Talking to Strange Men

by Ruth Rendell

  At first he didn’t take much notice of the sirens. You couldn’t tell anyway if they were on police cars or ambulances or fire engines. Charles did think for a split second that they could be police cars in pursuit of him, but this he dismissed immediately. It was impossible. Then he saw a fire engine, coming westwards from the fire station at Feverton, its siren blasting away, the cars pulling in to let it pass. He hadn’t far to go now, he had already turned into the long King’s Avenue that would become Station Road.

  King’s Avenue went uphill and then down again to where the station and the marshalling yards were. The hill was the highest point in the city after Fonthill Heights. Another fire engine came over the top and Charles turned to watch it charge down the other side. He could see the fire now, about a mile to the south. Neither then nor at any time until he saw the local television news on the following morning did it occur to him that the fire might have been in Pentecost Villas, in the safe house. That the candle, precariously balanced on the edge of the garden seat, might have fallen and ignited all that paper, never crossed his mind. Only the idea of the fire itself interested him. He wished he were nearer to it or it to him so that he might see what happened.

  There were no taxis on the rank when he walked into the station approach. That meant a train must have just come in and the taxi drivers swooped on the passengers. He might have to wait as much as twenty minutes. The station sweet stall was shut, all the local eating places were shut except the pubs which he wasn’t allowed into and which would soon shut anyway. Charles walked slowly up to the station entrance and then saw his father’s car parked by the car park exit. His father was sitting at the wheel, reading the evening paper. Or pretending to read the evening paper. Clairvoyant intuitive Charles could sense his anxiety, his pretended casualness, from here. His father would probably spin him some tale about having to bring someone to the station or forgetting to do something at the office and on the way back thought he might as well . . .

  He sauntered up to the car. His father lowered the paper and relief poured into his face, making it go red and soft-looking. He said:

  ‘Oh, there you are. I had a package to put on the London train for a client so I thought I might as well look out for you.’

  It could never happen to six-feet-four-tall Mungo. But then none of it could have happened to Mungo, thought Charles, getting into the car beside his father. Momentarily a wave of horror broke over him. It was something that was to happen a few times in the next eight or nine hours. Through the years to come it would happen occasionally. The horror broke and he thought, I killed a man. They drove south-westwards, crossing Ruxeter Road some half-mile north of the fire. The sirens were silent now but you could smell smoke everywhere. I killed a man, Charles thought, and he felt the penknife in his pocket with a little bit of fibre from the rope caught under its blade.

  4

  IT WAS AN extraordinary experience for the two of them, going to the safe house for the meeting there with Basilisk and Scylla, prearranged before Corfu, to find it razed to the ground.

  ‘Like Carthage, old Lindsay would say,’ said Graham. ‘Only the Romans ploughed over the site of that. Probably stirred salt in too, I shouldn’t be surprised.’

  It was Sunday afternoon. They had seen no papers, heard no radio, watched no television. The whole household in Church Bar had only just got up. Mungo and Graham stood on the opposite side of Ruxeter Road, part of a small crowd gaping at the blackened space, the few remaining struts and timbers, the whole ruin now surrounded by a temporary wire fence. Mungo had the wild idea that Moscow Centre had done it: it had been only a matter of time before the location of the safe house became known to Rosie Whittaker. She was said to be ruthless and intrepid. She might even have done it herself, or some agent of hers . . . No, it was impossible, he mustn’t let his imagination run away with him, it was far more likely to have been builders with a blow torch.

  Graham lit a cigarette. He was wearing his sunglasses, though the day was overcast and rather dark and grey for mid-August. Mungo thought he only needed one of those soft slouch hats to look like a spy in a film of the thirties.

  ‘There’s not much to be done about that,’ he said.

  ‘We shall have to find another safe house,’ said Graham. ‘My brother says there’s a house scheduled for demolition in Hartlands.’

