The Saint Zita Society

by Ruth Rendell

  The Princess had fallen asleep in front of the television and Gussie had fallen asleep on her lap. She might as well walk up to the Dugong, find someone to have a drink with. She felt vaguely uneasy, though she was the first to admit there was nothing to worry about. He had simply forgotten his phone. It was just rather odd that he hadn’t missed it and guessed where it was.

  Henry was in the Dugong with Richard and Sondra. June said, ‘Hello, strangers,’ because they hadn’t been in there for a long time. They said tomorrow would be was their tenth wedding anniversary and they were having a glass of champagne before taking themselves off to Le Rossignol for a celebratory dinner.

  ‘Happy tin wedding,’ said June, raising her glass of Chardonnay.

  ‘Is that what it is?’ Sondra sounded disappointed.

  ‘Bit dodgy for presents, isn’t it?’ said Henry. ‘I suppose you could always ask for some tinned fruit.’

  Up at number 7 Rabia was letting her cousin Mohammed out of the house by way of the basement door. Instead of ten in the morning he had arrived to mend the banister seven hours later, full of excuses that his wife had gone into labour. He had had to be in the hospital delivery room until he became the father of a fine boy at 3 p.m.

  ‘It is very good of you to come at all, cousin,’ said Rabia, feeling it would be unkind to mention that she had had to stay indoors all day waiting for him and he might have phoned. Nor did she point out that the new baby was not his first son but his fourth.

  She made him tea, brought him a plate of pastries and sent a loving message to Mumtaz. The banister, as he pointed out, was now as solid as a rock. Coming to the bottom of the basement stairs on their way out, he spotted something shiny lying on the black-and-white tiles in the corner.

  ‘It is not often you see such an object nowadays,’ said Mohammed, picking it up. ‘Smoking is an obsolete habit, wouldn’t you say? Silver, I would hazard a guess, and engraved with the initials RS. I wonder who has mislaid this valuable object.’

  In spite of covering her ears when the subject was raised by Montserrat, Rabia had unwillingly picked up enough to know who the cigarette case belonged to. But what to do with it and whom to tell? Somewhat preoccupied, she let Mohammed out and thanked him for coming.

  Rad Sothern’s body was again taken out of the car and laid on the grass. Montserrat kicked enough fallen leaves over it to cover it. The woman who took Preston’s call said their mechanic would be with them in anything up to forty minutes. Montserrat got into the back of the car and checked the seat for stains. The only one she could find was a brown patch which might be taken for blood but was in fact the result of Thea spilling a latte. The RAC man took only half an hour to get there, took the flat tyre off, attached the spare wheel and said not to drive on it at more than fifty miles an hour.

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ said Preston in a sneering tone as if it was the RAC man’s fault that the roads they would be driving on would be restricted to forty and thirty.

  Montserrat thought he was quite a dishy man, so when he handed her a form to fill in commenting on the standard of the service, she filled in all the ‘excellent’ boxes and signed it Preston Still. Then she warned Preston that he had better expect a big fuss in the media over the disappearance of Rad Sothern. It wouldn’t have started yet and there might be nothing tomorrow – with luck they would be spared the attentions of the Mail on Sunday – but once Rad started failing to turn up for appointments the search for him and the speculation would begin.

  ‘Why would they come to me?’ Preston sounded aghast.

  ‘Because people will have seen him come to the basement door.’ She added brutally, ‘When he was shagging Lucy.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t they think he was – er, shagging you?’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Montserrat vigorously. ‘Thanks a million. I’m to take on your wife’s lover, take responsibility for a guy you pushed down the stairs out of jealousy. What for? To save your bloody marriage? Let me tell you, mate, that’s buggered already, has been for years.’

  He made no sound. She saw that he was crying, the tears trickling slowly down his cheeks.

  ‘OK, I’m sorry. But it’s true. With a bit of luck if anyone’s seen him in Hexam Place they’ll think he was visiting June. Come on, we’ve still got to get rid of him – remember?’

