Talking to Strange Men

by Ruth Rendell

He couldn’t remain sitting there. He got to his feet and held on to the back of the chair so tightly his knuckles went white. The girl was looking at him with a strange expression. He thought it was pity.

  ‘I’ve told you what he told me. He confessed to me that he’d murdered my sister. He even gave me details, the time, the place, everything.’

  ‘Sit down, Mr Creevey. Don’t blow your top. Let me tell you something. We’ve got it all on record and of course we’ve been taking a good look at our records since Maitland was arrested. You may never have been told any of this, you and your parents I mean. It was probably thought too distressing. But your sister clawed at the man who strangled her and she must have made deep scratches. Her fingernails were full of blood and tissue. Don’t you suppose Mr Simms was the first to come under suspicion? Of course he was. His movements were checked and double-checked and everything he said sifted and examined. We’re not complete fools, you know, Mr Creevey. We do even sometimes know what we’re doing. In the light of what we found under your sister’s fingernails, he was the first man to be given a blood test, and he couldn’t have been more finally exonerated. Mr Simms’s blood is Group B negative. The blood under your sister’s fingernails was Group O positive which incidentally is the same as that of Rodney Maitland.’

  11

  EVERYONE WAS AWAY on holiday. Even the traffic in the city had got lighter. Leviathan and Chimera and Medusa, in other words Mungo and Angus Cameron and Graham O’Neill, were in Corfu. Scylla, or Keith O’Neill, was in Sweden. Unicorn or Nicholas Ralston and Basilisk or Patrick Crashaw had gone off somewhere or other with their families. Charybdis and the rest of the Hobhouse family had moved out to their cottage at Rossingham St Mary for a month. Only the Mabledenes, for some reason to do with Charles’s mother’s and father’s respective businesses, would not be off until the last week of August.

  Charles, therefore, expected to find no messages at the flyover drop. He was busy enough without that. It was proving surprisingly difficult to find out when the work of gutting and redesigning the interior of the safe house at 53 Ruxeter Road was due to begin. Nor had he got very far with his overtures to Martin Hillman, the apparently more enterprising of the London Central two possible recruits. An appointment had been made to meet Hillman at a café halfway between the Shot Tower and the Beckgate but when he got there, the only customers were Rosie Whittaker and Guy Parker. Rosie had put green dye on her spiky hair and was wearing black glasses with wire rims like Graham O’Neill’s. Both were dressed from head to foot in fashionable dusty black. They addressed him cordially and Rosie actually asked him if he would like a Coke. Charles refused and went off in a thoughtful frame of mind. He wouldn’t touch Martin Hillman now with a two-metre-long pole and he would give Mungo similar advice.

  His new digital watch told him it was six twenty-four. His father would be leaving for home at seven which gave him nice time to get to the garage by bus. Charles decided he might as well call it a day. The bus wasn’t the same one as he had taken out to Nunhouse three days before but it followed the same route as far as Rostock Bridge. Sitting in the seat he always picked if it was vacant, the right-hand side up front, Charles reflected on the Peter Moran affair.

  You couldn’t say he had had a lucky escape, of course, because he had never been in danger. The front door of the cottage had been open all the time and besides that, he had himself almost from the first been aware that a definite threat existed. And this was always half the battle. Indeed, Charles felt rather proud of himself on that score, mentally patting himself on the back for his undoubted sophistication. But he couldn’t help thinking how horrified and really frightened for him his parents would have been had they known about it.

  Only a couple of years back his sister Sarah and a couple of girlfriends of hers had got talking with some man they met and had allowed him to treat them to the cinema. Sarah had been unwise enough to tell her parents about this. Nothing had happened, the man had merely been friendly and enjoyed their company, but Charles had thought his father was going to have a stroke or something. And as for his mother . . . ! At the time Sarah started on all this his mother had been showing his father some new dress or suit or whatever she had bought that day. If he had been told anything would distract his mother from a thing like that he wouldn’t have believed it, but this had. She had burst out screaming and crying and made Sarah solemnly swear never to speak to any man again as long as she lived. Well, almost. There had been an awful fuss. Charles could see that just as bad a fuss might be made over his encounter with Peter Moran. Not that he had the slightest intention of telling his parents about it. It was over anyway and no harm done.

