by Ruth Rendell
He sat down at his desk and wrote, 'Found in Chepstow Villas a sum of money between eighty and a hundred and sixty pounds. Anyone who has lost such a sum should apply to the phone number below.' He transferred this to his computer in various sizes and styles of type and printed it out. He would attach it to one of the lamp posts as his neighbours attached appeals for lost cats. Armed with Sellotape and blu-tak, he went outside into the street with his sheet of paper and looked for a suitable lamp post. For the past week such an appeal had been fastened to the post outside number 62 and it was still there, though the missing animal, a spiteful Persian kitten called Bathsheba, had returned home two days before. Eugene peeled off the notice and put up his own in its stead.
He thought about it while he was cooking Ella's dinner. The applicant had only a telephone number. But he had no intention of handing over the money on a phone call alone. Whoever applied must be invited here and then asked to name the sum he had lost precisely. Not eighty pounds or a hundred and sixty pounds but somewhere in between. There was no way anyone could get it right except by the most enormous coincidence or by being the true loser of the money.
The phone call was really something to look forward to. He would tell Ella all about it later. Absently, he helped himself to another Chocorange.
CHAPTER FOUR
You couldn't walk down any of these posh streets without coming on a notice appealing for a lost cat. Always on the lookout for money-making scams, Lance thought it might be a good idea to find one of them and take it as a what-you-callit, a hostage. You could ask a big ransom. Those crazy cat owners would pay anything you cared to name. The difficulty, of course, was to catch a cat. One of them, a stripy chestnut and dark-brown job, had just come out from a bank of greenery and flowers and sat down on the wall opposite the lamp standard on which a member of its tribe was posted as missing. It began to wash its face.
Grab it, thought Lance. No, maybe go and get a sack or bag from somewhere first. He put up one hand, then the other, to see how easy grabbing it might be. The cat was a lot faster than he. Quick as a flash, its paw shot out and scratched him right across his four fingers and the back of his wrist. With a curse, Lance put his bleeding hand up to his mouth and stepped back. The cat had gone.
Kidnapping a cat was obviously a tougher task than he had supposed. He turned to read the notice on the lamp standard. It would be just his luck if the missing animal turned out to be that stripy thing, which looked valuable but had now disappeared. But the print on the sheet of paper wasn't about a cat at all. Found, Lance read, found in Pembridge Crescent, a sum of money between eighty and a hundred and sixty pounds. Anyone who has lost such a sum should apply to the phone number below. That was a funny way of putting it. Was it eighty or a hundred and sixty and what was the point of putting the two amounts? It took Lance a few moments to understand and when he did it made him angry. Trying to catch people out, that's what it was. The person who stuck that up there wanted to have a good laugh when the caller said a hundred pounds and it was really a hundred and twenty or ninety or whatever. Lance felt like tearing it down and stamping on it. He didn't. It would have been a woman who had written that, he was sure of it. He'd remember that number all right, it was the same code as his ex-girlfriend's and the four digits were those of his birthday 2787. Phoning would do no harm. But think about it first. Think carefully.
He might even ask Uncle Gib. He hated Uncle Gib and his religion and his horrible house but still he had to admit that the old man was clever. Not cleverer than him, of course, but clever in a different way.
Gilbert Gibson had put down a deposit on the house in the days when he was a burglar. Prison was an occupational hazard in his job and, all in all, he must have spent about twenty years inside. While he was away, his wife Ivy went to work in the Chevelure hair products factory to pay the mortgage and had just handed over the final instalment when she dropped dead of a brain haemorrhage. Her death coincided with Gilbert's exit from his fourth term of imprisonment. It would be his last. While inside this time his cellmate had been the Assistant Shepherd at the Church of the Children of Zebulun and the result of their frequent talks and Reuben Perkins's proselytising was that Gilbert got religion. This meant no more breaking of the eighth commandment. It also meant clothing the naked and giving shelter to those without a roof over their heads.