  Graham’s brother Keith, or Scylla, should have been at the meeting. Of course he hadn’t turned up because he must have known about the fire from the newspapers or TV. Mungo heard a man standing behind them say:

  ‘There was someone in there. They found a body. They haven’t identified it yet.’

  ‘Yes, they have.’ This from someone who had perhaps read a more recent paper or seen a more recent programme. ‘It was a man. They found his car outside.’

  Mungo and Graham began to walk off. They discussed going to the cinema, to the Fontaine, where a fairly appropriate old film, The Mask of Dimitrios, had succeeded the Japanese picture, but Graham said he might go to his aunt’s instead, he might go and have a talk with Keith. Mungo went home, making a detour round Nevin Square to see if there was anything held in the statue drop but the hand of Lysander Douglas was empty. He had been anticipating with some excitement deciphering the next message, expecting it to begin, very likely, with seventeen for the date and end with something around ten fifteen for the time. The empty hand was a bit disappointing.

  5

  PENTECOST VILLAS HAD been struck by lightning. That was one theory put forward in the newspapers. Another was that it had been arson and that Peter Moran was the arsonist who had fallen downstairs and stunned himself before he could escape. He was identified by the presence of his car outside, by the remains of his glasses and his watch and the bridgework in his mouth. Not much else of him remained. Charles read about it in the Free Press. Peter Moran was dead so they could say more or less what they liked about him. They quoted the police as saying that he had been convicted four years before of assault on a child under the age of thirteen. A patron of the Fontaine then told the Free Press that on the evening of the fire he had seen Peter Moran in the cinema with a boy of about ten. An inquest was opened and adjourned. Charles understood that as far as he was concerned it was all over and he had to swallow his indignation at being described as about ten. But he put a message in October Men into the flyover drop, asking for a meeting with Leviathan as soon as would be convenient.

  Mungo also read about it in the paper. The only thing of much interest to him was that when he first moved into the study he had last year he had been groping about on the floor underneath his bunk and looking up, read the name Peter Moran carved on the woodwork of its underside. There was a date there too: 1965 and a dash. It wasn’t necessarily the same person. He retrieved the message from Dragon next day. The difficulty was that they no longer had a safe house. Presumably Dragon would have to come along to Church Bar. There would have to be a showdown anyway, for according to Graham, Charles Mabledene had not passed the test set for him. What could you do with a traitor? No more than expel him, Mungo thought.

  He sat down on one of the boxes someone had provided as cat shelters and concocted his reply: ‘Leviathan to Dragon . . .’ It was rush hour and the traffic going south rumbled overhead. Mungo put his message into Dragon’s plastic zip-up bag and taped it back inside the central upright, remembering not to put it too high up out of Charles Mabledene’s reach. Dragon as traitor was probably capable of setting fire to the safe house. Mungo wondered if that was what had in fact happened. The new king cat, a bull-shouldered stringy-bodied yellow tom, rubbed himself in hopeful fashion against his legs, and Mungo bent down to stroke him. There was a strong civet smell, a nice perfumey sort of smell until you knew what it was.

  Still thinking about Charles Mabledene, wondering what he wanted, Mungo went down Bread Lane and the Beckgate Steps to the river. A barge was coming up under Rostock with a dog standing in its bows, barking at the fishermen. The sun shone white and soft b
ehind mist. For a moment he couldn’t see the top of the Shot Tower and then the mist moved like a scarf unwinding. This was Medusa’s drop in the base of the tower, but it was empty. The cathedral floated out of the haze and the sun painted it with a pale wash, so that the hundred saints on its east front seemed to step forward out of their niches to feel the light. The deep-throated bell on the clock began tolling the hour, ten o’clock, as Mungo walked westwards over Alexandra Bridge. He was nearly across when the mist uncurled and melted from the crown of the CitWest tower, or as it seemed to be, the tower like the cathedral saints stepped out of the whiteness into the sun where it showed in twinkling green: ten-O-one and seventeen degrees.

