The Saint Zita Society

by Ruth Rendell

  But there, on the following morning, she saw she was wrong. The tabloids, the ones that are called ‘red top’ and never ‘quality’, all carried a front-page story by a woman called Rocksana Castelli who said she was Rad Sothern’s ‘partner’ and had been sharing his flat in Montagu Square for the past year. The photograph looked a lot like Lucy Still, same emaciated body, long skinny legs and blonde hair, but about ten years younger. Miss Castelli, Montserrat read, had last seen Rad at the flat on Friday afternoon before she left to visit her mother in Hornsey. They had had a disagreement so she hadn’t been much disturbed when he didn’t return that night. On Saturday she phoned him twice on his mobile and got an answer but no one spoke. It was yesterday, Monday, that she thought things were serious and she told the police.

  Montserrat wondered if Lucy had seen it. Quite a shock for her if she had. Would it be a wise move to see June? The severe weather warning put out the night before had resulted in no more than a light breeze and a drizzle. She ventured across the road with the Sun in her hand only to meet June halfway there with the Daily Mail. That Rad had a live-in girlfriend interested June more than his disappearance.

  ‘I always knew he couldn’t have been going out with you.’

  ‘I never said he was,’ said Montserrat.

  ‘That must have been her that phoned. I heard it ring but of course I didn’t answer it. I don’t know how to work those contraptions.’

  ‘I’m going in, I’m getting wet,’ said Montserrat, putting the Sun over her head and retreating to the area stairs.

  The only way to initiate the next stage of the drama, thought June, was to phone the police. On the real phone, of course. Eventually she was put on to a Detective Sergeant Freud. ‘Mr Sothern spends a lot of time here with us. That is, the Princess and myself. The Princess is a great admirer of his medical serial. He was here having a drink with us last Friday evening.’

  ‘Where did he go when he left you?’

  ‘That I couldn’t say,’ June said virtuously. ‘It was no business of mine.’

  Sergeant Freud said he would send someone round to number 6 Hexam Place. She had a few minutes or perhaps a few hours in which to decide whether to mention Rad’s apparent connection with number 7 opposite. She had rather liked the look of the girl in the photograph, a pretty girl with lovely colouring and a shy gentle expression. No need to cause her further upset by telling the police about Montserrat. The Princess couldn’t understand how an episode and not a repeat of Avalon Clinic could be shown when Rad had disappeared but she watched it just the same.

  Jimmy dropped Dr Jefferson off, got into a queue of traffic, sat in the butter-coloured Lexus and phoned Thea, pouring out love words from a full heart and reminding her of the raptures of the previous night. A policeman moved him along and he drove back to Hexam Place where he had arranged to meet her in the Dugong. Thea had an early edition of the Evening Standard.

  ‘This stuff is so sordid,’ said Jimmy when she insisted on showing him a photograph of Rocksana Castelli in a bikini by the side of a swimming pool, Rad Sothern half submerged in the water.

  ‘He was seeing someone at number 7.’

  ‘Mr Still’s place?’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t seeing Mr Still,’ said Thea. ‘He isn’t gay. And it wasn’t Montserrat, that I do know. Maybe it was Zinnia.’

  ‘Can’t we forget these squalid people, sweetheart? Let’s go back to your place.’

  ‘OK, if you want,’ said Thea.

  After lunch, when it was time for Lord Studley to take his seat on the coalition front bench for prayers, Henry drove Oceane and her friend to Sloane Street to go shopping in Prada and its ilk. They kept him waiting outside so long that he had to evade traffic wardens by driving round and round Lowndes Square. Their conversation on the way back was of such a lubricious nature, punctuated by little screams and breathless gasps, that he wouldn’t have been surprised if, on arriving at Hexam Place, they had proposed a threesome before he went to fetch Lord Studley. But nothing like that happened and, having left the Beemer on the residents’ parking, he went up the road to fetch the Evening Standard.

  Montserrat was in the newsagent’s. This later edition had a photograph of Rad Sothern and Rocksana Castelli toasting each with champagne in a club. The headline said, ROCK IN TEARS FOR RAD.

  ‘I bet he never said a word about her.’