  From force of habit he glanced to the right as the bus swung left at the flyover. There was a message in the central upright. Well, it was unexpected but not impossible. No doubt it came from Charybdis, who had perhaps come in for the day from Rossingham. After all, he was always coming in from Fenbridge, the distance was much the same. Charles jumped off at the next request stop. It was still only six-forty, he could run the rest of the way across Rostock Bridge and his father would certainly wait for him.

  October Men the code was. He had a note of it in his pocket. He wouldn’t have dreamt of going out without that. Charybdis had put the package in very high up. Charles wouldn’t have thought he could have reached that high, he could scarcely reach it himself. He had to jump and tug to pull it down. Stuffing the plastic into his pocket and unfolding the message quickly, Charles looked at it in some astonishment. Of course he couldn’t read it just like that, most of it was incomprehensible, but the first word contained nine letters and he was pretty sure from his acquaintance with the October Men key that it was Leviathan. He was almost certain the first three words read: ‘Leviathan to Dragon’. How could that be when the message was a new one, put into the upright in the past three days, while Mungo had been in Corfu for six?

  ‘What have you been doing with yourself all day?’ his father asked genially as they got into the Volvo.

  Charles thought this expressed his intelligence activities, conducted solitarily, rather well.

  ‘This and that,’ he said and opened his notebook at the October Men key.

  He began a rapid deciphering. Usually on these trips his father and he maintained a placid silence. When he was with his mother in her car she talked incessantly. Charles could have done with silence this evening but it seemed his father was determined to talk. There was something coincidental about the subject he had chosen: the danger to people of Charles’s age, particularly those who were not large for their age, from molestation by those he called ‘sick’ adults. He also called them paederasts, mispronouncing the word, as Charles noticed rather sadly. It was the arrest of some man for assaulting and murdering a child up in the north which had led to this. The man had been mobbed and threatened by the crowd as he was hustled out of court by police. It had all been on television.

  ‘I thought it would be a good idea to have a chat about this when your mother and sister aren’t around.’

  Charles reflected that they had been chatting, if that was the word, about it all his and Sarah’s lives. But he only said OK and nodded. It would be rude to continue to look at his notebook. Besides, he had already deciphered the message: ‘Discontinue Peter Moran inquiry. Do not observe, do not tail.’ His father’s tone grew embarrassed as he tried to describe the kind of overtures such a man might make. Charles had a terrible urge, which he knew he must resist, to magic around with his father’s Silk Cut so that when he reached for a cigarette he would pull out ten metres of purple ribbon instead.

  Their route took them along the river. Nunhouse could be seen on the other side and Charles thought he could locate Fen Street and what was probably the roof of Peter Moran’s cottage. He was aware of a nasty little chill of fear. One of Charles’s strengths was his willingness to admit to himself that he was frightened but to conceal it from everyone else behind a face of inscrutability. Having more or less switched
off his hearing, he made mechanical replies to his father. The decoded message was in his head and he repeated it over to himself with increasing disquiet.

  Apart from the fact that Mungo couldn’t have written and sent the message, the language was wrong. Mungo wouldn’t have used ‘discontinue’ and ‘inquiry’ but would have said: ‘Abandon Peter Moran project’. Therefore the message didn’t come from the Director General of London Central but from someone else, Moscow Centre presumably. The October Men code had been broken – a simple matter with a mole in the department – and this message concocted by an agent who didn’t know Mungo was away. Possibly even by Rosie Whittaker herself. After all, when Charles had seen her she had been no more than a quarter of a mile from the flyover drop.

  All this would scarcely have been important, a matter merely for congratulating himself on seeing through the deception so early on. But it wasn’t so simple. If Moscow Centre had countermanded Mungo’s instructions they must have some good reason for doing so, they must be afraid of the outcome of the successful observation of Peter Moran. It was they, not Mungo, who wanted Peter Moran left alone.

