by Ruth Rendell
‘Leave that to me.’
They all turned their eyes on Keefer, who sat miserably in the corner of Anwar’s room, on the floor because there was nothing else and the rest of them were on the bed. He sat with his arms wrapped round his bent knees, the skin of his face and neck greenish and running with sweat. A trail of something viscid dribbled from the corner of his mouth. From time to time he let out a whimper of pain and, unwrapping his arms, thrashed them about. At the moment he was quiet, somnolent, and Flint and Julitta had both remarked, in various picturesque ways, that he looked on the point of death. When they referred to him, they spoke of this process of coming off hard drugs by one of the dozens of slang terms in current use, but Anwar called it ‘being rehabilitated’ and managed to give the phrase a sinister ring.
Now, poking one toe into Keefer’s flank, as one might attempt to shift a sleeping dog, he pulled Zeinab’s diamond pendant out of his pocket and laid it on the bed between himself and Julitta. ‘It belongs to that girl,’ said Anwar. ‘The beautiful one.’ He said this casually, as someone else would refer to ‘the dark one’ or ‘the thin one’. To a student of character like Inez it would have revealed either the intrinsic coldness of his nature or a budding appreciation of feminine beauty or perhaps both.
The others were used to his strange habits of speech. ‘How d’you know?’
‘My mate that’s the lover of the old Russian woman told me. She’s engaged to a funny old fucker that’s got five cars. Another diamond geezer. He gave it to her. We gotta be very careful how we dispose of it, that’s all. No good getting any ideas about taking it to Hawker down North End Road.’ Anwar fixed his eyes once more on Keefer, whose find this receiver of stolen goods was, and stared at him aggressively, though he was obviously incapable of ideas about anything. ‘You’d best leave that to me too. You get on the phone to our diamond geezer, Ju, and say to him he’s to bring what we’re asking for to the recycling bins in Aberdeen Place, St John’s Wood. You got that? Aberdeen Place and the bins are on the right side opposite Crocker’s Folly. He’s to bring the dosh in a white bin liner, not a black bag, and when he gets there he’s to look inside the bin that’s for old clothes, but he’s not to put the bag in. It’s mostly full, that bin, and it’ll be full when he gets there. The clothes bin’s a bit apart from the others, there’s a door in the wall next to it and then the bottle bank, right? He’s to put the bag on the ground between the clothes bin and the doorway.’
Julitta nodded. Her relief at not having to be present at this transaction was so great that she would happily have done anything else he asked her. ‘He’ll want the things. He’ll ask about the earrings and whatever.’
‘And he’ll get them—only the earrings’ll be different. You don’t say that, right? You say he’ll find them taped to the inside of the clothes bin lid. After that he can go. He’s to do it nine sharp tonight. Tell the bugger to go by way of the footpath by the canal and home down Lisson Grove. He won’t, he’ll stay and watch but that’s OK, that’s all to the good.’
He let it all sink in, then barked at Julitta, ‘Now repeat what I told you.’
She did so, not stumbling much, and Anwar shooed her and Flint out with instructions to Julitta to make her phone call within the next hour. Keefer was asleep. He wouldn’t sleep long but would wake up, thrashing about and screaming for the heroin he could now easily afford. Since he was coming off the hard stuff on his instructions, Anwar decided to get him some methadone if he could; he didn’t want the guy breaking the place up or otherwise attracting too much attention to them. Leaving, he locked the door behind him.
All his sisters were at home in the house in Brondesbury Park. They regarded him much as young Victorian girls saw their brother, as one who through chance happened to be male and therefore untrammelled, away from parental constraint and free. This, notwithstanding the fact that their mother and father were enlightened people who required no more of their daughters and expected of them no different standard of behaviour than of their son. But tradition dies hard and each of these girls, exposed to the views of elderly relatives, had yet to put ideas of the sheltered life, the long skirts, the chaperoned outings and the arranged marriage, behind her.
‘I should be so lucky,’ said Arjuna, at the sight of Keefer’s van parked at the kerb, though there was nothing to stop her borrowing a friend’s car and driving it, except the law, and that applied equally in her brother’s case.
