by Ruth Rendell
Chapter 1
When he lifted it off the seat the backpack felt heavier than when he had first put it into the car. He lowered it on to the soft ferny ground. Then he got back into the driving seat to move the car deep into a cave made by hawthorn bushes and brambles, and the hop vines which climbed over everything in this wood. It was late June and the vegetation very dense and luxuriant.
Getting out again and standing back to take a good look, he could barely see the car. Probably he only saw it because he knew it was there. No one else would notice it. He squatted down, hoisted the backpack up on to his shoulders and slowly stood up to his full height. The movement reminded him of something and it was a moment before he realised what it was: lifting up his little son to sit on his shoulders. A hundred years ago, it seemed. The backpack was lighter than the boy but felt heavier to him.
He was afraid that if he stood upright the pack would jerk him backwards and break his spine. Of course it wouldn’t. It just felt that way. All the same, he wouldn’t stand upright, wouldn’t even try it. Instead, he stooped, bending almost double. It wasn’t far. He could walk like this the two hundred yards to the bridge. Anyone seeing him from a distance in this half-light would have thought him a humpbacked man.
There was no one to see. The twisty country lane wound round Yorstone Wood and over the bridge. He could have brought the car right up to the bridge but that way it would have been seen, so he had driven off the lane along a ride and then through a clearing to find the hop-grown cave. In the distance he thought he heard a car, then something heavier with a diesel engine. They would be on the road below, Brimhurst Lane that ran from Myfleet to Brimhurst Prideaux, passing under Yorstone Bridge ahead of him. It wasn’t far now but it seemed like miles. If his legs gave way he wouldn’t be able to get up again. Would it be easier to drag the back pack? What, then, if he met someone? Dragging some thing looks much more suspicious than carrying it. He pressed his shoulders back a little and, surprisingly, that was better. There was no one to meet. He could see the lane through the trees and the little stone bridge no one had reinforced with steel or replaced with a brightly painted wooden structure.
Its parapets were low, too low for safety, according to the local paper. The paper was always on about this bridge, and the dangers of the lane and the low para pets. He walked out on to the bridge, squatted down and let the backpack slip off his shoulders to the ground. He undid the flaps and then the zip. Inside, now revealed, was a lump of concrete, very roughly spherical, a bit bigger than a soccer ball. A pair of gloves was also inside the pack. To be on the safe side, he put them on. Though it would never come to any one examining his hands, it would be stupid to scrape or bruise them.
What light remained was fading fast and with the coming of the dark it grew cooler. His watch told him that it was nine fifteen. Not long now. He lifted up the lump of concrete in his gloved hands, thought of balancing it on the parapet in readiness, then thought again. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that someone would come along the path he had used and cross the bridge. Wait for the call, he thought. It won’t be long now.
No traffic had passed along the road below since he had come on to the bridge but a car came now, going towards Brimhurst Prideaux, most probably all the way to Kingsmarkham. He closed his hand over the mobile in his pocket, worried because it hadn’t rung. Then it rang.
‘Yes?’
‘She’s left. You want the number again?’
‘I’ve got it. A silver Honda.’
‘Right.’
‘A silver Honda. Should be along in four minutes.’
He heard the line close. It was dark now. A car passed under the bridge, heading towards Brimhurst St Mary and Myfleet. The road dipped where the bridge passed over it and then twisted to the left, almost a right-angled bend. There were tall trees on the corner with thick ancient trunks and a black and white arrow sign opposite, pointing traffic to the left. A minute had passed.
He moved across to the other side of the bridge, dragging the backpack behind him, and there he bent down, heaved up the lump of concrete, his arms straining, and set it on the parapet. Just as well it wasn’t far to lift it. Another minute gone. A white van with head lights on at full beam came from the Myfleet direction, a car following it, to pass, just behind him, a motorbike coming from Kingsmarkham. He was momentarily blinded by the headlights, held in them, which made him curse. No one should see him. The silver Honda with the number he had memorised would be along soon, very soon. The third minute passed. A fourth.
