far? Rile you too far? Start screaming and wouldn’t stop? Did you stop him, Barry, and did you go too far?’
He hadn’t been afraid of them – ever. In his total innocence, he knew they couldn’t touch him. But he was insulted. He felt himself withdraw into a bitter offended silence they perhaps interpreted as guilt. At five-thirty, they let him go. By that time, no doubt they too had had enough and wanted to get home themselves. He would have liked to have walked back to Winterside Down but they insisted on taking him by car. Hoopoe and Black Beauty and the boy with the nose ring were in Bevan Square, bikes at rest round the Advance of Man sculpture. They watched the police car go by with Barry in it. Spicer was going in at his gate with a sack of rabbit food, weeds he’d pulled up out on the Marshes. In her widow-white sari, Lila Kupar, who no one ever spoke to and who never spoke to anyone, looked up from washing window sills and stared. It was never dark at Winterside Down; the overhead lamps brought it an endless unearthly daylight.
They could have put two and two together from the next day’s papers anyway. There was a bit on the front page about a man being all day with the police helping them with their inquiries. That in itself wouldn’t have been sufficient, but those reporters had made it follow quite a long account of how Mrs Carol Stratford waited in suspense day after day in the home she shared with twenty-year-old Barry Mahon. Then it said the man helping with inquiries was twenty and local and in the building trade. Barry winced. He bought the paper at the newsagent’s in Bevan Square and he sensed Mr Mahmud, the newsagent, and his pretty daughter with her long black pigtail looking at him with more than usual interest.
The police came for him again next day. It was Saturday so he was at home. Down at the station they hammered at him again. Had the cinema been crowded? Half-empty? Fewer people than that? How many people? Had he smoked? Which side of the cinema had he sat on to smoke? Barry answered calmly, he didn’t have to invent anything, and when he couldn’t remember, he said he couldn’t.
They asked him if he had a bad temper. What did he think about corporal punishment? Did he think it possible to discipline a child without smacking it? Barry answered mechanically. He was wondering why he should be the only man to suffer this inquisition. Perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps they had had Ivan, Maureen’s husband, down here for questioning. Perhaps they had questioned Jerry and Louis Isadoro. They hadn’t got into the papers, though, as helping police with their inquiries . . .
There was another man in Jason’s life. Had they asked about him? Had they asked Carol who he was? Barry wanted to shout at them: Jason’s got a father! He nearly did. In the end he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Loyalty to Carol, respect for her, stopped him. He suffered their questions, answering yes or no, sometimes not answering at all. In a curious way he had lost interest, just as on the previous day he had lost fear.
This time he walked home. Carol had gone out. There was a note from her though, with two crosses on it for kisses, so he had not to mind. He tried to watch the Ipswich–Arsenal match on television but he couldn’t concentrate, he could only think of one thing. A fellow-feeling for Dave – something he had never experienced before – made him pick up the framed photograph and study it closely. Dave looked so happy, smiling and carefree. Within a month of that picture being taken, he was dead, his body mashed in the wreckage of his truck on a Croatian mountainside. Barry found it hard to imagine him and Carol and Tanya and Ryan as one happy ordinary family. He didn’t know why but he couldn’t imagine it, he couldn’t see Carol as part of it. Yet Carol said that was how it had been. And afterwards? How had she handled her life afterwards?
The children had been taken into care and she had been on her own. Only Carol was too beautiful ever to be on her own for long. Who had taken Dave’s place? Barry hardly knew what he would prefer, a hundred or just one. He found himself wondering what went on in her mind when she was alone, what thoughts were passing through her head now, for instance, as she walked somewhere window-shopping or sat in the pub having a drink with Iris and Jerry. If he thought of Jason so much, her mind must dwell on him all the time, on Jason himself as he had been last week and also on how he had been as a baby, at his birth, and
in the months before his birth. It must be so. Barry knew that if he were a woman, if he were Carol, he would think like that. And how could he judge others’ ways of thinking except from his own way? She must think of when she first knew she was going to have Jason and about the love-making that had led to that. Perhaps it was because she thought of those things that they were less close than they had been.
On an impulse, he wanted to make a good evening for them. He wanted to get her thoughts back for himself. Wine, he decided, and a chicken to roast, he could do that all right, he could make them a real meal for a change. Going out of Winterside Down by the main exit he saw no one he knew. It started to get dark very early, especially when the sky was overcast as it had been all day. People were coming back from the last shopping of the week, laden with heavy bags. By the time he came back with his own bags, the yellow lights had started to come on.
A half-formed idea of going to talk to Maureen brought him back this way, along Winterside Road to the canal and the Chinese bridge. He passed Maureen’s house, he didn’t even pause at the gate. She wouldn’t tell him, she probably didn’t know, and anyway it was Saturday and Ivan would be home. On the bridge a fresh sample of graffiti had appeared – Chicken Rules – done in red aerosol. Barry thought he ought to know what it meant, he was young enough, but for all that, he had grown too old to know. The canal water was very clear today. You could see the pebbles on the bottom, the cans and broken bottles.
The motorbike boys had assembled on the Winterside Down side of the bridge. They weren’t supposed to take bikes on to the path, still less across the lawns, but who was going to stop them? There were deep tyre marks in the green turf. Hoopoe was wearing new leathers of kingfisher blue.
One of them – he thought it was Nose Ring – called out something as he passed by. That was all. He came over the bridge and they didn’t try to stop him, they didn’t molest him in any way, but as he passed, Nose Ring called out something he couldn’t catch. It was the first time that had happened. He knew they called out dirty things to girls and others sorts of things to pensioners. He had heard Blue Hair say to Mrs Spicer when she wore her tight trousers, ‘For an old woman you’ve got some good arse.’
