The Rottweiler (v5)

by Ruth Rendell

  He was too excited to eat much supper, just a scrambled egg on toast. The sun was setting, colouring the western sky over the park a soft orangey-pink. He wrapped up the spade in carrier bags and fastened them with elastic bands. Zulueta’s car wasn’t there but another one, which he recognised because Crippen was in the passenger seat, was further down the street. Will didn’t think much about it. He set off for Sixth Avenue on foot, enjoying the calm of the evening and the warmth which still lingered.

  One or perhaps two of the bags would do to put the treasure in. He wouldn’t need the spade any more, he’d have no further use for it, and if he ever wanted another, to work in their country garden, for instance, he’d have so much money he’d be able to buy all the tools he wanted. But he mustn’t rush ahead so fast. It might take more than one evening to find the treasure and unearth it. He tried to suppress his excitement but failed. Self-discipline was something he was no more able to exercise than was a child, so that by the time he reached the house the builders had been working on, the tension in his body was extreme, his hands were shaking and when he found himself in the back garden he began jumping up and down.

  There was work to be done. He must try to remember exactly where the treasure had been buried and he conjured up the film once more. The shed was over there—someone had mended it a bit since the film was made—and in front of it were a lot of flagstones, only the ones here were more broken and cracked, and there to the left of the shed was the strip of bare earth, just like here, and a bit further in, nearer the next-door wall, that was where they had dug to make the hole. Then he noticed something he hadn’t seen that first time. A piece of board and half a dozen bricks lay on the bare earth, more bricks than in the film, he thought, but that was unimportant.

  It was getting on for nine and most of the light had gone. Will had brought a torch, the lantern kind, and making sure no one was in the house to see him and no one, apparently, watching from next door, he switched it on and stood it, pointing downwards, on the eaves of the shed. Then he unwrapped the spade, carefully flattening and setting aside two of the plastic bags. They would serve for carrying the treasure home in. With another hasty glance at the house and the houses on either side, he set the spade to the heavy clayey soil and began to dig.

  By this time Crippen and Zulueta were inside the house, which they had entered by simply removing a flimsy baton, loosely nailed across the back door. They had put no lights on. Indeed, they couldn’t. The electricity supply was disconnected. Wary of using torches, they found the darkness impenetrable at first, but after a minute or two their eyes were used to it. Will’s own light supply gave them a perfect view of him and his endeavours. Young and very strong, he had soon dug a trench three feet long and a foot deep. He was turning towards the shed now, taking the torch and, on his knees, shining it into the cavity he had made. At this point Crippen turned to Zulueta and nodded. They made for the back door, put on their own powerful torches and advanced on Will.

  He was preoccupied in wondering why, having dug this far, there was no sign of the treasure, not a jewel or gleam of gold. Two blinding beams of light appeared from nowhere, directed first into his trench, then on to his face as he turned round, rising slowly to his feet.

  ‘William Charles Cobbett,’ said Crippen in a loud frightening voice, ‘I am arresting you on a charge of entering upon these premises for an unlawful purpose and concealing a body.’ He would simply have said a charge of murder if he had seen the girl’s corpse, if he even knew where it was. ‘You are not obliged to say anything …’

  The caution completed with more ominous words, Will said nothing. This was because he could think of nothing to say as he had no idea what was going on. Completely bewildered, he looked from one policeman to the other and, still clutching his spade, decided to run for it. It was, in fact, hardly a decision, more an instinctive reaction and the only thing to do. Somehow, he knew these men wanted to punish him and if you could, you escaped punishment. You ran. He ran to the side of the house, squeezed past the cement mixer and into the arms of Crippen’s reinforcements, three officers from the uniformed branch, who had just left their car.

  He put up no more resistance. They manhandled him into one of the cars between Zulueta and an officer in the Metropolitan police uniform which had always, since he was little, overawed him. One of the ladies at the home, when she took a group of children out, used to say to them that if they weren’t good that policeman over there would get them. In all innocence, Will repeated this one day to Monty. After that, for some reason, they never saw the lady again, but it was too late and he was left with a permanent fear of men who wore dark blue with silver buttons and blue and white chequered caps. The man in the car next to him was dressed like that and Will soon became rigid with fear.

