by Ruth Rendell
Becky left it another day before phoning to see how they were getting on. Of course it was Kim who answered. She sounded cheerful and calm, full of how nice the flat was, how much pleasanter than living at home with her parents, and what a good meal she and Will had had when they went out to eat at the Al Dar. Becky felt satisfied enough, she wouldn’t have bothered to suggest she speak to Will if Kim, after enumerating all the dishes on offer at the Lebanese restaurant, hadn’t done so.
He took the receiver, said hello in that neutral voice she associated, for no good reason, with his discontent. ‘I’m OK,’ he said.
‘Are you going back to work with Keith?’
She heard him ask Kim, ‘Am I going to work with Keith?’ and her answer, ‘You know you are, love. On Monday.’
‘I’m going to work with Keith on Monday, Becky.’
‘And you’re happy with that?’
If he had had to ask Kim if he was happy, she didn’t know what she would have done. But he replied for himself, saying again, ‘I’m OK,’ and ‘I’ve got to go back, haven’t I, Kim?’
Her answer she didn’t hear. She heard his next remark all right, it rang in her head. ‘I wish I was with you, Becky. When can I come and see you?’
‘How about Sunday?’ she said. ‘For the day, for lunch and supper?’ Did she have to ask Kim too? She waited, but neither of them suggested it.
‘I’ll come on Sunday. I love coming to you, Becky.’
She had been obliged to phone but she wished she had put it off till another day. One thing, she had seen James for two evenings (and two nights) in succession and she’d see him tonight, so she need not ask him on Sunday. As she helped herself to her first gin and tonic of the evening, needed after that phone conversation, she wondered what she was doing, what on earth was she playing at, being thankful because her new lover, at the start of her new love affair, would not be coming to see her.
He walked home with a young woman in front of him. She was just about the right distance ahead, about fifteen feet, and they were moving at the same pace. She turned into Star Street and he followed. Though the sky was overcast, it was warm and bright, and any attack made on her would be sure to be witnessed. Even if she had exercised that indefinable attraction on him, that mysterious force so strong as to pull his heart out of him, he couldn’t have killed her there, in broad daylight, and would have suffered from the deprivation, been made ill by it. The point was rather that he didn’t feel that attraction, he didn’t want to harm her.
Now he believed he had followed her to test himself, to see if being, so to speak, in her company, in the right position, the compulsion would rise and grow. It hadn’t. Nothing had happened. He would have liked to know why not. She seemed about thirty, was tallish, slender but not thin, fair-haired—still, he knew none of these things, except perhaps being of roughly suitable age, made much difference. He could smell the perfume she left behind her on the air, sweetish, floral, warm. The something else always eluded him. He watched her cross the road and continue her walk up to Norfolk Place and, when she was out of sight, went into the corner shop by the tenants’ front door.
He sat out on the roof garden and counted the money. Just over four thousand and he had four days to go, only Sunday didn’t count. He had Monday and Tuesday, really, because he would have to be here on Wednesday to take her call. Was he actually going to give it to her, all that money? He’d kill her first, he thought. He’d kill her, even though she wouldn’t have, or was most unlikely to have, the required qualification. But he couldn’t kill her. It wouldn’t save him, it would make matters worse. If no one else was involved, the boyfriend would be, and maybe her father. Kill her and they would go straight to the police with the earrings, the lighter and the watch. They could say they’d seen him drop those things into a litter bin, had retrieved them and given them up to the law. Blackmail? The girl had spoken to him only to say she had found his property and was returning it …
By coincidence, they were back. From where he was, he saw what he thought was Zulueta’s car coming along Bridgnorth Street, and when he went back into the flat and looked out of one of the front windows, there he was in the act of parking—with impunity, no doubt—on the yellow line. Another DC was with him. They sat, watching the corner shop. But Jeremy knew he had nothing to worry about there. It was Will Cobbett they were watching.
