The Rottweiler (v5)

by Ruth Rendell

  She and Jeremy Quick were alone in the house throughout Sunday and, more significantly, over Sunday night. This had never happened before; it made Inez uneasy. She hadn’t previously understood how reassuring was the presence of Will Cobbett and Freddy and Ludmila between her and him, but the last time she had thought about it she had had no reason to distrust Jeremy. Some would say she was giving the matter undue prominence. After all, he had done no more than invent a girlfriend and her mother, and fill into the story their biographical and circumstantial details, no more than recoil from her touch on his arm. Put like that, it amounted to very little. Hadn’t these women been dreamt up simply to avoid accepting her invitations? Still, she told herself, as she got ready for bed, normal men in their forties didn’t fantasise in this way and talk about their fantasies as if they were real. If he told her, a mere acquaintance, surely he must have told other people as well. And if he fantasised Belinda and her mother, how much of the rest of his life was a manufactured story, a lie?

  He was an accountant, he said, and he went to his place of business on a tube line from Paddington. He had a mother, he had never been married, he possessed no car. Some of that might be true and some of it not but she had no way of knowing. Sitting up in bed, she found herself unable to concentrate on the novel she had bought in paperback. Jeremy was up there—she had heard him come in from his evening walk an hour ago—but she had heard no other sound from him. The name he called himself by might not be his real one. For the first time she wondered if she should attach any importance to the fact that while Ludmila paid her rent by cheque and Will’s was paid in the same way by Becky, Jeremy’s always came in cash, in fifty- and twenty-pound notes. It could simply be designed to enable her to avoid declaring it to the Inland Revenue—something she had never done—but on the other hand, there was a possibility he paid in this way because ‘Jeremy Quick’ was not the name on his bank account.

  She passed a restless night. Between her and sleep kept intruding the idea that he was not asleep but waiting and listening some fifteen feet above her bed. Of course, she knew very well that night terrors and other products of a heightened imagination mostly disappear in the morning, but knowing that never made the fear vanish and it didn’t now. Fortunately, at this time of year darkness endured for only a few hours; it was light by half past four and she slept a little. Making her coffee at eight and swallowing two aspirins, she heard Jeremy come downstairs and the soft click of the front door as he closed it quietly out of consideration for her.

  Never before had she watched one of her tenants from her window but she watched Jeremy now, her mug of coffee in her hand. It was a surprise not to see him head for the tube at Paddington or Edgware Road but walk up Bridgnorth Street. He was wearing his dark-green sports jacket and carrying a suitcase, though he had said he was going to his mother’s only for the day. She lived in Leicestershire, so Inez would have expected him to get the Circle line tube or, failing that, a taxi, to King’s Cross. A taxi with its light up, a very unusual sight at this hour, came towards him along Bridgnorth Street but he didn’t hail it. He must intend to walk to King’s Cross, quite a long way if you were carrying what looked like a heavy case.

  By now Inez was very interested but there seemed no prospect of finding answers to her questions as within a moment he would have reached the far end. Instead, as she was about to move away, he turned left up Lyon Street. Was he going to call for someone? A real girlfriend? Some friend who would also be visiting Jeremy’s mother? He had disappeared from view and now she would never know. But she continued to stand there, sipping her coffee, soothed by the emptiness and early-morning silence. The sky was a pale blue sprinkled with tiny spots of cloud, the sun weak and distant. A cat crossed the road soundlessly, stood up on lean hindlegs to examine the contents of a litter bin. The newsagent’s boy emerged from Bridgnorth Street, pushing his trolley laden with newspapers, when a car came out of Bridgnorth Street and headed for the Edgware Road. It was followed by another, this time from different side turning further up Star Street and nearer Norfolk Square, going slowly in the same direction. Jeremy Quick was at the wheel.

