The Rottweiler (v5)

by Ruth Rendell

  But before he’d lifted the receiver, Zulueta’s car had drawn up outside. Inez had never been so pleased to see him. Morton and Woodhouse were once more going at it hammer and tongs but now there was no doubt Morton was the victor, Zeinab’s other fiancé beaten to his knees, making feeble feints at the former boxer’s legs. What was needed was a referee to intervene and one had appeared in the shape of Zulueta marching into the shop with DC Jones.

  ‘What’s going on here?’

  Woodhouse fell on the floor and rolled over, making sad little grunts. Watching him from the grey velvet chair, which he had sunk back into, Morton wiped his face with a red silk handkerchief while a smile of satisfaction spread across his face. ‘I don’t seem to have lost my touch,’ he said.

  Jones was bending over Woodhouse who, unwilling to be an object of pity, especially when his rival was a good thirty years his senior, struggled to his knees.

  Shaking his head as if in despair at the follies of humanity, Zulueta turned to Inez. ‘The purpose of our visit, Mrs Ferry, is to enquire if you can give us the address of a Mr Morton Phibling who I believe is engaged to be married to the young lady who works here.’

  ‘That’s me,’ said Morton, getting up as if to make himself more recognisable. ‘Don’t you remember me? When you came in about those murders I was here. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘The circumstances were rather different, sir.’

  Woodhouse had got to his feet, pushed Jones out of the way and would have made a fresh onslaught on Morton if Zulueta hadn’t grabbed him by the shoulders from behind. He shoved him into the chair Morton had just got out of and Woodhouse sank back into it with a groan of frustration.

  ‘That’s quite enough.’ Zulueta had the air of a primary schoolteacher admonishing a class of five-year-olds. ‘Now, you two gentlemen must call it a day and since neither of you is hurt, we won’t take it any further.’ He addressed Woodhouse with a frown. ‘However, I’ll remind you, sir, that there’s some would construe the shove you gave DC Jones just now as an assault. So be warned.’ Turning his attention to Morton and producing a notebook from his pocket, he said, ‘Now it’s our understanding, sir, that a valuable diamond pendant picked up off the street in the Mall, London double-you-one, last Monday is your property. According to Messrs La Touche-Chessyere, jewellers of Bond Street, same postal district, you purchased this ornament from them at the price of twenty-two thousand pounds’—gasp from Freddy and incredulous look from Rowley Woodhouse—‘May’—he looked at the notebook—‘twenty-second, two thousand and two.’

  Morton was nodding, his smug expression suddenly wiped away.

  ‘That seems to ring a bell,’ said Zulueta, abandoning pomposity, ‘so we’ll trouble you to come back with us to the police station and identify this item.’

  Woodhouse and his quarrel with him forgotten, Morton was now shaking his head in the same rueful way as Zulueta. ‘My beloved must have dropped it off her lovely neck while taking part in the Jubilee celebrations,’ He followed Jones towards the door. ‘Never mind. What a delight for her when I restore it into her hands!’ To the other officer he said, ‘I’m quite ready to accompany you to the nick, but I’ll go in my own vehicle if you don’t mind.’

  Up in the loft at his parents’ house, Anwar was searching through the boxes of old clothes, source of the chador. Results were disappointing, so he climbed down the ladder and went into his parents’ bedroom. Should it be a sari this time or a salwar and kameez? Of the latter she had only one set and he had never known her to wear it. Saris, and she had some magnificent ones, she put on when attending grand dinners or fund-raising receptions. With either he could wear a veil. It might be necessary to cover Julitta’s face with the corner of a dupatta, she was very fair-skinned and would look odd in a sari unless made-up. This, Anwar thought, might be beyond him.

