by Ruth Rendell
“I’m not queer, gay, whatever you call it.”
“It was the gin, love,” said Tim.
He had perched himself on the edge of the table. Martin managed to focus on him now, and if he was flushed it didn’t show in that light. “Perhaps I am, though,” he said in a low voice. “Perhaps I am really and I never knew it. Why have there been so many things I didn’t know and couldn’t see, Tim?”
“ ‘Humanity treads ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses.’ I remember I said that to you before all this started. We’ve both fallen in with a crash, haven’t we?”
Martin nodded. He was embarrassed still and ashamed still, but a warmth that had nothing to do with the heater was slowly engulfing him. He loved Tim, he knew it now. Nothing that Tim had done to him mattered any more. He said,
“That flat, the one Francesca was going to move into, you can have it. I want you to have it.”
“Is it yours to give, my dear?”
“Well, I …” Technically, legally, it wasn’t. It was the technical, the legal, aspect which mattered, though.
“It’ll be shared between four people, I should think. Francesca had a husband and a child and parents. Lindsay will get some of it and I suppose Russell Brown will get most of it.”
“Tim, I’ll give you …” What? He had nothing left to give. “I want to do something. We’ve both lost’Francesca, that ought to bring us together, it ought to … what are you smiling at?”
“Your naivety.”
“I can’t see that it’s naive to want to help someone because you feel you owe it to them. Look, I could sell my flat and buy a small house somewhere-well, not so nice, and you could bring Lindsay and come and live there with me and … We have to be friends, Tim.”
“Do we, my dear? I’ve injured you and we dislike those we’ve injured.” Tim walked across the room and switched on the central light. It was bright, glaring, uncompromising. “I’m sorry for what I did now, I bitterly regret it, but being sorry doesn’t make me like you any more. I wouldn’t dream of sharing a house with you, and if you offered me money I should refuse it.” He stubbed out his cigarette, coughing a little. “It’s time you went home now. I have to fetch Lindsay and put her to bed.”
Martin got up. He felt as if he had been hit in the face with something cold and wet, a wet glove perhaps.
“Is that all?” he stammered. “Have we said it all?”
Tim didn’t answer. They were out in the icy dank hallway now and from upstairs, distantly, came a wail, “Lindsay wants Daddy.”
Tim opened the front door. “The inquest was today. Accidental death. Cremation Monday, three o’clock, Golders Green. A hearty welcome will be extended to all husbands, real, imaginary, future, and common law.”
Martin walked down the steps and into the street without looking back. He heard the door close. His head was banging from bewilderment and incredulity and gin.
It was a quarter past seven. He had been with Tim for less than an hour. In those forty-five or fifty minutes his whole life, the past as well as the present and the future, had been changed. It was as if the world had tilted and he been thrown sliding down the slope of it to hang there, breathless, by his hands. Or as if, as Tim said, the thin crust had given way.
His head was hurting him now. He had drunk a lot of that gin, probably a tumblerful. But he didn’t feel drunk, only sick and headachy and drained. He was tired as well, but he didn’t think he would sleep; he felt as if he would never sleep again.
For a long time he sat in the car in Samphire Road. He only drove away because he was afraid Tim might come out and find him still there, and even then he parked again almost immediately, in one of the streets that had been turned into a cul-de-sac by the crater of devastated land.
It was quite dark now and the rubble-covered waste was totally unlighted. The edges of it only were visible, a horizon of black jagged roofs, punctured with points of light, against the crimson-suffused sky. Francesca had lived here, come from here every morning, returned here each night. It seemed to him infinitely strange, something he would never fully understand. She was dead and had been dead for nearly a week now. In her dying she had somehow come back to him-there had been no terrible betrayal. How could Tim know how she had felt? How could Tim tell that for all her early motives she hadn’t, at the end, come to prefer the new man to the old?
From taking a vicious pleasure in the fact of her death-he had felt like that when he first began to understand-he found he could now think of her with a pitying tenderness. They would never have been happy together, or not for long, he could see that. He was getting to know himself at last, he thought.
