by Ruth Rendell
‘It’s more than possible,’ John said. ‘Miss Aubrey – Detective Constable – I’m sorry, but what do I call you?’
‘Call me Susan.’
Somehow he didn’t feel he could quite do that. He was sorry she had suggested it. It was too intimate. He framed his question again. ‘Are you saying he was prepared to do anything to get my attention?’
‘Something like that. People do suffer intolerable feelings of rejection, solitariness, sensations of being in glass walls, belljars, you know. And then he might also feel guilty about your sister. I’m not saying there’s any possibility he killed her, there isn’t, but he might feel guilty in other ways. Perhaps, for instance, for not calling for her that evening when he said he would but nearly an hour later. You didn’t know that? It’s all in his statement he made sixteen years ago. He had been going to break with her. He was going to tell her so, but he got there late and she had already left – with the man who is charged with murdering her, as we now know.’
John stared at her. ‘So he did feel responsible for her death?’
‘In a way. How much do you know about your sister, Mr – er, John?’
So it was true. Mark hadn’t lied about that. ‘Everything, I think.’
‘Mark Simms had found out she had other lovers. Often he felt he would have liked to kill her. Do you begin to understand now?’
‘Are you a psychologist?’ John asked.
‘I used to be. I did psychology at university.’
He offered her coffee and she said thank you, yes, she would like that. While she drank it he talked a bit about Cherry, not speaking of her multifarious inexplicable love affairs or of her and Mark, but asking why she had been killed. Had she – and he tried to put it delicately – behaved in such a way to Rodney Maitland as to bring about her own death? Susan Aubrey said she didn’t think so, Cherry knew him, after all, had probably gone innocently with him when he offered her his escort to her bus stop. Maitland, who lived in London, had only come home to his native city that afternoon, had left again immediately after the killing. That was why he had never been investigated, never suspected, while hundreds of local men were fingerprinted and their blood groups examined. He was, it appeared, one of those men who derived sexual satisfaction simply from killing a woman, from surprising her by sudden attack and strangling her before she could utter. Cherry had fought him, she had put up more fight than the others, she had not submitted to her fate . . .
Susan Aubrey’s sympathetic manner tempted John to begin confiding in her about Jennifer, to tell her what had brought about his near-breakdown, but he resisted doing so. He had an idea that people who were trained psychologists kept a scientific attitude towards an opening of the heart, listening to confidences with a clinical detachment. It was only after she had gone, thanking him for the coffee, calling him John, that he thought how, if he had told her of his mental state he must also have told her of his therapy, the mini-Mafia and its codes he had penetrated. Perhaps he should have told her. The novel idea came to him that it was his duty as a citizen to tell the police about this gang’s activities and such instructions as that of ‘remove and eliminate’, for example. Now he had extricated himself from it with no harm done, he ought at least to inform the police of the drop at cats’ green. He would do so on the following day. During lunchtime he would do it, he resolved, setting off for work on Friday morning. It wouldn’t do to take any more time off.
Within an hour of his reaching Trowbridge’s something happened to put everything else out of his head.
13
IT WAS THE first day of the sale. All those plants that no one was going to pay the full price for at this season, overblown geraniums, herbs that had flowered and grown straggly, bushy begonias, were to be displayed on trestle tables at thirty pee each. It should have been set up by the time the garden centre opened but at ten-thirty Gavin was still selecting the plants and trundling them out of the greenhouses. That was when the elderly couple and their granddaughter or whatever she was turned up. They made as usual for the mynah’s cage.
‘Those two, they treat this place like a zoo,’ Sharon said to John, ‘always bringing that kid to see the mynah. They’ve never even bought a packet of seeds.’
‘They don’t do any harm,’ John said.
Les had come up to them.
‘They want to buy the mynah.’
‘There you are, Sharon,’ John said. ‘That’s better than a packet of seeds.’
He went over to the man, explained that the price of the mynah was eighty-five pounds.