He hated anticlimaxes. The silver Honda could have taken another route. It was all very well to say it never did but you could never say that, not when it came to the way people behaved. He was facing the way it would come, towards Myfleet. It would pass under the bridge but before it reached the left-hand bend. He could see lights in the distance. The lights appeared and disappeared as a hedge or a tree trunk cut them from his view, and appeared again. Two sets of lights, not one car but two, both of them silver, quite close together. One was the Honda but he couldn’t tell which, not from here, not in the dark, but he could read the number or the last three digits.
As soon as he had given a great push to the lump on the parapet and felt it drop, he knew he had aimed at the wrong car. The crash was huge, like a bomb. The first car, the one he had hit, ploughed into a tree trunk, its bonnet burst open, its windscreen gone, half its roof caved in. It seemed to have split and exploded. The car behind, undamaged until this point, crashed into its rear and its boot lid sprang open. That was the silver Honda which had been his quarry. As its driver got out of it, screaming, her hands up in the air, he knew he had failed.
He waited no longer but picked up the backpack and moved, looking back once to see the leading car burst into flames. In the brilliant light which illuminated everything he saw for the first time the woman he had tried to kill.
Chapter 2
George Marshalson had slept badly. He always did when she was out. Going to bed soon after she had left the house, he had slept for an hour or two, then woken and lain awake, no longer comforted by the presence of Diana next to him. It was August and the night was warm, humid and sticky in spite of the wide-open windows. He lay listening to the sounds of the night, the trickle of the sluggish river, a bird, its name unknown, giving its eerie wail.
Pressing the button on the clock which lit up its display panel, he saw that it was still only eleven forty-one. The bathroom summoned him, reminding him with a twinge that, as with most men of his age, his prostate gland was no longer in perfect working order. He parted the floor-length curtains an inch and felt a breath of air on his face. The sky was cloudless and the moon had risen. Weeks of heat had dried the foliage on the trees that arched above the lane but now only their abundance could be seen, their heavy luxuriance, hanging utterly still in the warm air. He thought how wonderful it would be if something had happened to send her home early. That wretched club closed, for instance, or even a police raid, though he hardly supposed Amber did things to attract police attention - or did she? You never knew with the young these days. Still, it would be wonderful to dose these curtains, part them again and see her walking down the lane...
There had been nights when he had gone out into the lane to look for her. A fruitless business, too stupid to confess to anyone. Even Diana had never known. He had gone out and walked up to the corner - two or three hundred yards? - looked up and down the road that ran from Myfleet to Kingsmarkham, then walked back. There was no point in it, there never had been, but it was what anxious parents or lovers did. Even if he considered doing it tonight, now was too early. She would be inside that club, an underground place he thought it was, with her friends doing what
ever they did. He dropped the curtains and stood looking at Diana. She slept silently, one hand up against her cheek. Youth came back to her while she slept, as it is said to come back to the newly dead. I wonder if she’s got someone, he thought, ‘someone else’, as they say. It suddenly seemed obscene to him to share a bed with a man when you had some other lover. But perhaps she hadn’t, probably she hadn’t. She was just indifferent to him, as he was to her. In any case, he didn’t care. On the rare occasions when he thought about it, he realised he didn’t really care much about anyone or anything except Amber.
He fell into a restless sleep. A sound woke him. A car in the lane? That boy might have brought her home. He usually dropped her at the corner but he might have brought her home. Once more he lit up the dial on the clock. One fifty-six. This was the sort of time she came home. She was usually very quiet about it, as much to avoid waking the child as disturbing him and Diana. Perhaps she was home. Perhaps the sound he had heard was the front door closing. He lay there and listened. Silence. Then that bird, whatever it was, let out its sad cry. Two o’clock, half past, ten to three. . . He got up and went out on to the landing. If she had come home she would close her bedroom door. It was wide open.
