The Lake of Darkness

by Ruth Rendell

  Nothing must happen. She only had Saturday to get through now. They had agreed not to meet on Sunday, she would be too busy packing. She pulled up the hood of her coat and set off along wide, cold, empty Fortis Green Lane for Finchley High Road. A taxi picked her up just before she reached it.

  “I don’t usually ever feel nervous about anything, you know,” she said to Tim. “I suppose anyone can get nervous if there’s enough at stake. While I was sort of lurking in that garden I kept thinking how awful it would be if that man came out of his house. I mean, he might have chased me and Martin might have hit him, thinking he was my husband. I imagined the most fearful things.”

  Tim laughed. “The most fearful thing about that would have been the outcome, the loss of our future home. Otherwise I can’t imagine anything funnier than Livingstone having a punch-up with a complete stranger in the middle of the night in darkest Finchley.”

  Francesca thought about it. Then she laughed too and helped herself to one of Tim’s cigarettes. “What made you pick on that funny house, anyway? What made you pick on that man?”

  “Me? I didn’t pick on him. I didn’t pick on the house. That was your fiance. Remember? I didn’t even know there was anyone called Brown living in Fortis Green Lane. The idea of writing that par for the Post was solely to give verisimilitude to your story. People say newspapers are full of lies, but they believe everything they read in newspapers just the same. Fortis Green Lane is a long road and Brown is a common name. There may be half a dozen Browns living there for all I know. Livingstone happened to find this one in the phone book.”

  With a giggle Francesca said, “It would be most awfully unfair then if Martin had hit him.”

  “You’ll have to take good care he doesn’t. He truly is that mysterious individual, the innocent bystander.”

  There was a heavy frost that night and the roof tops were nearly as white as when they had been covered with snow. Francesca and Tim lay late in bed and Francesca brought Lindsay in with them. They talked about the flat in Swan Place while Lindsay sat on the pillow and braided Francesca’s hair. Tim said they would probably have to sell the flat and buy one that wasn’t in Highgate, it would be so awkward if they ever ran into Martin. That would be all right, Francesca said, she would quite like to live up near the Green Belt or out towards Epping Forest, she wasn’t wedded to London. Nor to the distinguished author of The Iron Cocoon, said Tim, and they both laughed so much that Lindsay pinched their lips together.

  Tim drove her as near as he dared to Cromwell Court. Martin wanted to know what arrangements she had made for Monday. Had she booked a car? Was Lindsay going to the nursery that day or not? Could she manage all her clothes at one journey? And what about Russell? Had she told him there should be a fair division of their property and had he agreed? Francesca answered these questions as best she could while they were on their way to Swan Place to pick up the key from Mr. Butler. She felt elated when the key was in her possession. A key gives such a secure feeling of rights and privacy and ownership. Mrs. Butler took her round the flat once more, and Francesca could hardly contain her excitement. How different it was to view all this, to tread these soft, subtle-shaded carpets, finger stiff silky curtains, feel the warmth, turn on a tap, press a switch, in the knowledge it was going to be all her own!

  “Will you ask me to supper on Monday evening?” Martin said.

  “Tuesday. Give me just one day to settle in. Lindsay’s bound to be difficult, you know.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Tuesday then.” His face wore the hurt look that blurred his features and made it dog-like. “Adrian hopes to complete by mid-day on Monday, so you can come any time after. I expect the Butlers will still be moving out.”

  Francesca didn’t see much point in talking about it when she wasn’t going to move in at all. SJhe wished she had the nerve to ask Martin what was to be done with the deeds or lease or whatever it was. Deposited in his bank maybe. Not for long, she thought, not for long. Tim would deal with all that, she had done her part, she had almost done it. She held Martin’s hand in the car, held it on her knee and said, “Let’s not go out to dine, let’s have a quiet evening at home on our own.”

