The Lake of Darkness

by Ruth Rendell

  Watching the coiled element on the electric hot plate begin to glow red, Finn checked over his plan for the perfect accident. She would come in at six, turn on the heaters, including the electric fire in her bedroom, maybe have a drink of some sort, then her bath. She might bring the electric fire into the bathroom or she might not, it mattered very little either way. Finn would be lying up in the loft on the joists between the trap-door and the water tank. When he heard her in the bath he would lift up the trap-door and drop the hot plate down into the water. Electrocution would take place instantaneously. The hot plate he would then dry and replace among the glass jars and the National Geographic magazines. Once more broken and unusable, what more suitable place for it? When all the arrangements of flex and plug had been dismantled, nothing remained but to plug Anne Blake’s bedroom electric fire into the bathroom point, switch it on and toss it into the bath water. Accidental death, misadventure, the fire had very obviously (a complaisant coroner would say) slipped off the tiled shelf at the end of the bath.

  Finn felt no compunction over what he was about to do. There was no death. He would simply be sending Anne Blake on into the next cycle of her being, and perhaps into a fleshly house of greater beauty. Not for her, this time, the human lot of growing old and feeble, but a quick passage into the void before giving her first cry as a new-born child. Strange to think that Queenie too was a child somewhere now, unless instead her unenlightened soul still wandered aimlessly out there in the dark spaces.

  Clambering across the loft, he peered out through a gap between roof strut and tile to watch the fluttering snow. In the wind on the top of Parliament Hill grey trees waved their thin branches as if to ward off the cloudy blizzard. The sky was the hard shiny grey of new steel.

  It was because he was at the extreme edge of the roof, lying down to look under the eaves, that he was able to hear nothing in the depths of the house below him. Soft-soled shoes treading the carpeted stairs made sounds too low to reach him. He heard nothing at all until there came the scrabbling of a key in the front door lock.

  Finn might just have managed to pull the steps up in time and close the trap-door, but he wouldn’t have been able to push the fridge back against the kitchen wall or remove his open tool box from the middle of the kitchen floor. She had come home more than two hours early. He came across the loft and looked down through the aperture in the ceiling as Anne Blake opened the bathroom door and stood looking up, startled and annoyed. There were snowflakes on her bushy dark grey hair.

  “What on earth are you doing up there, Mr. Finn?”

  “Lagging the pipes,” said Finn. “We’re in for a freeze-up.”

  “I didn’t know you had a key. It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

  Finn didn’t answer, he never went in for pointless explanations. What now? She would never have her bath with him up there, otherwise he might have proceeded as planned. He must try again tomorrow. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t be quite safe to leave that mysterious lead proceeding from the gas pipe still plugged in. Finn descended. He wrenched off the plug, went back into the loft and disconnected the hot plate. It would be a good idea actually to lag those pipes, an excuse for being in the roof again tomorrow. He would go down and tell her he would return tomorrow with fibreglass wrap for the pipes.

  Finn put the hot plate with the iron and trivet, packed up his tool box and came down the steps, pulling the trap-door closed behind him. He was sitting on the side of the bath, about to close the lid of the box when, across the blue-and-yellow papered hall, through the open doorway to the bedroom, he saw Anne Blake crouched down, her back to him, as she struggled to pull open the lowest drawer of a tallboy. Lying on the top shelf of the box was the largest and heaviest of his hammers. How easy it would be now! In just such a manner had he struck Queenie down.

  He shut the box, slipping the hammer into his right-hand pocket. Then the box was on the bathroom floor and Finn was moving swiftly across the blue carpet towards her.

  VI

  She was on her feet, clutching to her the two or three garments she had been groping for in the drawer, before Finn had so much as entered the bedroom. He stood still on the threshold and she seemed to find nothing untoward in his looks or his behaviour. She said rather ungraciously,

  “Have you finished whatever you were doing up there?”