  They put the body back on the seat and covered it once more with the sacks. There wasn’t enough room for it in the boot.

  ‘We’ve got to take him a long way away from here. We don’t want that RAC man making the connection.’

  Montserrat drove, glad of the darkness. The spare wheel that had been put on was thinner than the one which had the puncture and had a bright yellow hub. Other drivers were less likely to notice it in the dark and so less likely to remember when and where they had seen it. She found her way out on to what Preston said was the Epping New Road and at a roundabout took an unclassified road up to High Beech. Preston kept saying nervously, ‘We can leave it here, we can leave it here.’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said and, ‘Why don’t you shut up and leave it to me?’

  It was a bad moment when the driver of the car that was following them began hooting. ‘It’s because I have to go so slowly,’ Montserrat said. ‘That’s all it is. I’ll pull off the road and park.’

  And it appeared that this was all it was. The pursuing car went on its way and they were left behind in an empty part of the forest, all tall beech trees and thin birches that shivered in the rising wind. Any car coming down here would have to have its headlights on full beam. Overhead the sky was invisible, a thick cloudy darkness, without moon or stars. They lifted the body out once more and carried it along a path of rutted clay. Something rustled in the depths of the woodland, a deer perhaps. There were deer in the forest, Preston said.

  ‘I can’t carry this any further,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to the end of my tether.’

  She didn’t answer, but dropped Rad’s body on the fallen leaves and, tugging the blanket in which it was wrapped, pulled it under a holly bush. ‘There. We’ll leave it there. It’ll do.’

  ‘No one could see it from the path.’

  ‘I said it’ll do,’ said Montserrat. ‘Now we’ll go home.’

  They had the car back in the St Barnabas Mews garage in just over half an hour and there they went their separate ways. Montserrat’s parting words were that she’d want paying for the new tyre she’d have to get on Monday. She watched him head for number 7 Hexam Place. He had nowhere else to go. She was beginning to wonder why she had got into this in the first place but now she told herself that perhaps she had some kind of future with Preston Still. If the police closed in on him she could probably save him and then his gratitude would begin.

  Not a good idea to go back to her flat quite yet. She went into the Dugong, asked for a Chardonnay and called Ciaran on her mobile. He’d be with her, he said, in ten minutes. By the time he arrived – nearer forty minutes than ten – June had arrived on her own and Thea had arrived with Jimmy. They were clinging to each other in the rather awkward position a tall man and a short woman must cope with, his arm round her shoulders, hers round his waist. Shortly afterwards Damian and Roland paid a rare visit to the Dugong, Roland shaking his head at the sight of Thea and Jimmy holding hands. Unusually for the regular drinkers of Hexam Place, they all split into separate parties, Montserrat and Ciaran drinking rather a lot of white wine before departing for Montserrat’s flat. Dex sat alone in a corner with a Guinness in front of him, and though politely asked by June to join them, only shook his head and said, ‘Cheers.’ Damian and Roland shared the smallest table in the room, well away from the others. Montserrat felt strange going into her flat after the events of the night and morning but there appeared to be no evidence of those events apart from the absence of the blanket. As she told herself, it really didn’t matter as you couldn’t prove a negative.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  There was nothing. Nothing in the morning papers �
�� Montserrat scanned them all in the newsagent’s on Ebury Bridge Road – and nothing on the radio or the TV news. She had a hangover and went back to bed. Lying there, feeling better now she was not perpendicular, she wondered how Preston was getting on. Had he shared Lucy’s bed or moved into a spare bedroom? She decided that, though he was undoubtedly a financial genius, he was a weak man, and because she was a strong woman, a weak man rather suited her. Preston was an awful name. She wondered what Macbeth’s first name might have been. One of those weird Scottish ones perhaps, Hamish or Lachlan. Perhaps it said in the play. Once her headache had gone away she would have a look and if she couldn’t find The Complete Works of Shakespeare in the house she’d see if Thea had it. It was the sort of thing Thea very likely would have.