  Afterwards, Inez thought she couldn’t have sworn in court that it was he but still she knew it was. The man driving wore a dark-green jacket, he had Jeremy’s profile and Jeremy’s sleek mouse-coloured hair. Of course, she would never have to swear to it anywhere. She watched until his car too had turned into the Edgware Road and then she went thoughtfully back to the kitchen. By eleven she was ready to leave for her sister’s, having spent most of the intervening time, while she was having her bath and dressing, in speculating as to what Jeremy was up to. It was almost understandable that a man might invent possession of a car when he hadn’t actually got one, nearly inconceivable for anyone to say he hadn’t a car when he had—and a large, high-powered Mercedes at that. And say he couldn’t drive?

  Was it Jeremy who had been into the garden in her absence and when he came back, turned the key not one and a half times but once only? He had denied it but that obviously meant nothing. She checked the back door and the key again, and put on the burglar alarm. As its braying died away, she walked across the road to the car she made no secret of possessing and drove up to Highgate.

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘Easy-peasy,’ said Anwar to himself as he climbed over the wall between the garden of the house where his room was and that of Inez’s. There was nothing covert in the way he did this. He knew better than that. Over his suit trousers and shirt he wore a pair of paint-stained workman’s overalls—he had spent an enjoyable hour daubing on the paint himself—he carried a bucket coated with dried cement and a roller, and used a ladder to help him. His story of sizing up the situation prior to an exterior redecoration job he had ready if anyone questioned him, but no one would. They were all watching the football at this hour of a Bank Holiday afternoon and, although it was bright sunshine, some of them had drawn the curtains of the windows behind which were their televisions.

  Ever the artist, Anwar stood for a moment clutching his paint roller and contemplating the back of Inez’s house just in case some nosy neighbour happened not to think soccer the most vital ingredient of British life and looked out. No one did. He inserted his key in the lock on the back door and opened it. A nasty thought had come to him that in the time intervening between his returning Inez’s key and today, some prudent busybody might have attached bolts to the top and bottom of that door. The ease with which the lock yielded set his mind at rest. Her key wasn’t even there on the other side to be poked through.

  The moment the door gave and he set foot over the threshold the alarm started braying. It was on the wall just inside the street door. Anwar punched in two-six-four-seven and the noise stopped. He listened. The house being part of a terrace, neighbours on either side might have heard the alarm but if they had, the noise it made being of such short duration, they would only think one of the tenants had come in, set it going and almost immediately turned it off. There was no key to the interior door into the shop. Anwar went in, opened Inez’s desk and extracted what he had hardly dared to hope would be found so easily, a key to each flat in the building.

  His team were to come singly and as he stood there waiting, Julitta rang the bell. Anwar let her in and two minutes later, Keefer. Flint came last, after fifteen minutes, just in case anyone might be watching and wondering why Inez was suddenly entertaining all these young people.

  By prearrangement, Anwar himself was to do the top floor where the ‘diamond geezer’ lived, Julitta Inez’s flat, Flint the shop and Keefer the two flats on the middle floor. Those were the least important. To Anwar’s disgust, Keefer smelt of the forbidden cannabis and couldn’t be trusted with anything significant. If he had had to confide in Freddy, Anwar had decided to promise him and Ludmila that their place would be left inviolate, but there was no need for it, the back door key having practically dropped into his outstretched hand. Therefore Freddy was as vulnerable as the other tenants. Not t
hat he was likely to possess anything worth taking, but Ludmila might. After Anwar had made an unkind remark about him looking even older than his years, his brains fried beyond saving, Keefer was told to put on his gloves and get going.

  Also gloved, Anwar went upstairs. The man called Quick might be wealthy but at first glance he seemed to have little worth taking. The tall teakwood racks were full of CDs but none of them the sort of music favoured by Anwar and his team. He left them. Drawers were rather a disappointment, though there was a driving licence in one of them in the name of Alexander Gibbons. This, along with the gold watch he found on the dresser in the bedroom, he put into his pocket. No cash anywhere. Then he opened the tall cupboard in the kitchen, looking merely for a tin with change in it, the kind of thing you keep for paying the milkman. Instead, he found Jeremy’s strongbox. You had to be really good at guesswork to open a safe like that without actually breaking into it, a difficult if not quite impossible task. The combination might be the man’s birth date—it usually was something like that—or the last four digits of his phone number. Or it might not. The only thing to do was reason that it wouldn’t be there and locked up unless it contained something of value. God, it was heavy! The carrier bag he found to put it in split as soon as he lifted it off the floor, so he took a canvas backpack from the bedroom, put the safe inside and carried it downstairs, carefully relocking the front door behind him. Of course there was no sign of anything having been disturbed.