  XVIII

  Most of the time there was nobody in the house, but the man was there more often than the woman. This was a reversal, Finn thought, of the usual order of things. He had never seen them together, though he had been to Fortis Green Lane on five evenings now, each time parking in a different place. He had seen the woman twice and the man three times, and once he had seen the man with another woman. This didn’t trouble him, nor was he perplexed about the relations of these people to each other or that of Martin Urban to them. Emotions, passion, jealousy, desire, even hatred, were beyond or outside his understanding. They bored him. He preferred magic. He longed now to be able to wield practical magic, to conjure his victim out of the house and into his trap.

  But he had lost that power even before the death of Queenie. Sitting in the van, watching, he thought of how, in Jack Straw’s, he had concentrated on that reporter and made him get out and light a cigarette. Or had he? Such doubt is the enemy of faith, and it is faith that moves the mountains.

  Come out of the house, he said in his mind to the darkened windows, the closed front door, the indestructible stucco. He said it over and over again like the mantras he repeated for his meditation. He had no idea, and no means of knowing, if the house was empty or not. There might be a light on in the downstairs back room or in the kitchen. He had been there since five, since before the dark came down, but there had been no sign of life from the house and no flicker of light.

  It was a cold evening, the air already laying frost in a very thin silvery glitter on the tops of fences and the crosspieces of gates, on twigs and laurel leaves and on the oblique rear windows of parked cars. The sulphur light showed tiny early spring flowers in some gardens, pale or white or no-colour buds and bells. Finn didn’t know the names of flowers. The frost wasn’t heavy enough to whiten the grass much. Inside the van it was cold. Finn wore the yellow pullover and the grey woollen cap and the leather coat and sat reading Crowley’s Confessions. Back in Lord Arthur Road he had left Lena and Mrs. Gogarty indignant because Mr. Beard, proposing to raise up for their edification Abremelin the Mage, meant to do so by indefencible methods. In fact, by the sacrifice of a pigeon, the emanation from whose blood would provide the material for the seer to build a body out of. Pigeons were commoner than flies in Brecknock Road, Mr. Beard had said. Lena and Mrs. Gogarty shuddered and twittered and sent Mr. Beard to Coventry. Finn wished he was back there with them and the innocent pleasures of Planchette to which they had retreated, scared by Mr. Beard’s sophistication.

  A light had come on in 54 Fortis Green Lane, a not very strong light as from a sixty-watt bulb, in the hall. It showed through the slit of a window on the right-hand side of the door and through the small diamond-shaped pane of glass in the door itself. No one came out, no one went in. It was ten o’clock. Finn didn’t think anything was going to happen tonight. Again it would have to be postponed. That he had taken Martin Urban’s money and as yet done nothing to earn it vaguely oppressed him. But because it was a waste of time sitting there any longer, he drove down to Muswell Hill, to the Green Man, and drank two bottles of Britvic pineapple juice.

  Sitting alone at a table, he fixed his thought on a fat man in a checked sports jacket, willing him to get up and go outside to the gents. After about five minutes of this the fat man did get up and go outside, but a smaller thinner man sitting with him had gone out a moment or so before. Finn didn’t know what to think. As he came out into the street he was visited by a premonition so intense as almost to blind him. He felt it like a pain in his head.

  Tonight was the time for it. If he would only seize his opportunity and go back to Fortis Green Lane now, all would be well. In his mind’s eye, as on a screen, he saw the house quite clearly, the light shining through and alongside the front door, the front garden with its alterna
ting turf and concrete. He stared into this vision and silently commanded Martin Urban’s enemy to appear. At once this happened and Finn seemed to be staring into a pair of puzzled and dismayed eyes. He got into the van and drove back to Fortis Green Lane as fast as he could go.

  There was no need to watch and wait. As in his vision, Martin Urban’s enemy was in the front garden, unlatching the white iron gate. But this time there was no meeting of eyes.

  Finn hadn’t even switched off the engine. He watched the figure in the fur coat close the gate and turn immediately left into the side street. For what purpose would anyone go out alone at this time on a Saturday night? Finn knew it was no good judging by himself. He might go out to commune with the powers of darkness but others lacked that wisdom. They would be more likely to visit some friend, a nocturnal person who had no objection to late callers.

