by Ruth Rendell
Never ill-humoured for long, Zeinab started laughing. ‘He won’t go for her, will he? They’re all young girls he gets his eye on. Or youngish. Who does she think she’s kidding?’
‘You know your mum.’ Algy opened the drum of popcorn and passed it to her. ‘You haven’t seen any TV today, have you? And you never got the Standard? Only there’s a bit about Gaynor Ray’s boyfriend and what he’s said.’
‘That’s the Nottingham one?’
‘Right. I reckon the police must have told him to, because he’s been right through their bedroom and he’s seen what was in her bag on that rubbish heap, and he says there’s something missing Gaynor always carried. Couldn’t separate her from it. he said it was her lucky mascot and her guardian angel, but they can’t find it now.’
‘What is it?’
‘A silver cross. It was supposed to go on a chain round her neck but she never wore it for work, just carried it with her. It’d put the clients off, wouldn’t it, a lap dancer wearing a cross?’
‘I reckon.’
‘He gave this interview. I mean, this chap the boyfriend did, and he said all that—well, not the bit about putting the clients off—he said the cross would have been in Gaynor’s bag, bound to be. It wasn’t no use searching the bedroom on account of it wouldn’t be there, not unless Gaynor was.’
‘Poor thing,’ said Zeinab. She was looking around her to see how the cinema was filling up. Of course, no one in their right mind would come at this time unless they had to, like her and Algy. She was supposed to be having dinner with Morton Phibling in an hour’s time and then going on with him to Ronnie Scott’s, but she was going to stand him up. A good-hearted girl, she could see what a bitch it was for poor Algy to be left alone with the kids night after night. She owed it to him. She’d tell Morton her dad had stopped her going out, locked her in her room, something like that. Not for the first time, she congratulated herself on inventing such a harsh father. It solved every problem that came up in the business of juggling Suzanne with Zeinab. A stroke of genius, really. Suddenly, turning her head to the left, she spotted someone she knew.
‘Look, Alge, there’s that Will I told you about, the one that lives upstairs at Inez’s. He’s all on his own. Shame really.’
Algy turned round. ‘Where? That one that looks like David Beckham?’
‘Does he? I hadn’t noticed.’
‘You hadn’t? I’d have thought any girl would fancy him.’
The lights began to dim. Zeinab took Algy’s hand. ‘Oh, come on, love, you know I’m a one-man woman. You’re the only bloke for me.’
The only thing about the film that much interested her was the cache of jewels stolen from Tiffany’s. The emeralds were especially beautiful and a lovely bluish-green, a colour that suited her. She might mention them to Morton when he was sympathising with her over her cruel father’s locking her up. She wouldn’t mind a change from diamonds and sapphires. Like many people, she was unable to follow much of the gangsters’ machinations in the film and the purport of the talk between men who spoke with a clipped accent in noisy underground bars eluded her. Of course, she was sorry when Russell Crowe got shot, as any woman might be, and she couldn’t care less about the fate of Sandra Bullock stranded on a beach in Brazil.
Leaving, they encountered Will. Zeinab made the introductions and Will muttered about being pleased to meet them and blushed dark red. Now he had been reassured about Will’s place or lack of a place in Zeinab’s life, she was half afraid the sociable Algy would ask him to join them for a meal, but thanks to her poking her stiletto heel into his ankle he didn’t.
‘We don’t have to be back till ten,’ he said, ‘or even half-ten if I walk your mum home.’
Will waited on the opposite side of the Finchley Road for his bus. He had done what he had set out to do, seen the film again, got a good picture in his head of that backyard and proved to himself that the front of the house or shop or whatever it was, was never shown. He had studied the position of the place where the jewellery was buried and the kind of bag, a black leather briefcase, it was in, and noted once more the hanging sign on a lamp post, saying this was Sixth Avenue. But he wasn’t as happy as he usually was on a Friday evening. Becky hadn’t phoned.
That was why he had decided, only that morning, to go to the cinema on Friday rather than Saturday or Sunday. Becky might still phone to make an arrangement for one of those days. She might even be phoning now while he was out. It was something he dreaded. He fretted for the bus to come so that he might soon be home to take her call.