  Which one wouldn’t his mother miss? The pale pink with the silver border he remembered her saying was now too young for her, but he had never seen her wear the dark-blue with the white pattern. It was cotton and she probably judged it too simple for a dinner engagement. On the other hand, the wearer’s face must be covered, he could see that now, and although a woman in a sari might wear a dupatta she would surely not cover her face with it. At the far end of the wardrobe he spotted something else: a long buttoned and belted coat, a dowdy dark- grey garment such as Moslem women wear in parts of the Middle East. His mother had bought it, he remembered, some three or four years before while she and his father were on holiday in Syria. It would be warm, she had said when derided by her family, suitable for wearing while out in the winter. She had never worn it, as far as he could recall. Though not at all clothes-conscious, this had turned out to be too unflattering even for her.

  Julitta could wear it with the hijab. Maybe a white one, or better still, since even a scarf wouldn’t hide her face, a yashmak. Anwar doubted anyone’s ability to make one, but just winding a black scarf round her head, across the bridge of her nose back again above her eyebrows, and tying it in a knot at the back should be all right. He bundled up the coat, found a long black scarf in a drawer and went back to the van without again seeing his sisters.

  Driving back to Paddington, his thoughts turned to the diamond geezer. They would soon have to find a new name for him. He wouldn’t be spouting out diamonds much longer, the rate they were milking him. Where should he send him to meet Julitta this time? How about the gardens, the little triangle of grass and trees, between Broadley Street and Penfold Street? It was one of those rather shady areas, not a safe place after dark, yet as birds fly, not far from the grand dwellings of Crawford Place and Bryanston Square. Over the other side of Lisson Grove, Boston Place where the geezer had killed one of those girls, ran down past Marylebone Station towards Dorset Square.

  Recalling the murder of Caroline Dansk as she walked past the railway wall, brought to Anwar what was probably the first chivalrous thought of his life. How pleased his father would be, though not, of course, by the context in which the thought had taken shape. Why not? He smiled to himself, reflecting that once again he would enjoy himself.

  The man who had bought the Chelsea china clock came back in the afternoon. Inez thought he must have found something wrong with it, a chip out of the porcelain or the works going wrong, but that wasn’t his reason. What that was he didn’t reveal but walked about admiring things and talking to her. He was sixty years old, newly widowed, a retired solicitor living in St John’s Wood. No doubt he expected her to remember the name he had given her for the invoice when he bought the clock. She racked her brains but couldn’t recall it, nor could she exactly open the desk and get the invoice copy out to look at while he was talking.

  Freddy came back about half an hour later than he had promised from his lunch at the Ranoush Juice with Ludmila, but Inez wasn’t as pleased to see him as she had expected to be. Her visitor stayed only two or three minutes after that, saying as he left that he would like to come back on the Monday as there were more things among her stock he wanted to look at.

  ‘It’s easy to see he admires you, Inez,’ said Freddy.

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’

  ‘All right, have it your own way. Poor old Freddy’s always wrong, as usual. But we shall see.’

  That evening she had intended to indulge herself by watching not one but two Forsyth films. Yet, when the time came, when she had poured her glass of wine and was comfortable in front of the screen, she made no move to press the key on the video remote but asked herself instead if there wasn’t something morbid in this cultivation of grief beyond its natural time of endurance. For too long she had wallowed in dreams of a past and perfect love, gone for ever. It was time, as the popular phrase had it, to move on.

  She picked up and opened a book she had bought months ago but never since looked at.

  CHAPTER 28

  The garrotte he used had been different each time. The first girl he strangled with her own silver chain. It was the only means to hand because,
of course, when he set out he had had no idea that he would kill Gaynor Ray or any woman. The next time, too, it was winter and he had used a length of electric cable he happened to have in his overcoat pocket. After that, although he had never set out on an evening stroll with the intention in mind of killing someone, perhaps he would hardly have gone out at all without the chance of it simmering below the surface of his mind, and he always carried something with him that would serve that half-contemplated purpose, a piece of rope, a length of picture cord, a strip of cloth. But he had never had in mind the distinct aim of following a girl and killing her with one of those tools of his method. It was just that the possibility was there and not to have had the means if there was a suitable encounter might have driven him mad. Sometimes he thought of trying to explain this to a policeman or a lawyer in the event of his being taken and how incomprehensible it would seem to the virtuous law-abiding who were never tempted. Not so long ago he had been law-abiding himself, so he knew.

