The Saint Zita Society

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Did those ancestors go to that church?’

  ‘St Michael and All Angels,’ said Preston as if that was what she had asked him. ‘I suppose they did. Hardly anyone goes there now, I’m told. Ancestors of mine are buried in a kind of family mausoleum in the churchyard.’

  What a lot of keys a man of property like him had to have or mislay or leave behind. He hadn’t mislaid the key to this front door. He unlocked it and they went in. Once she had got used to the idea of the kind of house Preston owned, the interior was just what she expected: oil paintings framed in curlicued gilt, oriental rugs, dark polished furniture, Chinese porcelain, pink and green and black with birds and flowers on. It surprised her that the interior was so warm.

  ‘We keep the heating on low from October to April.’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’

  ‘The caretaker and his wife. Oh, don’t worry. They won’t be here.’

  She hadn’t been worried, only amazed that a man of no more than forty would still talk in terms of a man and his wife.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Is there anything to eat?’

  The kitchen was enormous and quite modern – well, if you called twenty years old modern. There was sliced bread in the freezer and cans in a cupboard. ‘We could have beans on toast.’

  Maybe he didn’t know what that was. ‘I couldn’t eat a thing,’ he said. ‘If you feel up to driving back I’d like a drink.’

  ‘You said you didn’t like being driven by a woman.’

  He said with unbelievable ungraciousness, ‘I can put up with it.’

  A derisive laugh was her answer. ‘We have to put our celebrity somewhere before we think about that.’

  She thawed out two slices of bread by toasting them, opened a can of salmon and made herself a sandwich. He was sitting at the table with his head in his hands. Opening cupboards, she found a half-bottle of brandy, a half-used bottle of Cointreau and some dregs of red wine. The measure of brandy she poured for him was a generous one and she was about to add water when he covered the glass with his hand. He drank half and colour came back into his face, a dark red flush. ‘I’ve decided,’ he said. ‘We should never have done that, put him in that box. We should never have come here – or anywhere. When you’ve finished that we’ll go back to London and take his body to the nearest police station.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’ll be dark in two or three hours and then we can hide him somewhere and no one will see. Take a dead body to a police station? They’ll get you to a psychiatrist and have you sectioned. It’ll be worse than charging you with murder, putting you in a bin will, and that’s what they’ll do.’ She rinsed the glass and the plate under the tap and put them away. ‘You said it’s best if no one knows we’ve been here, so we have to be careful not to be seen. Now I’d like to look round the place, find somewhere to put him.’

  More keys. He picked three bunches off hooks on the wall and stuffed them into his pockets. There were all kinds of outbuildings, there were stables. He showed her a summer house and something that looked like a temple with a dome and pillars that he called a folly. At the end of a long drive was a small house built in what she recognised as the Gothic style but now abandoned, its windows boarded up.

  ‘That’s the lodge,’ he said. ‘Caretakers used to live there but the present ones have a flat we had made for them in the house.’

  The place looked forlorn, in need of painting, several tiles fallen off the roof. One of the doors to the garage sagged off its hinges.

  ‘I’ll have to have this place seen to,’ said Preston. ‘I don’t know why I’ve let it get into this state.’

  Not for want of cash, thought Montserrat. ‘What’s that?’ She pointed to a mound overgrown with long grass and weeds in which was a wooden door approached by a descending flight of six steps. A book she had loved as a child, a series of films came back to her. ‘It looks like something a hobbit would live in.’

  ‘It’s an Anderson shelter,’ said Preston.

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘In the war – World War Two, that is – there were two kinds of air-raid shelter, the Morrison which was like a sort of metal table and the Anderson which is that one. You dug a pit for it it in your garden and put turf on the top.’

  ‘But did you have air raids out here?’

  ‘There was a bomb in the village. A cow was killed.’

  ‘How do you know all this? You weren’t born. Your dad would have been a little kid.’

  ‘My grandfather told me.’

  ‘Can we see inside?’

