by Ruth Rendell
‘It was a first offence. Or the first time they’d caught him, more like. He got three years’ probation on condition he spent six months in a psychiatric clinic.’
Mrs Goodman was pouring out half-pint-size cups of dark brown tea. Colin reached for his and slopped from the overfull cup into the saucer.
‘You did that, chickie, mind, not me.’
‘All right, Mother, I’m not complaining.’
‘Did he spend six months in a psychiatric clinic?’
‘I suppose so. He must have.’
John didn’t like having to ask this question in front of Mrs Goodman. He could never be in her presence without recalling her as she had been in class, biggish, gaunt, beaky-faced, writing sums in long division on the blackboard or walking down the aisle between the desks and pausing to look over one’s shoulder. Not looking in her direction, eyeing his plate on which reposed a thick slice of Dundee cake, he said: ‘Was it a girl or a boy?’
Mercifully, Colin needed no further elucidation. ‘Oh, a boy.’
‘I wonder why it wasn’t in the papers.’
‘It was in the Orrington paper, pet. Perhaps it wasn’t big enough for the Free Press.’
‘He pleaded guilty, you see,’ said Colin. ‘It wasn’t much of a case. It was all over in half an hour.’
John knew what they were thinking. And he too repeated her name with a silent inner voice. Jennifer, Jennifer . . . He said abruptly to Mrs Goodman:
‘Do you know what a lodestone is?’
‘A magnet, isn’t it?’
‘That’s what the dictionary said.’
‘Wait a minute, pet. Wasn’t it supposed to be a kind of magic magnet which – well, if a husband possessed it, he could use it to get back a runaway wife?’
‘Charming,’ said Colin. ‘So much for your well-known tact.’
Mother and son had begun quarrelling after that in a kind of gruff controlled way. They never quite lost their tempers, though Mrs Goodman would sometimes laugh unpleasantly and Colin’s eyes flash. It ended with Mrs Goodman remarking that John would hardly now want to spend the rest of the evening in such a disagreeable house whose occupants sparred all the time and made their guests uncomfortable. How do you respond to that one? Of course John hadn’t wanted to stay and didn’t, taking his departure with all sorts of fabricated excuses while Mrs Goodman shook her head sadly and said it was just what she had foreseen, Colin had driven his friend away by his rudeness.
John could see a parallel between his present behaviour and the way he had reacted to Mark Simms’s confession. Returning home on the Honda, he had been full of plans for how to use his new knowledge just as, on that previous occasion, he had intended to go to the police. That evening he had spent in restless speculation and by the next day he had decided he must know more facts. Consulting the newspaper files in the library of the Orrington Onlooker was a far simpler process than he expected, but the account of the court proceedings was brief, for the child’s name could not be given or any personal details about him included. The boy hadn’t been injured in any way. Peter Moran had not attempted to deny what he had done. In fact there was little more to be gathered from the paper than Colin had already told him.
If he was like that though, why did he want Jennifer? To persuade himself, presumably, that he wasn’t like that. To be saved from himself and protected? Because there was something very motherly and caring about Jennifer? Or simply because Jennifer wanted him and with her love provided a cloak for his activities? Speculating, John realized how little he understood of abnormal psychology. And he shied away from the thought that Jennifer might want her lover more than he wanted her. Perhaps Peter Moran had been cured in the clinic he had attended – if he had attended it.
But there was a memory which kept returning to John and a question he continually asked himself. That Saturday when he and Jennifer had met in Hartlands Gardens, 2 April, that was the afternoon on which Peter Moran had ‘gone out’ and the afternoon also on which twelve-year-old James Harvill had disappeared. Was it fantastic to connect the two, knowing what he now knew? The question John kept asking himself and receiving, of course, no answer to, was: Does Jennifer know?
The information seemed to lie heavily in his keeping like a ponderous inert mass or like the lodestone that was a magnet with supernatural powers. He had only to lift it up and show it to the light of day to draw his wife back to him . . .