  In a bleak room at the police station they sat him at a metal table and the one called Zulueta, who couldn’t be a policeman because he didn’t wear a uniform, offered him a cigarette. Will had never smoked and he wanted to say no, thank you, but he couldn’t get any words out. Crippen came in, Zulueta pressed a switch on something a bit like Keith’s radio and said, ‘Interview commenced at twenty-two thirty hours. Present are William Charles Cobbett, Detective Inspector Brian Crippen, Detective Sergeant Finlay Zulueta and Police Constable Mark Heneghan.’

  Will thought it wasn’t so frightening because there was no one else there, but when he looked over his shoulder he saw a policeman standing just inside the door. He wasn’t wearing a hat but he had the uniform on and a belt with something that looked like a heavy stick hanging from it. The sight made Will shake, though his body was stiff and tense.

  ‘Where is she?’ Crippen asked him. He said it with a sigh as if he were very tired.

  Will didn’t know who ‘she’ was. When he tried to ask, the words wouldn’t come. The one in the uniform brought him a glass of water and Will drank some of it but his voice didn’t come back.

  Crippen asked him the same question, using the same phrase and then he said, ‘Where is Jacky Miller? What have you done with her?’

  All Will could do was shake his head. Zulueta asked him what he had done with a girl’s body and then wanted to know where the girl had been, alive or dead, when he took off her earrings. When did he put the earrings in the shop? Was her body in the shed in Sixth Avenue? (They knew it wasn’t because they had searched it before Will got there.) He couldn’t answer any of this, not just because of the absence of voice but on account of not knowing what any of it meant. He sat silent, not looking at any of them, but keeping his eyes fixed on a hole in the skirting board. It looked like the kind of hole a mouse might make. Will liked mice, though he had mostly seen them only on television, and would have liked one to put its head out while he was watching. If he kept on looking at the hole and thinking about the mouse, perhaps they would let him go home.

  ‘Keeping quiet like this’, said Crippen, ‘isn’t going to do you any good, you know.’ Why at least hadn’t the man asked for a solicitor? Well, he wasn’t going to tell him about his right to one or the one phone call he could make, if he wouldn’t ask. ‘You’re just making things worse for yourself.’

  Zulueta wanted to know if Will had been digging a grave. Who was the grave for? If it wasn’t for Jacky Miller, what was the purpose of it?

  If Will had been able to speak he would have told them about the treasure. Even if it meant sharing it with them. But he couldn’t get a word out. Perhaps it was best, his surest way of keeping the treasure for himself and Becky. He went on staring at the hole but not thinking of the mouse any more, thinking about the treasure. Why hadn’t he found it? Where was it? Could someone else have been there and dug it up? He didn’t think so, for the earth had been hard as iron, untouched by a spade for years …

  Two hours went by. They had tea and biscuits. While they ate and drank they bombarded him with questions. He couldn’t eat or drink anything. It was after one in the morning when Zulueta said to the machine that was a bit like a rad
io that the interview was terminated. Trembling because he was handed over to a real policeman, the one who had stood inside the door, Will was taken to a cell with a bed in it and a table and a covered bucket. Glad to be alone, he sat on the bed, then lay down.

  It was rather cold. He pulled the thin blanket over him. Tears trickled out of his closed eyes and he squeezed them more tightly shut. He was too big to cry. In the home they used to say that. A great big boy like you crying, we can’t have that, they used to say. The tears dried on his cheeks as he fell asleep, thinking of Becky, knowing Becky would come and please come soon. Let him wake up and find Becky there, ready to take him back to her house, and don’t, please don’t, let the policeman come back.