His head wasn’t going to get any better just sitting here. If the place had been more attractive-less downright sinister, in fact-he would have gone for a walk, walked to clear his head, for it was a mild evening with that indefinable smell and charge in the air that heralds spring. But he couldn’t walk here. He started the car and drove away into Hornsey Rise.
Someone walked across a pedestrian crossing ahead of him. He braked and waited rather longer than usual. He thought of the manner of Francesca’s death. Who could do such a thing? Knock someone down and drive away to leave her dying? She had taken a night and a day to die. He shivered uncontrollably. Whoever it was, the police would find him, the police would be relentless … Martin reflected that he shouldn’t be driving at all, he had had far too much to drink, a lot over the permitted limit. Perhaps Francesca’s killer had also been drinking, had sobered up in terror when he saw what he had done, and terror had made him flee. Martin drove home over the Archway, the road in its deep concrete gorge flowing northwards beneath him.
He put the car on the hard-top parking in front of Cromwell Court, parking it between an orange-coloured Volvo and a small grey van. The Volvo belonged to a doctor at the Royal Free who lived on the ground floor. The grey van was probably some tradesman’s, though Martin felt obscurely that he had seen it somewhere before, and recently, and in a context he couldn’t at the moment recall. It couldn’t be of the slightest importance. He walked across the asphalt to the entrance of the block, aware that someone had got out of the van and was also coming in.
But he didn’t hold the door open. He let it swing shut and made for the stairs, wishing not for the first time that there was a lift here as there was in Swan Place. Should he get Adrian to fight for Swan Place against that family of Francesca’s? Was there any chance of success? At least, he thought as he climbed the third flight, he could now tell Adrian and Norman and his parents the melancholy truth, that Francesca was dead.
The soft but regular footsteps which, lower down, he had heard coming behind him he could now hear again. They were coming up to the top. The driver of the grey van must be calling at one of the other three flats on this floor. Martin got to the top and crossed the corridor to his own front door. There, standing on the threshold of his home, he was suddenly and sharply visited by the memory of himself and Tim embraced in Tim’s red-lit kitchen, and of kissing Tim and holding him in his arms. What would become of him if this was what he wanted? What must he look forward to? He released his pent-up breath and put his key into the lock.
As he did so he heard a low cough behind him. It made Martin jump and he wheeled round. Standing about a yard from him, in grey woolly hat, yellow pullover, black-velvet waistcoat and a black scarf with coins sewn round it, was Finn. Martin hadn’t really noticed before what extraordinary eyes the man had. They were almost silver. The man with the silver eyes …
“Well, well,” said Finn. “I’ve been waiting long enough.”
XXII
The flat was warm and very stuffy. For most of the day the sun must have been shining on that big window. It was rare for Finn to be a guest in anyone’s home. He could count on the fingers of his large, splayed hands the number of times it had happened: twice at Mr. Beard’s, once at Mrs. Go-garty’s, three or four times in girls’ rooms.
He stood looking about him
. At the structure and the paintwork mainly; he had a business interest in things like that. He took off his woolly hat but kept his gloves on.
Martin Urban was getting a brandy bottle out of a drinks cabinet. You would think he had had enough, he stank of gin. Finn could tell that something had frightened or upset him. His hands trembled and made the bottle chatter against the glass.
“Brandy? There’s no whisky but there’s vodka and martini and sherry.”
“I don’t drink,” said Finn.
The voice sounded both weary and awkward. “Look, I’m sorry about the money. I’ve had a lot on my plate and I’m afraid I forgot all about you. I could give you a cheque here and now, only you will insist on cash.”
Finn didn’t say anything.
“Sit down, won’t you? I’m sorry you’ve come all the way here for nothing. You should have phoned.” He sat down and drank his brandy at a gulp as if it were medicine. Finn watched him curiously, watched a flush mottle his skin. He wasn’t going to sit down. What would be the point?
