by Ruth Rendell
The lighter he had taken from Nicole Nimms was the second of these objects and he had taken it for a simple reason. He wanted to light a cigarette. These days Jeremy seldom smoked, it was unsuited to his second self, the other image he was then about to create preferring to present himself as fairly abstemious in most respects. Weeks had already gone by without his smoking but that night, Nicole being his first victim for a year and the one he thought might never be, he had felt an overpowering need. So he had found the cigarettes and the silver lighter, initialled NN, in her bag and thus it became the precedent for further small thefts. As a general rule, Jeremy abhorred stealing. It was the British vice, he often thought, common now all over the country. You couldn’t leave anything out in Star Street without someone snapping it up while your back was turned. A disgusting petty crime. His taking a small artefact from the girls was different, it had become almost poetic, his sign, his benchmark, the way to know him.
After Nicole he had taken on this second identity, deciding to base himself in the district near where he had killed her. From the first he had felt he was not this man who killed, this garrotter, this Rottweiler, that was someone else with another life and another name. Alexander Gibbons, the conventional man, the normal man, was himself, this killer quite different and beyond his control. Jeremy Quick should be his name and his home not a Kensington mews but the top flat over a shop in Paddington.
If he killed again it would be in that name. Alexander Gibbons, himself, his mother’s son, the computer expert, the self-made successful man, would be innocent, clean, apart. It was that man who hoped his alter ego wouldn’t kill again, that whatever it was which drove him to kill was satisfied with two deaths and now would sleep in peace. Jeremy Quick, holding in his hands the objects he had taken not from two but from three out of the five he had killed, knew that nothing could stop him. He knew it without anguish, accepting it as horribly inevitable, something he did while he was this other one living in this other place.
Jeremy Quick was arrrogant in a way Alexander Gibbons never was. He knew he was and was proud to be proud. There was something masterly in the way he read people’s minds, as, for instance, the way he had read Inez’s over that absurd business of Belinda Gildon’s mother’s age. As soon as he had said she was eighty-eight, or rather, having said that, as soon as he had said Belinda was thirty-six, he saw in the expression on Inez’s face that he had made an error. A woman with any brain at all would notice that kind of thing. It was a stroke of genius anticipating her thoughts and pre-empting suspicious questions by slipping in that oblique reference to Belinda’s being an adopted child. Inventing Belinda was necessary to make him seem companioned, a normal man, not one who spent his evenings in brooding solitude. A lesser imagination would have called her something like Jane Venables or Anne Tremayne, novelists’ names, and novelette writers at that. It would make an interesting paper, part of a doctoral thesis perhaps, the subject of the names writers chose for their characters. You could group them into categories, from Trollope’s onomatopoeic Dr Omicron Pie and Dickens’s Sir Leicester Dedlock to the Carruthers and Winstanleys of the spy thriller, their wives invariably named Mary. Also clever was his telling the police he had seen the running man or woman and believed him or her out for an evening work-out. They trusted, even admired, him. He could tell.
He had finished his vodka and wouldn’t have a second. Nor would he have a cigarette. It was Alexander who smoked, not he. Everything in Jeremy’s life was organised, arranged to the smallest detail. Alexander was more casual. At twenty past seven he would go down and knock on Inez’s door. Meanwhile, although tempted to go on thinking of ways, dramatic, significant, shocking, in which to dispose of the keyring and the lighter, he crushed these struggling thoughts, sat down in an armchair between the bay trees and took from the table Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the place where he had left off reading it marked with a green leather and gold leaf bookmark. It was more difficult than Nietzche but also more satisfying. Long ago he had taught himself to concentrate on the matter in hand, whatever that might be, and here it was that his mind and Alexander’s met.
At seventeen minues past seven, half an hour after he had put the lights on, he replaced the bookmark but this time ten pages on, took his glass into the kitchen and put it on the draining board, left a single lamp on and another in his small hall, picked up his keys and went downstairs. He rang Inez’s bell and after a short delay she opened the door on the chain. Very wise. Usually he simply gave a light tap on her door. She had expected her caller to be another tenant, someone she wouldn’t let in but would talk to on the doorstep, and she had left the television on. She took off the chain and, turning her back, quickly switched off the set.
He understood immediately what she had been doing. Nothing but some sort of car chase, gone in a flash, had been visible on the screen, but he saw the cassette sleeve on the shelf, on its spine a photograph of her late husband. Martin Ferry—Jeremy had never watched one of the productions he was in for more than five minutes but he recognised him from newspaper photographs. Inez was blushing. What a fool she must be, pathetic and sentimental, maundering on in this ridiculous way over a man who had been dead three years.
‘I’m so sorry to disturb you, Inez,’ he said in a voice which was perhaps too compassionate, for she gave him a faintly suspicious glance.
‘That’s all right, Jeremy. What can I do for you?’
‘It’s a bit awkward. But I came down intending to explain to you and I will.’
‘Would you like a drink?’
He shook his head. ‘May I sit down?’
‘Of course. You’re not coming on Wednesday, is that it? Belinda can’t get away?’