He continued to look, saw a turquoise Jaguar arrive and Morton Phibling get out. Would those two, Zulueta and—Jones, was it?—would they do anything about the car on the residents’ parking? Probably it would be beneath their dignity to sink to traffic cop level. He had to go out and get more money. As he emerged into the street once more, he saw he had been wrong about Zulueta and Jones. They cared less about status than he thought, for there they were at the driver’s window of the Jaguar, haranguing Phibling’s defenceless chauffeur.
He shivered a little. He had been wrong. Was this the shape of things as they would now be? Was it coming to an end, his rightness, his success, his double life, his inviolability? Two lines came into his head from a play he had seen long ago in Nottingham. Which play he couldn’t remember but he said the lines in his head. ‘The bright day is done and we are for the dark …’
I am for the dark.
CHAPTER 23
She had been forced to ask James to stay away.
‘I thought we were going to spend our weekends together.’
‘James, I’m sorry, but now Will isn’t staying here any more I do have to see him sometimes. I have a duty towards him, I can’t just drop him.’
‘I understand that,’ he said. ‘Does it have to be at the weekends?’
‘If it were a weekday, it would be for the evening only now I’m back at work.’ She knew the next thing would cause an explosion. ‘Will likes to have his main meal at midday.’
‘And I’, James almost shouted, ‘like to have mine in the evening, like all civilised people. Like you. Why does everything have to give way to his ridiculous working-class rules? His detention centre timetable?’
‘It was a children’s home,’ she said, trying to keep her patience. ‘His habits were formed by it just as yours were by the parents who brought you up. Will didn’t have any parents, he had social workers.’
‘As you repeatedly tell me. Why you didn’t adopt him and have done with it beats me.’ The unfairness of this almost took her breath away. ‘And do you realise that’s what we mostly talk about? Will? It’s Will this and Will that until I sometimes wonder if he isn’t closer to you than you make out. But you needn’t worry. I shan’t come round on Sunday. I’ll make a point of staying away.’
He made a point of staying away on Saturday too. Becky lacked the heart to resume her old Saturday morning habit of leisurely shopping, shop-gazing and buying odd little luxuries. Perhaps she would never do it again. She was beginning to think she could never do anything that wasn’t criticised by James. He wanted to change her into someone else. Not only in the matter of Will but her physical appearance too. Why don’t you have a manicure, he had started asking, a facial, why not have a proper haircut? She was too old and too independent to change. Several times she wondered unhappily what he had meant by Will being closer to her than she had admitted—that he was her lover or really her own son? She went for a walk on Primrose Hill and stayed out for quite a long time, feeling more lonely now than before James came into her life.
Becky had once, years ago when she lived in a ground-floor flat with a garden, had a cat. He was a very affectionate animal, a large handsome tabby, and when he died, aged seventeen, she had resolved never to have another. The wrench, the real pain, of his death was not to be repeated over and over in her life as it is in the lives of inveterate pet owners. When he was about five he had disappeared. He went out as usual one day and failed to come home that night. She put the usual notices up on walls and lamp posts, rang the neighbours, phoned the local vets and the council’s lost animal service. Nothing helped and after a week
of anxiety and misery, she gave him up for lost. Friends, hoping to comfort her, said that he must have found a home he liked better, as cats will. Others believed he had jumped into someone’s car and been driven away. Only Becky knew he would never have found a home he loved more than his with her and that he disliked cars so much he would avoid them as he avoided dogs. On the eighth day of his absence he came back, jaunty as ever, bright-eyed, swift, bursting through the cat flap and coming straight to her for instant affection. He was thin but otherwise healthy. She never found out where he had been.
Will’s return was rather the same. In her eyes, he too looked thinner. In other respects he was like the errant cat, greeting her with joy, throwing his arms round her, his eyes shining. Like the cat too, he ate a huge lunch and, watching television afterwards, fell into contented sleep. Of his days with Kim he said nothing until she asked him. It was uncanny the way, at first, he seemed to have forgotten who Kim was, staring at her with puzzled eyes. Then some kind of realisation seemed to dawn. ‘She’s all right,’ he said.
