by Ruth Rendell
Once, after he had been to see his mother, he drove into Nottingham. It was the first time he had been back since he broke up with his girlfriend, years and years before. He was simply curious to see in which ways the city had changed. Going to clubs in London had never interested him. His life was quiet, solitary, his entertainment the theatre, the opera, a little select television, reading and shopping for the expensive things he needed for the mews house he had bought not far south of Kensington Gardens. But, just as he had been curious to see this city which had been his metropolis when he was young, so now the bright lights and the noise, while they repelled him, also exercised over him a strange attraction. Visiting what he believed must be called a ‘nightspot’ would do no harm.
This was about two years ago. He found himself in a club that was underground, a sordid flashy place where girls did titillating semi-strips and sat on men’s knees. He made it plain enough he didn’t want any approaches from the girl he later came to know as Gaynor Ray. The night dragged on, he was bored and tired but still he stayed. His behaviour became incomprehensible to him.
At midnight he started serious drinking, something he had never really done, not even when he was student. Just before three he left, went back to the Mercedes, which he had parked in a makeshift car park adjacent to a building site, and took a blanket from the boot, intending to sleep there. He stood for a while on the pavement, in the belief that the night air would take away the dizziness and the headache he was beginning to feel. Three girls came out of the club. They were the dancers going home. One, only one, of them was the girl for him. Why? How did he know? They were all young, pretty enough, provocative in the club, weary now. The one standing nearest to him was the one for him, the only possibility, a girl who must bear some invisible sign, a scar or branding or badge, but a mark that no one could see. Even he thought he couldn’t see it, he wasn’t sure, but he knew he could feel it.
A terrible excitement seized him. He could feel his blood pressure shoot up, distend his veins and drum in his head. Sweat broke out on his chest and soaked his hands. If anyone—well, a doctor, a psychiatrist—had asked him to describe how he felt he would have said it was as if he were going to explode. He watched the girls. No, he watched her.
She said goodnight to the other two and came in his direction alone. She stopped, smiled at him, said, ‘Are you staying in a nice hotel?’
‘Maybe,’ he said.
‘Then you’ll want to take me with you.’
‘Get in,’ he said.
She got into the passenger seat rather elegantly and in practised fashion, displaying long legs in high-heeled shoes. From her bag she had taken a silver cross on a chain and she fastened it round her neck, as if it were an amulet, a protecting charm. He came over to her side as if to shut the door, leaned over her instead, grabbed the chain in both hands and drew the two sides together, crossing his hands, pulling as tight as she could. Even then his fingers didn’t touch her skin. It never even occurred to him that the chain might break, and it did so only when she was dead and her prominent blue eyes, more prominent by then, stared hopelessly at him. Her face had gone blue, the way they said in books that faces did. He put the broken chain in his pocket, pulled the girl out of the car, threw her on to the building site and, using a spade workmen had left there, began covering her with shovelfuls of bricks and rubble and concrete dust. There was no one about. His had been the last vehicle in the car park.
It would probably have been quite safe to stay there all night, but he didn’t. Drunk as he was, he drove off for about a mile, found a silent suburban street and settled down there, sleeping until eight in the morning. The footfalls of a boy delivering papers woke him. He bought a bottle of water in a corner shop and drove back to the building site to check. Workmen had begun unloading rubble from a dumper truck on to the pile he had begun. A piece of luck. He drove back to London. Only when he was in the Chelsea flat did he look at the chain with the silver cross attached to it, but he came to no resolve or plan as a result.
