Talking to Strange Men

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Hallo,’ he said.

  Peter Moran turned round. Charles had anticipated a delighted wonder would be registered but in fact he didn’t look altogether pleased to see him.

  ‘Oh, hallo. Hi.’ A glance up the steps and then the pale pebble eyes returned to Charles’s face, the expression growing friendlier. ‘What brings you here then?’

  ‘This and that,’ said Charles. His courage had almost resumed its total proportions, which were considerable. ‘Sorry if I was out when you phoned.’

  ‘I did phone, since you ask. I didn’t get any reply.’

  He was only a man, a fellow human being, of average IQ, no doubt. Not all that bright. Charles was in the habit of assessing people quite coldly like this. He was also not a very large man, slight of build, a bit unhealthy looking, no more than – what? Five feet nine or ten? That voracious look that seemed suddenly to distort his features, maybe that was only because he was hungry. For food, that is, thought Charles.

  ‘You said something about having a coffee.’

  The glance went back up the steps. ‘Not now. I couldn’t now.’

  It was said repressively as if not he but Charles had made the initial overtures, as if he were having second thoughts. And Charles was going to move off, either go into the building or return later, was going to think again about observing and tailing this man, perhaps observing and tailing were all he needed to do, when Peter Moran whispered – or it would be nearer to say hissed – getting to his feet and starting up the steps:

  ‘This time Wednesday. Fevergate Café. Where they have the tables outside.’

  Charles didn’t say yes or no. A party of people strolling along the pavement, several of them his own age, engulfed him. Some would call it a piece of luck, for it removed the possibility of his being recognized by the woman Peter Moran had gone up to meet, the woman who had answered the door to him at the cottage in Nunhouse. They were coming down the steps together, not looking at one another, not holding hands or anything, but undeniably together. Charles drifted on with his new companions, foreign visitors they were, tourists with maps in their hands. Peter Moran’s coolness was explained. You could understand he wouldn’t want other people – sister? Housekeeper? Surely not a wife? – to know what he was up to. At the thought of what he might be up to Charles felt another cold tremor.

  He didn’t have to go to the Fevergate Café on Wednesday. He hadn’t committed himself. Even if he had committed himself he wouldn’t have to go.

  2

  ALMOST THE FIRST thing they did at the hospital was to give John an anti-tetanus injection. After his wound had been cleaned and stitched up he thought they might let him go home but they said they would like him to stay in for a couple of days. He had lost a lot of blood.

  The hospital was on top of one of the high suburb-clad hills and from where he lay he could look across the valley. On the other side of Hartlands Gardens he could see Fonthill Court where Mark Simms lived. The sun shone on the big picture windows, turning them all to golden mirrors. Next day he phoned Colin to tell him where he was and Colin came in to see him, promising to go back to Geneva Road and see the greenhouse got watered. But Colin was his only visitor. He wished he could rid himself of the absurd hope that Jennifer would come. Useless to tell himself that Jennifer didn’t know, that there was no reason to suppose Colin would have told her, that even if she did know she wouldn’t come. When visiting time came and the wives and girlfriends and mothers arrived, bursting in like a herd of hungry animals admitted at last to where the corn was, he found he was holding his breath, eyeing them, searching for her. Then he lay back on his pillows with an inner sigh of resignation.

  Fortunately there were only two such occasions. On Sunday they had let him go home with instructions to keep off work for a few days. It was the first time he had been away from the house overnight since his honeymoon. It felt as if it had been shut up for years, the unmade bed, October Men lying face down on the coffee table, a tea mug and bread and butter plate in the sink Marie-Celeste-like evidence of some long-distant moonlight flit. There was no reply from Jennifer to his letter. He saw what he had done quite clearly, poisoned her mind against Peter Moran without at all advancing his own cause. She would stick to Moran because on his account she had been through fire and water, but she had no enthusiasm left at the prospect of a new marriage or the dissolution of the old.

