by Ruth Rendell
‘We can go in my car,’ she said.
‘It’s best if I call the police first thing in the morning. I won’t mention you. I’ll bring the body out again and lay it on the floor and tell them I was coming in the basement door when I saw – what’s his name? Rad Something? – come to the top of the basement stairs and fall when he grabbed hold of the banister. I’ll say I came that way because I mislaid my keys – which is true – and you were out so couldn’t let me in. I’ll say I had no idea who this Rad person was and he was dead before I could find out. It all hangs together.’
‘That’s the most hopeless scenario I’ve ever heard,’ said Montserrat. ‘Talk about “hangs together”. If there was still capital punishment, it’s you who’d hang. We may as well put the body into the case now, get it over with and we can leave in the morning when Lucy’s gone to the gym. Don’t you say a word to Lucy, mind.’
Thomas woke up crying, his right cheek bright red and wet with tears. Rabia gave him slightly warmed orange juice (freshly squeezed) to drink and an ivory teething ring (freshly sterilised) to bite on. It had been hers when she was a baby and giving it to Thomas made her feel that he was really her child, using his mother’s infant things as small children often do. It made her happy that he liked the ring and smiled at her and said his new word ‘sweetheart’.
‘Love Rab.’
‘And Rab loves you lots, Thomas.’
‘Say sweetheart,’ said Thomas.
So Rabia did and changed his nappy and kissed him and laid him tenderly back in his new grown-up bed.
Along the street in the basement of number 11, Henry and the Honourable Huguette slept in each other’s arms or had done so until they got too hot and rolled apart. It was the first time Huguette had shared his bed in her father’s house and delightful as it was in many ways, especially not to have to leave her flat for the cold night outside, he was nervous and his sleep was fitful. It would have been better if there had been a key to his door but there wasn’t, only a keyhole. Henry thought perhaps he might buy a bolt for the door which would provide them with great privacy. As it was, every creak, tap and squeak in the house made him fear someone was approaching down the basement stairs.
A few houses along, at number 3, Jimmy was sleeping in for a change. Dr Jefferson had no idea how to manage servants. Jimmy was well aware of this and instead of despising him for it, rather liked him. Of course he could detect from Dr Jefferson’s accent, superficially refined – an inner London comprehensive before Oxford – his working-class origins. That was why he wouldn’t let Jimmy call him sir or open the car door for him, and although Jimmy didn’t ‘officially’ live in, a nice bedroom in the basement of number 3 was at his disposal. This was where he was sleeping on Bonfire Night, and in spite of being newly in love, was sleeping alone. There was no night bus to where he lived and although Dr Jefferson wouldn’t have objected for a moment to his driving home in the Lexus to his flat in Kennington, Jimmy had been drinking with Thea and drinking far too much to drive anything anywhere.
For it was Thea that he was in love with. It was extraordinary. She was over thirty and not or not particularly good-looking and he had known her for years. Nor had he been aware of liking her much. But the evening before in the Dugong, sitting next to June on one side and Richard on the other, he looked up from his half of lager and his eyes met Thea’s across the table. In that moment he had the curious sensation of his heart tilting, stopping still and then righting itself. He thought, I love you, Thea. Then he wanted to shout it aloud. I’m in love with you, I’m in love with you. Their eyes held each other’s and she smiled at him, a wonderful radiant smile that transformed her rather ordinary little face into a raving beauty’s.
He said nothing, did nothing, but went again to the Dugong the following night. She was there, as he knew she would be, sitting at the same table alone. Was any hair colour lovelier on a woman than that natural red? Nasturtium red, conker red. It was too early for any of the others to be there. Half the night and most of the day he had been thinking about what had happened to him and he wasn’t going to waste time on small talk now. He went up to Ted Goldsworth at the bar and asked for two glasses of champagne, aware that Thea’s eyes were on him.
