A Judgement in Stone

by Ruth Rendell

  “If you go on like that they’ll hear you,” said Eunice. “I’m glad we did it too.”

  They left the tray on the table, the teapot in the middle of the bed. The light was on down in the hall. Joan went straight to the gun room and rooted about in George’s toolbox.

  “I’m going to cut the phone wire.”

  “Like they do on T.V.,” said Eunice. She had ceased to protest. She nodded approvingly. “It comes in over the front door,” she said. “Stop them phoning the police, that will.”

  Joan came back, a silent smile glittering. “What shall we do now, dear?”

  It hadn’t occurred to Eunice that they would do anything more. Breaking things down here must necessarily be heard in the drawing room, and, police or not, she and this frail stick of a woman could easily be overpowered by four strong adults. “I don’t know,” she said, but this time her habitual response had a wistful note in it. She wanted the fun to go on.

  “May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,” said Joan, picking up the shotgun and looking down one of its barrels. “Frighten them out of their wits, it would, if I fired this.”

  Eunice took the other gun off the wall. “Not like that,” she said. “Like this.”

  “You’re a dark horse, Eun. Since when’ve you been a lady gangster?”

  “I’ve watched him. I can do it as well as he can.”

  “I’m going to try!”

  “It’s not loaded,” said Eunice. “There’s things called cartridges in that drawer. I’ve often watched him do it They cost a fortune, those guns, couple of hundred each.”

  “We could break them.”

  “That’s what you call it when you open them to load them. Breaking the gun’s what you say.”

  They looked at each other and Joan laughed with a sound like a peacock’s shriek.

  “The music’s stopped,” said Eunice.

  It was twenty-five minutes to nine. Act One had come to an end, in the opera and in the kitchen.

  20

  In the lull between acts Jacqueline poured second cups of coffee for all of them. Melinda stretched and stood up.

  “Marvellous,” said George. “What do you think, darling?”

  “Zerlina’s awful. Too old and too tinkly. George, did you hear any sounds from upstairs during the minuet?”

  “I don’t think so. It was probably our bête noire slinking in.”

  “The last thing she does is slink, Daddy,” said Melinda. “Sneaking, maybe. Oh, God, I’ve forgotten to stop the tape.”

  “It wasn’t slinking or sneaking I heard, but breaking glass.”

  Melinda switched off her recorder. “They were at a party,” she said, referring to the opera. “I expect it was sound effects.” The rest of what she was going to say was cut off by a thin shriek from somewhere outside the room.

  “George!” Jacqueline almost shouted. “It’s that Mrs. Smith!”

  “I do believe it is,” said George slowly and ominously.

  “She’s out in the kitchen with Miss Parchman.”

  “Very soon she’ll be out in the cold with her marching orders.” He got up.

  “Oh, Daddy, you’ll miss the beginning of Act Two. Nasty old Parchment Face is probably just having a farewell party.”

  “I’ll be two minutes,” said George. He went to the door where he paused and looked at his wife for the last time. Had he known it was the last time, that look would have been eloquent of six years’ bliss and of gratitude, but he didn’t know, so he merely cast up his eyes and pursed his mouth before walking across the hall and down the passage to the kitchen. Jacqueline considered going with him but thought better of it and settled back against the sofa cushions as Act Two began with the quarrel between Leporello and his master. The tape recorder was on. Ma che ho ti fatto, che vuoi lasciarmi (But what have I done to you that you wish to leave me)? Oh, niente affato; quasi ammazzarmi (Oh, nothing at all, but almost killed me)!…

  George opened the kitchen door, and there he stopped in amazement. His housekeeper stood on one side of the table, her stripy hair coming away from its pins, her pale face flushed maroon, facing the crane-chick figure of Joan Smith, befeathered in green and salmon pink. Each was holding one of his shotguns which she pointed at the other.

  “This is monstrous,” said George when he recovered his voice. “Put those guns down at once!”

  Joan gave a babbling shriek. “Bang, bang!” she said. Some memory of war or war film came to her. “Hande hoch!” she shouted, and pointed the gun at his face.

