by Ruth Rendell
‘But I don’t suppose you have a fridge?’
Charles shook his head. The place was subtly different. It was changed, things had gone, two of the chairs, for instance. The long ragged pink curtains and as far as he could see most of the cobwebs had gone. And the keys had gone. Unless they were inside the doors, and London Central had never kept them inside, all the keys on this floor were gone.
‘You’re soaking wet,’ Peter Moran said.
‘So are you.’
‘I could dry you on my jacket. I’ve got a jacket in here.’
In the bottom of the carrier, a woolly thing. Charles closed his eyes and felt a sinking of the heart, of more than that, as if all the organs of his body dropped, at his folly in coming in here, in coming up here. The cataracts flowing down the glass seemed to close them in more firmly than mere bricks and windows. He could see beyond the waterfall something green and distant winking on and off. The woolly folds of Peter Moran’s sweater, sheep-smelling as soon as it absorbed the water, enveloped his head. Hands began a gentle rubbing. The two candles on the arms of the metal seat burnt with elongated steady flames. Their shadows were cast long and black, a Frankenstein monster, thin and stretched, Peter Moran looked like, grasping in its paws some hydrocephalic creature, strangling it perhaps or punching its wobbly head.
Charles broke free but not in a panicky way. He pushed his fingers through his damp hair, smoothing it. Peter Moran was very close to him, looking at him without actually touching him. He said:
‘Come and sit down. We can have the food.’
He sat on the rotting silk cover of the chaise longue, patted the seat beside him. Charles felt himself creep to it, feeling his way as if he were blind.
‘Come here.’
No power on earth, no act of will or need could have made Charles move nearer. The rain had become even more violent and the crashing it made against the facade and windows of the house gave Charles the illusion it was in his own head, his blood roaring. Peter Moran shifted up close to him, said in a bashful nervous monotone:
‘When I was about your age and starting at Rossingham I was very lonely, I felt alone and abandoned. I was very happy at home and I didn’t want to go away to school. I couldn’t settle in at Rossingham, no one seemed to like me and I didn’t like anyone.’
Charles was thinking about upstairs, about getting out on to the roof. It was quite possible, Mungo and probably Graham too had done it. You went up through the trap into the loft, pulling the ladder up behind you, and out of the loft on to the slates through a sort of hatch . . .
‘There was this gardener at Rossingham, a groundsman I suppose you’d call him. Just an ordinary working man, young you know, about twenty. He was kind to me, he was loving to me – do you know what I mean?’ Peter Moran’s voice was breathy and excited. ‘I’m talking about physically loving. I made him happy and after a bit I was happy too, I wasn’t lonely any more.’
‘I’m not lonely,’ Charles said, his voice coming out as a squeak, babyish, terrified.
He was curiously hypnotized, unable to take his eyes off Peter Moran’s pale windowed unblinking eyes. A paralysis held him still, listening to the sounds that might be the noises of storm or his own blood beating. Yet there was still a cold intellectual core somewhere a very long way inside him, a mind that said, is this it? Is this what I am supposed to discover? Peter Moran put out his hand and laid it on Charles’s thigh. It burned through his jeans like a hot iron and he jumped up, grabbed one of the candles and ran to the door. The flame streamed and the shadows flew like a flock of monstrous birds. Peter Moran shouted:
‘Ian, come back!’
Charles was out of the door and running up the last flight. Hot wax poured down the candle and the flame guttered. Peter Moran came out of the room holding the other candle. At the top of the steep stairs Charles leapt across the landing to the open door, the keyless door, and his candle went out. He turned, dreadfully at bay, the rooms, the doors, useless to him. Peter Moran stood two stairs from the top, lit by the flame he held, his own features and his glasses casting shadows on his face, and a great black shadow of the whole of him stark on the wall behind.