The chaotic untidiness, the unmade bed, the clothes scattered, tossed about, abandoned, confronted him, the offence they usually gave him softened by the moonlit dark. She wasn’t home. Three was very late and it was after three now. He went downstairs, barefoot across the wide wood-floored hail, the only cool surface in the place, telling himself he would find her in the living room, in the kitchen, eating something, drinking, that sparkling water they all poured down all the time. She wasn’t there. He thought, what’s the use of going back to bed, I’ll never sleep. But what was he to do if he didn’t go back? There was nothing to do in the night because that time was set aside for sleep. As he climbed the stairs a cry came to him that wasn’t from that bird but from the baby. If it had been left to George he would have let the baby cry, though he had never let Amber cry He went into the bedroom arid saw Diana sitting on the side of the bed, stark naked. She slept like that. She always had. Of course he had liked it when they first knew each other, when they were first married. Now he thought it. . . unseemly. At his age and, come to that, at hers. She stood up without speaking to him, threw on the blue silk robe she had taken off at bedtime and went to see to the baby.
It took her about ten minutes to calm him. When she came back he had the light on and was sitting up in bed.
‘She hasn’t come in,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘You’re going to have to put your foot down, aren’t you? You’re going to have to tell her this sort of behaviour is wholly unacceptable. If she wants to live under our roof and enjoy the advantages of living here, she’ll have to be in by midnight at the latest. She’s only just eighteen, for God’s sake.’
‘She’s going, isn’t she, in November?’
She made no answer. She’ll be relieved, he thought. He turned off the light and in the renewed darkness heard the blue silk slide off her naked body. The smooth warm skin of her thigh brushed against him. It made him shiver in the heat.
The moon had gone, the dawn not yet come. He lay wakeful for an hour, then got up, went to the bathroom and put on his clothes. Old men’s clothes, Amber said they were, flannel trousers, a shirt with a collar and cuffs, socks and lace-up brogues, but he didn’t know what else to wear. Probably he had slept a little after Diana came back to bed. It was said that you slept, you dozed, even if you were sure you hadn’t. While he had drifted off into that fitful sleep she might have come in. He stood waiting by the bedroom window, giving it five minutes, ten, before going out on to the landing, postponing the joy of seeing her door closed at last or the horror of finding it still open.
It was open.
He thought now, putting his long-held fear into words, something must have happened to her. The thing that happens to eighteen-year-old girls out alone at night. It was ten to five and growing light. The sky was pale and glowing, of that colour that has no name and no description unless it is to be like a pearl. Outside the air, which for hours had been heavy and close, felt fresh and cool. He thought, I will walk down to the corner, I will walk along the road, miles if necessary until I find her. And if I don’t, at least I won’t be at home in that bed beside that woman, hearing that baby cry
The only houses in Mill Lane were his own and, a hundred yards from it, on the other side, a terrace of three small villas. Why they had been built there a hundred and fifty years ago, to house whom, no one seemed to know. Outside the middle one a car stood parked by the grass verge. Briefly, George wondered why John Brooks left his car there overnight when there was room for it on his driveway. The thought was fleeting, carrying him back inevitably to Amber who had been assisted by Brooks in her efforts to use Diana’s computer. Why not ask Diana herself? They had always disliked each other, those two, from the first. How could anyone dislike his little Amber?
But where was she? What had become of her? Walking on the Jewel Terrace side, he came to the end of Mill Lane and looked up and down the Myfleet Road. It was long and straight at this point, a single carriageway with fields and woods on either side of it, cats’ eyes down its centre but no traffic signs or road markings apart from the signpost ‘To Brimhurst St John’, which pointed down Mill Lane. Walking along that road was pointless. He would do better to go back and fetch the car. Or he could phone that boy, that Ben Miller. Of course, it was outrageous to phone anyone at five in the morning and Miller wasn’t Amber’s boyfriend, she had no boyfriend, but he cared very little about that. Oh, the relief if she were at the Millers’ in Myfleet - except that she wouldn’t be. Why would she be?