13
‘HAVE YOU EVER thought,’ Angus said, ‘that it might all end in tears?’
They had encountered each other after prep in the New Library.
‘Why would it?’ Mungo looked seriously puzzled. ‘We never do anything illegal.’
‘You sail near the wind sometimes. And things go wrong, even things that start innocently. You could get yourselves expelled, you could get into some disaster.’
‘You sound like Dad.’
That was on 29 June, the day Mungo sent out a directive to his agents to ignore all further Spytrap commands and adopt Armadillo Army Three. It went out in Spytrap and the direction for the new code referred to the third story in the Yves Yugall collection, a sharp little thriller called ‘Gila Haunt’. He preserved the Utting photograph Charles Mabledene had taken in a file marked ‘Most Secret’. The two books on yachting were restored to Bruce Reynolds and the photograph of the Whittakers’ damaged car conveyed, via his brother, to the elder Ralston.
No efforts on the part of Mungo or any of his experts had been able to break Stern’s code, nor was there any clue as to what that preliminary number and those ultimate numbers signified.
During the first week of July Unicorn received a letter from his father which seemed to indicate the possible imminent loss of 53 Ruxeter Road. Unicorn’s father wrote to his son of the possibility of buying a flat in Pentecost Villas when the block had been converted. Demolition, it seemed, was no longer envisaged. Mungo, in Armadillo Army Three, instructed Basilisk and Empusa to find out more. The blow fell when Unicorn, paying a routine call to the horse trough drop, picked up a message to abandon Pentecost Villas research. He had given up all work on the elaborate plan to have his father secure building dates and plans and on his own initiative called off Basilisk, before the discovery was made by Mungo that the directive was a false one and came from Stern or Stern’s mole. Moscow Centre had broken the July code.
This didn’t necessarily mean that Stern knew the location of the safe house. In all commands, since the primary reference to it when its precise address had been given, it was referred to as PV for Pentecost Villas. Stern very likely didn’t know. But he had broken the code within days of its formulation.
Mungo, three days before the end of the summer term, changed the code from Armadillo Army Three to Armadillo Army Seven, reasoning that such a daring choice wouldn’t be suspected. The change, initially, was known only to Unicorn, Basilisk, Medusa and Charybdis. On the last day it was also imparted to Dragon who was Charles Mabledene.
14
JENNIFER’S LETTER CAME on the first day of John’s holiday. Of course he wouldn’t be going away. He would have a go at the garden, maybe redecorate a room, spend a day with Colin and his mother, visit his aunt. How dull it sounds, he thought. In spite of the world-changing pieces of knowledge he held in his mind, he felt himself lapsing back into the old John. Outwardly, there had been no alteration in the way he lived. But he knew he was waiting for a sign and perhaps that sign was contained in the letter. He opened it slowly, not at all in a feverish anxious way.
Dear John,
You said you would think about what we asked you when Peter and I came to see you. That is over a month ago now and we haven’t heard from you. You said you would think about a divorce, if you wouldn’t divorce me for adultery that you might at any rate let us have a mutual consent divorce after two years apart. We have been talking to a solicitor and he has told me that I would have a right to a share in the house, even possibly as much as a third of its value. This may sound a bit ou
trageous seeing that the house is basically yours and I didn’t pay for it or anything. But the law works like that and of course I have nothing of my own, as you know, except what I got from selling my flat which had a big mortgage on it anyway. Peter has nothing, absolutely no assets at all. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say we are on the breadline.
But what I want to say is this, that if you will let me have a divorce so that we can get married I won’t ask for anything from you. I mean that I promise I won’t ask for any alimony and I won’t demand any share in the house. I think that is quite a fair bargain to make.
Please do think about this. I am not going to threaten you, John, but you must understand that if I have to wait five years I would have to have some support during that time and some sort of capital sum at the end of it.