  It was a lovely day for November – well, a lovely day for any time of the year. The sky was blue, the sun shining, a little breeze blowing. A text from Thea inviting her over for coffee fetched her out of bed at midday. The house was silent, Rabia spending the day with her family as was customary on a Sunday, the girls off somewhere with their mother at some athletic enterprise. As far as Montserrat knew. It was quite possible, of course, that Rabia had taken all three children with her and in their absence Preston had murdered Lucy and then killed himself. Possible but unlikely. She went across the road to number 8. Thea had put two chairs out on her balcony and made real coffee in her espresso machine.

  ‘Did you watch Crosswind on Channel 4 last night?’

  Montserrat said that she had been out with Ciaran.

  ‘Yes, well, I was out with Jimmy. Or, rather, in with Jimmy. But I did catch the start of it and guess what, Rad Sothern was supposed to be on the panel but he didn’t turn up. He’d never told them, he just didn’t come, and at the last minute they had to get some politician.’

  ‘Maybe he’s ill or stoned or something.’

  ‘Yes, maybe. But I saw June coming back with the papers and she said he’d been with them on Friday and when he went he forgot his mobile phone, it was down the back of the sofa, but she tried and tried to get hold of him and she couldn’t.’

  ‘He’ll turn up,’ said Montserrat, glad she hadn’t been asked if she’d seen him on Friday night.

  Thea offered her a glass of Pinot Grigio and Montserrat accepted on the grounds that it would be a hair of the dog. They got through more than a glass each, nearer a bottle, while Thea described in detail how wonderful sex was with Jimmy. This was not really the case but she had refused to admit her disappointment even to herself. She had heard that the effect of being in love was to see the sky as bluer, the sun brighter, the whole world changed for the better, so of course the sex must be the best she’d ever had.

  Fighting just about successfully against sleep, Montserrat hoisted herself from the near-supine position she had sunk into and asked Thea what Macbeth’s first name was.

  ‘He didn’t have one,’ said Thea, not too pleased at being distracted from her theme.

  ‘He must have.’

  ‘Well, no one knows what it was.’ Ever-helpful, she fetched Montserrat a tattered paperback of The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

  From the sunny balcony Montserrat watched the front door of number 7 open and Preston Still come down the steps. She guessed he had gone to fetch the Sunday papers and waited for him to come back with them but after half an hour he hadn’t returned. Where was her two hundred pounds and the money for the new tyre?

  It was rare for Lucy to mention Rad Sothern to Montserrat except to say at what time he would present himself at the basement door. So when she tapped on the front door of Montserrat’s flat at seven that evening the au pair thought she had found out she and Preston had spent the previous day together, for experience of life had already taught her that you may still be jealous of your spouse or partner while being unfaithful yourself. But it was the disappearance of Rad she had come about.

  ‘It’s so odd never to hear a word from him, darling. Do you know where he went when he left here on Friday?’

  Montserrat said that he hadn’t said and of course she hadn’t asked him.

  ‘He wasn’t on his programme last night and they didn’t seem to know where he was. It’s so unlike him not to call me.’

  ‘Have you tried asking June?’

  ‘Well, no, darling, I haven’t. Would you like to?’

  Montserrat wouldn’t like to at all and had no intention of doing so, but if asked, she would say she had and June had said she didn’t know. For once she went to bed early. Ciaran phoned seven times but she didn’t answer.

  Henry sat outside number 11 for nearly two hours on Monday morning before Lord Studley appeared. When he finally turned up, the under-secretary was in a bad temper because the junior minister called in as a substitute for Rad Sothern on Crosswind had while on the air called an Opposition peer a toffee-nosed poof. He had been required to apologise but so far had refused to do so. Unusually for Lord Studley, he recounted all this to Henry on the way to Parliament.

  ‘Shocking language, My Lord,’ said Henry, sensing that this was what he was supposed to say.

  He was to pick up Lady Studley and a friend of hers who was staying with them at twelve and bring them in for lunch. Henry wasn’t altogether sorry about the presence of the friend as this would prevent Oceane sitting next to him in the car and touching him in intimate ways while he was negotiating the traffic in Parliament Square. Both women had on hats of the kind usually worn at Ascot.