Will’s nature, or his mind, was such that unlike people without his difficulties, he was unable to distract himself from worrying by concentrating on something else. The treasure and its whereabouts might have served this purpose but, for the time being, he had almost forgotten the treasure and could think only of Becky and the phone call which hadn’t come. She might be ill, something might have happened to her. Without much imagination, he couldn’t conceive of what, and his mind was filled only with a drifting foggy unhappiness. He felt bereft and bewildered, like a pet whose owner has gone away and left it with food and water but without companionship.
The search for Jacky Miller had disappeared from Sunday’s newspapers, having been driven away by the more exciting disclosures about Gaynor Ray, her way of life, her job and the men she had known. One story in a tabloid described her as ‘working in the sex industry’, another, in a broadsheet, carried interviews with three men who had been intimately associated with her. She had gone missing not one but two years ago. Her boyfriend expressed himself as ‘devastated’ by the revelations. ‘In spite of the kind of work she did,’ he said, ‘I had no idea I was not the only man in her life. We were going to get engaged at Easter and were already planning our wedding. Hearing about these others she was seeing has completely devastated me.’ From what they had discovered, journalists implied that Gaynor was easy prey for the Rottweiler—in spite of the Rottweiler Society’s protest and the absence of bites, the name was by now universally used—as she would accept any lift offered her by a man.
These stories, breaking on the Friday evening and the Saturday, had provoked Caroline Dansk’s stepfather into an angry defence of her moral character. Anyone who suggested Caroline had ever picked up a man or accepted a lift from a man would be guilty of casting a slur on a girl who had never even had a boyfriend. It was well-known that when she encountered the Rottweiler in Boston Place she was on her way to visit a girlfriend and the girlfriend’s parents who had ‘a beautiful home’ in Glentworth Street. His wife, Caroline’s mother, had been prostrate ever since the discovery of her body and he really feared that aspersions of this kind might kill her. The parents of Nicole Nimms and Rebecca Milsom had confided nothing to the press.
Inez, reading all this, began to feel rather ashamed of herself for buying the tabloid and reading it in addition to the newspaper which had been delivered. She put both into the recycling bin and sat down to consider how to spend her day. The house was utterly silent, though it was by now almost noon. Ludmila and Freddy were very likely still in bed. They would get up around one and go out, as they always did, to eat the huge lunch of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and two veg provided by Crocker’s Folly up in Aberdeen Place. Jeremy Quick might be up and moving about but he was always quiet as a mouse without a mouse’s proclivities for scratching and burrowing. It looked like a fine morning, the sky a milky blue with tiny white clouds like yogurt curds, the sun shining mildly, yesterday’s wind entirely gone. In the garden the old pear tree was coming into blossom. Jeremy was probably having coffee out in his roof garden or even an early lunch. This afternoon he would be bound to pay his twice-weekly visit to the hospital where Mrs Gildon languished and Belinda spent four nights out of the seven.
As for Will, he no doubt had gone over to Gloucester Avenue to spend the day with Becky. She hadn’t heard him go out but she slept in the back from where footfalls on the stairs weren’t always aud
ible. Becky was so kind and thoughtful, she thought, far beyond the call of auntly duty. Will must think of her as his mother … Listening again, she heard only the silence, then a car pass along Star Street, the distant moan of a fire engine siren. Feelings she usually tried to suppress, a sense of isolation, of utter solitariness in a world where everyone else had someone, enclosed her in walls of glass. Last evening she had gone for a walk but the combination of a bitter wind and the equally bitter sight of so many couples inside lighted windows had driven her home where, as her never-failing remedy, she had put on a Forsyth video. It had done its job, but as sometimes happened, only up to a point. She had gone to bed longing not for the ghost on tape, the shadowy entity which looked like and spoke like Martin, but the real man with a real man’s arms and lips and voice.
But she might as well play another now. How about Forsyth and the Miracle? It was her favourite because in it Forsyth’s young wife died and he mourned her, just as she, Inez, mourned him, and in a melancholy way she reflected that if it had been she and not he who had died—something she occasionally wished had happened—he would have been as grief-stricken as was the character he played.