  This time the garrotte he took with him, a piece of electric cable, perhaps the most efficient means, was deliberately pocketed. One of those bags made of shiny synthetic fabric that are light to carry and cheap to buy, sometimes given away at conferences as a package full of documents and brochures, was requested. Jeremy had to buy his; as a self-employed person, he never attended such gatherings. But he failed to comply with his blackmailer’s request to fill it with five thousand pounds collected up from different sources. This time the chosen container, jade green and black with an unidentifiable logo on the front, held only newspaper cut up into note-sized pieces.

  Apart from wondering what disguise she would adopt this time, he speculated very little about the girl. The only risk, as far as he could tell, was that he had been wrong and she had others to help her. But in that case, would these others always allow her to collect the blackmail money herself? Knowing his proclivities, would they allow the same person, and a woman, to expose herself over and over to a very real danger? Would they not send one of them, a man? Wouldn’t one of them phone him and make the demand? She had talked of her boyfriend, he thought, in a rather desperate way, as if she were willing him to believe. Why, if he were present, hadn’t he spoken and declared himself? And if the answer to that was that she had always made the calls on her own, why had she?

  Because she was doing this on her own, had possibly done something of the same kind before. If she died, garrotted in a garden off a back street in Marylebone, why should not the police and the media take it for granted she was simply another victim of the Rottweiler? To that end he would take from her some small personal item, as he had done from all the others. Disposing of her would be easy, she was slight and not nearly as tall as he. And he had had plenty of practice.

  This collection point was the nearest to Star Street of the three, the time appointed hours later than either of the others. Midnight—it would be dark, of course, even at nearly midsummer it would be very dark, especially if the sky was overcast. It was ten minutes to twelve when he set off, not wanting to be forced to hang about as he had last time.

  He found Broadley Street rather a sinister place. Perhaps that wouldn’t be apparent in the daytime but by night there was a loneliness and an emptiness about the area, particularly in the narrow cross streets with their blocks of local authority flats and the occasional tall Victorian house. Lights were on in some windows, yet there seemed to be no people about until a gaggle of teenage boys erupted from Penfold Street, jostling each other, letting out unearthly howls and kicking an empty beer can from one to another like a football. They passed on ahead of him, loping into the roadway without looking to the right or the left, up on the pavement at the other side towards Lisson Grove. A car came along too fast, its roof open and music of the thump, beat and squeal kind pouring out of it at full volume. After that the silence returned, seeming deeper now than it had before the various interruptions.

  He looked at his watch as he crossed the road, just able to make out the time. Two minutes past midnight but the girl wasn’t there yet. No one was about in the still silent garden which no woman in her senses would enter alone at this hour. For this girl it was different—or she thought it was. Then he saw her approaching from Ashmill Street, or gliding rather, for she walked as modest Asian women do, slowly as if she had all the time in the world, her head held high, her face, head and body entirely enveloped in clothing the colour of the night.

  There was no moon, there were no stars and few street lamps, but he could tell her ankle-length belted coat was dark grey and the scarf which was wound round her head, then round the lower part of her face and her forehead, was black. She gave no sign of having seen him but stood a few yards from the tree, under which he was to place the document case. But instead of advancing to the tree he stood where he was, staring at her, trying to meet her eyes but not knowing whether he had done so. Her eyes and eyebrows were uncovered, that he could tell, but not whether what light there was caught them and he fancied the lids were lowered. He sniffed, smelling for her, knowing he would get a scent of her even from this distance, but there was no hint of that perfume, of course there wouldn’t be. If there was any smell it was of the grass, a lingering of tobacco smoke and, oddly, a whiff of coconut.

  His hand in his pocket, he felt for the electric cable, closed his fingers over it. The case in his other hand, he walked very slowly to the tree, hoping by his apparently casual calm to unnerve her. She might have been watching him, she might not. He laid the case on the grass and turned, standing quite still to look at her. It would be easier, he thought, if she showed the nervousness she ought to feel, if she showed something instead of standing there like a statue. He was seized by a strange distaste for the act he had to perform, a reluctance he had never felt before. On previous occasions, as soon as he knew this was the destined one, the blood pounded in his head, his whole body pulsated and throbbed, yet his feet seemed to have springs on them and his hands to be charged with electricity. Why was that missing now when it was so much needed?