As he set the glasses down she said, ‘Hello, Jimmy,’ in a voice that seemed to him full of meaning, and he said, ‘Hello, Thea.’ All he had wanted to say the evening before and during the night and all day while he was driving Dr Jefferson, he now said. ‘I’ve fallen in love with you. I know it’s mad but I think you feel the same.’
No one had ever spoken to Thea like that before. Lonely and fretful, she was overcome by Jimmy’s declaration. ‘I do,’ she said as if they were getting married.
‘Then let’s drink this and go on somewhere else, just you and me.’ He raised his glass. ‘Here’s to us.’
‘To us,’ she said and she gave an incredulous laugh.
They had not really drunk too much, just too much for Jimmy to think of driving. The evening passed in a wine bar in Ranelagh Grove to the rumble of fireworks and the hiss of rockets. A sign of love, Jimmy had heard, is that it deprives you of appetite and they ate very little. She laid her hand on the table and he laid his over it. The kiss he would postpone till their parting later on, for he had no idea of their spending the night together, not yet, not for a while. A feeling he half knew to be ridiculous was that there was a holiness about their love it would be wrong to ‘spoil’ at this early stage. The consummation would come, though, and both of them accepted it with peace and joy and a smiling taking for granted.
They walked back to Hexam Place, hand in hand, it wasn’t far. A light was still on in Damian and Roland’s drawing room but Miss Grieves’s flat was in darkness and out of the range of Roland and Damian’s light and the light from the street lamp, Jimmy kissed Thea. Thea held him in her arms a long time, asking herself what she was doing.
‘Phone me in the morning,’ she said.
‘Of course. That’s a matter of course. I shall want to hear your voice.’
Inside her own bedroom, in the silence, Thea wondered what she had meant by that ‘I do’. Had she only said it to please him, not to hurt his feelings? Was it that she was flattered or again just a case of her trying to please someone but this time landing herself in a great deal of trouble? No one had ever before said he was in love with her. She had never been in such a romantic situation. Perhaps she could teach herself to love him by telling herself how handsome he was and how kind.
As Jimmy let himself into number 3 and that bedroom he was at last making use of, the lights in houses gradually went out until the whole street was in darkness.
Montserrat was wakened in the night by Preston tapping on the door and hissing at the keyhole, ‘Open the door, Montserrat. We have to talk.’
If anyone heard him, she thought, they’d think he and she were lovers. That might do very well one day but not yet. She opened the door. ‘There’s nothing to talk about. We’ve said it all. All we have to do now is find a way to get that case thing on top of the car without anyone suspecting what’s inside it. Where are you sleeping?’
‘I was in her room,’ he said. ‘I can’t go back there, it’s horrible.’
‘Oh, well, there are four spare bedrooms in the house. You find one of them and come back here about seven.’
She went back to sleep, but first she thought that one good thing to come out of this was that now she wouldn’t have to explain Rad’s visits to Ciaran. Preston was in her room again at six thirty, fully dressed in his weekend go-to-the-countryside clothes, sports jacket, grey flannels, brown brogues. For God’s sake, she thought, he can’t be more than forty. She had nothing on under the bedclothes.
‘Go away, will you, while I get up? You can make yourself some coffee while I have a shower,’ she said. ‘Meanwhile, listen to me. We do nothing till Lucy’s gone out. She’ll go early, she always does when it’s workout time, and she’ll take the girls with her. Never too soon to train
them to be toned-up ladies.’ She saw him wince and crease up his mouth. ‘My car’s in that garage block in St Barnabas Mews, number 12. Your garden more or less backs on to it. We can carry the roof-rack box out into the mews and attach it to the roof rack inside the garage. If anyone sees they’ll just think you’re helping me do it in advance of my holidays. We tell them it’s skis. Right?’
The morning, when he was going to call the police, had come. He seemed to have forgotten all about it. ‘Right,’ he said.
‘How long does it take to get to your country place?’
‘About an hour or less.’
‘Is it really country? Essex?’
He didn’t answer, just looked sullen.