  Finn nodded, fixing her with his pale eyes. He knew she was uneasy in his presence, but there was nothing new in that, most people were. Quite alone in the house with him for the first time, she was probably afraid of rape. Finn smiled inwardly. He wasn’t much interested in sex. It was more than a year since he had had anything to do with a woman in that way, and then it had been very sporadically.

  He put the steps away and got into his jacket. It was still only four-thirty, but twilight. Anne Blake had turned some lights on and gone into the kitchen. The gas fire, just lighted, burnt blue in the living room grate. Finn still had the hammer in the pocket of his jeans. He went into the kitchen to tell Anne Blake about coming back tomorrow with the fibreglass, and while she talked to him, asking him what right Kaiafas had to a key to her flat and scolding him about knocking over something when he moved her fridge, he closed his hand round the hammer handle and thought, how easy, how easy … and how easily too he would be found out and caught afterwards, not to mention Lena’s terror.

  She forgot to ask him to relinquish the key or perhaps she thought he had better keep it since he was coming back the next day. It was still snowing when he got down to the street, but the snowflakes were now the big clotted kind that melt and disperse as soon as they touch a solid surface. Finn walked along Mansfield Road and under the railway bridge at Gospel Oak and got into the van.

  Immediately, it seemed, that he had closed the door the blizzard began. The wipers on his windscreen weren’t what they had been and Finn decided to stay put until the snow stopped. It flopped on to the roof and windows of the van and streamed as water down its sides.

  After about twenty minutes the snow had almost ceased but there was a big build-up of rush-hour traffic headed for Highgate West Hill. Finn couldn’t stay parked where he was and he couldn’t turn round, so he started the van and drove back the way he had walked. It was dark now but the street lamps were all on, and as he passed the end of Modena Road he saw Anne Blake leaving the house, holding a pagoda-shaped umbrella in one hand and a plastic carrier in the other. She turned in the direction of Hampstead Heath.

  Finn turned right at the next turning into Shirlock Road and came out into Savernake Road by the great porridge-coloured pile of All Hallows’ Church. Anne Blake had just reached the corner of Modena Gardens and Savernake Road and was now crossing the road towards the footbridge. Finn parked the van among all the other parked cars and vans. The snow had changed to a thin sleety rain.

  It was very dark, though not yet half-past five. Finn supposed that Anne Blake had gone to call on some friend who lived on the other side of the railway line in Nassington Road maybe or Parliament Hill. She wouldn’t go shopping that way. Besides, the carrier had looked full. He debated whether to go back into the house in her absence. She would very likely be absent for a couple of hours.

  He wondered if she had had her bath. There had been quite enough time for her to have had it, but would she go out into the cold immediately after having had it? She might intend to have it immediately she got in. It would only take him a few minutes, say ten, to reconnect those plugs. But if she had already had her bath he might find himself stuck up there in the loft all night.

  Perhaps a dozen people, coming singly or in pairs, had appeared from the approach to the footbridge while he sat there. Its only use really was to take one on to the Heath or into those streets to the east of South End Road. No one living here would use Hampstead Heath Station when Gospel Oak was just as near. She hadn’t gone to the station.

  At last Finn got out of the van, crossed the road and let himself once more into the house in Modena Road. The rain had begun las
hing down by the time he got there. He went upstairs without turning any lights on, and at the top, he entered Anne Blake’s flat in darkness. A street lamp lit the living room and so, with a richer orange glow, did the gas fire which she had left on. She wouldn’t have done that, Finn thought, if she had intended to be out for long.