He reminded her of this and while she was thinking up a suitable reply, asked her if Mama’s friend’s old abaya was still in the house. Nilima, the eldest girl, had once worn it in a school performance of Flecker’s Hassan.
‘What d’you want it for?’
‘Not your business. Where is it?’
‘If you can’t tell me why you want it I’m not telling you where it is.’
Anwar looked at his Rolex. These girls wasted so much time. ‘What you saving up for, Arj? There must be something.’
‘Telly in my bedroom. If Nilima can have one why can’t I?’
‘OK. How much more d’you want?’ He took a wad of notes out of his pocket.
His sister eyed them. Fives and tens they were. If he had twenties and fifties he wouldn’t show them to her. ‘Fifty,’ she said.
‘Twenty-five.’
‘You must be joking. Forty.’
‘Thirty-five,’ said Anwar, ‘and that’s my last word. I can find the thing myself only it’ll take me a while.’
‘OK. Thirty-five.’ She rolled up the notes and pushed them into the cleavage revealed by her low-cut T-shirt. It was a movement she was perfecting for more worthwhile company than a brother. ‘It’s in the loft, in the big trunk, inside one of those plastic things the dry-cleaners give you.’
Anwar went off up the stairs, carrying a pair of steps, the more easily to reach the trapdoor in the ceiling which was the entrance to the loft.
CHAPTER 24
Although he knew there would be at least one further demand, it was still a relief. The money itself was very little to pay as the price of safety and impunity. Of course, it wouldn’t be if multiplied but he would face that when the time came. If there was anything that seriously worried him it was how he was to receive back the fob watch, the lighter and the earrings. The girl had said he would find them there, in an opaque plastic bag taped to the pull-down drawer at the top of the clothes bin. But suppose they weren’t there? What then?
He left home much too early. It was inevitable in his situation. As he came out of the tenants’ street door he looked about him, certain they must be watching. If they were, it wasn’t out in the street. No one was about and none of the cars had an occupant in any of its seats. Earlier in the day it had rained, but the clouds had shifted away at sunset and the pavements were slowly drying. Jeremy carried the money inside the white plastic bag, as instructed, in a small blue backpack he had once used but not in recent years. A briefcase was more his style but he thought that might look conspicuous in this neighbourhood in the evening. He walked up the Edgware Road and under the flyover. The usual crowds of men were gathered outside the Lebanese restaurants. Very few women were to be seen and those who ventured out at this hour wore the scarf or in some cases the chador, that all-enveloping black robe that conceals all but the points of the toes and the eyes.
Nearly at the top he crossed on the lights into Orchardson Street and entered Aberdeen Place by way of Lyons Place, a rather more discreet approach than directly from the Edgware Road. One or two people, braving the damp chill of evening, sat at tables outside Crocker’s Folly. Jeremy thought of them vaguely as potential witnesses. But witnesses of what exactly? And who was to be confronted with their evidence? He was a murderer and could therefore tell the tale of his wrongs to no one, ever, let alone call witnesses.
His watch told him it was still only ten to nine. Better do as they said. After all, he had done the rest, the worst part, so why quibble about ten minutes? But how slowly they passed! If anything could
have convinced Jeremy that time doesn’t move along at the same rate, or at any rate at all, but remains still while we move in it, it was how sluggishly it seems to pass in some circumstances and how swiftly in others. All illusion, all self-deception … He walked up to the St John’s Wood Road, past Lord’s Cricket Ground, up Hamilton Close and back, and it was still only five to. Back down Northwick Place, trying to drag his feet, and at last it was a minute to. He waited to hear a church clock chime somewhere, heard nothing and went up to the old clothes bin. Drawing a deep breath, he lifted the lid. There, taped inside as promised, was the small opaque plastic bag containing—what?
The men outside Crocker’s Folly weren’t looking at him but he slipped into the narrow defile called Victoria Passage just the same and in there, in the shadows, looked inside the bag. Earrings, fob watch, lighter. Good. Well, he had better get on with it. He took the white bin liner with the money in it out of his backpack, came out of the passage, and dropped the bag between the clothes bin and the doorway in the red brick wall. Back into the passage to wait and watch.