  The door was locked but Preston had a key on one of the bunches. Inside were two bunks, their mattresses green with mould, a table with a mould-overgrown book lying on it, a bare bulb hanging from the roof.

  ‘It’s something like this we want,’ Montserrat said, ‘but this won’t do. If you do the place up this might get – well, dismantled. A cave or something – are there any caves?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Not in Essex.’

  She walked up the steps, let him lock the door, and stood in the lane which led to the church. Its tower loomed up very close to them. A hundred yards along was a gate in the hedge that was the boundary of a little cemetery. The grey stone church looked solid enough but the churchyard appeared to be quietly decaying in an unnatural darkness. All the trees which grew among the gravestones were dark, two or three evergreens were far from green but had leaves that appeared to be made of black leather, the yews extravagantly large, the holly luxuriant. Ivy climbed over everything. Even some of the gravestones were canopied with ivy. And all of this vegetation seemed to be mouldering, perhaps because these were leaves which never fell but wore out with time.

  Most of the monuments were slabs and upright stones, many leaning over, but there were three tombs, shaped like large boxes of stone. All were coated in yellow-green lichen and darker green stonecrop. At half past two it was still light out in the lane. Only in here dusk had come or had never been absent.

  ‘There’s never anyone about,’ said Preston. ‘You may see four or five old people come to matins on Sunday. The vicar looks after three local parishes and tomorrow morning may not be one of his Sundays.’

  Montserrat put her hand out to touch the lichen on the biggest of the tombs. ‘It’s an Anderson shelter for the dead,’ she said in a ghoulish voice and read the the three words incised on its base. ‘The Stills Family.’

  ‘It’s not been used since my grandfather was laid to rest.’

  Preston’s tone was both pious and reproving. But he had brought the wrong key and they had to go back.

  They went for a walk in Holland Park, holding hands, and when lunchtime came had their lunch in a restaurant there. A lot of people were about. Jimmy liked to be seen with Thea and Thea was training herself to like being seen with Jimmy. Each of them thought they would be an object of envy and each told the other. This wasn’t difficult for Thea on account of Jimmy being so good-looking, tall and well built and with a fine head of dark hair.

  ‘Those men would like to be in my shoes.’

  ‘All those women would like it to be your hand they’re holding.’ She couldn’t think of much to say but that would do.

  Though dry, it was too late in the year to sit on the grass and the seats were uncomfortable. The restaurant had a bar area and there they sat with their drinks (tonic water and Angostura for Jimmy, Pinot Grigio for Thea) and told each other about their past lives. Jimmy had been married for five years back in the nineties but his wife had run away with a chimney sweep.

  ‘I didn’t know there were such things any more,’ said Thea.

  ‘He didn’t actually go up chimneys. He had a chimney-cleaning company. They’ve got three children now.’

  Thea had been to a polytechnic which became a university where she got her degree in computer studies.

  ‘You’re a clever woman,’ said Jimmy.

  He had been a driving instructor, a driving examiner, a
car salesman and had met Simon Jefferson when giving his wife a driving lesson. Dr Jefferson, noticing Jimmy’s skill at parallel parking from the window, took him on as his driver two years after his divorce and Jimmy’s, which by coincidence happened at much the same time. Thea recounted her first meeting with Damian and Roland while escorting Miss Grieves and her shopping trolley to the corner shop in St Barnabas Street.

  Jimmy paid the bill and said, ‘Your place or mine?’

  Thea felt guilty about letting him pay when she didn’t really love him yet. ‘Well … we may see Damian and Roland on our way in.’

  ‘Dr Jefferson will be out all day.’

  ‘Your place then,’ said Thea, pushing away the unforgivable thought that it was as well to get it over.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  By the time it got really dark things had undergone a change. They had removed the box from the roof rack, taken it into the house and, after some hesitation and gritting of teeth, opened it. Neither of them had much experience of dead bodies. Preston had seen his father after death and two years later his mother. Montserrat had never seen a body except this one immediately after death. She expected changes to have taken place, though she couldn’t have said of what kind. It was she who unwrapped the blanket. There was no stiffness, the limbs felt limp, and from her wide experience of reading and watching thrillers, she supposed that rigor mortis had come on and passed off again.