  He went into the bathroom and ran his hand along the inside of the bath. It was wet and so was one of the towels that hung on the chromium towel rail. There was no point in his remaining. He padded softly, although there was no one to hear him, across to the bedroom window. The rain was now coming down in the kind of deluge that no one would venture out in unless he had to. Finn had to. He opened one of the doors of Anne Blake’s wardrobe. Inside, among her clothes, were two or three garments still sheathed in the thin polythene covers in which they had come back from the dry-cleaners. Finn selected one of these, slipped it off the hanger and the long black evening dress it covered, and pulled it over his head, splitting its sides open a little way down for his arms to go through. It made a kind of protective tunic, impervious and transparent

  The rain began to let up a little as he came up to Savernake Road. There was no one about. He felt drawn by the Heath, by its wide green emptiness, and he walked up the steps and on to the footbridge. A single lamp, raised up high, illumined the bridge, but you couldn’t see the railway line, the walls were built up too high for that. To prevent suicides, thought Finn. He gazed across the smooth slope of Parliament Hill Fields to Highgate on the horizon, the emerald domes of St. Joseph’s gleaming colourless and pearly against a sky which the glow of London made velvety and reddish. The backs of the houses in Tanza Road were as if punctured all over with lights, but the glittering screen of rain prevented much of that light from being shed on the path. It seemed to Finn that the whole area to the left of the footbridge and immediately above the railway embankment was extraordinarily dark. He could barely see where the turf ended and Nassington Road began.

  He came down the steps on the Parliament Hill side of the bridge. A train rattled underneath as he passed. The rain was running in streams down his plastic covering, though now it was lightening again, setting in evidently for a night of torrents with short drizzly remissions. In the dark hollow where the path ran under trees to link with the end of Nassington Road, Finn picked his way between the puddles. Now he could see why it was so dark. The lamp at the end of Nassington Road had gone out or never come on.

  Finn liked the solitude and the silence. The train and its noise had long gone down the deep cutting to Gospel Oak. No one was venturing out into the rain. A strange tall figure in a shining glassy robe, Finn stood under the trees viewing the grey and rain-washed plain, feeling one with the elements, a man of power, a conqueror.

  Someone was coming down Nassington Road, he could just hear the footfalls, though they were deadened by the wetness of the pavement. He stepped a little aside, behind the trunk of a tree. He could see her clearly now, passing under the last lighted lamp, the pagoda umbrella up, the carrier in her other hand empty or nearly so. She had waited to leave for home until the rain lifted a little. He could tell she was nervous because the lamp was out. She looked to the left past where he was standing and to the right, towards the bridge, and then she came on into the lake of darkness.

  Finn no more intended to move forward and strike than he had intended to move forward and strike Queenie. It happened, that was all. It happened without his volition or his desire in the same way perhaps as the stone had moved and the pictures fallen. At one moment he was standing, watching with those night-seeing eyes of his, at the next the hammer was in his hand and he had fallen upon her. Queenie had made terrible sounds. Anne Blake made none but a throaty gasp, falling forward from the knees as he struck her again and again, now using the wide, flat side of the hammer.

  In the dark he couldn’t tell which of that dark fluid that spread everywhere was water and which blood. He pulled her away from the path and round the side of the nearest tree. There was no pulse, she was dead. Already she had passed into the unknown and was in possession of what was beyond. He almost envied her.

  There was no Lena this time to come in and witness what he had done. He must keep this from Lena, wash himself clean of all the blood that so terrified her, deny her newspapers. Finn picked up Anne Blake’s umbrella and furled it. He felt inside the carrier and found there a small suede handbag in which he found twenty-six pounds in notes, a cheque-book, and two credit cards. He took these and the money with him.

  In the light on the bridge he could tell blood from water by running his fingers down his body and then holding up his hands. The lamplight robbed everything of colour, but the fluid was dark that ran from his hands. Someone was coming from the Parliament Hill side. Whoever it was had passed Anne Blake’s body. Finn took refuge at the foot of the switchback slope that was designed for those who didn’t want to or couldn’t use stairs. Footsteps passed across the bridge and went on towards Savernake Road. The rain had returned now to all the force of its former intensity. Finn stepped out into it and let it wash him clean.

  He also washed the hammer in the rain. Once back in the van, he stripped off his plastic tunic and rolled it up into a ball. Underneath he was perfectly clean and fairly dry. He replaced his hammer in the tool box and fastened the lid. The gas fire would still be on in Anne Blake’s flat, might very likely remain on all night, but it wouldn’t burn the house down.