‘It’s not in the sale then?’
‘No, it’s not in the sale,’ John said, smiling.
‘It’s a lot of money but we reckon it’s worth it, don’t we, Mother? We’ve taken a long time to make up our minds, it’s not a snap decision, we’ve really thought about the responsibilities involved.’ The serious tone and earnest look suggested it might be the fostering of a child he was embarking on. ‘We’ve read up on the subject, we’ve had books from the library.’
John was tempted to say something to the effect that he knew he could safely entrust the mynah to their keeping but of course he didn’t. It was at this point though that he first thought of Gavin. He felt glad Gavin was out in the back, busily occupied, for although at that time he had no real notion of how strongly Gavin felt about the mynah he suspected that if he had been in the shop he would have attempted to discourage the sale. Started talking about Newcastle’s Disease or Gracula religiosa being dangerous to children. In fact the little girl was poking her fingers into the cage, feeding the mynah from a packet of assorted fruits and nuts, and it was taking her offerings quite gently. The man meant to pay cash for it. Four twenty-pound notes and a five-pound were carefully unrolled. They had evidently called at the bank on their way here.
‘Do we get his cage as well?’ said the little girl.
‘Yes, how much is that?’ A look of near-dismay made it plain he had made no provision for this in his budgeting.
‘The cage comes with the bird,’ said John. ‘Part of the package.’
They went off, carrying the mynah, towards the car park. John was watching them place the cage, with absurdly tender care, on the back seat of an aged Morris Minor, when Gavin came into the shop from the back. He started telling John that two of the shubunkins had fungus. Then he saw the empty space where the cage had been.
‘Who’s moved him?’
‘That old couple bought your Dracula.’ Sharon’s tone was very slightly malicious. ‘They’ve just this minute gone. Never even gave him a chance to say goodbye.’
Gavin rushed out of the front door. The Morris Minor had already gone, would by now probably be turning out on to the main road, but he was off in pursuit of it, pounding up the long gravel drive.
‘He was very keen on that bird,’ Les said.
After a minute or two Gavin came back, not flushed but white-faced in spite of his exertions. His eyes had a wild look. He said hoarsely:
‘We’ve got to get him back. I’ll buy him off them. I was going to buy him anyway, I’ve been saving up. I’d nearly got enough.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’ John said. He was beginning to understand. ‘You could have had him at a discount or on hire purchase or something.’
‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll get him back. I’ll go and see them, I’ll go now. I’ll tell them there’s been a mistake. I’ll tell them he’s mine.’
John was appalled. He felt guilty, he felt he had betrayed Gavin by his thoughtlessness. ‘Gavin, I don’t know their name or where they live. They paid cash.’
‘You don’t know their name?’
‘Look, I’m sorry, Gavin, but you know I can’t refuse to sell customers something that’s on sale.’
Until then the shop had been empty but now the swing doors opened and there was a sudden influx of customers. A woman picked up one of the wire baskets and came up to John with an inquiry. What it was he never found out, for Gavin, his
face working and his eyes wild, turned and delivered at the table on which the mynah’s cage had stood a powerful kick. It was a long table that also held terrariums and gardens in bowls and troughs. The kick dislodged a pyramid of glass vessels which juddered and crashed to the floor, sweeping the grass cloth with it, causing a cascade of stone urns and copper pots, flying earth and broken leaf. The noise it made was loud and reverberating and the woman who had come up to John gave a shriek. The other customers stopped where they were and stared at Gavin.
The attention he got seemed to fuel him. He drew back his arm and made a backhanded sweep along a shelf of bowls and vases. Some of these were of plastic but most were pottery. They shattered and the pieces flew. Gavin went mad then. He began grabbing at everything in sight and hurling it to the floor, plants in pots, vases, jars, wire baskets, tools. An elaborate barbecue device of metal and wood and glass he wrenched into its component parts and cast them to right and left, overturning a stone nymph and breaking a window. One of the women started to scream.