He turned round and began to walk back on the other side. She might have stopped over with one of her Kingsmarkham friends, Lara or . . . was she called Megan? Or Samantha or Chris. He was clinging to straws and he knew it. He felt them float away from him downstream. The sun was coming up, already bringing a touch of heat. He stepped on to the grass verge, preferring its soft feel underfoot, looked to the left of him into the shade of the trees and saw some thing white gleaming there, half hidden by the tall attenuated weeds. A hammer knocked at his heart and a tide of terror tore through him. For a moment he couldn’t move, only stand there with blindness enclosing his eyes. He took a step towards the white thing. Trying to see was the most painful thing he had ever done but he had to do it, he had to look. He saw her outflung hand, that stupid white watch with the Gollum face, and he fell forward. In a faint, perhaps, he didn’t know, or just because lying across her body was the only place to be.
How long he lay there he was never sure. He wanted to die. He thought that if he willed it hard enough he would die and they would be found together. It wasn’t so. The delivery man bringing newspapers to his house and Jewel Terrace left his van at the corner and, walking down the lane, found him and her. When he refused to move, the delivery man phoned the police and waited for them to come.
Chapter 3
The woman who emerged from the house as they came up the drive had a child of about a year in her arms. Wexford and Detective Sergeant Hannah Goldsmith introduced themselves and the woman said, ‘He’s asleep. Our doctor has him under sedation.’
‘I’d like to talk to you,’ Wexford said. ‘You are Mrs Marshalson?’
She nodded. Wexford had never before known a case of a father finding the murdered body of his daughter, never thought to see a bereaved parent prone over his child’s corpse. He had daughters of his own but he could barely imagine himself in George Marshalson’s position.
Once the man had been persuaded to go home, had been taken home, the pathologist had come. The photographers had come, the scene-of-crime officer, the whole panoply of those who attend a murder scene. For his part Wexford had needed to register only that she was very young, still in her teens, very good-looking, and that death had come through a violent blow to the head with a brick or
piece of masonry.
He questioned the paper man who had found him and her, then he and Hannah had walked down the lane towards Clifton, the Marshalsons’ house. Already the heat they were so used to that it had begun to feel normal was closing in. You could almost feel the temperature rising. The air was as still and heavy as at noon. Mill Lane was overhung with densely foliaged trees through the branches of which shafts of glare penetrated.
Clifton’s front garden was flowerless, its shrubs wilting and its lawns yellow. The front door of the house opened and the woman came out before they were in talking distance. Politically correct to a degree Wexford thought ridiculous, Hannah said to him in the kindly and forbearing tone she often used when speaking to him, ‘That will be his partner.’
‘His wife, most likely.’
Hannah gave him the sort of look she kept for a middle-aged man who still called the woman he had married his wife. They followed Mrs Marshalson into the house. The child, a little boy, looked heavy to carry and she set him down. Not yet able to walk, he crawled rapidly across the polished wood floor, saying, ‘Mama, Mama.’
Diana Marshalson took no notice of him. ‘Come in here. I don’t know what I can tell you. When he came back he was speechless. He’s absolutely broken.’ Their expressions must have told her the misapprehension both were under. ‘Oh, I’m not her mother. I’m George’s second wife.’
Wexford had learnt to detect signs of satisfaction on DS Goldsmith’s face and in what she would have called her body language. He saw them now, the approving set of the mouth, the relaxation of her usually tense shoulders. That would have been brought about by Diana Marshalson’s revealing she was the dead girl’s step mother. Hannah liked complex family arrangements. In her world they signified freedom of choice and self- assertiveness. A bunch of children, thought Wexford, each with a different father and some with different mothers, all living under one roof with four or five unrelated adults would be her ideal.