Yours ever,
Jennifer
Peter Moran had put her up to that, John thought. So that he wouldn’t have to get a job, or rather, so as to reconcile himself to being unable to get a job. Could a woman who had only lived with her husband for two years, a childless woman, claim a share in his house? John didn’t know and he didn’t want to ask a solicitor. He would never do that, he wouldn’t need to. It was only just nine in the morning. They might not be up, but he didn’t want to think about that. He gave Peter Moran’s address to directory inquiries and they found the number for him. Thought, consideration, might have given him pause but he didn’t think. He lifted the receiver and dialled the number.
The spare economical voice with the beautiful accent answered. John nearly put the receiver back. He said hesitantly:
‘This is John Creevey.’
As if he had never been to his house, drunk his wine, stolen his wife, ‘Yes?’
‘I’d like to speak to Jennifer.’
No request for him to wait, hold the line. Silence and then the sound of footsteps going away. It seemed a long time before Jennifer came.
‘Hallo, John.’
‘I had your letter,’ he said. ‘It’s just come.’
‘Don’t say no just like that, John. Think about it. You don’t have to give me an answer now.’
‘I wasn’t giving you an answer. I want to see you. I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘Can’t you tell me now?’
What did she think it was? That he was moving? Changing his job? Had even found another woman?
‘I can’t tell you on the phone. When can we meet?’ He added quickly, ‘Just the two of us, mind. I don’t want him there.’
He heard her sigh, a sad troubled sound. ‘I’ve got a job,’ she said. ‘Only part-time but it’s better than nothing. It’s secretarial, with a firm in Feverton. How about Thursday afternoon? I stop at lunchtime on Thursdays and you do too, don’t you?’
‘I’m on holiday,’ he said.
She told him where she worked and agreed to meet him on Thursday at one o’clock. After he put the phone down, the enormity of it hit him. It wasn’t long enough for the thinking he needed to do, four days wasn’t long enough. Then he reflected on how readily she had said she would meet him. She had even seemed to want to meet him. Was the boorishness of Peter Moran proving too much even for her? He looked again at the letter, convinced anew that Jennifer hadn’t written that unaided.
Newspapers had never been delivered to the house in Geneva Road after Cherry’s death. When John wanted a paper he went out and bought one – the Free Press usually. Paying for his paper and taking a copy from the top of the pile, he wondered if perhaps the story of Peter Moran’s conviction and sentence had in fact appeared in the Free Press. How would he have known whether it had or not? If it had, Jennifer might already know. She might always have known . . .
A heatwave had begun. Funny that you could always tell, that you always knew when a fine day was going to be isolated, a flash in the pan, and when it was the start of a hot spell. He walked along the embankment and over Randolph Bridge into Feverton. Jennifer had told him she was working for Albright–Craven in the Feverton Square complex. They were a building firm about fifty times larger in scale than Maitland had been, yet the analogy with Cherry couldn’t be ignored. His life seemed full of parallels and omens.
She would be there now. Mondays, Tuesday mornings, Wednesdays and Thursday mornings, she had told him, and he looked up at the windows, wondering which was her office, as in days gone by he had stood opposite Peter Moran’s cottage, watching for her. The sky was a strong dark blue, the sun on all that glass and silver metal making a blaze that seared the eyes. He thought of walking, or more likely taking a bus, over Rostock to cats’ green but he had been there several times in the past weeks and there had been nothing inside the central upright. It seemed that his mini-Mafia had once more gone into retreat.
Nevin Square was full of people. Like a piazza in some foreign city, he thought, milling with tourists. The sun had brought them out. The council had done the flowerbeds with coleus in brilliant variegated oranges, browns and sharp green, alternating with cockscombs, red and gold silken plumes, and Amaranthus caudatus that was called love-lies-bleeding. John sat on the low wall that surrounded the statue of Lysander Douglas, looking at the trailing crimson tails of blossom, and beyond them to the fountains in whose vaporous spray the sun made rainbows. Once, one hot day, when he was a big child and she a small one, Cherry had dared him to jump into the basin under the fountain, but he hadn’t been adventurous and he hadn’t dared. Now he opened the paper for something else to look at and his eye fell at once on a story about the court appearance of members of a protection racket.