‘It must be nice for you, having someone you like with you.’
Could anything be more banal? Still, he seemed to be giving the matter serious thought. She knew what his thinking would achieve, she knew what he would say, though she expected less vehemence.
‘It’s better here with you. I’d like it better, I’d like it lots and lots better, if you’d come and live there with me.’
Later, when it was almost time to take him home, he astonished her with a revelation and an explanation. ‘I was looking for a treasure,’ he said, ‘when I was digging that garden. When those men found me and took me away. I knew the treasure was there, I saw it in a film, and I bought a spade and dug and dug but I couldn’t find it.’
She had nothing to say.
‘It was jewels, worth millions and millions. When I found it I was going to buy a house and you and me would live in it, there’d be room for us both, not like here or my place. I was going to buy it. But there is room here really, isn’t there, Becky? There is.’
Morton Phibling came in every morning now and he and Zeinab, regardless of how many customers might arrive, sat side by side in a corner discussing wedding plans. Zeinab’s ploy about the diamond pendant appeared to have allayed any fears Morton might have as to its whereabouts, for Inez, having failed to persuade a visitor to buy an early nineteenth-century French horn, a sale she was sure Zeinab could have brought off, heard him tell his fiancée to get it out of the bank on Friday the seventh in order to wear it at Saturday’s ceremony. Meanwhile, he had presented her with a diamond and emerald bracelet, which she had put on and flashed about, the rays from it when it caught the bright sunlight making rainbow spots up and down the walls.
‘So you’ve made up your mind, have you?’ Inez asked as Morton was driven away.
‘Made up my mind to what?’ Zeinab sounded abstracted, as if imagining her sumptuous future as Mrs Phibling. In fact, she was wondering where she could take the bracelet to get the best price for it.
‘To get married, of course.’
‘I reckon I shall have to.’
To Inez it seemed as if she were coming back to earth, had awakened from a dream, while though Zeinab had indeed regained equilibrium, it was from the realisation that if the bracelet fetched what she expected, she and Algy would have halfway enough to buy the kind of house they wanted. Make the flat exchange first, as soon as they could, to get her away from here and her two fiancées, then start phoning estate agents … She got up, served a customer who was looking for genuine old Venetian glass and another in search of 1930s jewellery. It was amazing, Inez thought, how she could sell anything and not only to impressionable men.
‘Then I suppose you’ll be giving me notice?’
‘Do I have to let you know now?’
‘Well, you do if you’re leaving on Friday week. It’s Monday now.’
‘Yeah, well, a week’s will do, won’t it?’ Zeinab swiftly changed the subject. ‘Have you noticed how those murdered girls have taken a back seat?’ The grotesque picture this presented to Inez was quite enough to take her mind off her assistant’s wedding plans. ‘It’s like they’ve found them all now and they’ve found Jacky Miller’s earrings, so they’re not bothered.’
‘They haven’t found the lighter and the watch.’
‘No, you’re right. I never asked you what that Zulueta wanted last Friday. It slipped my mind.’
‘Oh, more nonsense about Will. Was he ever alone in the shop? Had I ever seen him digging the garden here? That sort of thing. Jones even said that girl he’s got with him might be in need of protection. I told him I thought that Anwar had been in here sniffing about while I was at the police station but he didn’t seem interested.’
‘I’m not going to tell her,’ Algy said, ‘and I’m counting on you not to say a word.’
Reem, sharing a greasy bag of chips with her grandson, said with her mouth full, ‘You know me, Alge. I never do say much, don’t seem to have the energy. I see this move as one step up the ladder to you getting your own place with a nanna annexe for me, eh, Bryn?’
‘Bryn love nanna,’ the little boy said fervently, climbing on to her lap.