‘Can’t you stop him?’ a man shouted. ‘Can’t someone stop him?’
Gavin was trampling on the broken bits of glass and pottery like a wounded elephant. His arms flailed among the bamboo mirrors. Upraised hands tugged at two hanging bowls from which ivy trailed. His voice had been silenced while his body made mayhem but now he began shouting and a stream of obscenities poured from him like the soil from the broken bowl. Les had got behind him and one of the men customers looked as if prepared to help. Paralysed for a while by the horror of it, John now came from behind the counter and began moving towards Gavin. Seeing him advance, Gavin leapt for the drum that bristled with a variety of garden tools like umbrellas in a stand. He grabbed a long-handled fork, its head small but with four sharp stainless steel prongs, and holding it like a javelin, made a lunge at John.
It was all ridiculous, grotesque. It was also frightening. John had sidestepped behind a stand hung with bulbs in packets but the lot came crashing down as Gavin rushed it. And this time his efforts succeeded. He let out a triumphant yell like some primitive warrior, jabbed at John with the fork, catching him a glancing blow on the shoulder. The pain was intense, savage. Gavin would have followed up his stroke with further stabbings, would perhaps have gone on till John was severely wounded or even dead, but as he aimed a second lunge Les and the customer grabbed him from behind, trying to pin his arms behind his back. Gavin fought them tigerishly, snarling and squealing and grunting, throwing back his head, twisting his neck and trying to bite Les’s hand. Holding on to his shoulder from which blood was welling through his clothes, through the thick canvas coat, John was aware that Sharon was phoning the police.
It took the three of them, one of the women holding the door open, to get Gavin into the office. The blood was now actually flowing from John’s wound. They shoved Gavin into the desk chair and Les was all for tying him up, trapping and immobilizing him inside one of the fruit cage nets. But John wouldn’t have that.
Gavin was still holding on to his pike but he let John take it away from him. His hands were as limp as dying leaves. He hung down his head and sobbed.
PART FOUR
1
MUNGO WOULD BE home on Friday or Saturday, Charles couldn’t remember which. But that was a week ahead. Of course he could do absolutely nothing about Peter Moran until Mungo came back. He could simply do nothing and await further instructions. Charles could see that this really wasn’t on. For one thing, this was obviously the test Mungo had said he would set him, this was the test of his loyalty, to follow and observe the behaviour of Peter Moran. Secondly, if he could ever be in doubt of the value of this exercise, the command to abandon it from Rosie Whittaker or Michael Stern or whoever confirmed its importance.
He did nothing on Saturday or Sunday. On Sunday anyway he couldn’t do anything as neither of his parents went into town. Most of the day he practised card tricks. One of the things he practised was doing a waterfall, holding half the cards in each hand and letting them trickle from his palms in such a way that they interwove, one from the left, one from the right, feathering into a single pack of fifty-two. He hoped to be good enough at this to give a casual, apparently unrehearsed, demonstration to Sarah and his parents after tea, but he wasn’t satisfied with his performance. If you are a perfectionist you are a perfectionist and there isn’t much you can do about it.
It was said that Mungo was afraid of growing any taller, that he hoped desperately he had stopped growing. Charles was still only just over five feet. He knew he would get taller eventually, for his parents were of average height, but he would have liked some of that growth now. Looking at himself in the mirror, he considered dispassionately that if these things went on appearance alone what a marvellous child actor he would make. The male Shirley Temple of the eighties. His angel face gazed back at him and he recognized in it that other-worldly expression, as if the eyes were fixed on some distant beatific vision, which painters of the past gave to their cherubs and their infant saints. It was in the eyes of course, but in the delicate mouth too and faintly pearly translucent skin. Even his hair had achieved some unwanted growth in the past week, shaping itself into little curly tendrils. Bloody hell, thought Charles. Oh, shit . . .