“I haven’t come here for nothing,” he said.
“Well…” Into the glass slopped more brandy. “Not in the sense that you’ve reminded me. I can get it for you sometime next week. Cash is difficult, you know, that sort of cash. I’ll have to phone my bank first, I’ll have to …”
Finn took a step forward from the position he had taken up by the balcony door. “You can get it for me Monday morning,” he said. “And I don’t want it sent, not this time. Put it in your car on the front passenger seat and leave the car in the car park outside the palace.”
“The palace?” repeated Martin Urban, staring at him.
“Alexandra Palace.” Finn was getting impatient. “Have you got that? Put the money in a carrier on the front seat of your car and leave it there between one and two Monday, okay?”
Martin Urban had flushed a dark crimson. His eyes had become very bright, his features blurred and thickened. He set down his glass and stood up. Very deliberately he said, “No, it is not okay. It is very much not okay.” He passed a hand over his forehead, and when he took it down Finn saw that his face was working with fury. “Just who the hell d’you think you are, coming here, barging in here, telling me what I should do with my own money? You haven’t got some sort of right to it, you know. You people, you’re all the same, you think anyone with a bit more than you’ve got owes you a living. It’s purely out of the kindness of my heart I’m making it possible for your mother to have a decent place to live in. But I’m damned if I’m going to break an important appointment on Monday morning to go to the bank for you or do without my car for an hour. Why should I? Why the hell should I?”
Finn thought the man was going to fall. He watched him get hold of the back of a chair and hang on to it and draw a long breath and seem to get a grip on himself. Enough control, at any rate, to say coldly now, “You’d, better go,” and then, pushing past Finn to unlock the balcony door, “Excuse me, I must have some air.”
Martin Urban went out on to the balcony. Finn watched him standing there, looking down on London and then up at the clear, faintly starry, purplish sky. After a moment or two he came in again, appearing partially recovered, and stood staring with a curiously pained expression, like a hurt dog, at the big cactus which stood on the window sill, at its pink, waxen flowers. Without turning to Finn, he said,
“I thought I told you to go.”
Finn didn’t reply to this rhetorical question. He said, “I don’t want the money sent. Is that understood? I don’t want those delivery people knowing.”
“Knowing what, for God’s sake?” Martin Urban turned round and said sharply, “I’m sick of this. I’m tired. I’ve had a bad day. If it wasn’t that I promised and I don’t like to break my word, I’d, tell you you can forget the money. Right, so you can have a cheque or nothing.”
“Well, well,” said Finn. “Now we know.”
“Indeed we do. And when that’s over I think I’ll have done quite a favour to you and your mother.” He went to the writing desk, though none too steadily, and fumbled about inside it for a cheque-book.
“Haven’t I ever done anything for you?” said Finn.
Without looking at him, Martin Urban said, “Like what? Like making a damned nuisance of yourself. What have you ever done for me?” He began to write the cheque. Finn went up to him, laid a heavy hand on his arm and took the pen away. Martin Urban jumped to his feet, shouted, “Take your hands off me!”
Finn held him by the upper arms and looked searchingly into his face. The square, flushed, puffy face was resentful and indignant-and utterly bewildered. Finn could read faces-and minds too sometimes.
“You don’t know about it,” he said flatly. “It wasn’t in the papers. Well, it’s done. Last Saturday.”
Martin Urban struggled to free himself and Finn let him go. “How dare you touch me! And what the hell are you talking about?”
It was a strange thing, but now that he had to do it Finn found it as hard to put the act into words as his clients had done. He looked around him, he cleared his throat.
“Last Saturday,” he said gruffly, “I did for the girl. Like you wanted.”
Martin Urban stood quite still.
“What did you say?”
“You heard.”
“Last Saturday you …”
“I did for that girl, like you’re paying me for. I’ve done it and now I want my money.”