Nicole Nimms had been the result of just such another inexplicable impulse, such a thunderous upheaval of his whole body—of Jeremy’s body—specifically directed at this one and only to her. When he thought about their deaths at his hands and analysed what he had done, he broke out into a sweat and had to restrain himself from screaming aloud. It was as an escape from this that he had become Jeremy Quick. Being called the Rottweiler by newspapers and, following their example, the public, made him angry. He had never bitten anyone. He doubted if he was physically capable of biting into human flesh, for this was touching of the worst kind. He would vomit before he did so. The idea of himself as a mad sadist who bit his victims was made worse by the fact that he hadn’t wanted to kill, he hadn’t meant to. Why had he? And an equally mystifying question, why had it happened to him so comparatively late in life? Why had ‘it’ waited until he was in his forties?
Until he knew the answers, he would go on, because knowing was the only way to stop.
CHAPTER 10
‘You can learn a lot,’ said Freddy Perfect, ‘from doing what I do. I mean, pottering about in shops like this one. Notice I never said “junk” shops, Inez. Antique shops. Yes, like I say, you can learn a lot from just quietly examining little bits and pieces. This vase, for instance, and this little box.’
‘Yes?’ Inez was reading in the Guardian about the continuing search for Jacky Miller or her body. ‘Put that box down, please, Freddy. It’s fragile.’
‘I shan’t harm it. I’ve got very delicate fingers, Ludo always says. I’m thinking of becoming an auctioneer, I reckon I may have a talent for it.’
‘Possibly.’
The police had a theory and Jacky’s parents another. It appeared that she had been an Internet enthusiast, had exchanged e-mails including photographs with a man the police had tried to get in touch with and failed. He too was missing from home. Was it possible she had left of her own accord and gone somewhere to meet this man? In that case, said Jacky’s father, why not tell her mother, who wouldn’t have tried to stop her, she was over eighteen and a free agent. His theory and his wife’s was that she had gone on holiday to some resort on the Red Sea. This was less far-fetched than it sounded at first. A friend had wanted her to go with her and two others on a package tour but Jacky’s mother had, in this case, done her best to stop her. With the present situation in Israel, it was too dangerous to pay a visit to the region. On this question Jacky had been mutinous, even saying she would go anyway, though her parents had heard no more about it.
In spite of this, the newspaper had several articles on the subjects of serial killers, young women as victims, parallels between the Rottweiler, Jack the Ripper and the Yorkshire Ripper, What Was To Be Done About It? and the possibility of reintroduction of the death penalty. Earlier, Jeremy Quick, drinking his tea, had brought more doubts to Inez’s mind concerning his true character by remarking that he was all in favour of execution for those guilty of murder.
Zeinab arrived at the same moment as a phone call came from Detective Inspector Crippen to tell her to expect Zulueta and Jones at ten a.m. in quest of the full names and addresses of her assistant, those of her tenants the police hadn’t yet interviewed and any other regular callers at the shop.
‘I’ve nothing to hide,’ said Freddy when she told him.
Zeinab had a new nose stud. This one was very obviously a real diamond. When she moved her head, tossing back her long black hair, the lights reflected from the diamond flitted up and down the walls. ‘I couldn’t say the same for Morton. He won’t want them around his place in Eaton Square.’
‘That’s supposed to be the best address in London. Is that where you’re going to live when you’re Mrs Phibling?’
‘If,’ said Zeinab, ‘and it’s a big if. Don’t you let Inez see you waving that Meissen plate about, that’s two hundred years old.’
Inez put the paper down. ‘That’s enough, Freddy. Now, I’ll be over at my sister’s tomo
rrow evening so if you and Ludmila are going out I’ll give you the burglar alarm number. I’ll write it down.’
‘That’s a new departure,’ said Freddy with the air of one about to begin an interesting conversation. He took the scrap of paper with the number on it out of Inez’s hand. ‘I’ve never known you to put that alarm on in all the years I’ve—I mean, Ludo’s—been here.’
‘Less than two, in fact. Off you go now, Ludmila will be wondering where you are.’
Ambling reluctantly towards the back of the shop, Freddy was still only halfway there when Zulueta and Jones arrived. As the least respectable-looking person present, he was homed in on by the hatchet-faced Zulueta. ‘And you are?’