Two of them had been charged with demanding money with menaces. It was an old story, though more familiar to John from the pages of thrillers than from his experience of life. The gang, if gang it was, had promised various shopkeepers and publicans freedom from vandalism in return for a weekly tariff. One of the witnesses was the licensee of the Beckgate and there was a photograph of the Beckgate in the text, showing that very hanging basket over the saloon-bar doorway which had come from Trowbridge’s and which John had himself chosen and recommended.
The licensee said in evidence that when, after paying for week after week the rather paltry sum which had been demanded, he finally refused, the telephone in the passage at the back of the building was smashed and the chair seats in the small lounge bar ripped open. Half a dozen more witnesses were lined up and the case was expected to continue for several days. John turned back to the front page and saw that the missing schoolboy James Harvill’s drowned body had been found in a lake somewhere in the Midlands. it was more than two months since he disappeared. John shivered a little in the heat.
15
‘LORD, DISMISS US with Thy blessing,’ Mungo sang, ‘Fill our hearts with joy and peace; Let us each, Thy love possessing, Triumph in redeeming grace . . .’
When the whole school was assembled in the chapel at Rossingham it was so crowded you had to keep your elbows tucked in not to prod the next man. Most days they had to hold staggered services, third and fourth forms first, fifth and sixth second, but it was different on the last day of term, the last of the school year. There was talk of extending the chapel, the Rossingham intake had increased so much. It was rather hard to see how this could he done without ruining what his father said was a monument to Pre-Raphaelitism. Mungo glanced round at the blue and crimson windows, moneychangers and bird-sellers, lilies of the field, fowls of the air, loaves, and fishes, and back along the neighbouring pews.
‘O refresh us, Travelling through this wilderness.’
It was extremely hot, the shafts of sunlight stained azure and vermilion holding a suspension of dust motes. Graham O’Neill stood next to him, mouthing the words only because he was tone-deaf and forbidden to sing, while his twin, three men down the pew, sought refreshment in the wilderness in a fine true baritone. The Lower Fourth were in front, Patrick Crashaw and Charles Mabledene piping in yet unbroken voices, Robert Cook braying in a near-tenor, Nicholas Ralston a little bit flat as always.
/>
‘Let us pray.’
Not for the first time Mungo thought it a bit odd asking to depart in peace, as if they were all going to die. But there probably wasn’t a suitable bit in the Bible about a school breaking up. Graham was coming home with him for part of the holidays and accompanying the Camerons to Corfu while Keith went with his aunt and uncle camping in Sweden. And when they came back next term they would be in the Fifth, O Levels ahead, private studies, greater freedom. But first I’ll break Stern’s code, said Mungo to himself.
He had got permission on the previous afternoon to go down into Rossingham St Mary but there was nothing from Charybdis under the horse trough. Next year he wouldn’t need permission. Signing the book would be sufficient. Strange really that Angus had given up the directorship just at the point when he attained the freedom essential to the head of London Central. As they filed out Mungo could see Angus ahead of him and for a moment he was aware of something he seldom felt even when Angus was mildly admonishing him, the gulf in ages between his brother and himself. It was an abyss that he too must leap one day, the girlfriend and the applications to medical schools waiting on the other side.
But now no more school for eight weeks, the formal goodbyes to Mr and Mrs Lindsay, the obligatory word of thanks to the linen lady, the final survey and clear-up of the study one was quitting for next year’s larger room and lower floor. He seemed to have more baggage than anyone else. The London Central ‘most secret’ files, and various books associated with what Angus persisted in calling Spookside, took up a whole case.