  ‘I think I’ve made it clear enough,’ Charles switched on to hear his father say, ‘that you don’t in any circumstances whatever let anyone, even someone young and friendly, get himself alone with you. The people you get to know you meet at home or at school. It just isn’t worth it, Charles. The risk is too great. In a nutshell, to use the old cliché, you don’t talk to strange men.’

  12

  WITHOUT ACTUALLY BEING rude or offensive, Fordwych had indicated to John that he suspected him of stirring things. He suspected him of trying to make things look bad for Mark Simms, out of some kind of undefined malice, presumably. John didn’t understand any of it. Well, he understood that Mark Simms was innocent of Cherry’s murder and that for some reason he had lied. Was it possible he had lied about her manner of living as well?

  He had gone to work eventually but he couldn’t concentrate. This didn’t much matter as they got less custom in August than perhaps during any other month. Walking about the rose gardens, nipping the dead heads off pink Wendy Cussons and vermilion Troika, he was aware of an unexpected feeling. It was relief. His sky was lightening. His hands full of petals, he looked up at the overcast heavens and felt easier, less tense and stressed. The past had been wiped a little, if not washed clean. The immediate past too seemed less agonizing and less incomprehensible. And he hadn’t committed the unforgivable crime, the crime he could hardly now imagine he had contemplated, of perpetrating some act of violence, perhaps worse than that, against Jennifer’s lover.

  Gavin was putting the mynah through his paces for the benefit of an elderly couple and their grandchild John remembered seeing at Trowbridge’s two or three times before. The mynah uttered all its newly learned phrases obediently. Gavin rewarded it with offcuts of Mars bar. It was Thursday and they closed at one, Gavin and the bird he called Grackle going off inevitably together. John began thinking on the way home how Jennifer had said she hated him and would never forgive him for what he had told her about Peter Moran. Had he been wrong to tell her? Perhaps he had because he had told her from the wrong motive. Probably it was all in his own head, the idea of Peter Moran killing anyone or even of returning to his old tastes. It derived from all this stuff on television about the Lancashire child-killer and rapist. As soon as he got home, without even bothering about lunch, John sat down and wrote to Jennifer. He began the letter ‘Dearest Jennifer’, thinking that no matter what became of them, however distantly they might be parted and whatever other partners she might find, he would always write to her like that.

  Dearest Jennifer,

  If you still want a divorce after we have not been together for two years I will agree. I will do anything you want. I can’t bear you to hate me and I tell you honestly that I am saying this so that you won’t hate me. A kind of bribe to make you like me, if you want to put it that way!

  I am not going to say anything more about Peter. People do change. You changed me, as I expect you know, so perhaps you have changed him too. I want to say though that I love you. Nothing has changed that. If you change your mind about a divorce, come back to me. I will always want you back.

  There were too many repetitions of ‘change’ and ‘changed’ but never mind, it was what he felt. Tears had come into his eyes and he felt them slowly run down his face. They were tears of self-pity, he thought, and he rubbed them furiously away. Remembering their love-making didn’t help, the tenderness, the gradual mutual learning of joy. He wanted to write pleading words, to ask her for reassurance, just to tell him it hadn’t all been pretence on her part, that she had for a while felt love and desire for him. But he was afraid that if he asked she would never answer that part of the letter, so he wrote only: ‘always your loving John’ and ended it.

  Colin and his mother were supposed to be coming at about four, calling in during one of their drives. They had been away for a week’s holiday in the Lake District where it had rained all the time. John got himself another ploughperson’s lunch and then went out to post his letter. Most of the afternoon he spent looking at Colin’s holiday snapshots. There were also a lot of slides which had to be put into a contraption Colin had brought with him and peered at with one eye shut. They were all views of green mountains and grey skies, not a living creature in sight. Constance Goodman, immediately on arrival, had asked him oddly:

  ‘Any news?’

  ‘Leave it, Mother,’ said Colin.