Uncle Gib, as he was known to everyone in the family, knew no one who was naked. However, his own nephew – in fact, his late wife's great-nephew – was without a home. When Lance Platts's parents threw him out and the girlfriend he moved in with got her brother to deal with him after he blacked her eye and knocked out one of her teeth, Uncle Gib took him in. Lance didn't want to live with Uncle Gib. It wasn't that he was fastidious or ambitious – he was in no position to be either – but even his parents' flat was moderately clean, had central heating and quite a nice bathroom. The girlfriend's place had been newly decorated by the council before she moved in with her baby. She had a microwave and an espresso coffee maker, and a huge flat-screen TV on which you could get about five hundred channels. Her flat in Talbot Road was always clean and gleaming, and had a balcony that caught the afternoon sun. Uncle Gib's house, on the other hand, standing in Blagrove Road right up against the Westway and the train line, was in much the same state of decoration now as it was when he put down that deposit on it in 1965. What had changed was the immediate neighbourhood, now packed with social housing, blocks and blocks of flats, rows and rows of little houses. Lance knew this because Uncle Gib often boasted about the unchanged condition of his home and the virtues of his wife.
'My poor dear wife, your Auntie Ivy, she couldn't afford the paint, let alone what you might call structural alterations. Everything she earned went into paying off the mortgage. A saint she was. They don't make them like that no more.'
The saint had nailed up the bathroom door when only a rusty trickle was coming out of the cold tap and the old geyser broke. The prevailing view held by Uncle Gib and Auntie Ivy was that when you had a kitchen sink and an outside toilet you didn't need a bathroom. One icy morning in early spring when Lance opened the toilet door he saw a rat scuttle away behind a ragwrapped pipe. He reported this to Uncle Gib who merely looked up from his scrambled egg and slice of black pudding and said, 'Don't let the folks next door hear you or they'll all want one.' When he had got over laughing at his own joke, he added, 'Beggars can't be choosers.'
Lance was a beggar and he couldn't be a chooser. He lived on the benefit and Westminster City Council paid his rent to Uncle Gib. The council had been told he had the whole first floor but this was a joke, considering Uncle Gib had the main bedroom, the box room was unusable on account of a leak in the roof over the window where water came in every time it rained, and the bathroom was boarded up. There was a second floor but this was never used or even visited. A rope had been tied across the bottom stair with a card hanging on it which said No Entry like on a one-way street. Lance and Uncle Gib lived in the quite large kitchen and a kind of cavern with a stone floor and a sink the old man called the 'scullery'. The front room and 'dining' room were never used, though they were furnished with hand-downs inherited by Auntie Ivy when her own parents died in the seventies. These rooms, according to Uncle Gib, were to be kept 'looking nice' for when he put the house on the market and prospective vendors came to view it.
When he wasn't writing tracts for the Church of the Children of Zebulun or being an Agony Uncle, answering The Zebulun magazine's readers' queries, Uncle Gib spent his time leafing through the glossy brochures estate agents put through his letter box almost every day. The neighbourhood was 'coming up' and houses soaring in price into the four and five hundred thousand bracket and beyond. Only after considerable refurbishment, of course, a requirement that Uncle Gib ignored while reiterating the enormous advantage of the house being made detached by the construction of the flyover. His laptop in front of him, he sat at the kitchen table drinking cup after cup of dark-brown tea and chain-smoking.
Another thing Lance hated about the house was the all-pervading stink of cigarettes.
'There's a poky little place here,' said Uncle Gib, 'only two bedrooms, no garden, what they call a patio, which means a backyard, no scullery, couple of streets away in Elkstone Road, what d'you think they're asking?'
'I don't know,' said Lance. 'Might be five fucking million for all I know.'
'Don't you use that language here. This is a godly house. Of course it's not five million. Have a bit of sense. Be your age. Four hundred and fifty thousand, that's what.'
Lance tried to get his own back by making a fan out of one of the brochures and waving it briskly to clear the air.
'You don't like my fags the remedy's in your own hands. You don't have to stay here. I don't want you. You'll have to go when I sell the house.' Uncle Gib pointed a nicotine-stained finger at him. 'I'll tell you something. Our Lord would have smoked if there'd been any tobacco about in the land of Galilee. He drank, didn't he? It wouldn't just have been water into wine at the marriage at Cana, it'd have been Marlboro Lites for all the guests.'