  Rather roughly, Preston pushed her aside and rolled the body back in the blanket. ‘We’ll carry it inside the car,’ he said. ‘It will be impossible to cope with it in the case. If you don’t need it I’ll put it in the luggage room.’

  Proud of not shrinking, in contrast to his squeamishness, Montserrat wasn’t going to say she couldn’t face using the case now. ‘You have a luggage room? Wow!’

  He carried the case away. Would she have the nerve to ask him for what she had paid Henry for it? Or what she could say she had paid. She would. ‘That box cost me two hundred pounds.’

  ‘Very well.’ It was the first time she’d ever heard anyone say that. ‘I’ll give you a cheque when we get home.’

  ‘I’ll drive,’ she said.

  If she let him drive she was afraid he might take them past the churchyard and out on to the major road before she could stop him. But he didn’t demur. They heaved Rad Sothern’s body on to the back seat of the car and Preston covered it with sacks he brought from a room off the kitchen.

  At five it was very dark. Lights were on all over the village of Theydon Wold and in the house on top of the hill, but when the houses stopped all the lights stopped too. Montserrat asked him why there were no street lamps and Preston said that local people had petitioned to maintain the rural darkness they preferred and that the protest had been successful. The best place to park a car for their purposes was a little way along a track that led off the lane they had used before when visiting the churchyard. The clay surface was ridged with deep ruts but these were hard and firm as there had been no rain for a week.

  Hard to believe, Montserrat thought, that they were no more than twenty-five miles from London. The silence was deep, the darkness impenetrable. Preston had said they would need a torch and he had brought one. Above them the black sky was studded with stars, a sight not seen by her since she had last been in Catalonia with her mother. Preston removed the sacks and put them on the floor, then he and she lifted out the body in the blanket and laid it on the ground.

  ‘His death was pure accident,’ said Preston.

  ‘You’ve said that before. Quite a few times actually.’

  ‘It needs to be said. You’re behaving as if I murdered him and you’re helping me cover up a crime.’

  She didn’t answer. They walked along the gravel path, carrying the body in the blanket, Preston shining the torch he had brought on the ground. Montserrat wondered about the blanket. Could it be identified as coming from number 7 Hexam Place, home of Mr and Mrs Preston Still? Not if it were placed inside the Stills mausoleum, perhaps inside one of the coffins with its other ancient occupant. She doubted if even she, with the iron nerves she was discovering in herself, could face performing such a task.

  Halfway there Preston lowered the body to the ground, set his end down and said, as she had half expected he would, ‘Let’s take it back, Montserrat. Take it to London. There won’t be any hue and cry for him yet.’

  She stood her ground, holding on to Rad’s legs. ‘And do what?’

  ‘I see your point about going to a police station. We can’t do that. What we could do is take it to Hampstead Heath, say, and leave it somewhere. Take it out of the case and just leave it in – well, woodland.’

  She tried sarcasm. ‘And no one would see us, of course. Have you been up on the Heath lately? Have you? It’s like Piccadilly Circus up there on a Saturday night.’

  He lifted his shoulders, shook his head. Her eyes growing used to the darkness, she could see him clearly enough. ‘If I do this,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I can go back to Lucy and the kids as if nothing has happened.’

  ‘Well, something has happened. A lot. Once we get rid of the body you’ll feel better. You’ll see.’

  ‘You talk as if you’ve done this before.’

  She made no answer. Let him think that way if he liked. She edged forward and after a moment’s hesitation he lifted Rad’s head and shoulders once more. They set the body down on the shaggy grass beside the Stills Family mausoleum and Preston went down the steps to the door, lighting his way with the torch.