  He allowed his quarry two minutes’ start and then he followed. Martin Urban’s enemy was nowhere to be seen. The street was deserted. Coldfall Wood, grey and still under the indigo sky, lay ahead of him. He turned right along the edge of the wood and then he saw the figure in the fur coat ahead of him, a long way ahead, casting an attenuated black shadow as it passed under a lamp. There was scarcely any other traffic; parked cars everywhere but only one that moved, a sports car that passed him, going towards Finchley.

  Finn lagged behind, stopped for a while. When he started again, driving slowly, it wasn’t long before he came to a sign that indicated the nearness of the North Circular Road. The houses had stopped. Soon the parked cars had stopped. On either side of the road he had turned into stretched open land. Not woods, though, or heath or anything that remotely approximated to real countryside except that grass grew on it. It was a vast acreage of tips, of heaps of rubble, dismantled cars, rusty iron, stacks of wood that looked like collapsed huts, and the overgrown remains of abandoned allotments. The whole of this wilderness was weirdly but brilliantly lit by lamps on tall stems which coated the sky with a shimmering brownish fog and gave to the ground a look of total desolation.

  There was no dwelling of any kind in sight. Finn knew that most new approach roads to motorways or trunk roads look like this, that the land only had this appearance of nightmare violation because heavy construction work had not long since taken place on it. Yet knowing this, he still had the feeling of having entered a different and uncanny world, a place where the ordinary usages of life were suspended and the occult reigned. In it he felt alone, he and the bobbing shadow in the distance ahead. He felt too that he might even be invisible, had perhaps discovered unwittingly the secret of invisibility which since the beginning of time magicians had sought for.

  A thrill of power ran through him. The clear brown sky seemed to be meshed all over with a dazzling veil of gold. But for a distant throb there was silence. Finn made the van glide slowly along. On the left-hand side, ahead of the moving figure, the pavement petered out. It would be necessary, inevitable, soon to cross that wide curving roadway, white and gold and glittering at close on midnight.

  The head above the fur collar turned to the right, to the left, to the right again. The black shadow dipped into the road. Finn was in second gear. He rammed his foot hard down on the accelerator, changed in one movement up into fourth, and shot towards the shining, moving pillar of fur. Now, at last, he saw the eyes, round, gleaming, dark with terror. He had to swerve in pursuit, to make sure. A shattering scream rang through the glittering empty air, arms were flung up in a desperate useless defence, and then, when it seemed as if the suddenly huge, screaming, animallike shape must flatten and paste itself against his windscreen, he felt it under the van, the wheels crunching flesh and bone.

  Finn reversed over the thing he had crushed and then drove over it once more in bottom gear. There was a lot of blood, dark and colourless as Anne Blake’s had been, splashed blots of it on the white road. He made a U-turn and drove back the way he had come up. For a yard or so his tyres left their imprints in blood. He would clean those tyres when he changed the licence plates, before he went home to Lena.

  XIX

  As yet the wood showed no sign of greening but it had grown sparkling brown and the beech trunks silver. Their myriad delicate fronds, for twigs was too solid a word, fanned against a mother-of-pearl sky. Martin was inescapably reminded of Tim. He had a feeling, utterly absurd and one to which he wouldn’t have dreamt of yielding, that he should park the car here on the winding bit up to Highgate, and go on a pilgrimage through the wood to find the spot where he had met Tim. The dying day-not so different from a day just born-and the coming spring recalled to him the warmth of that encounter and that other curious feeling which he had felt for no one, not even for Francesca, either before or since.

  He drove on. The sky was deepening to lavender and the sunset had brushed it with pink and golden strokes. What had Tim been doing in the wood that morning? Strange that he had never asked himself that question before. While he had come in from Priory Gardens and was walking north, Tim seemed to have entered from the Muswell Hill Road as if he had come from the junction where the Woodman was. Martin was approaching this junction now and it occurred to him that he might go into Bloomers and buy Francesca some spring flowers. Of course he had promised not to see her today, but he would phone her when he got home and if she really didn’t want to see him tonight, he would take the flowers to her on his way to work in the morning.