  Colin had flooded the greenhouse plants and the tomatoes, their leaves yellowing, stood in pools of water. John poured away the surplus water and stood there in the stuffy little lean-to that was full of buzzing insects, thinking about Gavin and about love, objects of love. Somehow he had always thought Gavin must have some wild sex life, a succession of glamorous girlfriends, a happy family, devoted mother and sisters too. Perhaps he had but it was a mynah bird he had loved. How astounded those people with the grandchild would be if they knew what their purchase of the mynah had led to!

  Next day it was made clear to him that they would come to know. The police arrived to tell him Gavin was to be charged with something or other, unlawful wounding it seemed to be. It was in vain that John protested. Apparently, it wasn’t up to him to decide. When he asked where Gavin was now they said – sheepishly, he thought – that he had been taken to Summerdale. This was the psychiatric hospital that in John’s parents’ time had always been known as Copplesfield after the district where it was, and called in those days a lunatic asylum. He would have liked to ask questions and he would have done if Susan Aubrey had been there but it was two policemen he had never seen before, wooden-faced, officious, talking as if tapes of requisite cop-speak played out of their mouths.

  No sooner had they gone than the phone rang. John had given up trying to cure himself of thinking it was going to be Jennifer. He even elaborated on this. He even started thinking, it’s looking after people she likes, it’s people in need of care, dependent people, when she knows what happened to me . . . The voice of Mark Simms, not at all diffident or wary, said:

  ‘Hallo, John. How are you then?’

  He had no reason to replace the receiver now – or had he perhaps more reason?

  ‘OK,’ he said. He knew of old how pointless it would be to tell Mark anything about his encounter with Gavin, anything about his injury or being in hospital. Mark was probably going to apologize. John said, going carefully, to show Mark the way, give him a chance, ‘I suppose you’ve seen they’ve got someone for the – for Cherry’s murder.’

  There wasn’t even a pause. ‘That’s what I was ringing up about, as a matter of fact. Well, partly that. I wasn’t sure if the police had been to you. They’ve actually kept me quite thoroughly informed, which was a bit unexpected to say the least.’

  ‘They’ve been to me too.’

  ‘Oh, good. I mean quite right too, but you never know with them. Well, all that’s cleared up then, John, the questions answered, the mysteries solved. Old Maitland’s son – would you credit it? I knew him by sight. Well, that door’s closed for ever. Time to start afresh with a clean slate. And talking of starting afresh, who do you think I’m seeing tonight? Three guesses.’

  ‘I don’t know any of your friends, Mark,’ John said.

  ‘You know these. Scarcely friends yet though, but who knows? Jennifer and Peter, how about that? I’m invited round for a meal. They said to bring someone, they meant a woman of course, but I don’t know any women. You know what a hermit I am. Much like yourself really. You’re about the only person I could take and that wouldn’t exactly do, would it?’

  John said it wouldn’t do. He put the phone down, having managed to resist promising to go out for a drink some time. It was a strange feeling this, being talked to by someone whose behaviour seemed to defy all the laws of normal human interchange. Weeping and cowering, exposing himself to blows, Mark had cringed at his feet and confessed to a murder he hadn’t done and couldn’t have done. Whatever his motive – loneliness, guilt, a desire for attention, drunkenness – he had forgotten
all about it now, John was sure of that, he had even forgotten it had happened. Drink would do that too probably, wipe away everything except perhaps a vague memory that he had made a fool of himself.

  And how did he know Jennifer? How did he know Peter Moran? The Fevergate Café, of course, when Jennifer had cried and Mark had got a taxi for her, had done more than that, it seemed, had taken her home in that taxi. After a bottle of wine or two he would maybe fall at Jennifer’s feet and make some other false confession – that he had murdered his wife, for instance, or (shades of Colin’s hints) had a homosexual affair with him, John. Anything was possible with Mark Simms.

  3

  NOTHING MUCH COULD happen in a restaurant. Charles knew now that he was going to have to keep that appointment, he had done well and he couldn’t stop now. And nothing would happen. There would be some talk and possibly some suggestions made that he would find unpleasant and even frightening, but nothing he couldn’t handle in that cool laid-back style he had cultivated and which was now second nature. The odd thing was that notwithstanding all this, he was still afraid.