  “Fortunately for you, it isn’t loaded.” Calmly Major Cover-dale of Alamein looked at his new watch. “I will give you and Miss Parchman thirty seconds to put those guns on the table. If you don’t I shall take them from you by force, and then I shall call the police.”

  “You’ll be lucky,” said Eunice.

  Neither woman moved. George stood stock-still for the full half minute. He wasn’t afraid. The guns weren’t loaded. As the thirty seconds came to an end and Joan still pointed the gun at him, he heard faintly from the drawing room the beginning of Elvira’s sweet and thrilling O, taci ingiusto core (Be silent, treacherous heart)! His own was thudding steadily. He went up to Joan, grasped the gun, and gave a sharp grunt as Eunice shot him in the neck. He fell across the table, flinging out his arms to grasp its edge, blood shooting in a fountain from the severed jugular. Joan scuttered back against the wall. With an indrawn breath, Eunice fired the second barrel into his back.

  At the sound of the two shots Jacqueline sprang to her feet with a cry of alarm. “For heaven’s sake, what was that?”

  “Mrs. Smith’s van backfiring,” said Melinda, and, dropping her voice because of the tape, “It always does that. There’s something wrong with the exhaust.”

  “It sounded like a gun.”

  “Cars backfiring do sound like guns. Sit down, Jackie, or we’ll miss this, and it’s the loveliest song of all.”

  Be silent, treacherous heart. Beat not so in my breast. Elvira leaned from her window, Leporello and the Don appeared beneath it, and the great trio swelled on the two baritone voices and the soprano. Jacqueline sat down, glanced at the door. “Why doesn’t your father come back?” she said nervously.

  “He’s shot the lunatic,” said Giles, “and he doesn’t know how to tell us.”

  “Oh, Giles. Darling, go and see, would you? I can’t hear a sound.”

  “Of course you can’t, Jackie, with this on,” said Melinda with asperity. “You don’t want to hear him bawling Parchman out, do you? All this rubbish is going to be on my tape, isn’t it?”

  Jacqueline put up her hands, fluttering them in a little gesture of apology, yet of anxiety too, and Giles, who had begun languidly to raise himself from his chair, slumped back into it. From the television came the softly plucked notes of Giovanni’s mandolin. Deh! vieni alla finestra (Then come to the window) … Jacqueline, her hands clenched, obeyed his behest. She jumped up suddenly, went to the window on the left of the set, and parted the curtains. The tape forgotten, she cried out:

  “Mrs. Smith’s van is out there! It can’t have been that we heard.”

  She turned back to face them, a disgruntled Melinda, a bored, exasperated Giles. Her face was puckered with distress, and even Giles saw it, felt it, her tension and her rising fear. “I’ll go,” he sighed, beginning to shift himself very slowly like an old man with arthritis. He lounged towards the door as Joan Smith and Eunice Parchman passed from the kitchen into the passage.

  “We’ll have to kill the others now,” said Eunice in the voice she used when speaking of some necessary measure, not to be postponed, such as washing a floor.

  Joan, who needed no encouragement, looked back at George. He was dead, but his watch lived on, and since his death the minute hand had passed from the ten nearly to the twelve. It was almost nine o’clock. She looked back once, and then up at Eunice with a great face-splitting smile. There was blood on her hands and face and on the jumper Eunice had knitted
for her. They passed into the hall and the strengthening music, music which met them with a blast of baritone voice and plucked strings as Giles opened the drawing-room door. He saw the blood and shouted out.

  He shouted, “Oh, Christ!” and turned back, a split second before Joan told him to.

  “Get back in there. We’ve got guns.”

  Eunice was the first to follow him. A jumble of male voices singing roared in her head, and power, the chance at last to command and avenge, roared through her body. It strengthened her hands which had failed her a little back there in the kitchen. They were hard and dextrous now as she levelled the reloaded gun. Jacqueline’s face, blanched and terrified, was to her only the face which had sneered a little while handing over that Valentine. Jacqueline’s voice, screaming for her husband, was still the voice of a woman who read books and looked up from her letter writing to murmur sarcastic courtesies. In those moments the words they cried and their pleas passed over her almost unheard, and by some strange metamorphosis, produced in Eunice’s brain, they ceased to be people and became the printed word. They were those things in the bookcases, those patchy black blocks on white paper, eternally her enemies, hated and desired.