‘That’s a good boy.’
‘I’ve scheduled the move,’ said Algy rather grandly, ‘for Friday, June seven.’
‘Suppose she don’t play?’
‘My two mates’ll come with the van half-seven, and by the time she wakes up half the stuff’ll be out on the pavement.’
‘Good thinking.’ Reem’s rumbling laughter rocked the little boy up and down and up and down pleasantly. He laid his cheek against the vast billows of her bosom and closed his eyes.
By Tuesday evening Jeremy had amassed all the money. He was impatient to get on with things. If he had to give them £10,000, he wanted to get it over, and he tried not to think about their receiving it and then coming back for more. Their call would come, he calculated, learning their habits, around three in the afternoon, and they would name a place for the—did they call it the ‘drop’?—for that evening or the next day. Briefly, he thought with envy of those people who, facing blackmail, were in a position to tell the police the nature of the threat and secure their help. For him that had always been out of the question.
A letter from his mother on the Wednesday had a request for him to buy her a certain kind of perfume. Not for herself but for a present for a young friend, a girl who sometimes did errands for her. His mother would of course reimburse him when she saw him on Monday, a promise which made him smile, it was so absurd for her even to think of it. On Saturday morning he’d visit some big store and buy the stuff, and he noted down the name.
In spite of being sure the phone call wouldn’t come before the afternoon, he still found it impossible to go out. But he had accustomed himself sufficiently to this particular kind of tension to be able to sit outside in the roof garden without being afraid of not hearing the bell. Ever since he read the letter he had been thinking about his mother, her uncritical love for him, her ultrasensitive mind, her consideration. Unless he had invited himself for this coming Bank Holiday Monday, she would never have presumed to expect him. As it was, when he had asked if he could come for the day, she had said tentatively, ‘Are you sure you can spare the time, dear?’ And when he had assured her he was looking forward to it, ‘It’s very nice of you to say so.’
How would it have been if his father had lived? Jeremy, aged thirteen, had been with him the day before he died, or so his mother assured him when he told her he couldn’t remember. Sometimes, if he concentrated, if he tried to pierce the curious swirling dark mists which had to be penetrated to reach it, he thought he could see his father’s yellow cadaverous face on the hospital pillow, but he only thought so and couldn’t be sure. He was afraid to ask his mother if his father had had jaundice that day he had been there.
Once, and only once, re-creating that macabre picture, he had seemed to see another figure present and
it wasn’t his mother. A woman or a man, he couldn’t tell that either, except that it wasn’t his friend Andrew’s frumpish mother either. And as he brought thought and reason to bear on it, it vanished as if it had never been—and perhaps it had not. Gradually, he reconciled himself to the certainty that he was never going to remember. Why did it matter? He had loved his father but had come to dislike him, had wiped the deathbed at which he had nearly been present clean from his memory, that was why. And there was another reason. He was beginning to wonder if his motive for killing those girls had its origin in the last scenes of his father’s life, those forgotten scenes, which might yet be vital to track down.
The sun was warm, the lilac in bloom in its tub and the snowy philadelphus in the wide-mouthed green vase. Their mingled scents, quite different yet equally exquisite, drifted past him when the little breeze blew, and he fell asleep in the cushioned cane chair—to be awakened, with a start and an exclamation, by the phone bell.
‘I’m not doing it on me own,’ Julitta had said. ‘He might murder me. He done the others and they hadn’t done nothing.’
Anwar had already thought of this in all its aspects, from the point of view of Julitta’s safety and that of expediency. If Alexander Gibbons—even in his own mind he had no patience with aliases—strangled her in his habitual fashion, he, Keefer and Flint would have an even greater hold over him than they now had. But on the whole, he decided, the hold they had was more than adequate. He wasn’t going to tell her she was right, that wouldn’t do at all. ‘No question of that,’ he said. ‘I shall do it myself.’
‘The geezer’ll know you again,’ Flint objected.