  ‘I barely knew him,’ said Montserrat.

  Henry spotted the plain-clothes officer going up the steps to number 6. He’d know one of them anywhere. Why did they bother to disguise themselves? June had been waiting for him for hours. If he didn’t hurry up, she was thinking, she’d have to postpone the extraordinary general meeting of the Saint Zita Society scheduled for 7 p.m. Then the doorbell rang. DC Rickards looked about eighteen but even people in their thirties and forties looked eighteen to her.

  He appeared to believe that the Princess was a member of the royal family and seemed overawed by her. Gussie set up a furious barking and had to be shut in the kitchen. ‘This is Mr Sothern’s mobile telephone,’ said June. ‘Should I have reported it to someone?’

  ‘Just us,’ said DC Rickards. ‘You did quite right. Mr Sothern your grandson, is he?’

  ‘Certainly not. I’m an unmarried woman. He’s my great-nephew.’ She had already told DS Freud about Friday evening’s drink and that she didn’t know where Rad went after he left number 6. To reveal that she had never previously heard of his girlfriend would have betrayed an ignorance of Rad’s private life and make him appear less of an intimate friend and kinsman than she would have this young man believe, so she said what a lovely girl Rocksana was and how fond of her were the Princess and herself. ‘She must be out of her mind with worry.’

  DC Rickards made no comment. ‘Do you know if Mr Sothern was on friendly terms with other residents of Hexam Place?’

  Quick thinking brought June to say that she thought not but that everyone must have recognised him when he called at number 6 owing to his being the famous face of Mr Fortescue. DC Rickards thanked her and said to her surprise that she had been very helpful.

  She had half an hour in which to give the Princess a stiff drink, make her a plate of smoked salmon and scrambled egg, walk Gussie round the block and take herself across the road to the Dugong for the Saint Zita Society meeting. Henry, Richard, Zinnia and Thea were already there but not Jimmy. Jimmy was sitting in the butter-coloured Lexus on the consultants’ parking at University College Hospital in the Euston Road. It was probably the first time since he had worked for Simon Jefferson that he had been kept waiting while his employer carried out life-saving treatment on a six-year-old. He was trying to write a poem to Thea but finding it more difficult than he expected.

  The Saint Zita meeting had been called specially (not much more than a week after the previous one) to discuss the response from Westminster City Council to the second letter about the bags of dog excrement. The ‘clean streets’ enterprise wrote that they would continue to remove all waste from the streets but, in the light of recession, economy and ‘the general tightening of belts’ could take no specific steps to curb canine waste litter. June made her little speech and threw the meeting open for opinions and discussion, but it quickly deteriorated into the favoured topic of the evening, the disappearance of Rad Sothern.

  ‘If he doesn’t turn up,’ said Zinnia, ‘if he’s like dead and they can’t do any more recording, do you think they’ll have to kill Mr Fortescue?’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  All her life since she had come to London with her father when she was small Rabia had judged the ways of those she called British Christians as very strange. Often very wicked. Their morality, or lack of it, shocked her deeply. It had begun to worry her that Thomas, so good, so sweet, so innocent and pure, must grow up among people to whom chastity meant little and marital infidelity was common. There was nothing she could do, it was not her business – all that she knew – but it worried her.

  Now the household i
tself where she worked was to be disrupted by a breach between the parents. She knew it, she had seen it. Shouts that were still perfectly audible behind the closed bedroom door began it, the obscenities that had dreadful meanings. Pain hurt her physically when she saw Thomas’s face crumple at the hateful words, when the tears splashed down his cheeks and he put out his arms for his Rabia. Then Mr Still moved out of that beautiful big bedroom with its two pairs of long windows, its cherubs on the ceilings, its silk-curtained bed, and took himself up to the top of the house above the nursery floor where he made a bedroom and a bathroom and study his own domain.

  ‘They’ve actually separated,’ said Montserrat, ‘except that they’re still living under the same roof. There’ll be a divorce.’

  ‘What will become of the poor children?’

  ‘If it wasn’t for them the whole thing could be over in a matter of weeks. But it can’t be a quickie when there are kids. Lucy will get custody of course.’