‘I do Lucy’s breakfast at the weekends,’ she said, ‘so I’d better get on with it. You’ll just have to be patient.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘Where’s my daddy?’ Hero peered behind the sofa on the gallery as if she was likely to find him there.
‘He came in very late,’ said Lucy in a tone of extravagant boredom. ‘I expect he left again very early. It’s what he does.’
‘I’m never going to work as hard as him,’ said Matilda. ‘I don’t see the point.’
Montserrat thought, but of course didn’t say, that Matilda would marry a rich man and probably wouldn’t have to work at all. She watched them prance downstairs, all dressed to match in scarlet jackets over white leotards and black leggings with yellow-and-silver Chanel trainers. The girls were pushed out first, Lucy following and slamming the front door. Rabia had already departed with Thomas.
The garden at number 7 Hexam Place was seldom used. When the Stills first moved in, Montserrat had heard, it had been neat with a lawn and flower beds but in the four years since then the trees and shrubs and weeds had taken over and now it was a wilderness. All the better for their enterprise, though it really mattered very little whether they were seen by the Wallaces and Cavendishes at number 9 or the Neville-Smiths at number 5. The body in the case was heavier than Montserrat had expected, Rad Sothern being such a thin little shrimp of a man, but she and Preston Still managed. No one was about in the mews. Montserrat unlocked the garage door. She thought she saw a glance of contempt on Preston’s face when he saw her blue VW, grey with dirt and pigeon droppings, but maybe she imagined it. Heaving the case up onto the roof rack was a much harder job than carting it up the basement stairs and through the garden. A pair of steps at the back of the garage she had never noticed before came in handy – indeed were indispensable – and after fifteen minutes of struggling the case was at last bolted into place. When he had finished Preston’s hands were trembling.
‘I shall drive,’ said Montserrat.
He didn’t argue.
‘We’ll make a detour to avoid passing along Hexam Place. It doesn’t matter about people seeing me but they mustn’t see you with me. It would look strange.’ Preston nodded. ‘To be on the safe side, though, you’d better get on the floor in the back.’
‘Now, look, wait a minute. Surely that’s not necessary –’
‘Of course it’s necessary. You should have thought of that before you pushed a TV star down the stairs.’
‘I’ll give you my postcode for the satnav.’
‘Useful if I had satnav but I don’t. You’ll have to direct me.’
He said he would. Montserrat got into the car and Preston into the back, struggling to squeeze himself into the space between the back of her seat and the rear seat. Once they were well on the way to the North Circular she stopped for him to climb out and get into the passenger seat beside her. Fear and perhaps guilt made him bad-tempered.
‘It goes against the grain with me to have a woman drive me.’
‘Too bad,’ said Montserrat. ‘Tell you what, when we’ve disposed of Mr Fortescue, I’ll let you drive us back.’
The magazine section of a quality newspaper always carried an interview with a media celebrity on Saturdays and it was Thea’s habit to read it while eating her breakfast. She shared the paper with Damian and Roland, they interested only in politics and business, she keeping the magazine, media and arts sections, though she would have liked the news too. Today the interview happened to be with Rad Sothern and the cover was a full-page colour photograph of him in his guise as Mr Fortescue, but Thea who would not long ago have been enthralled by revelations about Rad’s past love life, the fact that June was his aunt or great-aunt and that he had once been the guitarist in a pop group, found it impossible to keep her attention on the article. Her thoughts were dominated by Jimmy, but they were not perhaps the thoughts he would have liked her to have. Today she must begin teaching herself to love him. There were so many things she had taught herself to do to please other people that surely she could do this. She and he were going out for the day in Simon Jefferson’s car and she expected Jimmy to call for her at ten. Awake since six and up since seven, she had dressed with the greatest care in her new jeans, pristine white shirt and rose-pink heavy-knit cardigan. Her hair was newly washed, her eye make-up taking a quarter of an hour to get right, although she somehow knew, with no real experience in this area, that what she looked like no longer mattered much to Jimmy. What has mascara to do with love?
At a quarter to ten she took the three sections of the paper down to Damian and Roland. ‘You may as well have them. I’m going out for the day.’