Did Mungo know the kind of man Peter Moran was? Was this part of the test, the terrible part you either survived, thus proving your allegiance, or else perished in the attempt? Charles thought of what he had read somewhere about novice druids, in order to attain promotion, having to lie all night composing epic poetry in tanks full of icy water. Such an ordeal might almost be preferable to what lay before him. Picking up the cards again, splitting the pack into two, he felt a grudging admiration for Mungo, for his nerve, his ruthlessness. In the past he had often felt London Central was simply not tough enough. Mungo, and apparently Angus before him, had been stern about no actual lawbreaking, no theft, forgery, violence against the person; so much so that Charles had certain changes in mind when he succeeded Mungo as he meant to do. There would be no place in his organization for all this squeamishness.
In view of that he ought to be glad Mungo was coming out of the scruples closet. If only he hadn’t been the object of this departure. Fear ran down his spine in as precise a trickle as the falling cards. It was hot again but his hands had felt cold all day. At any rate, he had perfected the trick, he would never do it wrong now, it was there, mastered, controlled, for ever. He went downstairs to show it off – well, to pick his moment when he could do it in full view of all of them as casually as anyone else might pick up and open a book.
‘Good God,’ said his father. ‘Amazing. Do that again.’
Charles smiled the closed-lips smile they had all learned from Guy Parker, it seemed very long ago. He thought again and inescapably of how different his father’s reaction would be, of his anger and fear, if he knew his son contemplated establishing a rapport with a paederast.
But he had decided to postpone a second confrontation. Going into town with his mother rather late in the morning, sitting beside her in the Escort, Charles had no plans to make the trip out to Nunhouse that day. Another one of those cold shivers erected the hairs on the back of his neck when he thought of Peter Moran phoning the empty Cameron house. Today, though, he would put all that out of his head, no point in worrying about it at this stage. He was on his way to the building firm of Albright–Craven whose tender, he had at last discovered, had secured the contract for the conversion of Pentecost Villas. How exactly he was going to penetrate the place and make his inquiries he hadn’t yet decided. Smallness of stature and juvenile looks were again a grave disadvantage.
As it turned out he never did get inside the building that day, for quite by chance he encountered Peter Moran again. By then it was late lunchtime. Somebody had parked on Charles’s mother’s ratepayer’s parking space in Hillbury Place and they had to put the Escort a long way off in the underground car park in Alexandra Bridge Street. Then Gloria wanted to buy Charles a track suit sh
e saw in Debenham’s window, which Charles didn’t want and wouldn’t have worn. Nor would he let her buy him lunch at Debenham’s roof-garden restaurant. He was afraid Albright–Craven might close for lunch. It would take him half an hour on foot to get there anyway.
It was gone one by the time he reached Feverton Square that lay just outside the old city walls. He had seen the CitWest clock indicating twelve fifty-seven and twenty-five degrees and a moment or two later as he passed through the Fevergate he heard the cathedral clock strike one. It was always a fraction fast. Because it was a hot sunny day the square was full of people sitting on benches or lying about on the grass or eating sandwich lunches. The strange thing was that though Peter Moran wasn’t far from his thoughts, couldn’t be in the nature of things, but so to speak lurking just behind the threshold of his consciousness, he didn’t see him sitting there on the top of a low pillar at the foot of the Albright–Craven steps. He was about as observant as you could get was Charles, but still he didn’t see him until he was himself no more than a yard or two away. Peter Moran was sitting there with his back to the pavement, looking up the steps to the big ornate silver and black swing doors. He was wearing a very old white tee-shirt with short sleeves that showed pale hairy arms. His head was bent back a bit so that his rather long, greasy, fair hair touched the neck of this tee-shirt.
As is so often the case with fear (though bearing this in mind never seems much use for next time, as Charles reflected) it went away immediately in the actual presence of what caused it. He could probably have got up those steps, or nearly all the way up them, before Peter Moran saw him but he dared not miss this opportunity. And there were people about everywhere. He was quite safe.