She came within five minutes. She was tallish, slight, as far as he could tell, for her figure was covered from head to foot in a black garment. Only her eyes showed, large, black, fringed in thick black lashes, their lids violet-coloured with eyeshadow and painted with kohl. She picked up the bag, burying it somewhere inside the voluminous folds of the black robe, and disappeared the way she had come, down the steps on to the canal bank. Jeremy followed but by the time he reached the head of the steps and the sluggish yellow waterway lay beneath him, the figure was nowhere to be seen. Only his backpack, open and empty, lay at the top of the iron stairway.
‘I’ve never been married,’ said Freddy and, as was his way, settled himself down in the grey velvet armchair to elaborate on his subject. ‘It will be a new experience. I ask myself how I shall find it. Less congenial than the present arrangement or more blissful?’ He began to wag his right forefinger as he spoke. ‘Ludo, of course, has been married before. I’m not at all clear how many times, but all that is behind us. Marylebone Town Hall is the venue, June first the date and eleven ack emma the witching hour. The honeymoon will be another of our favourite weekend breaks, this time in a place called the Isle of Man. It will be a magical mystery tour for me, in more ways than one. Have you ever heard of the Isle of Man, Inez?’
‘Of course I have. It’s off Liverpool, in the Irish Sea. I went there once with my first husband.’
‘Another lady of multiple marriages, I see,’ said Freddy, meaning to be polite. ‘Is it anything like Barbados?’
‘I’ve never been to Barbados, but I shouldn’t think so, certainly not as far as climate goes.’
‘I shan’t mind, I am always ready for a change. In for a penny, in for a pound, I say, or should it be “in for a euro”?’ He got to his feet as Zeinab came in, whether as gentlemanly behaviour or because he intended to get moving Inez couldn’t tell. ‘Good morning, Zeinab. I was just telling Mrs Ferry, or Inez as we are all privileged to call her, that me and my fiancée will be tying the knot next Saturday.’
‘Tying what knot?’
‘He means he’ll be getting married,’ said Inez.
‘Is that right? The week before as me and Mort.’
‘So my next move this morning—I am up to my eyes in it—must be to buy a wedding ring and I’m sure one can be found here. No need for fresh woods and pastures new, eh?’
‘Let me help you,’ said Zeinab.
This morning, Inez noticed, she was entirely jewel-free, not a diamond or sapphire about her. This must mean both Morton Phibling and Rowley Woodhouse—if he really existed, no one ever saw him—were out of town for the day. She had already heard Will Cobbett and his girlfriend leave the house by the tenants’ street door and see them walk up Star Street towards the Edgware Road, carrying shopping bags. The girl was holding Will’s arm and it was plain to see he was doing no more than acquiesce in this, passively allowing her hand to remain hooked on his elbow. Was it generally true, then, that there is always one who kisses and one who lifts the cheek? It hadn’t been so for her and Martin. Would the day ever come when almost any event, serious, disturbing, ludicrous, ordinary, no longer served to remind her?
After his attempt to return to a place in her regard, Jeremy Quick hadn’t come into the shop. Nor had his behaviour in other respects been normal. For instance, he hadn’t been to work every day. He had gone out but come back to the house several times before staying at home for the afternoon and evening. Now, as she sat looking out of the shop window waiting for custom, while Freddy and Zeinab scrutinised the stock of plain gold rings, she heard Jeremy’s feet on the stairs and the tenants’ street door closed with almost a slam. He walked in the opposite direction from the other two, heading for Paddington Station or St Mary’s Hospital or just Hyde Park.
He would be visiting his mother on one of the Bank Holidays, the Monday or the Tuesday, she guessed, and probably was off now to buy her a present. A good son, whatever might be his other shortcomings.
‘Can he take this lot upstairs for Ludmila to see which one fits?’ Zeinab asked her.
Five wedding rings, one of them with a lover’s knot and ‘Albert and Moira, entwined for ever’ engraved inside it, lay on a jeweller’s black velvet tray.