  On the other hand, chaos prevailed in Ludmila’s room.

  ‘It was like that, I swear,’ muttered Keefer. ‘I never done it. There’s some people live like pigs, you know that.’

  ‘You included. What you got?’

  An elaborate heavy necklace of what might have been, and Keefer said were, rubies set in gold.

  ‘Those are glass,’ said Anwar contemptuously, ‘and that is shit called pinchbeck. You wouldn’t give a fiver for that down Church Street market. But we’ll have those wedding rings—how many times has she been married, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Maybe they’re her dead mum’s or her auntie’s.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe. Take the pearls too and let’s get going.’

  In the shop Julitta, who should have been upstairs, was standing by a long gilt-framed mirror, holding up to the light a chain from which hung a large diamond.

  ‘That’s a diamond, innit, An?’ Anwar examined the pendant Morton Phibling had bought for Zeinab. It consisted of a single large stone of emerald cut, suspended from a thin gold chain. ‘It’d be worth thousands and thousands,’ he said. But he spoke excitedly, not at all in his usual laid-back fashion. ‘Maybe fifty thousand.’ Now the look of wonder on his face, an expression that had briefly turned him into a child again, changed to one of doubt. ‘It can’t be. Who’d leave a thing like that in here for anyone to pick up?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Flint, ‘maybe it’s a trap.’

  ‘What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’ Anwar rounded on him. ‘I suppose there’s a needle on it going to give me a shot of cyanide, is there? Or a microchip sending a code to the pigs at Paddington Green?’

  Not very quick at the best of times, Flint could think of no answer to that. Anwar wrapped the pendant up in one of the pieces of Valenciennes lace Inez sometimes sold to antique dress connoisseurs and put it in the bag with the safe. ‘Why aren’t you upstairs like I told you?’ he said to Julitta.

  ‘I done her flat. There’s nothing in the jewellery line but costume and you said not to mess with costume. Oh, and there’s hundreds of videos, TV crime shit.’

  ‘No cash?’

  Her ‘Oh, no, An’ came so readily that, meeting her eyes in a disconcerting way, he said roughly, ‘Come on, give it here.’

  Four twenty-pound notes and two tens were unwillingly put into his hands. He would have searched her himself if she hadn’t handed it over, inflicting the maximum pain. ‘Thief,’ he said. ‘You get your share when the time comes, you know that,’ and then, ‘Is that all?’

  ‘I swear it, An.’

  That amounted to very little, but if she wanted to keep a fiver and a few coins, who cared? Some people were irredeemably crooked and couldn’t even stick to the code of honour among thieves. ‘Time to go,’ Anwar said as Keefer appeared at the interior door. ‘Leave as you came, one by one. Not carrying anything, are you?’

  They weren’t. He watched them go, making sure of a full ten-minute gap between Julitta’s departure and Keefer’s. Then he put the backpack, which now also held Ludmila’s wedding rings, into the cement-coated bucket and the notes into his overall pocket, punched six-two-four-seven into the burglar alarm keypad and left by the back door. As he was closing it the alarm began making its siren howl. Anwar locked up, but instead of taking the key he had had cut away with him, he pushed it carefully under the door. What she had done with the original he had no idea, taken it with her, he supposed. Leaving his behind was not only an artistic gesture but a kindly one. A householder could always do with a spare key, especially one she didn’t have to pay for.

  He listened to the alarm till it stopped, then went back the way he had come, over the wall. If he hurried he would be in time to get to his cousin’s wedding in Neasden.