‘You little devil. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
Charles’s hand crushed the matchbox in his pocket. His thumb flicked out one of the small blunt blades of the penknife. In the light from the single candle he could see wound round the cleat the rope that held the heavy double ladder close up to the ceiling. The worn bit on the rope showed, no one had replaced it. Charles pulled the knife out of his pocket. He dropped the candle and the saucer broke. Peter Moran was looking at the knife and somehow Charles could see he thought he was going to throw it. He came up one stair. He said:
‘Give me that.’
Charles shook his head. He couldn’t speak, he had no voice, but his fear was going just the same. His fear was being sucked out of him and replaced by a springing hard energy, like pain. He put out the hand that held the knife, holding it steady, his thumb pressed hard down on the handle. He held it as if for an overarm stab. One stair more Peter Moran came up, made a lunge for the knife, and as he did so Charles raised it and brought it down hard on the frayed rope.
Afterwards he thought, he hadn’t meant that, he only wanted the ladder. He only wanted even then to escape by the roof. It was the quickest way to undo the rope. But it wasn’t really true any of that, he had meant it, he knew what he was doing, he knew in his adrenalin high what the outcome would be, what would happen.
It happened horrifyingly fast. There was no creaking hesitation, no pause or tremor before the cumbersome mass of wood and metal fell. It swept down in an avenging arc, missing Charles by inches but enough inches, and as if poised for this accurate strike, smashed into the man’s jaw. He had tried to duck, he was aware enough for that, and he did duck, but it struck his jaw just the same with a sickening crunch of bone, and sweeping on, cast him backwards down the stairs. The extinction of the candle and Peter Moran’s scream, a howling cry of pain, happened simultaneously. The ladder swung wide over the head of the stairs, back towards Charles who leapt aside, and shuddered to a stop.
Charles was left up there in the doorway in the darkness. He had fallen on to his hands and knees and he was screaming too, involuntarily, short sharp screams like a very young child.
PART FIVE
1
THERE WAS SILENCE. The rain had ceased. Charles stopped making those childish sounds. He got to his feet and stood still, forcing himself to take deep breaths, feeling the trembling in his legs gradually grow less. After a moment or two he bent down and grubbing about in the dark, picked up the candle Peter Moran had dropped and the saucer it was in which had not broken. He re-lit the candle and carrying it, crept across to the head of the stairs.
The storm, which he had thought past, reasserted itself in a last violent flare, a huge lightning flash irradiating all of this top floor, the stairwell, the angled slopes of the ceiling, the open doors and hollow empty rooms, the ladder, that engine of destruction. Thunder, as loud and sharp as the ladder striking the floor, followed in a split instant. In the flood of light Charles saw Peter Moran lying broken and twisted at the foot of the steep narrow stairs. He put his hand across his mouth to stop himself crying out again. The darkness came back, walls of it outside the leaping circle of candlelight. Charles began going downstairs.
With head averted, he passed the man who lay half on the bottom stair, half on the landing floor, and went into the room that had furniture in it. Peter Moran’s woolly garment, the thing he had dried Charles’s head with, lay on the chaise longue. Sprawled across the floor, where Peter Moran had perhaps kicked them over in his pursuit of Charles, lay a packet of sandwiches, crumpled paper napkins, the tissue wrappings of the wine bottle. The windows, washed clean, showed a clear brilliant darkness shot with jewel-like bright-coloured lights, the winking green clock: nine-sixteen and fourteen degrees. The temperature had fallen sixteen degrees sinc
e they went into the cinema. So much had happened since they went into the cinema!
Charles was still shaking. It was something he couldn’t handle. Deep breathing failed to control it. He was shaking so much he was afraid of actually dropping the candle and he set it down in its saucer on the edge of the metal garden seat. Now he knew he must look at Peter Moran, he must make himself go over there and bend down and look at him. Charles took the matches out of his pocket. He lit a match to help him out of the room, leaving the candle behind him, lighting up the room, the metal seat casting a shadow of ribs and arcs like some strange, non-human skeleton. The door swung behind him, cutting off the light. His match burnt down, he lit another. He opened his eyes, which he had closed without meaning to, and made himself look at Peter Moran. Gradually he dropped into a squatting position.