  Mungo had been going straight home but it wasn’t far out of his way into Nevin Square. He thought he saw the Stern brothers in the doorway of Marks and Spencer’s diagonally opposite but when he looked again they were gone. There were people sitting on the wall round the plinth on which Lysander Douglas stood and they turned to stare when Mungo stepped over it to take the folded paper out of the bronze hand. His habit was to copy it down there and then but not under those curious eyes. He took it to one of the seats on the paved walks among the flowerbeds. Mungo, who knew practically nothing about horticulture, wondered why the council planted those crimson flowers that trailed bleeding plumes like offal, like butchers’ discard.

  Before he attempted a deciphering, as soon as he looked at the paper, he knew something was wrong. There was no number to open the message, no number to close it. Moscow Centre had changed the code. In the week since he had found the key to the code they had changed it. That could only mean they knew the old code was broken. He seemed to hear distant triumphant laughter but he was imagining it, there was no one there to laugh. Slowly he crossed the square and replaced the message in the statue’s hand. But he had told no one that he had broken the code, or no one who could possibly . . . Certainly he had said nothing to Charles Mabledene, had had no opportunity to say anything. Had he been wrong then about Charles Mabledene?

  Perhaps he had. But it was not true that he had told no one.

  6

  IT MUST HAVE been like when Cherry died and the police came to tell them. The police were with Jennifer for a long time, questioning her about Peter Moran. A man and a woman, Jennifer said, and from her description John knew the woman must have been Susan Aubrey. John hadn’t seen Jennifer but had spoken several times to her on the phone. She told him dully that she wanted to feel grief, she would have wanted to be stricken with grief, for she had once thought of Peter Moran as the great love of her life, but all she felt was resignation and pity. The implication – though she didn’t say this – was that John had been responsible for her indifference. John’s telling her the truth about Peter Moran had spoiled her feeling for him. But John thought, if I hadn’t told her when I did, she would know now. She would know from the papers – or the police. It wouldn’t have made her hate them, so why should she hate me?

  He phoned her every day. She wouldn’t see him but she had stopped saying she never wanted to see him again. She had forgotten once saying she would never speak to him again. In the middle of the week after Peter Moran died he phoned her and a man answered. The police probably, John thought, a policeman who was with her at that interminable questioning. There was something about the voice he thought he recognized, so perhaps it was Fordwych, the detective inspector. The voice, though very familiar, was unidentifiable.

  Thursday afternoon he spent in Hartlands Gardens. It was the day of the inquest. John thought that today perhaps he wouldn’t phone but would go to her, would go straight to Nunhouse without returning home first. Old feelings of hope had reasserted themselves powerfully. He had left the Honda in the car park just inside the main gate. Emerging on to the road that wound up to Fonthill Heights, he sat waiting for the ascending stream of traffic to pass. It progressed slowly with frequent stops and John turned to look into each driver’s face, hoping for the nod and the raised hand that would indicate he was to be let through. The third driver he looked at, sitting at the wheel of his red Escort, was Mark Simms. Beside him in the passenger seat was Jennifer.

  Mark Simms lifted up his hand. It might have been the motorist’s courtesy wave or something more, a sign that he recognized John behind the goggles and under the crash helmet. Or it might not. His headlights briefly flashed on, perhaps only because John hadn’t moved but remained poised there, taking in what he saw, understanding the import of what he saw. Jennifer was looking at Mark Simms, she was talking to him, and she didn’t turn her head. As far as John could see they weren’t actually touching, only sitting side by side. He moved out quickly in front of the Escort, turning right, coming up behind a stream of traffic descending the hill. It seemed to him that superimposed over the back of the car in front of him was that picture his eyes had indelibly registered, that little scene of Jennifer in Mark Simms’s car.

  He understood. That voice answering the phone, that had been Mark Simms. She had rejected his, John’s, offer of help in favour of Mark Simms. Anyone’s company, anyone’s sympathy, was preferable to his, this finally proved it, this was the end. If it hadn’t been Mark Simms it would have been someone else, it would always be someone else. In that moment he understood how strong his hope had been, how he had hoped on and on in the face of all odds, even after she had asked for a divorce, even after she had rounded on him for telling her the truth about Peter Moran. And since Peter Moran’s death hope had positively burgeoned, he had believed her return inevitable.