  CHAPTER 14

  Four of them were in Anwar’s room in St Michael’s Street, discussing the proposed break-in and passing round a spliff prepared by Keefer Latouche. Keefer was thought the most highly skilled at filling and rolling joints, on the grounds that he was older and had once been threatened with jail ‘next time’ by DC Jones for being in possession of a white powder. For about five minutes Jones thought the powder was cocaine, but it turned out to be a substance for dissolving in water to treat splitting nails and the property of Keefer’s then girlfriend. The other two people were a black boy called Flint Edwards and the girl, who had been Keefer’s girlfriend, the manicurophile, and was now Flint’s. Her name was Julitta O’Managhan, pronounced O’Moin. Keefer, at eighteen, was the eldest and therefore known to the others as Grandad.

  ‘So I reckon on May sixth for B Day,’ said Anwar, who never smoked anything.

  Keefer and Flint looked at him uncomprehendingly but Julitta said, ‘My auntie’s got a bidet in her bathroom.’

  Already high on his mixture, Keefer and Flint rocked about laughing, into which Julitta joined, rolling about on the floor. Keefer began tickling her under her arms and round her waist.

  ‘You take your dirty white hands off her,’ said Flint, laughing no more.

  Anwar looked at them despairingly but he wasn’t one to let things slide. ‘Will you shut the fuck up, the lot of you? Or do I have to make you?’

  ‘You and whose network?’ said Flint but he said it half-heartedly and, sitting up again, took a long indrawn gulp on the joint.

  ‘I call it B Day,’ began Anwar, already at sixteen an accomplished chairman, ‘because that’s the day we’re going to do the job, the break-in. B for break-in, see, as I don’t suppose there’s one of you fuckers can spell. The folks’ll all be out all day. It’s what’s called the Spring Holiday, right? Come over here.’ He had moved to the window. Pulling down the sash and letting in the mild night air made Keefer double up with coughing. ‘We’ll go in the back way, providing Grandad lasts that long. I’ve drawn a plan and I’ll show you how in a minute. The burglar alarm number is 2647 and I want you to memorise that—if Grandad’s shit hasn’t fried your brains.’

  They all contemplated the backs of houses in the parallel street. Large old sycamore and plane trees intervened, making clumps and fronds of darkness between this window and the bright amber rectangles in the brick expanse. Those who could interpret what they saw would have detected from the pairs of fiery yellow points in the leafy mass below a dozen cats squatting and watching.

  ‘We going in one of them windows?’ asked Flint.

  ‘By then I shall have a key to the back door.’ Anwar didn’t specify how he would acquire it and no one asked. They knew that if he said he’d have a key he would. ‘Me and Ju’ll do the top floor, Flint can do the middle—and remember, nothing from Flat 2—Grandad and me Flat 1. I’ll give him a hand when I’ve done the top.’ He rounded on Julitta and barked at her, ‘What’s the alarm number?’

  ‘I do not give a fuck, as all alarms suck,’ said Julitta, a reply which prompted screams of laughter, as her rhymes and jokes invariably did.

  ‘Oh, what’s the use?’ Anwar slammed down the window, the noise scattering the cats. ‘Fucking moggies,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s best if you don’t remember. It’s enough that I know it. There’s a week to go to the sixth. Balaclavas or black stockings’ll do. Trainers, obviously.’ He eyed the four-inch heels on Julitta’s cowboy boots with disapproval and turned his gaze with equal distaste on Keefer’s hands, busy with a fresh mix. ‘Meet again here Sunday night. On the sixth we go in at noon sharp, so it may be just possible for you lot to keep off the grass for the morning. And the juice.’ This was for Flint, a well-known vodka connoisseur. ‘You can all fuck off now. I’m going to bed.’

  Shocked into forgetting her role as comedienne, Julitta said, ‘What’s with you, An? It’s not midnight.’

  ‘I’m younger than you, remember? I’m a growing boy and I need my sleep.’ He yawned hugely to prove it, hustled them towards the door, pushing at the air with his hands like someone driving away a brood of hens. Down the uncarpeted woodworm-eaten staircase they clattered, shouting and shrieking, waking up the tenants whose rooms they passed, blowing cannabis fumes under doors. They tumbled out into the street and into Keefer’s filthy white van with the notice about not cleaning it in the rear window. Before moving off, Keefer turned on the radio to a garage channel at full volume and opened all the windows.