  ‘I don’t for a moment suppose the key will turn. No one’s opened this door since my grandfather was – laid to rest here.’

  Of all the soppy ways to put it. ‘And when was that?’

  ‘Nineteen ninety-two.’

  ‘You can only try.’

  The crippled old door opened. It trembled and creaked but it came open. Montserrat expected a horrible smell in the form of a stinking fog to come rolling out of it but there was nothing, only a dense darkness. Torchlight showed an interior very much like the inside of the Anderson shelter but with shelves instead of bunks and coffins on the shelves. She had noticed no cobwebs in the shelter but in this small shabby mausoleum spiders had spun lavishly and some of the threads looked to her like dusty ropes, they were so thick. It was a cavern hung with spun and woven tapestries.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘We’d better get it inside. Someone passing by in a car could see this light and think it was funny.’

  As she spoke a car did pass, a hundred yards away, not along the lane, but by the village street. Its headlights were on full beam and blazed momentarily, catching them in blinding light. Montserrat had spoken to him without looking at him. Her gaze had been on the inside of the mausoleum and its contents. But now when he didn’t answer she turned to face him. He was trembling, his face livid in the light from the torch which was itself shaking in his hand. His voice came with difficulty as if his throat had dried.

  ‘I can’t put this – this thing in there.’

  ‘Why not? What do you mean?’

  ‘Those are my ancestors in those coffins. They are my family. I can’t contaminate them with that, a creature who sneaks in after dark to another man’s wife …’

  ‘They’re dead. They won’t know.’

  ‘I can’t and there’s an end of it.’

  ‘What are we going to do with him then? We can’t leave him here. They’ll find him and make the connection with you. Of course they will.’

  He looked as if he was about to kick the door but thought better of it and closed it almost reverently, turning the key in the lock. ‘Put him back in the car.’

  If he wouldn’t leave it here there was no arguing with him. How many times had they gone over it already? They carried it back. The torch battery had expired and the darkness seemed deeper than before. They heaved the body on to the back seat once more, rearranged the blanket, covered it with the sacks. Montserrat got into the driving seat. This was something else there was no
point in arguing about. She was resolved only on not returning Rad’s body to Hexam Place. Somewhere along the route, down some byway, in some woodland, it must be left. She was starting to wonder why she had helped Preston in the first place. He was nothing to her. Or was he something to her? Was he becoming something to her? Today had brought them together in a curious way, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The way they spoke to each other now could never have been contemplated when he was the master of the house – she really had seen him that way – and she was just the au pair. That relationship had changed.

  He directed her away from the motorway on to the roads that ran through Epping Forest and it was on one of these, leading from Theydon Bois towards Loughton but still in deep woodland, that she became aware of the car wobbling, not quite holding the road surface. The unmistakable sign of a flat tyre. She tried to pretend she was imagining it but that illusion lasted only a moment. She managed to bump the car into the entrance to a ride that ran off the road.

  ‘Why are you stopping?’

  ‘We’ve got a flat tyre. Didn’t you feel it?’

  He got out, said, ‘It’s the nearside rear.’ He peered at the tyre. ‘It looks like a nail in it.’

  She joined him. ‘Can you change the wheel?’

  ‘I don’t know. Certainly not in this darkness. I belong to the RAC of course. I’ll call them. It doesn’t matter that it’s not my car.’

  ‘Yeah, sure, you can call them. With a corpse in the back. They won’t notice that.’ She gave a little dry laugh. ‘Before we call anyone we have to dump him somewhere or sit here all night till we think of something else.’

  June called Rad on his landline and was invited to leave a message. ‘You left your phone here. Down the back of the sofa. The Princess got me to ring because she was anxious.’ Then she called the other number she had for him and the phone with the little pictures started playing the national anthem, a tune she wouldn’t have thought he’d know. Perhaps you didn’t have to know it to make it work on a mobile phone. She had left another message before she realised there was no one to receive it but herself.