But in need of fresh air, Lance had gone out into the garden, a very small trapezium-shaped plot where nature prevailed untouched and where grass, nettles and thistles, dock and the occasional large speckled fungus grew unchecked. A shed in the far corner, its roof long caved in, served as a winter store place for Uncle Gib's garden furniture, an iron table he had stolen from a pub and two kitchen chairs, one of them with a leg missing. Lance sat down on the intact chair – the other one had to be propped up with bricks – and began thinking carefully. She'd want to see him, whoever she was, she wouldn't just be content with him talking on the phone. Maybe she wouldn't even ask him for the right number between eighty and a hundred and sixty. He'd have to go to her place and have her question him. He went back into the house to consult Uncle Gib.
The old man had opened his laptop and was answering his letters. Immensely proud of his role as amateur psychologist and adviser, Uncle Gib never minded other people reading what he had written, though criticism wasn't allowed. Over his shoulder, Lance read: What you are doing, co-habiting with a man outside wedlock, is morally wrong and against God's law and you know it. Now, after nine years of sin, you say you have met another man and think of leaving your paramour. Leave him you must if he refuses to marry you. As for the other man you can never enjoy the glory of God's love if you persist in seeing him… Lance couldn't help admiring Uncle Gib's command of language, not to mention being able to spell all those words. He waited until Uncle Gib had finished the letter.
'I want to ask you something.'
'Can't you see I'm working? You don't know what that is, though, do you? Not just ordinary work either, God's work. Showing this bunch of sinners the error of their ways.' Uncle Gib's tone changed from droning piety to an aggressive bark. 'What is it, then? Come on, don't beat about the bush.'
Lance told him.
'She's got your measure all right, hasn't she? You and them as are like you. Want me to break the commandment, do you, teach you how to thieve, teach you the tricks of the trade?'
'I'm only asking what you think I ought to do.'
Uncle Gib was a very tall, very thin man whom prosecuting counsel had once described as looking like the famous statue of Voltaire. 'The resemblance is purely physical, my Lord,' he said to the judge and was reprimanded for irrelevance, misguided wit and trying to be clever. It was true that his piercing eyes, cadaverous face and emaciated body gave Uncle Gib an intellectual look. He had very good white teeth, which had miraculously survived years of prison food and only sporadic cleaning. These he bared now in what might have been a smile but was probably a snarl.
'You've lost a sum of money in Pembridge Crescent, have you? You was strolling down there with a hundred plus in your pocket when the wind blew, all them notes flew out and settled in a little pile on the pavement and you never noticed. Give me a break.'
'You reckon it's all notes, do you? That means it's got to be a round figure, not like eighty pounds forty-two or something. And it's more than a hundred or else she wouldn't have put the whatyou- call-it, the high number right up there – I mean like a hundred and sixty. Maybe it's halfway, like -' Lance had to work it out '- like a hundred and forty.' That wasn't right. He tried again. 'A hundred and twenty. Or it could be a hundred and twenty-five.' He looked helplessly at Uncle Gib.
The Voltaire lookalike said, 'You're doing fine. Keep at it. Only don't you forget all the time you're diving deeper and deeper into sin.'
'Why d'you reckon she's doing this? Why not just keep the money?' Lance found it hard to imagine anyone who wasn't in need of a hundred pounds. 'I mean, she's playing some game, isn't she?'
'Suppose she's just an honest woman? Didn't think of that, did you? No, you wouldn't.'
'Why don't you fuck off?' Lance said, making a quick exit, though not so quick as to avoid hearing Uncle Gib's bitter reprimands for his language and threats of unquenchable fire coming down from heaven.
His latest mobile had ceased to work after its owner had had a bar put on it. This hadn't happened until five days had passed after Lance stole it from the back seat of a car. No doubt its owner hadn't noticed its absence. People had too much money for their own good. Anyone who left a mobile inside an unlocked car deserved all he got. Lance threw the mobile away before someone told him all it needed was a new Sim card and now he was obliged to use Uncle Gib's phone. It was a wonder the old man had one at all. No doubt it had been Auntie Ivy's decision and she had the phone installed during one of his long periods as a guest of Her Majesty's government.