  Rabia thought that would be a terrible shame and she remembered how Thomas had turned away from his mother and come to her, but she said nothing. Just the same, she thought it no harm to tell Montserrat that Mr Still came up (down these days) to the nursery at every opportunity he got to ask about his children’s health.

  ‘It’s no exaggeration to say that the whole country is searching for Rad Sothern. I do wonder what’s happened to him. What do you think?’

  Rabia didn’t know what to think. But she did wonder if she should tell the police that, in addition to arguments between Lucy and Mr Still, she had once heard the voice of Mr Fortescue on the floor below. Avalon Clinic was one of the few programmes she watched. Thomas was asleep by the time it came on and Rabia liked sitting with the girls to see it. It was about healing people and doing good. That familiar voice might mean Rad Sothern had been in this house several times. Montserrat might know. She would ask Montserrat before she told the police, of whom she was rather afraid. She took another look at the silver cigarette case, wondering once more what to do about it.

  Montserrat was indignant at Rabia’s suggestion. She must be mistaken. It was possible that Lucy and Mr Still met Rad at one of the Princess’s parties but they would never have had reason to invite him to number 7. No, Rabia was wrong. She might have heard Rad’s voice on television but it was an actor’s voice, Montserrat said earnestly, a disguised voice, suitable for an upper-class top-flight consultant, nothing like his normal tone which, frankly, was nearer Estuary English.

  She thought she had convinced Rabia. The girl was rather naive. Montserrat piled on the hard time the police would give her if she mentioned Rad and his voice and the even harder time Lucy might inflict on her. ‘She’s capable of giving you the push, you know.’

  ‘The push?’

  ‘Sacking you.’

  Preston Still had only once made contact with her since the money had been handed over. Being used in this way and then ignored was hard. She started answering Ciaran’s calls again, went to the cinema with him and once let him stay the night. He asked if he could have a key to the basement door and she didn’t see why not. Preston had apparently made a flat for himself on the top floor. Rabia said he generally went out for his meals. Once or twice Montserrat saw Beacon open the car door for him and Preston climb the steps to the front door. He had never mislaid his keys again.

  The Princess had always been fonder of Rad than his great-aunt. She told June that she lay awake at night worrying about him. June was to invite Rocksana Castelli round for tea.

  ‘A drink will be more in her line, madam,’ said June.

  ‘You shouldn’t say things like that. The poor girl will be broken-hearted.’

  June recognised her from her photograph. She came in a taxi and June watched her climb the front steps, looking around her and taking in her surroundings. In skintight jeans, equally tight sweater with a pale gold leather jacket over it and high-heeled boots, she looked uncannily like Lucy. June wondered if she was wearing a wig as surely no one could naturally have quite so much hair, striped in various shades of blonde and with little braids sprouting out of it.

  The Princess told June to open a bottle of The Drink That Is Never Wrong because the poor girl must need cheering up and Rocksana showed them both an enormous sapphire she said was her engagement ring. Rad’s girlfriend drank more champagne than the two of them put together and June had to open a second bottle. She said she had fallen in love with the house and would June show her over it. Rocksana’s disappointment showed plainly as, once they had climbed the first flight of stairs, one shabby room succeeded another, the furniture was thick with dust, the atmosphere smelling of dog and stale French perfume. No one had decorated these rooms since the Princess moved in over half a century before and Zinnia repeatedly said they’d have to get a team in to spring-clean the place before she could be expected to take it over.

  ‘You could let the top two floors to someone,’ said Rocksana.

  Got her own eye on it in case Rad doesn’t come back, thought June. She took the girl downstairs again and put the the champagne back in the fridge. Invisible to June behind the basement window, Montserrat watched Rocksana walking up and down looking for a taxi. There never were taxis – Montserrat had only seen them bringing people home to Hexam Place. After about ten minutes’ pacing that became limping, Rocksana took off her shoes and set off to walk in her stockinged feet towards Sloane Square.

  ‘It’s going to cause a lot of trouble,’ said Thea, scanning the civil partnership guest list. ‘You want to have a look at who you’ve got down here. You tell me what strikes you, there’s something stands out a mile.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Damian.