  The problem was to get rid of the contents of the handbag, particularly the cheque-book and the credit cards. Finn drove home. It was still only seven, the rain falling steadily as if, having at last found a satisfactory rhythm, it meant to stick to it. Because of the rain he put the van away in the garage he rented in Somerset Grove, an old coach-house with bits of rotting harness still hanging on the walls.

  With Lena was Mrs. Gogarty, the friend who had predicted for Finn a violent death in old age. The two of them were intent upon the pendulum. A white-and-pink baby’s shawl with a scalloped edge had been thrown over the birdcage. Mrs. Gogarty was as fat as Lena was thin, with abundant hair dyed a stormy dark red.

  “Well, well,” said Finn, “you are cosy. Can I have a lend of a pair of scissors?”

  Lena, looking in the mauve dress and yards of stole like the appropriate one of the Three Fates, handed him the Woolworth scissors with which she picked and snipped at her daily finds.

  “He’s a lovely boy, your boy,” said Mrs. Gogarty, who made this remark every time the three of them met. “The picture of devotion.”

  Finn managed to palm his mother’s reading glasses off the top of a chest of drawers where they nestled among some half-burnt candles and incense sticks and pieces of abalone shell. He went down to his own room where he cut up the notes and the cheque-book and the credit cards into very small pieces. The tin from which he had eaten pineapple chunks at lunchtime was now quite dry inside. Finn put the pieces of paper and card into the empty tin and applied a match. It took several more matches to get it going and keep it going, but at last Anne Blake’s twenty-six pounds and her Westminster Bank cheque-book were reduced to a fine black ash. The American Express and Access cards were less destructible, but they too went black and emitted a strong chemical smell.

  Re-entering his mother’s room, Finn dropped the glasses and trod on them. This made Mrs. Gogarty scream out and jump up and down, jerking her arms, which was what she did whenever anything the slightest bit untoward happened. Lena was too much occupied in calming her down to say anything about the glasses; she diverted her with the pendulum as one diverts a child with a rattle.

  Finn promised to get the glasses repaired as soon as he could. He would go into the optician’s first thing tomorrow, he said. In the meantime, had she noticed the rain coming in over her gas stove? Better put a bowl there, and the first moment he got he’d, be out on that roof.

  “Devotion itself,” gasped Mrs. Gogarty.

  The pendulum rotated, widdershins and swiftly.

  VII
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br />   The snow, which had been falling for most of the afternoon, had changed to rain when Martin drove across the Archway Road and began searching for a place to park. Southwood Lane was hopeless and so was the narrow congested curve of Hillside Gardens. He finally left the car in one of the roads up behind Highgate Police Station and walked back to the crossroads, wondering if he might be too late to catch Bloomers open, although it was only ten to six.

  During the week-end he had asked himself several times why he should bother to call at the shop when he was sure it must have been the Bhavnani family who had sent those flowers. Anyway, did it matter particularly who had sent them? Of course, if he knew, he could write a note of thanks or phone. Dr. Ghopal had phoned the office during the afternoon to say that the great heart specialist was prepared to operate in the week immediately preceding Christmas. No further time should be wasted when a condition like Suma’s was in question. Would Martin buy the air tickets himself and arrange a hotel for Mrs. Bhavnani? Martin had agreed to do this, but he had felt unable to make enquiries about the flowers, especially as he was going to see the pretty dark-haired girl that evening.

  He saw her when he was still on the other side of the road, outside the post office. She was taking in boxes of cut flowers and poinsettias in pots from the pavement. He waited for the lights to change and then crossed the street. The shop, which was very small, had a red bulb in one of its hanging lights, and the orangey glow, the mass of fresh damp glistening foliage, the red-velvet long-leaved poinsettias, gave to the place a festive air, Christmasy, almost exciting. It was dark and bleak outside. The shop was alight with reds and yellows and jungle greens, and the girl stood in the middle of it, smiling, her arms full of carnations.