Another match was needed. The initial bright flare of it showed Charles the dreadful purple contusion on the side of his jaw where the ladder had struck his face. The cheek was cut, lacerated by some metal protrusion probably, and had been bleeding but it wasn’t bleeding now. Charles thought, I can’t touch him. At once he knew he had to touch him, he had to know. The match burnt out, burnt his fingers. He was in darkness alone with Peter Moran, alone, still and silent. Curiously, the shaking had stopped.
Peter Moran must have struck the back of his head on the skirting board which stuck out at the foot of the stairs in a sharp-angled wedge. He had fallen backwards very hard and struck his head. Still in the dark – it was somehow better in the dark – Charles put out his hand, his hand crept to Peter Moran’s face and felt the skin, felt the forehead. It wasn’t cold but it was cool. It wasn’t warm as his own forehead was warm. Charles was holding his breath and he expelled it now. He put his hand on his own chest and found his heart. It was beating away like anything, a strong young healthy heart that drove highly oxygenated blood round the body to cope with fear. Charles found the same spot on Peter Moran’s chest and laid his hand there. For a moment he felt a terror that Peter Moran would suddenly sit up, clasp him in his arms. But nothing like that happened, nothing happened, there was a slack heavy stillness under his hand.
Charles drew in his breath with a harsh rattling gasp. He pulled away his hand as if something had bitten it. And yet he had known all along really, he had known from the moment the ladder struck, that Peter Moran was dead.
Another match dropped to the floor. He lit the last he was to light there. He touched Peter Moran again, feeling the skin again, feeling it colder surely, dislodging the head somehow so that it slipped and lolled on to the other side, the mouth falling open and showing a bloodiness inside. Charles shouted out in shock, it was too much for him, it was the pits of horror. He dropped the matchbox and made for the stairs, running down in the dark past the grey streaming window, holding on to the banister. At the foot there was grey light, about as dark as light could be, coming in from open doors. He stumbled across to that kitchen they sometimes used for meetings, to the back door he and Peter Moran had come in by, pushed it open and stood on the back step in cold fresh air. The air felt as if it were new, or like pure oxygen. And at his feet Charles saw water, more than puddles, less than a flood. A great still pool of water lay covering the remains of a path. Avoiding it, he slopped through the wet long grass, under the dripping trees, up to the gate in the wall.
He didn’t look back until he was out in Fontaine Road. Then he wished he hadn’t looked back, up to the window set high in the wall of the stairwell between the first floor and the attics. For there was a light on in there, a light of a pale orange colour that moved and leapt behind the glass. He wasn’t dead, Charles thought. How would I know if anyone was dead or not? He wasn’t dead but he had got up and lit the candle and was coming down the stairs holding the candle aloft . . .
Charles started to run. He ran past the parked Diane, through the puddles, the sheets of water, across the road and down Ruxeter Road, putting the house and Peter Moran and the moving light far behind him.
2
HIS ARM WAS out of the sling and only a small dressing was on the wound but perhaps it was a mistake to go out on the motorbike again so soon. His shoulder ached.
It was a mistake too calling on people without forewarning them. John realized that he hadn’t phoned Colin because he was afraid of not being wanted, of being put off. But that was an unwise way to go on. And yet the worst he had thought could happen was that Colin and his mother would be out and he would have had a fruitless journey. All the way out there the idea was with him that he could talk to these two, especially to Constance, tell her of his new inability even to think about Cherry, use Constance as a kind of psycho-therapist.
Colin came to the door. His face fell when he saw John, he looked almost laughably like Harpo Marx when he has done something wrong and is in trouble for it. Constance was out, he said, she was out as she always was on Fridays at some over-sixties whist club she belonged to. John hadn’t known that, hadn’t known about this Fridays club, or had forgotten. Of course Colin had to ask him in, but it was a near thing. John went into the living room and sitting there on the sofa was a woman, a youngish quite pretty woman with lipstick spread over her chin but none on her mouth.
Awkward introductions were made. John stayed no more than ten minutes, refusing the drink that was offered him. Was this what Colin did every Friday evening when his mother was out? John had never dreamt of it. It had shocked him rather and – yes, this must be confessed – made him envious.