  ‘Just look at the sort of people you’ve got on the list. Rather, the sort of people you haven’t got on the list.’

  ‘Come on, don’t keep me in suspense.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got the Stills and Simon Jefferson and Lord and Lady Studley and the Princess and me but you haven’t got any of the servants. You haven’t got Jimmy or Beacon or Henry or Rabia or Montserrat or Zinnia or Richard or Sondra or June.’

  ‘It didn’t occur to us to ask them.’

  Thea threw down her ballpoint. ‘Suit yourselves of course but whatever happened to equality? Maybe not Rabia, she’s a darling but she’s a strict Muslim and she wouldn’t come. Zinnia – well, she’s a bit rough is Zinnia and anyway she works on Thursdays. But Montserrat? Her dad went to school with Lucy’s dad, something like that. And June’s more of a lady than the Princess – anyway, the Princess wouldn’t come without her.’

  ‘We’ve got enough people with those on the list. It’s not snobbery, I promise you, Thea. Another ten guests and we won’t be able to get them all in this room.’

  ‘Well, it’s your party, but I’m telling you, there’ll be trouble.’

  In her secretary’s role, Thea wrote all the cards as instructed despite her misgivings. She was already wondering if she could keep these omissions dark. If Jimmy found out there would be hell to pay and equal hell if she told him. Perhaps, though, she should tell Montserrat. Montserrat of all the people on the list would be least disappointed. Damian and Roland bored her and she had once told Thea she disliked weddings and would never go to another. A civil partnership was really a wedding, wasn’t it, just a wedding under another name? Jimmy would have to do without her this evening. She picked up the phone and called Montserrat.

  Even in the heart of London gales blow, winds crack their cheeks and tiles fall off roofs. Even in a little bar round the back of Leicester Square tempestuous shrieks and claps of thunder penetrate the walls when a November storm starts up. This storm had been forecast but no one believed in it till the first sixty-mile-an-hour gusts started and the rain lashed down out of a black sky.

  Thea and Montserrat were sitting in the little bar, drinking Chardonnay and eating Pringles crisps and big black olives. Thea’s mobile rang the moment they sat down. Of course it was Jimmy, wanting to know if he should come and
join them.

  ‘Better stay in on a night like this,’ said Thea.

  Montserrat helped herself to more of what the barman called ‘nibbles’. ‘I’ve lost seven pounds in the past month so I think I can treat myself to a crisp or two.’

  ‘No one ever eats two crisps,’ said Thea.

  Very thin herself, one of those who boast that they don’t have to worry about their weight, Thea looked critically at her friend and admitted that her looks had greatly improved recently. The spots were gone and the little roll of fat, the dimension of a bicycle tyre round her middle, had disappeared.

  ‘You’re looking good,’ she said. ‘Ciaran brought that on, has he?’ When there was no answer beyond a small smile, she moved on to the question of the guest list. ‘It’s true they’ve got about a hundred people coming.’

  Montserrat gulped down the dregs of her wine. ‘I wouldn’t have thought they’d got a hundred friends. They’re not very nice people. You won’t go, will you?’

  ‘What d’you mean, like make a gesture? If you’re not asking my friends I’m not going? The fact is, Montsy, I don’t come in the category, I’m not a servant.’

  ‘You’re nearly as much a one as I am and they’re not asking me.’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t mind,’ said Thea. ‘I thought you’d be glad. I mean, you don’t like them. You wouldn’t enjoy yourself.’

  ‘It’s the principle of the thing. To be perfectly honest with you, I wouldn’t mind so much if you’d make a stand with me and not go.’

  Driven to placating Montserrat, anything rather than give in, Thea picked up their empty glasses and offered her friend another drink. ‘Have a vodka this time, why don’t you? I’ll pay.’

  Montserrat nodded coldly and Thea went up to the bar, wishing she had never said a word about civil partnerships and guest lists. It would have been better to leave it for Montserrat to find out for herself. Jimmy rang again while she was waiting for their drinks and she nearly didn’t answer it. But even if she hadn’t yet succeeded in loving him, she couldn’t do that to Jimmy.