  CHAPTER 18

  A van was parked outside the shop when Inez got back. It was yet another of those white ones that seemed so popular with a certain type of young man, but surely a newcomer to the neighbourhood. Some days had passed since she had last seen the dirty, fingermarked and graffiti-coated van with the once-amusing notice in its rear window.

  She put her key in the street door lock and let herself in. The alarm starting up told her she was the first of the household to return, for if any of the others had come in they would hardly have reactivated it. With a glance into the shop to make sure nothing was amiss, she went upstairs to her own flat. Intending to settle in front of the television with a glass of wine and a Forsyth film—needed after a day with her sister and brother-in-law behaving as if she had never been married at all, so excessively tactful were they—she stopped halfway across the room and stared at the untidy pile of her videos on the coffee table. She would never have left them like that, she was a neat, methodical person. At least they were all there and otherwise untouched …

  Was it possible Freddy had in fact come home already and been in here? He knew there was a key to her flat in the desk. But why would he and why touch her videos? Besides, Freddy was an honest man, she was certain of that. Silly and trusting but honest. She didn’t put the video on but she poured herself the drink, carried it back into the living room and looked about her. Nothing else appeared to have been touched. In the bedroom what not-at-all valuable jewellery she had, apart from her wedding and engagement rings which were on her finger, was all in place. There was money in the tin in the kitchen, kept there for household shopping, dry-cleaning and so on. As soon as she picked it up, she knew the tin was empty by the weight of it. Even the small change was gone as well, of course, as about a hundred pounds.

  Forgetting the burglar alarm, Inez remembered the incident of the key. Recall sent a cold shiver through her and she swallowed the rest of her wine at a gulp. She always knew she hadn’t given it a mere single turn. It was still in her handbag where she had put it this morning after checking the back door was locked. Sure by now that no one else was in the house, she went downstairs and felt a little relief at the sight of the locked door and no key. But wait a minute … A key, like her own but brighter and shinier, lay on the floor between the bottom of the door and the edge of the mat. She picked it up, examined it, not that there was much point in that. Some visitor to the shop in her absence must have … Still, he, whoever he was, had let her down lightly, but what of her tenants?

  One of them was coming in now. She walked down the little passage towards the street door. It was Jeremy Quick.

  ‘I’m sorry to tell you we seem to have had a burglary,’ she said.

  ‘What, the shop, you mean?’

  I
f that didn’t take a national award for selfishness she didn’t know what would. His tone had been positively eager.

  ‘No, not the shop, oddly enough. They’ve been in my flat, raided the cash tin in the kitchen. I imagine they went over the whole house.’

  He had gone white. Not just pale but a sickly almost greenish-white, the bones of his face standing out and his eyes staring. There must be something up there he didn’t want anyone, anyone at all, knowing about. Hard pornography? Child pornography? Stolen goods? She knew suddenly that there was nothing she’d put past him. ‘I’d go straight up and check if I were you,’ she said. And then she remembered she should have called the police. Dialling the number, she wondered which of them would come or would it be someone unfamiliar?

  Jeremy took the stairs two at a time. The inside of his flat looked undisturbed. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and opened the cupboard, hoping against hope the weight of the strongbox would have deterred them. It hadn’t. Although he had expected that empty space on the shelf, it was still such a shock that he had to sit down. Was there a chance they might find it so hard to open they would abandon the attempt and throw it away? Drop it over one of the bridges into the river? Not much chance, he thought, facing things. They would be sure a safe so securely locked contained valuable items.

  An unfamiliar feeling invaded him. He didn’t want to be alone, he wanted the company of his fellows. Inez and however many of the others were at home would have to be told what the thieves had taken from him, and it would be wiser not to mention to them, and certainly not to the police if they came, that his safe was missing. Better say money and jewellery, cufflinks, a watch, something like that. He had left his other watch on the dressing table in the bedroom, he remembered, running in there. The watch was gone. He went downstairs.