‘You know, I think I’ve seen this guy coming out of next door,’ said Roland. ‘Someone said he was the Princess’s grandson.’
‘According to this he’s June’s nephew.’
‘Wonders will never cease.’ Damian took the magazine and shook his head over the portrait of Rad. ‘Leave the arts and media bits with us. Even if we don’t read them, which is most probable, we’ll put them in the recycling. By the way, we’re thinking of getting married.’
‘Oh, cool,’ said Thea. Had they taught themselves to love each other or had it come naturally?
‘Roly proposed over breakfast. He said, “Will you civil-partner with me?” Don’t you think that was neat?’
‘Oh, I do. Can I come?’
‘I expect so.’ Roland’s tone was cool in the old-fashioned sense of the word.
From the window where she had stationed herself Thea saw Simon Jefferson’s custard-coloured Lexus pull up at the kerb. This was her own dream scenario come true! Learning enthusiasm, she ran off to the front door without saying goodbye.
Tidying the drawing room, June found an object which might have been something designed to play music or speak into, or both, down the back of the sofa cushions. The inadvertent pressure of her thumb stimulated it to chant the first line of ‘God Save the Queen’, and display a dozen little brightly coloured pictures.
‘It must be Rad’s,’ she said, showing it to the Princess when she took up her breakfast.
‘It’s what they call a Raspberry. You’d better phone him. But not on that thing, even supposing you know how. Do it on the real phone.’
June tried the landline but got no reply. The alternative number she had for him which she had never used before set off the national anthem again on the thing she held in her hand, making her jump. It asked her to leave a message but she saw no point in that. ‘He’ll turn up when he wants it,’ she said to herself.
They passed through the village of Theydon Wold, Montserrat noticing that the pub called the Devereux Arms did three-course lunches. Maybe she could persuade Preston to take her there once they had unloaded Rad Sothern’s body. It amazed her that he had scarcely known how to find Gallowmill Hall, in spite of owning the place. His directions had gone wrong three times and once they had nearly found themselves on the M25, heading for the Dartford Crossing. It turned out that when he drove he had to use the satnav because he knew the postcode but not the rest of the address.
Montserrat had been nearly but not quite as impressed by the place as Rabia. She, after all, had seen such houses before, in reality and in pictures. How must it be to own a house like this? Not
only to have number 7 Hexam Place but this Gallowmill Hall as well.
‘Why’s it called that?’
‘There’s a watermill on the river and there used to be a gallows somewhere near here.’
She noticed he winced when mentioning this instrument of punishment for capital crimes. ‘You can take the car through the archway. There shouldn’t be any callers but you can’t be sure and it’s best if no one sees us.’
There went her chance of a good lunch in the Devereux Arms. ‘Now we’ve got him here what are we going to do with him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We don’t take the case off the car till we’re sure. It’s too heavy to keep lugging about.’ She noticed how pale he looked. ‘Not carsick, are you?’
He shook his head. ‘Let’s get some fresh air.’
The archway led into a kind of courtyard. They left the car and walked back through the arch to where lawns sloped away from the broad gravel expanse. Everywhere was carpeted in fallen leaves, red, brown and yellow, and the trees from which they had come had almost returned to their state of bare skeletal branches. Above the shallow wooded hills the sky was a pale milky blue, streaked with strips of pale grey cloud.
‘Has this place been in your family for hundreds and hundreds of years?’
‘About two centuries,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you live here?’
He didn’t answer the question. ‘My parents did and my grandparents and ancestors all the way back to the beginning of the nineteenth century when my great-great-great-grandfather built this place.’
The view enlarged as they rounded the house and came to what Preston called the garden front, opening up to show all sorts of details in the landscape, a biggish house on the crest of a shallow hill, village roofs, ugly barns around a farmhouse, a church spire. It brought back to Montserrat recollections of period dramas on television, women in bonnets setting forth from houses like this one, Regency bucks on horseback, doffing hats to the ladies.