  Inescapably in his mind throughout all this was a kind of shocked wondering feeling. It was amazing and shocking that he should be contemplating this in the climate currently prevailing, a climate of universal or at any rate national terror of paederasty, assaults on kids, child-rape, child murder and all the rest of it. Adult reaction would be to label him innocent, ignorant even, naïvely unaware of what might happen to him. Charles, however, was not in the least unaware. Whatever state of ignorance he might have been in a week before, he had remedied this since and now knew more about sexual abuse of juveniles than his parents did. The library and then, when that failed, Hatchard’s shelves, had afforded him all he could wish to know and more. He was going into it with his eyes open.

  He watched the television news with his parents and Sarah. There was something on it about the schools sex education controversy. Should this be left to teachers or to parents? Boys, apparently, seldom if ever discussed these matters at home. Charles, amused in spite of himself, reflected that it might be left to the kids themselves who could do it all in libraries and bookshops. Then a new child’s face flashed up on the screen, a newly missing boy. Twelve years old this time. Younger than he was but, according to the description, taller. It was happening all the time, as many boys as girls. This one came from Nottingham. Charles was acutely conscious of himself as they sat there, of his sex and his size and yes, of his golden hair and angel face. He felt his parents’ eyes glance fearfully at him and away. The missing boy’s mother came on the screen, weeping, wringing her hands, crying when asked if she had anything to say, whoever’s taken Roy, please, please, send him back . . .

  ‘It isn’t right, exploiting people like that,’ said his father.

  ‘She doesn’t have to do it.’

  ‘I’d rather die,’ said Gloria. ‘If something like that happened to one of my children I should die, I know that.’

  His poor mother. Charles thought quite dispassionately how ridiculous it would be if the police came to break the news to her that her son was dead and there she was in turquoise blue tights and a skirt above her knees. He wondered what had happened to Roy – one of the nasty things described in his books, he supposed. The papers were full of child-abuse cases. Charles, who had picked up the Free Press, laid it aside. Probably there were no more of these cases than usual, it was his heightened awareness that drew his attention to them, like when he got his music centre for his thirteenth birthday and every paper was full of pieces about the newest albums and every other shop sold record players.

  He went in with his father in the morning. There was no talk of paederasty. Charles did the cigarette packet trick with the purple ribbon and this was appreciated with guffaws and compliments, especially as the full Silk Cut pack was quickly produced. It was getting on for ten-thirty when they got into town but Charles still had a lot of morning to kill. A mist lay on the surface of the river and a haze, golden with sun, hung in the alleys between buildings on the eastern side. Someone was fishing from the embankment at the foot of the Beckgate Steps. Charles walked across Rostock Bridge and up to the green where the flyover drop was. If Moscow Centre didn’t know Mungo was away they might have put another of their messages there, a message which by the very falseness of its commands might be of help to him. But there was nothing inside the central upright.

  Charles made cat noises. These were not the usual mewing sounds humans make when they want to sound like cats but carefully studied long-practised soft yowls. The effect was immediate and then Charles wished he hadn’t mewed so persuasively, for he had nothing to give the six or seven cats who came rubbing themselves against him and pushing whiskery faces against his jeans. It was too far to walk to Feverton even in the interests of using up time, so he went to the bus stop, trying to think positively about the meeting ahead. I have to know what it is Mungo wants, he thought, I have to know the purpose of this contact. It can’t just be a test, can it? And if it is just a test, how will I know whether I have passed it or failed it? What I really need is a sign.

  The Albright–Craven exercise proved in the end one of the easiest Charles had ever undertaken. It just went to show how pointless worry was, how wasteful of time and energy was all this speculation. He tried to make a resolution to stop worrying, to cease speculating. For he had no sooner entered the building by those flashy black and silver doors, had not even approached the lift or been accosted by the porter from the window of his cubbyhole, when he saw the pyramid-shaped stand in the middle of the foyer that proclaimed the Albright–Craven Pentecost Project.