  Realisation made him shudder. It was the scent, the nameless scent, which wasn’t there, only the hint of coconut. He needed that scent to impel him, to be the mainspring of his actions. Never mind, he must do without it, he knew what he was doing, none better, and if he could do it when driven on by a compulsion he must be able to do it unaided and unstimulated. She had moved towards the tree, again with that graceful gliding gait. He saw her in the only light there was as the small pale street lamp shone on her passage across the grass, and he sprang, one end of the cable in each hand. She let out a deep roaring gasp, bent forward and kicked him. He held on, pulling hard, hoping the cable would still constrict the windpipe, through all those folds of thick black stuff. For a half-second he would have to slacken his hold. He did so and wrenched the scarf from her neck, falling back with a cry as his knuckle felt the projection of the thyroid cartilage.

  Adam’s apple. This was a man! A very young man with smooth olive skin, a rather long aquiline nose and eyes which, blank though they had seemed before, now glowed with anger or triumph or revenge. His upper lip curled back and he snarled. He came at Jeremy kicking, scratching with nails far too long for a boy, but Jeremy was taller and able to seize his blackmailer’s throat with his bare hands. He squeezed, pushing in his thumbs, his finger ends. Surprisingly strong but gasping and retching, the boy managed to knee Jeremy hard in the groin. The pain was excruciating. Jeremy didn’t fall but he staggered, unable to stop himself crying out, and while he struggled to keep his feet, the boy grabbed the case and ran. He was young and he could run faster, much faster, than a man of forty-eight, even while holding up the skirts of his floor-length coat. In pursuit but far behind, Jeremy saw him shed the coat and leave it lying in a heap on the pavement. The scarf he had already dropped on the grass, though he kept hold of the case.

  Jeremy gave up. He had to, he knew when he was beaten. The boy who should have been a girl he could still see far ahead of him. He had run down i
nto Penfold Street, Jeremy limping behind him, but he soon gave up. The boy had reached the comparative safety of the Marylebone Road, he could see him still running, heading as fast as he could towards Baker Street Station.

  The pain in Jeremy’s scrotum had ceased to stab and burn but the throbbing ache left behind was almost insupportable. He was forced to sit down on one of the wooden seats. After a little while, the pain cooled slightly, thought came back. He hadn’t thought at all for the past ten minutes, only acted and suffered. As he got up to turn back the way he had come, he reflected on what he had done. The garrotte had bitten into the boy’s flesh, must have been painful, depriving him briefly of breath, and when he discovered the mark or even the wound, he would be bent on revenge. He and the girl, his girlfriend no doubt. Would he go to the police? Probably, for Jeremy now understood that there would be no need to bring the earrings into this at all. He had only to go to the police with the evidence of the mark (or wound) on his neck and with the ability to describe and identify his attacker, for them soon to recognise the man he meant and come straight to Star Street …

  At home he mounted the stairs slowly, unhindered in his progress by the sound of someone, a child surely, sobbing behind Will Cobbett’s front door. The rest of the house was in darkness and uninterrupted silence. Jeremy let himself into his flat and flung himself into an armchair without putting lights on. To sleep seemed an impossible ambition, he would never sleep again. But he closed his eyes and lay back, thinking what to do. Stay there and wait for them to come?

  The idea of that had no appeal. To his surprise and then to his shame, he found that he wanted to run home to his mother. That couldn’t be. He might never see her again, or if he did, it would be in prison or at his trial. Don’t think in those terms, he said to himself. He opened the drawer in the desk where he had put the false earrings, the lighter and the keyring and put them in his jacket pocket. Was there anything else incriminating in his possession? Not that he could think of. Carrying his key in his left hand, he went downstairs again. The sobbing behind Cobbett’s door was still going on and now a line of light showed between it and the floor. Jeremy went out into the street.