  It took John a while to realize – and by then they were looking at photographs – that they had expected to find Jennifer there, that Jennifer had returned to him as a result of the information they had given him. This was an attitude that now seemed naive, though he too had had faith in it once. The Goodmans had read about the arrest of the man for Cherry’s murder. Would John have to give evidence? Would Mark Simms? Constance wanted to know if the police had been in touch with him.

  ‘He doesn’t want to talk about it, Mother. You can see that.’

  ‘Not everyone is as inhibited as you are, chickie.’

  ‘If someone is inhibited the parents are presumably to blame, notably the mother, I should think.’

  They bickered for a while. John gave them tea, took them round the garden, showing off his fuchsias and the pink lavender. The greenhouse was admired, though Constance said what a shame he had to keep the Honda in there, and they left with a basketful of tomatoes and capsicum. It was a daunting thought that for the rest of his life the majority of his evenings would necessarily be spent alone. This was the first time he had faced it. In the fiction he read single men were always in demand by hostesses, but John had never found that this applied to him. No doubt, he didn’t move in those social circles. He couldn’t recall that he had ever been invited to one of the drinks parties given by neighbours in Geneva Road. A murdered sister, a departed wife, set a man apart; people were wary of him, not knowing quite what approach to make, what subjects to avoid.

  He watered the greenhouse, removed the yellowing lower leaves from the tomato plants. The aubergines were very susceptible to greenfly and though it went rather against the grain he sprayed them, choking at the noxious fumes. When the door bell rang he hoped it might be Jennifer. Was he going to feel like that for years every time the phone or the bell rang? You had no control over your initial reactions, he thought as he went to the door. All your resolutions, determined cheerfulness, ‘pulling yourself together’, were of no avail in preventing the leap of the heart, the spring of hope, the rushing into mind of the beloved name . . .

  The woman who stood there wasn’t Jennifer but Detective Constable Aubrey.

  She said, ‘Good evening, Mr Creevey. May I come in for a moment?’

  He nodded. He knew he must look mystified.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about. This isn’t an official call.’

  She followed him into the living room. The Goodmans had left their photographs behind and view
s of Skiddaw and Ullswater lay scattered all over the coffee table.

  ‘Have you been away?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. They belong to some people I know.’ Why hadn’t he said friends? Why not ‘friends of mine’? He began gathering up the pictures, replacing them in their yellow envelopes. She said:

  ‘May I sit down?’

  He flushed. ‘I’m sorry. Yes, of course.’

  She was wearing jeans, a striped shirt and a zipper jacket, masculine clothes, a man might have worn them without looking odd, but she remained powerfully feminine. He had seen that face in a picture somewhere, a reproduction in a book perhaps, those delicate features and that rosy translucent skin, the barely defined eyebrows, the red-gold hair. It was a pleasure to look at her, though academic only while Jennifer existed and came between his eyes and all other pretty faces.

  She said in her pleasant gentle way, ‘I came to talk about your sister Cherry, Mr Creevey.’

  He nodded, wary now.

  ‘Your visit on Monday, your talk with Mr Fordwych, it seemed to leave so much unanswered. What I really want to say is if you’re upset or worried about what Mr Simms said to you, could you try not to be? Making false confessions is so common, it happens all the time.’

  ‘But why?’ he said. ‘Why would anyone say he’d – done murder, when he hadn’t? I thought you didn’t believe me,’ he added.

  ‘Oh, we believed you. Let’s just say we rather wondered that you ever believed him. It occurred to me that you might have been in a particularly receptive state for that sort of thing. Forgive me if I seem to probe. Had you been very depressed or nervous or anything?’

  He looked at her, beginning to understand many things. ‘I think I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown for months but I never quite tumbled in.’ He said quickly, ‘I still don’t see why he’d make something like that up.’

  ‘There are quite a few possible reasons,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘He might have resented something about you. I mean, perhaps he thought you weren’t really interested in him, didn’t listen while he talked? Is that possible? That he was lonely and wanted your attention and felt he didn’t really get it because you – well, you had problems of your own?’