‘Mr Perfect,’ said Freddy, picking up a piece of Japanese porcelain and studying it dreamily.
‘Are you trying to be funny?’
Suppressing a laugh, Inez said, ‘I assure you, that really is his name.’ But as soon as she had spoken, she wondered if she knew that for a fact. How did she know any of them—always excepting Will—were who they said they were?
‘Well, Mr Perfect …’ Zulueta put a wealth of irony into the name. ‘Well.’ He referred to the notebook in his hand. ‘What might your full name be?’
‘Frederick James Windlesham Perfect.’
‘You live on the second floor, am I right?’
‘No, you’re not,’ said Freddy. ‘That’s where my lady friend lives. Naturally, I am a frequent visitor.’
‘Then where do you live?’
‘Twenty-seven Roughton Road, Hackney, London, E nine.’
That was the first Inez had heard of it. Perhaps he had made it up on the spur of the moment. There was probably some penalty for giving the police a false address. Now for Zeinab who was looking distinctly uneasy. Jones hastened Freddy’s departure by opening the interior door and holding it open for him to pass slowly through.
‘Your full name, please?’
‘Zeinab Suzanne Munro Sharif.’
Where did the ‘Suzanne Munro’ part come from, Inez thought. Simply an invention, perhaps. But when Jones asked for Zeinab’s home address her expression became rebellious.
‘I don’t know what you want that for. It’s none of it nothing to do with me. I haven’t been strangling girls with silver chains.’
‘You’re not accused of anything, Miss Sharif. This is just for routine purposes.’
‘If I tell you, you won’t go around there involving my dad? He’ll kill me if you do that.’
‘It’s merely for our records and absolutely confidential.’
Inez already had an address for Zeinab on her books. In case she came up with a different version, she listened with interest as Zeinab gave a number in Redington Road, Hampstead. It was the same one as her assistant had given Inez when she first came to work for her. A fine address near the west side of Hampstead Heath, if not quite up to Eaton Square.
‘Now, about the gentleman you said was your fiancé …’
‘He is my fiancé. And I’m not telling you where he lives. You’ll have to ask him.’
She looked very flushed and rather dishevelled from running her hands through her hair. While Inez gave Zulueta the names of a few regular customers but refused to do the same with their addresses, Zeinab began combing her hair and restoring her make-up in front of the gilt-framed mirror. The girl was certainly hiding something, though what Inez couldn’t tell. Did everyone she knew—always excepting Will, her sister in Highgate and a few friends—practise deception? Jeremy Quick probably, Zeinab and Freddy certainly. Ludmila with her variable accent and her claims of Russian descent, very likely. How about Rowley Woodhouse? She had once had a man pointed out to her across the street and been told by Zeinab that was who he was. But he hadn’t crossed over to speak to her or indeed taken any notice at all of her. Did that mean you had to be … well, have learning difficulties before you could be transparently honest? Was she herself a deceiver?
Absolutely not, she thought as she closed the street door Zulueta and Jones had left swinging open on their departure. Then she thought of the videos, concealed from all visitors, the television switched off when someone arrived and, once or twice, the lies she had told as to what she had been watching when Jeremy or Becky called. With Will alone had she been honest …
He had spent Friday evening at Becky’s and the whole of Sunday. She was so demoralised and so weary that when he asked, while eating his supper in front of the television on Friday evening, if he could come to lunch on Sunday, she lacked the strength to say no. It had always been unlikely that James would phone her, would ever phone her again, but a shred of hope remained and she clung to that, while at the same time foreseeing her embarrassment over Will, her prevarications and her pretences, if he did.
Will’s pleasure in being with her, and especially in being allowed to come back two days later, went some way to consoling her. During the course of Sunday afternoon she had gone into the kitchen to make tea and, standing there waiting for the kettle to boil, she had seen Will come out of the living room and pause in the hall on his way to the bathroom. He opened the study door and looked inside. Of course, he had often not only looked inside the study but been in there, yet it seemed to her that this scrutiny of the room was different. She was sure he was making an assessment of the place, saying to himself that a single bed could easily be put in there without much disturbing the rest of the furniture. Why shouldn’t it become his bedroom?