She kept the set turned down low so as not to disturb anyone, which was why after about twenty minutes she heard feet descending the stairs. Because they halted outside her door she stopped the tape. Whoever it was must be standing there, just waiting outside. She listened, heard silence, and because she knew it must be an occupant of the house, she opened the door. It was Will.
‘Is something wrong, Will?’
He had been crying. She could tell from the puffiness of his eyes, though the red flush on his face was probably due to her having caught him when he had been hesitating about ringing her bell.
Instead of replying, he said in a faltering voice, ‘I’m going out, that’s all, I’m going out,’ and he threw open the street door, slamming it behind him, most unusual behaviour for Will.
Inez didn’t know what to make of it. But she told herself he was very likely only late in leaving for Becky’s or had omitted to buy something for her—it would be that sort of thing. She went back to Forsyth and the Miracle, to her favourite part, the bit where Forsyth wakes in the morning and briefly thinks he has only dreamt his wife’s death. How many times had she too felt that about Martin!
Running along Star Street towards the Edgware Road, Will heard the crash of the door behind him and began to worry that it would get him in trouble with Inez. He didn’t want that. After Becky, he most wanted Inez’s affection and, although he couldn’t have articulated this, Inez’s protection. Anxiety slowed his step but he didn’t go back. Outside the door of her flat he had been bracing himself to ask her to phone Becky for him. He simply didn’t know how to do this himself. But Inez would do it and ask Becky why she hadn’t phoned him, where had she been, what was wrong. In the event, he had lost his nerve and he was going to her instead, walking to Gloucester Avenue, though it was a long way. The treasure of Sixth Avenue had disappeared from his mind as if it had never had its exciting place there.
Reaching the house where Becky’s flat was on the first floor took him an hour. By now it was nearly a quarter to two, he had had very little breakfast and no lunch. His appetite, that trusty mainstay of his existence, was gone. It would come back when he found Becky and was there in her flat with her. But no one answered when he rang her bell, the second one up from the bottom of the row, marked with her name on a red tag. He rang and rang. She couldn’t be out but she was. His imagination was insufficient to form ideas or pictures of where she might be, it was enough that she wasn’t where she should be, the place in which he believed she always was. The prisoner of love, she must always be in those rooms thinking of him, waiting for him.
There was only one thing to do. Stay there till she came. Sit on the steps that led up to the front door and wait for her. If there had been a seat in the front garden of the house he would have sat on that but there were only the steps. He sat there in the spring sunshine. A woman from the bottom flat came back from her lunch date, passed him and said an uncertain ‘Good afternoon’; a couple who lived on the top stepped over him because he had fallen into a doze; a visitor for tea to number three gave him a wide berth, thinking he was a rough sleeper.
By the time Becky came home, hand in hand with James, Will was fast asleep.
CHAPTER 7
For the first time in years Becky was taking a day off work. She had phoned and said she wouldn’t be in. As a partner in the firm she didn’t have to give a reason or make excuses. She felt genuinely ill, weak, tired and shaky, due no doubt to not sleeping at all the previous night. Or, rather, she had finally dropped off at about four and been wakened by someone’s car alarm at five. She would have preferred never again to think about the previous afternooon and evening but she couldn’t help herself, it had been so horrible, was horrible still.
They had had a nice time, she and James, at James’s sister’s buffet lunch party to which he had taken her. Rather too much wine but after all, it had been a fine day, they were mostly out in the garden and there were interesting people to talk to. The house was not far, only in a Regent’s Park mews, so James had left his car in her street and they had walked there and back through the park. She had forgotten all about Will. If she had thought of him at all it was to tell herself that he was very likely out with Kim somewhere. She must break herself of the habit of inviting him over once a week and now might be the time to start.
Yesterday had begun well. Of course, she saw now how silly she had been when making weekend plans (or not making them) to have imagined James might want to spend the whole of Saturday and Sunday with her as well as Friday evening. It was much too soon for that. But Friday had been a success and she felt gratified when he phoned on Saturday morning, before she went on her shopping jaunt, and asked her to come with him to his sister’s on the following day.