Lance dialled the code, which was shared by his ex-girlfriend, though, as is the way with exchange codes, in a considerably less upmarket neighbourhood. The first time he tried he got the engaged signal, the second time, much later, a woman answered. Just as he thought.
'It's about the paper you put up in the street.'
'I'm sorry?'
'Up on the pole. The one about the money you found.'
'I'm afraid you've lost me. Gene! It must be for you, Gene.'
Another woman, thought Lance. Probably a couple of lesbians. But it was a man's voice. 'Eugene Wren. What can I do for you?'
Lance repeated what he'd said.
'Ah. You lost some money, did you?'
'Yeah. That's right.'
'I'm not going to ask you how much it was. Not now. Perhaps you'll do me the courtesy of coming here and we'll have a chat about it. When would suit you? Tomorrow evening about 6.30?'
Lance agreed. The rest of the empty day stretched before him. He would have liked to go out somewhere for the evening, pub first, then maybe a club up West. He'd never been to a club, he couldn't afford it, he couldn't afford anything. His benefit was basic. He was a 'Jobseeker' but he didn't know what to say at interviews, he just sat there in hopeless silence. No one wanted to employ him and now he had given up trying, though poverty was a perpetual trial to him. Everything he received went on food to supplement the very small amounts Uncle Gib made available to him. If you were rationed to an egg a day, two slices of black pudding or luncheon meat, four slices of bread, a bun and a small wedge of processed cheese, you needed a good deal extra. When he complained, Uncle Gib said that was all he had and people ate too much. God would have vengeance on them for not thinking of the starving millions in Africa. Lance bought tins of baked beans and tins of sliced peaches, pork pies and sausages, king-size bags of crisps and chocolate bars, and the biggest loaves of sliced white bread he could find. He also bought quite a lot of booze, Bacardi breezers, bottles of cider and the cheapest gin as well as wine from Kurdistan and Bulgaria. All his benefit was gone and he remained stick-thin.
He had no faith in securing this 'found' sum of money for himself but he'd get a look at the place where this Eugene Wren lived, he'd have an idea of the house and its contents. Remembering some of the things Uncle Gib had said years ago in his unregenerate days when Lance was a child, he thought of the term '
casing the joint', and he thought of observing entrances and exits, ways of getting in and out. And of course there was always a chance he'd get the money as well.
CHAPTER FIVE
In the hospital, when he regained consciousness, they told him he had had a heart attack and requested his consent to the operation he should have had a year or two before. Joel asked to have it done privately, knowing Pa would pay. Pa would pay anything to keep him out of his way; out, preferably, of Hampstead Garden Suburb and its environs, out of the whole of north London. The operation was performed with the frightening (if he had known about it beforehand) splitting of his breastbone and lifting out of his heart – and something else.
His surgeon told him afterwards, 'We nearly lost you. Don't know why. You seemed OK, thriving no less, and then you arrested. Of course we brought you back. Don't suppose you remember anything about it, do you?'
Joel said he didn't. What had happened to him he intended to tell no one – not yet, at any rate. If he really tried it might go away. Concentrate instead on trying to remember exactly what had happened before he passed out and fell over in the street. His mother came to see him, unknown to Pa, and he told her where it was he had had his heart attack.
'I think I'd drawn some money out of the hole in the wall,' he said to her. 'I think it was a hundred and forty quid but there was only twenty-five in my pocket. It's in the drawer in that cabinet now.'
'You were never any good with money, Joel,' said his mother mournfully.
'Someone might have handed it in to the police. It's worth asking.'
His mother looked doubtful. She said she would enquire and then she said she wondered if it was 'all those drugs' he had taken in time gone by that caused his 'little heart problem'. Joel said he'd gone into rehab, hadn't he, he'd got cured, and then he lay down and pulled the sheet over his head. It was too light in his room. He had asked them for dark blinds and preferably dark curtains too, but they said the ones at his window, pale-blue and translucent, were the best they could do. He had read in a travel supplement about a place in the north of Sweden called Kiruna. It was inside the Arctic Circle and at midsummer when daylight endured all night, the Ferrum Hotel put up pitch-black blinds at their windows to give guests a dark night. At midwinter it stayed dark night and day. Joel liked the thought of Kiruna. It was just the place for him.