He had prepared his story and it was as well he had. Inez was looking annoyed—well, impatient. This was the right moment. ‘I’ll come straight to the point. Belinda and I have—well, not split up. Not quite that, though doubtless it will come. We’ve decided we both need’—he must get the absurd phrase right—‘some space,’ he said. ‘We need time to think about our situation. The fact is—I may as well tell you—she says I resent the time she spends with her mother and I couldn’t deny it. I said I didn’t want to be married to someone who always puts her mother before her husband.’
Inez nodded. ‘Her mother is going to live, then?’
‘It looks very much like it. Probably for years. What is that going to mean for Belinda and me? I believe in absolute loyalty between marriage partners, don’t you?’
‘I suppose I do.’
‘A woman should put her husband first.’
‘And a man his wife, surely?’
‘That goes without saying,’ said Jeremy.
‘Well, I’m sorry. I hope you can find a way to come together again. From what you’ve said, you seemed so well-suited.’
Inez was won over—or was she? Possibly it was only that she wanted to get back to her maudlin reliving of the past or whatever it was she got out of watching a dead man in a second-rate video. ‘Still, if I may come on my own on Wednesday, I’d love that.’
‘I don’t think so, Jeremy. I’m going to take this opportunity to go and see my sister. She hasn’t been well and I haven’t seen her for weeks.’
She didn’t smile or even look at him. Perhaps it was only that she was tired or the events of the day had frightened her. He had expected her to want to talk to him about them, discuss the implications, ask him what the police had said and be able to tell him perhaps what they had said to Cobbett and that girl with the Indian name. But she got up out of her chair, the most dismissive gesture that can be made to a guest. He had no choice but to leave and no choice had no place in his life programme. Choosing always played a big part in his existential philosophy. Hadn’t he chosen this second identity as a safety valve for his sanity? In only one respect was he without choice …
Outside, by now, it was quite dark, but nowhere in this immediate vicinity was an unlit place or space. Jeremy enjoyed absolute d
arkness. Even Hyde Park, not too far away, had lamps on at this hour, but most London squares had a garden in their centre that lay under a pall of blackness. Not Norfolk Square, which was too small, he thought as he reached it, turned southwards and crossed Sussex Gardens by the Monkey Puzzle pub. No moon tonight. The stars were always invisible up there in the dull reddish-black sky.
Sussex Street formed one side of Gloucester Square. It was far from brightly lit. No doubt the elite residents objected to chemical lighting on tall concrete stilts. That was for the poor, that was for council estates. Jeremy walked along the railings in the centre of the square until he came to a gate. Of course it was locked, it would be, and all the residents had keys. Choosing a corner the least overlooked by the windows in the tall terraces, he laid his raincoat over the spikes on top of the railings and climbed over.
Bushes and trees inside, a path going round a grassy area. These squares were all the same. Probably there was a seat. His eyes growing accustomed to the darkness, he walked along the path, found a seat and sat down. An icy chill from the stone crept up through his buttocks and his back, making him shiver. It was almost pain. The pleasure of being there overcame it. It was extremely unlikely that anyone would come into this garden now. Only in these quiet squares, under the trees in the scentless soundless dark, could he ever feel truly alone and at peace.
His thoughts turned to the keyring and the lighter. He could just send them to the police. That was what a lesser man would do. Wearing fine latex gloves, he could wipe them clean, drop them into a new hitherto untouched padded bag, do the label on a computer, and send them to Paddington Green Police Station. Once it would have been easy. Not now, with all these methods of detection. These days they could probably tell where the padded bag had been bought and where the label had, what sort of gloves had been worn and certainly through which post office it had been dispatched. Not the computer yet, though. As a computer consultant in his Kensington mews office, Alexander spent a good part of his time working towards the discovery of a method whereby forensics could isolate individual IT systems and thence the individual hand that had used them. A fortune awaited the inventor, if invented it could be. It would hardly do for him to discover it now …
Still, he wouldn’t send the objects to the police, he wouldn’t put them in other antique shops. Of course, he could drop them down a drain or even, without fear of detection, into a rubbish can. But this failed to satisfy something artistic in him—or was obviously less risky. He shivered, and not from the cold. Plant them on someone else? That fool Freddy Perfect or the idiot in the flat next to him? Fun but an over-the-top risk. He would have to borrow the spare keys from Inez’s office behind the shop and get them back again. He could do it but did he need the hassle?
Jeremy got up and walked round the garden in an anti-clockwise direction. Then he walked back clockwise. The square was very quiet. A car drove down one side, another down Sussex Street, but they were big expensive cars and they were driven slowly. He climbed the railings again and began to walk back by a very circuitous route that took him into Bryanston Square and up Seymour Place. It was in a mews off York Street that he had strangled Nicole Nimms, taken a cigarette from her bag and the lighter. She had been going home to the tiny house in the mews she shared with two other girls. This was the place, or rather, that was the place down there under the stone arch. He noticed a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of daffodils lying on the cobbles. Of course! Yesterday had been the first anniversary of her death. He hadn’t forgotten but it hadn’t meant much to him.