  Bloomers, however, was closed and its lights off, though the time was only twenty to six. Martin drove up South-wood Lane and down the High Street to Cromwell Court. No letters had come by the second post. He had written again to Mrs. Cochrane on Friday but perhaps it was too soon yet to expect a reply. In the living room, part on a chair and part on the floor, were still stacked the saucepans, the frying pan, the apricot-and-brown-and-cream-patterned towels, the brown-and-white sheets and pillowcases, and the Denby ware dinner service. Francesca might be in need of those things.

  In the flat on Saturday afternoon he had noted the Butlers’ phone number. He dialled it now and got the unobtainable signal. The Post Office presumably hadn’t let her keep the old number when they came in today to reconnect the phone. Perhaps you always had to have a new number. Should he now phone Tim? It was three months, more than that, since he had last spoken to Tim. There was nothing really that he would like more tonight, since he couldn’t be with Francesca, than to spend a couple of hours with Tim. They hadn’t even quarrelled. They had parted because of his own absurd guilt over nothing. He had broken their friendship over that money. And it was nearly all gone now, would all be gone when he had settled with Mrs. Finn and Mrs. Cochrane.

  Tim wouldn’t be home yet. Martin phoned Adrian Vowchurch and thanked him for getting completion so promptly.

  “Francesca move in all right, did she?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Martin.

  “By the by, I had a message, heaven knows why, that there are two more keys with the agents. Okay?”

  Martin said it was okay and that he had wondered why there had only been one key. He kept Adrian talking for a while in the hope that he might invite him and Francesca round one evening, but Adrian didn’t. He said he must fly because he and Julie were going out to dinner with the senior partner and his wife. Martin thought it likely that Francesca would phone once she had got Lindsay to bed and off to sleep. He drank some whisky, he made himself an omelette with four eggs and two rashers of bacon and a lot of mushrooms, and when he had eaten it and washed up it was half-past eight.

  The phone rang at nine. It was Norman Tremlett. Norman lived at home with his parents, and he wanted to know if Martin would bring Francesca to dinner on the evening of Saturday week. Martin didn’t much want to dine with the Tremletts, but he felt excited at the idea of having the right to accept for himself and Francesca just as if they were already a married couple, so he said yes, they’d, like to.

  Just as it had previously been too early, it now seemed too late to phone Tim, too late anyway for them to arrange to
meet and go out anywhere that night. He would phone Tim tomorrow or the next day. For the first time since the autumn Martin unlocked the glass door and went out on to the balcony. The night was cool but the sky so unusually clear that you could see the stars, though so tiny and faint that it was as if the gloomy pall of London had pushed them even greater distances into space. Francesca wasn’t going to phone tonight. He realised it with resignation, but it was silly to feel such intense disappointment. She would be tired after her long day, which had started perhaps with a final quarrel with Russell and ended with Lindsay’s tantrums, and by now she might well be asleep.

  The post brought a letter, not from Mrs. Cochrane, but from her brother-in-law. The tone was that of Mr. Cochrane’s notes, clipped and censorious. It began “Dear Martin,” and the gist of it was that he and Mrs. Cochrane would come to Cromwell Court that evening, eight o’clock if this was convenient. Martin looked in the phone book to see if Mr. Cochrane was on the phone and found, to his surprise, that he was. But when he dialled the number there was no answer. He would have to try again later. This evening he was to dine with Francesca in Swan Place, so of course he couldn’t see Mr. and Mrs. Cochrane.

  He drove to work via Shepherd’s Hill, thus passing close by Stanhope Avenue, but Francesca’s windows weren’t visible. It was a nuisance having no phone number for her. He had an appointment with a client at eleven, which eventually lengthened over lunchtime, and it was half-past two before he got back.

  Francesca hadn’t phoned.

  “Are you positive there haven’t been any calls for me?”

  Caroline, with black-varnished fingernails today and red hair cropped to a crew cut, said that of course she was positive; he ought to know she didn’t make mistakes like that.