  Anwar closed his door very quietly. First he made himself a cup of cocoa with full-cream milk, his favourite drink. Leaving it to cool a little, he took off the suit he wore, dark grey with a pinstripe, and hung it on a hanger in the cupboard. His white shirt he dropped on the floor for the laundry tomorrow. He possessed no jeans, T-shirts, leather jackets or boots.

  Aged sixteen but looking younger, he was the only son of a doctor who had come to London from Bombay when a boy, and his wife, a teacher in a sixth-form college. They also had three daughters and, being comfortably off, lived in a large detached house in Brondesbury Park, not far from the premises of the group practice of which Dr Ghosh was a member. Anwar, his parents had been told, had a phenomenally high IQ, was certainly tipped for Oxford and would very probably manage ten GCSEs and sit for his A Levels a year early.

  But that had been eighteen months before and the GCSEs had not been taken. It was uncertain whether the friends he associated with had corrupted Anwar or he had corrupted them. His parents didn’t enquire because most details of the life he led were unknown to them. Of course, they were aware of his truancy because his school told them about it and they knew it was impossible to say if he had fallen behind in his work because he was seldom there to do any. But the room he rented in St Michael’s Street, Paddington, and the successful crimes he and his cronies committed, of all that they were ignorant. He was so polite to them, so clean in his person, so clever and talented, that apart from his seldom attending school, there seemed no fault to find with him, yet both of them remonstrated with him continually about this failure.

  He must go to a university. It would be absurd if he, of all his contemporaries, a natural for Oxford or Cambridge, should miss out on this vital stage of education while even the dimmest C-streamers were off to some former polytechnic somewhere. There was even a period when Dr Ghosh drove him to school and parked at the gate to see that he didn’t come out again. Anwar, naturally, got out through the gym, across the car park and, lying very low, by way of someone’s back garden. All that was a year ago. Once he became sixteen no one could compel him to attend school. He wouldn’t even have to live at home and he could get married if he liked—but of course he didn’t like. Almost the only thing he couldn’t do was vote, and who cared about that?

  At first he had explained his overnight absences by saying he was staying with a friend. Perhaps they only believed that because they wanted to. They wanted to think he did something ordinary and normal, that other boys did. It wasn’t as if he never came home. He often did for a night or two, a tallish boy, very thin, immaculate in one of his dark suits, smelling of the coconut soap he used in his shower. Mena Ghosh would happily have washed his shirts and underwear had he brought them to her but he had them all done at a laundry in t
he Edgware Road. His parents were sociable and when they went to a party or a dinner he would often accompany them, courteously addressing elderly relatives as ‘auntie’ and ‘uncle’. He helped his sisters with their homework and escorted them to friends’ houses if they went after dark. He always had plenty of money.

  Dr Ghosh told himself that his son was prudent, well able to manage the modest allowance he made him. But the handmade shoes made him wonder and so did the ring with what looked like a genuine diamond in it. Now Oxford had gone by the board, he spent a lot of the time Anwar was at home in nagging him at least to ‘do something vocational’. Becoming a plumber or an electrician would at least be a means of his earning a living. Anwar always went off again after a couple of days. He had ‘some friends’ in Bayswater, he said. This was quite true, for Julitta and Flint had a room at the Sussex Gardens end of Spring Street. His own place, as he referred to it among his cronies, he rented along with half a dozen other people, each of whom had single rooms, from a Turkish man. Mr Sheket ran a sweatshop in the basement, where fifteen women worked at sewing machines in twilight conditions for twelve hours a day.

  No word had ever come from James. For the first few days after he had gone, leaving her on the doorstep with Will, she had felt only a bitter resentment. What a shallow conventional man he must be to abandon her simply because, through no fault of her own, she had a relative who appeared to be a street sleeper. To go like that, without even waiting for an explanation and without any promise of getting in touch. He had been frightened of Will, she thought. And not only that. He had been wary of any closer involvement with her, fearing that any at all might lead to his being drawn into some kind of caring for Will, helping him, perhaps even spending money on him. For a little while she managed contempt for someone who could be so selfish and so cowardly.