  On one of the triangular panels was an artist’s impression of what the five houses in Ruxeter Road would look like when Albright–Craven had put new windows in and plastered their outsides and put up new balconies, and on another their renewed insides with arches and split levels and kitchens and bathrooms. On the third panel were all the details, specifications and costs and – more to Charles’s interest – the projected dates when work on the building would commence and when be finished. ‘Starting October,’ it said, ‘for completion by early summer.’ But prospective buyers should secure units now as the demand was expected to be enormous.

  The porter came over. ‘Was there something you wanted, son?’

  ‘I was looking for Mr Robinson,’ said Charles.

  ‘There’s no Mr Robinson here.’

  Charles went out into the sunshine. There was plenty of time still, time enough to put a message for Mungo about the fate of the safe house into the flyover drop. On the other hand perhaps not. Moscow Centre had the October Men code. Angus Cameron knew about the flyover, Angus had passed it on to his brother, Charles had heard. Suppose – was it possible? – Angus Cameron or Chimera, the former head of London Central, was the mole in the department?

  It was dismaying even to think of it. Charles walked slowly riverwards. The mist had lifted, the water lay a perfectly flat clear silvery-blue, and a herd of swans came up out of the deep shadow under Randolph Bridge. It was all gardens and walks along the river here. Charles bought himself a Cornetto, chocolate mint, from the mobile ice-cream vendor parked in the open space a one-time Labour council had named Rio Plaza. On the river wall, throwing gravel chips into the water, sat Graham O’Neill’s brother Keith, code name Scylla. They didn’t know each other very well, Charles and he, and their greeting was the bare acknowledgement of a lifted arm.

  I could go up to Hillbury Place instead, he thought, and get Mummy to buy me lunch, Chinese maybe. With embarrassment he realized he had used in his inner reflections the name for his mother he had cast off two years before. Mummy indeed! Whatever next? Like a child . . . Up the steep street he went and through the Fevergate. There was a plaque here claiming the walls of the city to be of Roman origin. Charles stood reading the plaque which had been familiar to him since he could first read. It was still only twenty to one but he didn’t want to get to the restaurant before Pete
r Moran did. He wanted to see Peter Moran arrive.

  From here he could see the Fevergate Café with its awning and the tables spread with pink cloths set out underneath it. Peter Moran would also be able to see him. He moved along the wall into one of its embrasures, at this time of the year a mass of pendulous dusty plants. Charles squatted down on his haunches, licked the last of the ice cream out of his Cornetto and offered the wafer tip to a flock of sparrows.

  He couldn’t see the CitWest tower from here and he wasn’t wearing his watch but it seemed to him that Peter Moran arrived rather early. He had made sure of arriving before his guest. He swung up the open space between the tables and into the comparative darkness of the restaurant. Charles got to his feet. He was queasily imagining being in a dark corner in there with Peter Moran when the man came out again and took his seat at one of the tables under the awning. It was a relief. Charles waited until he heard a single brazen stroke from St Stephen’s clock and then he sauntered across the wide paved walking area where no cars were permitted to go.

  Peter Moran looked up and smiled. It made him think that there were some people, otherwise quite ugly, whose faces became nice when they smiled. He was wearing an open-necked shirt that looked quite clean and this somehow comforted Charles, though the fact that a silver chain hung against the pale hairs on his chest equally unaccountably did not.

  ‘Hallo, Ian.’

  For a moment Charles couldn’t think what he meant and then he remembered he had given his name as Ian Cameron while they were in the cottage at Nunhouse. He sat down, saying nothing but doing his Guy Parker face, the enigmatic smile Guy was said to have achieved as a result of studying a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. Then something dreadful happened, or it seemed dreadful at first. Charles’s skin and flesh shrank against his bones. Peter Moran leaned forward, put out his hand and touched Charles’s face, one finger touched it anyway, at the corner of his mouth.