  The homeward route he hardly seemed aware of. The horse knows the way, though, the Honda knew the way. Usually he was very careful to switch off the engine before putting the motorbike away. He was afraid of causing damage to the plants with carbon monoxide. It wasn’t the most convenient place to keep the Honda and sometimes he thought of getting a shed specially for it, he could get one at a discount from Trowbridge’s. He sat on the saddle, pointlessly twisting the handlebar grips, lightly revving the engine. The greenhouse door and its windows were wide open, for it had been a very warm day, was still warm. Without switching off the ignition, John went into the greenhouse and shut the windows. He took off his crash helmet and goggles and gloves and laid them on one of the slatted shelves in front of the pots of capsicum. His mind had become blank and he seemed aware of only one thing, his intense isolation in this city of indifferent thousands, this world of uncaring millions. Beyond the gingko tree, beyond the garden wall, hung with a multi-flowering dark blue clematis, the sky was orange with sunset. The Honda purred evenly, animal-like, a useful beast of burden, friendly but ridiculous as might be an elderly fat donkey. Instead of turning the key and letting the engine die preparatory to humping it into the greenhouse where he would jack it up for the night, John got back into the saddle and coasted the motorbike in through the doorway.

  He pulled the door behind him and closed it. The greenhouse was now quite tightly sealed up. He got off the saddle, still holding the handlebars, lightly twisting the grips. Already the fumes were strong. Gingerly he leaned the bike against the shelf, keeping the engine running, moving his hands rhythmically on the grips, staring out at the fading orange of the sky. He stared hypnotically at the sky, his hands rolled the grips automatically, he breathed in the choking chemical vapour. A dizziness began.

  It was then that he heard the footsteps.

  He didn’t take his hands from the handlebars. He didn’t even wonder who it might be, he knew who it couldn’t be. Slowly he turned his head and saw coming out of the side way, walking towards him, Flora the tree girl. An immediate onset of panic must have made his face appear aghast, he was aware of his eyes becoming wide and staring. She flung open the greenhouse door as he snatched his hands off the grips and the engine stalled.

  ‘What on earth were you doing? This place is a gas chamber. You could have gassed yourself.’

  He muttered something about only putting the bike away.

  ‘Are you sure?’ She was looking
penetratingly at him. ‘You weren’t trying to . . .? You weren’t, were you, John?’

  The very fact that he knew what she meant implied the truth of it. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘No, of course not.’ And he hadn’t been, had he? He hadn’t really meant to kill himself. When the fumes got too strong he would have got out, wouldn’t he? He had only perhaps killed the capsicum. ‘I haven’t done the plants much good.’

  He was outside now, breathing clean evening air. Had she saved his life, this bright-faced curly-haired tree expert, or only provided him with an evening’s company?

  ‘Did you come to see the monkey puzzle?’

  She sounded shocked, dazed. ‘I was out looking at flats – well, bedsits really, somewhere to live. Then I remembered about Geneva Road and Araucaria and I came down this way. I haven’t seen the tree.’ Her eyes went to his face, then up at Cherry’s bedroom window. ‘Do you live all alone here?’

  He nodded, still thinking, did I really? Might I be dead now? Shall I be glad one day that she came in the nick of time or shall I convince myself . . .? ‘I’ve got two spare rooms,’ he found himself saying, and then, ‘Come on, I’ll show you the monkey puzzle.’

  7

  HAVING SLEPT ON it, Mungo knew what he must do. First though he went to the flyover drop to pick up the message from Dragon, his agreement to a meeting later that day. Somehow and without making a drama out of it, he knew he would never come here again, never pick his way among the copse of metal posts or attach a message to the inside of the central upright. Angus would say it had happened, what he predicted. Mungo didn’t much care what Angus said.