The sound he made was a kind of ghastly groan, the like of which Finn had only previously heard from Lena, and he fell back on to the sofa, covering his face with his hands. Finn regarded him as he rocked backwards and forwards, pushing his fists into his eyes, beating them against his temples. Finn stepped away and sat down on an upright chair, understanding now that he had made a mistake. Things, details, fell gently into place like the silver balls in Lena’s Chinese puzzle dropping into their slots.
“Give me some more of that brandy.”
Finn poured some brandy and pushed the glass at Martin Urban’s mouth. The brandy was drained and there was a shuddering and a kind of sob and the thick broken voice said,
“You were-in the car-that-didn’t-stop?”
“I’ve said so.”
“What am I to do? My God, what am I going to do? You thought I’d, paid you to do that? What sort of a monster are you?” He got up shakily and stood with his hands pressed to his head. “I loved her,” he said. “She loved me. We were going to be married. And you …”
He turned towards modern man’s succour, lifeline, first aid-the phone. He took an uncertain step towards it. Finn calculated how to get there first, take him by surprise, wrench the wires out of the wall. And then? There was only one way to make certain no one was ever told what Martin Urban knew.
Swaying, holding his head, he stood staring hypnotically at Finn. Finn began to get up. Sweat beads had started to prickle his face. Somehow he must get Martin Urban out of here, into a car, away from this place into some lonely place. In order to silence him he must put on an act, make promises, play along … He didn’t know how to do these things, he was powerless, bereft of energy, as if a fuse had blown in him and there was no current to power his limbs.
Martin Urban took down his hands and turned away from the phone. The attack he made on Finn was entirely unexpected. One moment he was standing there in the middle of the room, his fists clenched, his arms gradually falling to his sides, the next he had sprung upon Finn, flailing out, using his hands like hammers. Finn toppled backwards. It was the first time in his life he had ever been knocked down by another.
He rolled over on to his front, pressed himself up with a violence that sent the other man staggering back, and leapt like a panther. Martin Urban ducked and stumbled out on to the balcony. London glittered out there like the window of a tourist souvenir shop. Finn stood poised in the doorway, his arms spread, his body quivering. And the man who had given him five thousand pounds from some quixotic altruism Finn couldn’t even beg
in to understand, stood against the low parapet, convulsed, it seemed, with some kind of passionate need for revenge. He leapt forward again, deceived perhaps by Finn’s white thinness.
But Finn was there a split second before him, to smash with his right arm harder than he had ever smashed before. And a strange thing happened. Martin Urban raised his arms hugely above his head in some exaggerated defensive gesture. He staggered backwards in an almost comic, tip-toe slow motion, bathed in the shining night air, against the spangled backdrop, staggered, teetered until the parapet wall, that reached lower than the tops of his thighs, was just behind him. Finn could see what would happen and he jumped to catch the man before he fell. He jumped just too late. Martin Urban made contact with the wall, doubled over backwards, and with a low cry, fell.
Forty feet into a pit of blackness. There was a concrete well down there, an area that perhaps gave access to a porter’s basement. Finn stood, looking down. No other windows opened, no one appeared, no one had been alerted by the groaning sound the man had made as he starfished to earth. Finn went in and closed and locked the balcony door. He turned off the lights and stood listening for movement in the corridor outside, for doors opening and footsteps. There was nothing.
He had been a fool to lock that door. It must look like suicide. It must look as if Martin Urban had killed himself over the death of the woman he was to have married. Finn unlocked the door again. He didn’t touch the brandy glass. A man might well drink brandy before he committed suicide. The irony of it struck Finn, though, as he moved towards the front door of the flat, the irony that now, at this moment, in this place, he was at greater risk through this man’s accidental death than he had ever been when he had done murder.
When he was satisfied that all was quiet and still he passed stealthily out of the flat and pulled the front door softly shut behind him. He went downstairs very fast, passing no one, hearing nothing. The van was waiting for him in a deserted car park. And deserted too Cromwell Court and its environs would have seemed but for the lights which shone with tranquillity in most of its broad rectangular windows.