  An appearance in the nursery from Lucy in the middle of the day was so unusual as to make Rabia believe at first that she must have done something wrong in taking Thomas to visit her family on the previous afternoon. But months ago she had asked permission to take him to her father’s house and leave had been indifferently granted. It was soon plain, though, that rebuking her was not the purpose of Lucy’s visit. However, it started off on the wrong foot in more ways than one. Thomas, now quite good at walking, was toddling across the floor to pick up a fallen fluffy rabbit when Lucy interposed herself, squatted down and held out her arms to him.

  ‘Here’s Mummy, Thomas,’ said Rabia. ‘Say hello to Mummy.’

  She was perhaps a formidable sight to any small child with her five-inch-heel knee boots, miniskirt, faux-leopard jacket and streaming blonde hair. The little boy reacted promptly enough. Screaming, ‘Rab, Rab,’ he turned to Rabia and threw himself into her arms.

  ‘Oh my God, what’s wrong with the child?’ Lucy got to her feet with difficulty, looking bewildered rather than cross, but Rabia was terrified. How would a mother feel if her child seemed to prefer another woman to herself? Of course Thomas couldn’t really, all children love their mother best, it only looked that way. But suppose Lucy was so hurt and angry, as she might well be, that she would think getting rid of the nanny was her only course?

  It was only a single moment of horror. Lucy said, ‘Come and sit down a moment, darling. I want to ask you something. I think of you as the expert, you see.’

  They sat at the table, Rabia having quietened Thomas with a mug of chocolate milk and a Jammie Dodger. ‘Do you think it terribly important for children to have their father living with them?’

  ‘It is what I have always been used to in my community.’

  ‘I suppose it is. But then you’ve been used to arranged marriages and praying God knows how many times a day, haven’t you?’

  Rabia felt able to say nothing, only to smile.

  ‘A father would never get custody, would he?’

  Rabia said she was sorry but she didn’t know what this meant.

  ‘If there was a divorce, the mother would always get the children, wouldn’t she?’

  Momentarily plunged back into fear, Rabia said Lucy would have to ask a lawyer. She wanted to ask if the Stills were going to have a divorce but she dared not. Lucy thanked her and went away, taking no more notice of Thomas. In need of instant comfort, Rabia seized Thomas and hugged him tightly, covering the front of her black gown with smears of jam and chocola
te milk. She still hadn’t decided what to do with the silver cigarette case.

  Downstairs, Montserrat had come home from buying a pair of black leather boots from Marks & Spencer and found an envelope pushed under her front door. Inside was a cheque for three hundred and fifty pounds drawn on Coutts Bank to Montserrat Tresser and signed P. Q. Still.

  ‘I wonder what the Q stands for,’ she said aloud.

  No note was inside the envelope. She didn’t exactly expect him to have thanked her for driving him around to dispose of a body but he might have written something, maybe a few cryptic words acknowledging unspecified help. That was it then, was it? There was to be no more. Lucy’s conduct was to be overlooked, they were together again and all was well. She poured herself the dregs of the whisky she and he had shared on Friday night. The boots looked rather less attractive than they had in the shop. She had bought them because they were a lot like Lucy’s but Lucy’s came from Céline and cost eight hundred pounds. She knew because she’d seen them advertised in the Sunday Times Style magazine.

  The tap on the door at seven woke her. She had fallen asleep from boredom, nothing to do and whisky. It must be Ciaran except that he had no key and couldn’t get in. She opened the door. Preston stood there.

  He came in and spoke to her as if they had known each other for years and years. No greeting, no ‘How are you?’ ‘I’ve told Lucy I want a divorce.’

  The logistics of it concerned her more than the law, the personalities or the emotions involved. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I expect I’ll take a flat somewhere near. I’ll need to see the kids.’

  ‘Is there anything in the paper about Rad?’

  ‘It’s too soon.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if he had a wife or a girlfriend to miss him.’