Minute by minute it seemed to be growing colder. The sky had cleared, the moon had come out. There would be a frost. He walked briskly up Seymour Place, turned left and took the Old Marylebone Road. A girl on her own came out of Harcourt Place, not looking nervous but walking fast towards the Edgware Road. He watched her progress, smiled, though to himself not her, when she looked twice over her shoulder to check his whereabouts. She was safe with him, if she did but know it. Whatever it was that his victims had which drew him to them, she lacked it; even close to her and in the dark, he knew that. It must be odd, awkward, to be a woman and afraid to be out when daylight was gone. But he couldn’t imagine being a woman. He could more easily have pictured himself as some fine animal, a noble dog or a beast of prey. The jaguar in Inez’s shop when it was a living hunter in the pride of its strength. Or even a Rottweiler?
The time was coming up to ten when he crossed into Sussex Gardens and turned down into Southwick Street. No one about, not a soul. It had still been lively in the Edgware Road, lights bright, crowds of teenagers everywhere, Middle Eastern men sitting outside the cafés in the cold, smoking hookahs, the Lebanese restaurants crowded and the little shops doing a brisk trade. Star Street was just as quiet. He preferred it here where all was still. He always had liked silence and calm. Look what had happened when, uncharacteristically, he went into a ‘nightspot’, a noisier place than anywhere one could think of. If he hadn’t, perhaps the cycle of deaths might never have begun …
A boy of about sixteen turned into Star Street ahead of him but on the other side. His origin was evidently somewhere in the Asian subcontinent, in the south probably, for his skin was a dark bronze, his shoulder-length hair black. He wore a pin-striped suit which was odd in itself. Just before he reached the turning that would take him into St Michael’s Street, he crossed the road and stood on the corner in the lamplight as if waiting for someone. Jeremy, as he came to the street door of Inez’s house, glanced across at him and saw that his finely chiselled face was more Caucasian in structure than any European face, the mouth thin-lipped, the cheekbones high, the nose long, straight and sharp. Their eyes met, the black ones and the pale mauvish-grey Jeremy looked away and went indoors.
Like the two young men in the Leopold and Loeb play, he told himself that Jeremy killed out of curiosity, to see what it felt like. But Rope was written before psycho-investigation of the human mind had had much impact on literature and it is doubtful if such a motive would convince today. Alexander knew that and although he went on giving this reason in inner colloquies, he supposed there must be something else as well. But what? If, of course, he had Repressed Memory Syndrome, if such a thing existed, he might never know. It would have to be fetched out of him. Yet he believed that in the event, say, of some male relative having abused him as a small child (a most unlikely eventuality considering his mother never let him out of her sight and managed to delay sending him to school till he was seven) or some nanny beating him in secret (he hadn’t had a nanny) or even his widowed mother neglecting him (she adored him and even more after his father’s death) he would know when he dug deep down. Much digging had been done and had yielded nothing.
Of his early childhood he had no memory, and from his extensive reading in psychiatry, he knew that it was in infancy that a trauma would occur. It had also taught him that few people had much conscious memory of events before they were three. But what event could there have been with his mother always watching over him? When, eventually, he went to school he had encountered no bullying, nor had his teachers used draconian methods.
Should he be looking for unhappy incidents with women? There had been none unless you counted his marriage. This had taken place when he and the girl were both in their second year at the University of Nottingham. She had said she was pregnant and in those days it was still obligatory, in such circumstances, to marry. No baby came. After a couple of months she claimed to have had a miscarriage. Alexander was so ignorant that he believed her but after a time he began to doubt as there had been no signs of pregnancy and no signs either of its coming to an end. As far as he could tell sexual relations had always been satisfactory and he would quite contentedly have settled for things going on as they were, even though he admitted to himself that he didn’t much like his wife or enjoy her company. But it was the sex she began to complain of and in an offensive insulting way, shouting at him that what happened was all to please him while he was indifferen
t to her feelings. Quarrels grew more frequent and after two years they separated.
Alexander went back to live with his mother. He took a series of jobs, all in computers, slowly climbing the ladder, and on one course he met a woman who became his girlfriend. She had a flat of her own, he moved in with her and for a while he was happy. His girlfriend was both more experienced than his wife had been and less demanding. But while he was with her he made a discovery about himself. He disliked touching and being touched. No doubt this phobia, failing, peculiarity, whatever it was, had contributed to the break-up of his marriage. He faced up to something else too: he had found that it was possible to have sex with a woman without touching her with his hands. Discussing this with his girlfriend was impossible for him to do and he wasn’t altogether surprised when she decided she preferred the boyfriend she had left for him and he was once more alone. This he found he didn’t at all mind. He liked the freedom and peace of being alone, and if he missed the home comforts his mother provided, he realised he couldn’t bury himself in a country village for the rest of his life. He moved to London and a flat in Hendon.
For computers and their complexities he had a special aptitude and when he was thirty he went back to university (not Nottingham) to get a degree in computer studies, a relatively new course subject. A much better job awaited him when he graduated and he began to make money. A knack for appearing genial and pleasant made him popular and he was asked to dinner parties. Acquaintances rang him up and asked him to charity receptions and fund-raising events. Underneath his warm exterior he remained cold and reclusive, and this, he told himself, was by choice. He bought a much bigger flat, in Chelsea this time.