  “You’d better sit down,” she said. “You’ve got it coming to you.”

  Joan’s laughter cut across her words. Joan shouted something from the Bible, and then Joan fired her gun. Eunice gasped. Not because she heard the screams or saw the blood but because Joan might do it first, Joan might beat her to it. She advanced, pointing her gun. She fired both barrels, reloaded while another shot rang in her ears, and then she emptied the two barrels into what lay on the Chinese carpet.

  The music had stopped. Joan must have stopped it. The banging had stopped and the screaming. A silence more profound, more soothing to the mind and the savage breast, filled the drawing room like a thick tangible balm. It held Eunice suspended. It petrified this stone-age woman into stone. Her eyelids dropped and she breathed evenly and steadily so that, had she had an observer, he would have supposed her fallen asleep where she stood.

  A stone that breathed was Eunice, as she had always been.

  21

  The exalted calm of one who has performed a holy mission descended upon Joan Smith. She surveyed what she had done and saw that it was good. She had scattered the enemies of God, and thus purified herself. If the McNaghton Rules had been applied to her she would have passed the test, for though she had known what she was doing she did not know it was wrong.

  She was innocent in the true meaning of the word. And now she would drive down into Greeving and tell the village what she had done, proclaim it in the streets and shout it aloud in the Blue Boar. It was a pity she had cut the phone wire, for otherwise she could have lifted the phone and announced it to the operator. Calmly, majestically, she laid down the gun and picked up the tape recorder. It was still on. She pressed something and the little red light on it went out. Inside it was a record of her achievement, and it is a measure of Joan’s madness that at that moment she saw herself, at some future time, playing the tape for the edification of the Epiphany brethren.

  Of Eunice she took very little notice. Eunice stood immobile, still holding her gun, staring implacably at the bodies of Giles and Melinda, who lay side by side in death, closer to an embrace than they had ever been in life. But Joan had forgotten who Eunice was. She had forgotten her own name, and the past, and Shepherds Bush and Norman. She was alone, a titaness, an angel, and she feared nothing but that some malignant spirit, allied to the Coverdale interest, might yet intervene to prevent her from proclaiming the good news.

  George’s blood was on her jumper, on her hands and face. She let it dry there. Uncharacteristically, with a long slow stride, she walked towards the door and the hall, and Eunice was aroused from her contemplation.

  “You’d better wash your face before you go,” she said.

  Joan ignored her. She opened the front door and looked for demons in the darkness. The drive and the garden were empty, and to Joan they seemed friendly. She got into the van.

  “Suit yourself,” said Eunice. “Have a good wash before you go to bed. And mind you don’t say a word. Just keep quiet.”

  “I am the spear of the Lord of Hosts.”

  Eunice shrugged. That sort of thing didn’t much matter, Joan always went on like that, and the village people would only think she was more crazy than ever. She went back into the house where she had things to see to.

  With only side lights on, Joan drove the van euphorically out of the grounds of Lowfield Hall. She drove with her head held high, looking to the right and the left, anywhere but ahead of her, and she smiled graciously as if to an admiring throng. It was a miracle she even reached the gates. But she did reach them and got about a quarter of a mile along the lane. There, where the lane bent rather sharply to avoid a high brick wall that enclosed the front garden of Mr. Meadows’ farmhouse, she saw a white owl drop from one of the trees and flap heavily in front of her at windscreen level. Joan thought it was a demon sent by the Coverdales to get her. She stamped on the accelerator to smash through it and smashed instead into the wall. The front part of the van crumpled up like a concertina, and Joan’s head crashed through glass into a twelve-inch-thick bastion of concrete faced with brick.