Returning home on the Honda, he heard fire-engine sirens behind him as he came into town. He was in Ruxeter still, coming into Ruxeter Road, and he pulled in to let the fire engines pass him, travelling at high speed, their sirens howling. Ahead of him he could see a dense pall of brown smoke with a red glow in the heart of it. An inch of rain must have fallen just before he left home and in places the gutters were still full of water from overflowing drains. The wheels of the Honda were deep in gutter water. John pulled back on to the crown of the road. A few hundred yards along, diversion signs had been put up, directing the traffic round to the right.
The diversion led westwards nearly as far as the station. The slow heavy stream of traffic wasn’t directed out again until Nevin Square was reached. There a policeman was directing traffic, letting more fire engines through, an ambulance. John wondered if some building back up there had been struck by lightning. It took him a further half-hour to get home and he had scarcely put the Honda away when the phone started to ring. John, who had believed he would never hear the phone again without expecting it to be Jennifer, didn’t now even consider Jennifer as a possibility. It was very late for anyone to phone – or late by his standards. Perhaps, though, it was Colin, feeling the need to offer an explanation.
John sighed. He picked up the receiver, said hallo. Jennifer’s voice, anxious, rather sharp, seemed to penetrate his body and run through his bones, to find the wound and pluck at it.
‘John, is Peter with you?’
‘Peter? With me?’ He heard himself stammering. It was such a shock, it was so unexpected. ‘Why would Peter be with me?’ And he added, ‘The last place surely . . .’
‘I don’t know. He might have come to you, I did suggest he ought to talk to you himself. About the divorce and the house and everything. I’m phoning everyone we know, everywhere he might be.’
Being lumped with ‘everyone we know’ hurt very much. ‘He isn’t here.’
‘He was going to the cinema,’ she said, ‘with some friend of his, someone he was at school with. But it was the early showing. He said he’d be back by nine at the latest.’
He has left her again, John thought. He has left you, he wanted to say but he didn’t say it. ‘A bit premature, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s only half-past ten.’ His voice softened, he couldn’t help that. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, and then, ‘I’m here if you need me. Phone me again if you need me.’
After he had put the receiver down he thought, why didn’t I say I wou
ld come to her? Why didn’t I say I’d come and take charge? He lifted the phone to call her back but the line was engaged. He has left her, he has left her, he repeated over and over, silently first and then aloud to the empty house. Hope began once more to revive. When he has left her for the second time she will come back to me . . .
3
FROM THIS PART of town there was no bus direct to the main line station in South Hartland. Charles knew that no taxi driver he stopped in the street would be prepared to take him fifteen miles out into the country at this time of night. He had to get to the station, walk it in fact. He was finding that walking is not easy when you are in a state of shock. His legs trembled and, behaving like a paraplegic’s, did not obey his brain’s commands. They simply would not move quickly. What he probably needed, he thought, was brandy. Not that he had ever tasted brandy, and if what people said was true, it was the last thing one ought to have on an empty stomach. Charles’s stomach was very empty, having received nothing but the Yorkies and half a dozen of Peter Moran’s chocolates since lunch.
Whatever that light might have been it was not Peter Moran pursuing him. He knew that now. Most likely it was the candle he now remembered he had left burning in the room with the furniture. Perhaps the door to that room had blown open and revealed the light. Something like that. Ruxeter Road was quite crowded and with a lot of traffic. It was a busy part of town with pubs and cinemas and restaurants and this was Friday night. Charles crossed the street and trudged on northwards, his pace steadying and quickening after a while as control returned. The evening behind him he had expelled from his mind or perhaps his own consciousness had blanked it off, but now it gradually came back. He supposed he had murdered Peter Moran. Killed him anyway, killed him in self-defence. How odd. How peculiar that he should have done such a thing. He didn’t feel any different and he supposed he didn’t look any different. It was quite something to have actually killed someone when you were only just fourteen, something that probably hardly ever happened.