Pouring water on the teabags, lifting the large chocolate fudge cake out of the fridge, she rehearsed silently what she would say if he asked her. I need to work in there, Will, sometimes as late as midnight I have things to do in there. You know I have to earn my living, don’t you, Will, the same as you do, you know that. It sounded feeble. It sounded like what it was, someone desperately snatching at excuses.
In fact, Will had been thinking somewhat along those lines. But Becky was wrong when she calculated he might ask her for the room or even that he might suggest it to himself as a possibility. The presence of the desk, the chairs, the computer and its attachments, the photocopier and shredder made it clear, as far as he was concerned, that there was no room for him. Besides, she had told him so and what Becky said was his law. Poor Becky hadn’t enough money to share her home with him.
A couple of weeks before, he had been thinking that when he had the treasure all would be changed, he and she could share the money, buy their house, live together for ever and ever. He had written ‘Sixth Avenue’ on the back of an envelope, which had had a pizza restaurant advertisement in it. In order to do so, he had asked Inez how to spell it and had painstakingly printed the words with a ballpoint pen. It was to show people he asked in case they didn’t understand.
But now he had almost lost hope of finding the place. He had asked everyone he knew and shown them the envelope, and they all said Sixth Avenue was in New York or ‘some other place in America.’ At first he hadn’t accepted that. Reasoning wasn’t something Will was really capable of. Cause and effect eluded him and he had never ventured into the mystery of the deductive process. If someone like Jeremy Quick had said to him all numbered avenues are in America, Sixth Avenue is a numbered avenue, therefore Sixth Avenue is in America, he would probably have laughed and agreed but he wouldn’t have known what it was about. Without the need for any of that, he now sadly and reluctantly half accepted it. One thing kept his doubt going. That was the sound of the police sirens. It had to be somewhere here because the sirens were the ones he heard lying in bed at night. He heard them making that noise, braying and yodelling, as police cars or ambulances or fire engines roared down the Edgware Road or charged along Sussex Gardens.
The difficulty was that none of those other people he had asked had seen the film. He had tried to get Keith to see it and he tried again on Monday while they were sitting on the floor in the Ladbroke Grove flat, eating their sandwiches.
‘I can’t go out in the evenings, Will, I can’t leave the wife alone with th
e kids when she’s had them all day.’
‘They could go too,’ said Will.
‘No, they couldn’t. You don’t know what boys of two and three are like. And we can’t keep asking Kim to babysit.’ He paused to see if Will showed signs of embarrassment at his sister’s name but there was no reaction. ‘I reckon she’s a bit disappointed she hasn’t heard a word from you since you two went to the pictures.’
Keith thought Will’s silence and concentration on the Kit-Kat he had brought with him in his lunch box a sign of shame and awkwardness. He always overrated his companion’s mental capacity. Having an almost superstitious fear of anything approaching brain damage, he would never have encouraged his sister to go out with Will if he had truly understood his limitations.
‘Well, if you’re worrying you’ve upset her you just give her a bell and I reckon you’ll be surprised.’
They packed up at four. Rain had begun and, as soon as Keith started the van, began to lash against the windscreen. In the Harrow Road he remembered an errand which had slipped his mind. ‘I told the wife I’d bring in a cut loaf and a pound of tomatoes. If I squeeze the van in here I’ll leave you to move it if the warden turns up. It’s a double yellow line.’
Will had passed his driving test with no trouble five years before. A short while later the written test was introduced, a measure which would have precluded him from ever having a licence. He was an efficient driver who wished he had more chances at the wheel. Now he half hoped the traffic warden would come so that he could take the van round the block while he waited for Keith.