Walking back with him after the party she was happy. And she came close to saying so. ‘I am having a nice day.’
‘Good,’ he said, ‘so am I,’ and he smiled and took her hand. They walked along holding hands, up over the bridge and into Princess Road. At five in the afternoon the sun was warmer and brighter than it had been all day.
If she had seen Will sooner she might have found a way of stopping James coming in with her or at any rate have prepared him. But she hadn’t even looked in the direction of the front entrance until they were almost at the steps. Even then, it was James saying, ‘Do you get much of this sort of thing?’ plainly meaning, do you get many of these rough sleepers taking a nap on your doorstep, that made her look down at the sleeping man. She felt the hot wash of a blush flood her face and neck.
At that moment Will woke up. He was always clean, or he always started off clean, but he had been lying in the sun on a dirty step and he had been crying. His face was tear-stained, pale runnels through a dusty layer, his hands were black and his hair stood up in spikes.
She said, ‘Oh, Will …’
‘I waited for you to come back,’ he said, apparently unaware of James. ‘I waited and waited.’
But James wasn’t unaware of him. ‘Do you know this man, Becky?’
Prevarication was useless now. ‘He’s my nephew.’
‘Oh. I see.’ He said it in the tone people use when they don’t see at all and don’t want to. ‘Look, it might be best if I left you with him. Better not be around.’
Plainly, he thought Will was drunk or on something, very likely took him for an addict desperate for his next fix. She didn’t watch him go but she heard the car start up. ‘Come on in, Will,’ she said.
He didn’t explain why he was there. He didn’t need to. She understood perfectly. She hadn’t asked him over and he had pined and fretted until at last he could stand it no longer. A broad smile transformed his dirty face and he chatted away as they climbed the staircase—wasn’t it a lovely day? Had she seen all the flowers that were coming out? It was really spring now, wasn’t
it? She sent him to wash his hands and face and comb his hair while she looked in the fridge for what she could possibly have to cook for him. He had said wistfully as she let them into the flat that he had had nothing to eat all day.
There were eggs and a piece of bread. In the freezer she found frozen chips that were past their sell-by date but you couldn’t come to much harm from old chips, could you? She fried two of the eggs, put the chips in the microwave, toasted the bread because it was stale, and while she was doing so poured herself a stiff gin and tonic. She had already had nearly a whole bottle of wine but she needed something to calm her down and stun her feelings. Will ate voraciously, pouring tomato ketchup over everything and buttering slice after slice of toast. He drank Coke and she made tea for them both. She couldn’t have eaten to save her life. His training in the children’s home stopped him turning on the television without first asking her but she anticipated the request. Over the years she had learned to read the shifting expression that crossed his face.
The serial for the under-twelves and then the banal game show satisfied him completely—or being in her flat and her company while he watched them satisfied him—and he laughed with glee, darting at her happy smiling glances. There were to be no recriminations, no inquests, that wasn’t Will’s way. That she had been absent when she should have been present, that she should have failed to invite him, that she had omitted to phone, all that was forgotten in the entirely contented now. He watched television, he sat with his head against the cushions, blissfully eating crystallised fruits out of a box someone had given her but which, for reasons of staying slim, she had never eaten.
All the time he was there she had stopped herself thinking. Not only about what had happened but what its consequences must be. I must not think, she told herself over and over, I must not think, not now. Television had become unsuitable for him, with only hymn singing on offer or ancient civilisations or a murder drama. The news was a slightly lesser evil than this last. She switched to it tentatively and saw the screen filled with an enlarged photograph of Gaynor Ray wearing her amulet, the silver cross lying against her soft young skin, a rather provocative smile on her lips. Then the pendant alone appeared, rather blurred because it had been so much magnified, a cross that had at first looked plain but now revealed a chasing of leaves on the surface of the silver. The photograph had been taken a few weeks before she disappeared. There was nothing about Jacky Miller. That neither she nor her body could be found was no longer news.