‘She won’t want that one,’ Inez objected, picking up the engraved ring.
‘Unfortunately,’ said Freddy, ‘I fear that may be the only one to fit her slender finger.’
Fearing the worst, Jeremy had nevertheless not looked closely at the earrings. He was experiencing the coward’s retreat into that state where what you don’t know for sure, when a doubt lingers, you can’t worry over it. Except that you can, but hope still remains and the knowledge that if things turn out well by a miracle, the postponement will have been worthwhile. Eventually, of course, you have to leap upon the thing in question and examine it quickly. This he had finally done at one in the morning. He had awakened in intolerable anxiety, jumped out of bed and torn the bag open. Still a vestige of hope was there. He closed his eyes, opened them, and counted the brilliants in the silver metal. Sixteen, of course, only sixteen, not twenty. His blackmailers—he was sure now there was more than one—had bought a similar pair to the ones he had placed in the shop. They were probably in every cheap jeweller’s in the country.
Their reason had to be that they would come back to him for more money. Not today, perhaps, not even next week, but around 10 or 11 June, that was when he should expect a call. No more sleep for him that night, though what had happened was only what he had dreaded since he untaped the package from the bin lid. But he acknowledged the inevitability of things. He could no more have stayed in bed and slept again without getting up to look and check than he could have refused their demand in the first place. He had no choice and what was happening to him now was the beginning of his fears about the bright day being done and the dark coming.
All this he thought of as he walked up Star Street and turned towards Sussex Gardens, choosing a pleasanter if more roundabout way of reaching Oxford Street than the Edgware Road. There were trees here, laden with the dense foliage of spring becoming summer, window boxes on Georgian houses, troughs of flowers outside smart little pubs. He would never go to prison, he would kill himself first, but his heart sank a little when he thought of his mother, bereft of him for ever.
It was to buy this perfume she wanted that he had come down here. Tourmaline was its name, some kind of semi-precious stone, he had thought, but it must be very challenging thinking up new names for scent, there were so many on the market.. Four big stores were to be found in Oxford Street between Marble Arch and the Circus, the nearest being Selfridges. At Selfridges he would make a start.
It was a long time since he had been there. Since his last visit the perfumes and cosmetic departments had grown much larger. He would never have considered himself well-informed in matters of the kind of scent and beauty aids women used, but the big names
were familiar to him. Some of these were still there but the firms he remembered his mother patronising when he was a child, all these were gone or their counters reduced in size and exiled to a corner. New names were everywhere. Photographed women, girls, surely the world’s most beautiful, beamed or pouted at him from every wall and pillar. Their flawless skins and gleaming hair left him cold. He wanted neither to kiss them nor kill them.
But he was bemused. Women looking very different from the cosmetic company’s models wandered about gazing or marched purposefully to their prearranged goal, but he felt himself lost in a mysterious dreamlike emporium with no idea where to go or even what to look for but that elusive name, Tourmaline. Last time he had bought perfume for his mother he had seen what he needed in a pharmacist’s window at the Marble Arch end of the Edgware Road, had gone in, pointed, said he wanted that one. Perhaps he should have done something like that this time, gone into a little shop and handed the assistant a piece of paper with the name written on it.
Tourmaline was nowhere. He would go up Oxford Street and try the next store. This time he would ask instead of wandering around. He made his way towards the nearest exit, or tried to do this, but he found himself impeded by a crowd of young women who stood staring at a girl seated on a high stool having her face made up by a beautician. Impatiently forcing his way through them, he had come out into a relatively empty space with watches and jewellery ahead of him and then the street door. But just as he calculated he could reach the door without further hindrance, a young and beautiful oriental girl with long dark hair stepped into his path, holding up a spray bottle and asking him if he would like to try this particular scent. It was an old perfume, out of use for years but so many requests for it had been made that the perfumier had brought it in again two years ago.
‘By popular demand,’ she said in her seductive perfumed voice. ‘It used to be called “Yes” but that’s outdated, so we renamed it. Would you care to try?’