  It was half past nine. Mr. and Mrs. Meadows were visiting their married daughter in Sudbury, and there was no one else in the house to hear the crash. Norman Smith was in the Blue Boar where they had had their own bit of excitement, although it wasn’t until the following day that they realised how exciting it had been. He went home at ten-fifteen. His van wasn’t parked between the village store and the triangle of grass, but he supposed Joan was still off somewhere with Eunice, it being Eunice’s last night in Greeving, and a good thing too. No one down Greeving Lane (or, at least, no one reported the crash) until the Meadowses got home at twenty-five past ten. When they saw their ruined wall and the van with Joan lying unconscious half in and half out of it, they phoned first for an ambulance and then they phoned Norman Smith. Joan, who was alive though in a bad way, was taken to hospital where they weren’t going to worry about whether the blood on her was all hers or not, there was so much of it. So Joan Smith, who ought to have gone into a mental hospital months before, ended up in an intensive care ward for the physically injured.

  This was the second time that evening Norman had been afforded the sight of blood. Very nearly three hours before he was fetched to the scene of his wife’s accident, two young men had walked into the saloon bar of the Blue Boar, and the smaller and younger of them had asked the licensee, Edwin Carter, where the men’s room was. He wanted to wash his hands, for the left one appeared injured in some way, and blood had seeped through the handkerchief that bandaged it.

  Mr. Carter directed him to the lavatory, and his wife asked if there was anything she could do in the way of first aid. Her offer was refused, no explanation of the injury given, and when the young man came back he had rebandaged his hand with a cleaner handkerchief. Neither of the Carters nor any of the patrons of the bar recalled actually having seen his hand, but only that there had been blood on the original bandage. The other witnesses were Jim Meadows of the garage, Alan and Pat New-stead, Geoff and Barbara Baalham and Geoff’s brother Philip, and Norman Smith.

  Mrs. Carter was to remember that the man with the injured hand drank a double brandy and his companion a half of bitter. They sat at a table, drank their drinks in less than five minutes, and left without speaking to anyone except to ask where they could get petrol at this hour, Meadows’ garage being closed. Geoff Baalham told them there was a self-service petrol station on the main road past Gallows Corner and, describing how to find it, followed them out onto the Blue Boar’s forecourt. There he noticed their car, an old Morris Minor Traveller, maroon bodywork in a wooden shooting brake frame. He didn’t, however, notice the registration number.

  They left the village by Greeving Lane, their route inevitably taking them past Lowfield Hall.
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  On the following day all those witnesses furnished the police with descriptions of these strangers. Jim Meadows said they both had long dark hair, were both dressed in blue denim, and the one whose hand was not injured was over six feet tall. The Carters agreed that the tall one had long dark hair, but their daughter, Barbara Baalham, said both had brown hair and brown eyes. According to Alan Newstead, the one with the injured hand had short fair hair and piercing blue eyes, but his wife said that, though piercing, the eyes were brown. Geoff Baalham said the short one had fair hair and grey corduroy jeans, while his brother insisted both wore denim jeans and the tall one had bitten nails. Norman Smith said the fair one had a scratch on his face and the dark one was no more than five feet nine.

  All of them wished they had taken more notice at the time, but how were they to know they would need to?

  Left alone, Eunice, who had wanted to “see to things,” at first saw to nothing at all. She sat on the stairs. She had a curious feeling that if she did nothing but just went off in the morning with her cases, to the bus stop she had long ago located, to the station, and got to London, it would all be all right. They might not find the Coverdales for weeks, and when they did they wouldn’t know where she was, would they?

  A cup of tea would be nice, for she had never had that earlier one, Joan having poured the contents of the pot all over Jacqueline’s bed. She made the tea, walking back and forth past George’s body. The watch on his dead wrist told her it was twenty to ten. Now to pack. She had added very little to her personal property during those nine months apart from what were truly consumer goods—sweets, chocolate, cake—and these she had consumed. Only a few hand-knitted garments swelled her stock of clothes. Everything was packed into Mrs. Samson’s cases in much the same order as it had originally gone in.

  Up here, in her room, it felt as if nothing had happened. Pity she had to go tomorrow really, for now there was no one to make her go, and she liked it here, she had always liked it. And it would be even better now that there was no one to interfere with her life.