The Saint Zita Society

by Ruth Rendell

  The state of the cups, chipped, cracked and when the home help had paid a rare visit stained with dark crimson lipstick, always ensured Thea’s refusal. She sat down briefly on the edge of a chair. ‘Didn’t you once tell me you’d been in service, Miss Grieves?’

  ‘Nothing wrong in that, I hope. They’re a bunch of bloody snobs round here.’

  ‘Nothing wrong at all. Quite the reverse. I thought I’d propose you for the Saint Zita Society.’ Thea explained, describing it as a kind of combination of a union and social club. Miss Grieves said she didn’t mind, her usual rejoinder when she liked the idea of something very much. Then she said, ‘How d’you get hold of the police? I want to complain about the bloody foxes.’

  Thea knew she was lying. ‘Look in the phone book,’ she said because she couldn’t exactly not answer. She even fetched the directory for Miss Grieves, rooting it out from under a stack of old magazines. The date on the top one was April 1947.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The conspiracy in Hexam Place that none of the ‘staff’ would say a word about seeing Rad Sothern make his secret way into number 7 gave Montserrat confidence. If there were no untoward developments, if no police interest was shown in the Still household, Preston would go ahead with the divorce, not as speedily of course as if there were no children, but helped on its way by his being a very rich man. Money always expedited these things. It would be a no-fault divorce so that Rad’s name need not be brought into it.

  It would be best for Preston to move out and into that flat he had talked about. She didn’t quite trust him so near to Lucy. While he had said last night that he could never forgive Lucy, he had shown signs of sympathy for her. Montserrat had decided that she would marry him. She didn’t love him or even like him very much. He was too hairy to be attractive to her and too pompous as well, too stuffy with his long words and his Macbeth quotes. But she would marry him. He must be grateful to her, she had saved his life or saved him from years of jail. Lucy was thought beautiful by a lot of people but she was beginning to look worn. Besides, she was thirty-six and she, Montserrat, was twenty-two.

  Lucy had money of her own from her rich father so Preston wouldn’t have to give her so much. She would get the children, a good idea as far as Montserrat was concerned. She’d let Preston see them whenever he liked. It was best to look facts in the face and this marriage she contemplated would hardly last long. She might even fix a period of time for it – say four years. She would still only be twenty-six and be as beautiful as Lucy by that time what with all the cosmetic surgery and facials and body toning and designer clothes she’d have paid for with Preston’s money.

  Her next step was to make a change in the kind of meetings they had. Permanent relationships were not grounded on sneaking into a girl’s bedroom after dark and disappearing again at dawn. She would have to get him to take her out to expensive restaurants and later away for weekends. One place they would never go to was Gallowmill Hall.

  Her friendship with Thea, once so enriching (as Thea put it) for both, had now dwindled to almost non-existence. Her friend was always somewhere with Jimmy. If Jimmy and Thea’s relationship became a permanency, Montserrat decided that she and Preston would not number them among their friends. Preston wouldn’t want to know someone’s driver, or ‘chauffeur’ as he called it. The day was fine and bright, if cold, and Montserrat was making up her mind to go shopping to Kensington High Street – Sloane Street being beyond her means at present – to get her hair done, buy some clothes and make-up, when the landline phone rang. Not Preston then. He would have used her mobile. Another one of those premonitions she knew meant nothing came to her.

  The voice, very unlike Preston’s or that of any man she intended to associate with in future, said, ‘Miss Tresser?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is Detective Constable Colin Rickards. I’d like to come and see you if I may.’

  Montserrat asked what this was about, disgusted with herself for speaking in a small squeaky voice. Why don’t we leave that till I get to see you? said Rickards, and Montserrat hadn’t quite the nerve to say she’d like to know now. But she did try to get in touch with Preston. The woman who answered his phone knew she wasn’t Lucy, with Lucy’s voice she seemed familiar. Mr Still was in a meeting, she said, and when Montserrat said it was urgent, told her it was a board meeting. She wouldn’t have believed this Rickards could have got here so quickly and come to the front door, though she’d asked him to the basement. The chance of Lucy answering the front door was highly unlikely but Rabia might, and though Montserrat raced up the basement stairs, Rabia had answered it. Thomas was in her arms and Rickards, a small thin ginger-haired man, was praising him to the skies.

  ‘Your youngster?’ he said to Montserrat.

  Her headshake was almost a shudder. But it was a natural mistake. He could hardly have thought Thomas with his golden curls and milk-white skin was Rabia’s. But now he would know about Lucy’s existence. Did that matter?

  She took him down to her flat.

  ‘You the tenant of this flat?’ was the first thing he asked.

  ‘I’m the au pair,’ said Montserrat, ‘and a friend of the family.’

  He looked in his notebook. ‘And also a friend of Mr Rad Sothern, I understand.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ She was sure none of the ‘staff’ in the street would have said a word. Thea had promised they wouldn’t. Surely Lucy wouldn’t be so treacherous when it was she whose lover Rad had been …

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Rickards. ‘I can say you’ve been seen speaking to him and admitting him to this house.’

  Outright denial was what it had to be. ‘I spoke to him once,’ said Montserrat firmly. ‘I was coming out of the basement door –’ she waved her hand in that direction – ‘and he was passing and he asked me the way to Sloane Square.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. And if that’s all –’

  ‘That’s not all, Miss Tresser. What’s your first name, by the way?’

  She told him.

  ‘That’s a name I’ve never heard before. Where’s that come from? Asia, is it?’

  ‘It’s Spanish. I’m half Spanish.’

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it? People come from all over now, don’t they? All four corners of the earth, you might say. When did this meeting with Mr Sothern take place then? When he asked you the way?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember something like that.’

  ‘Let me help you. Would it have been the fifth of November, Bonfire Night?’

  ‘It might have been,’ said Montserrat, using the phrase favoured by petty crooks of all kinds.

  ‘I’m asking, you see,’ said Rickards, a sudden burst of sunshine breaking through the window turning his ginger hair to red-gold, ‘because that was the last time Mr Sothern was seen alive. He had visited his great-auntie at number 6 and then came across here. That’s why it seems strange to me that he had to ask you where Sloane Square was instead of his auntie.’ Momentarily, he shut his eyes against the bright light and shifted his chair out of the sun. ‘It seems even stranger to me that Mr Sothern didn’t know where Sloane Square was when before he moved to Montagu Square he lived for two years in the King’s Road.’

  Montserrat said defiantly that she couldn’t help that. That was what he said.

  ‘Now, are you sure you wouldn’t like to think about it for a few minutes and then tell me what really happened between you and Mr Sothern?’

  ‘I’ve told you what really happened,’ said Montserrat.

  ‘Because, you see, Mr Sothern was never seen by anyone after he spoke to you and, according to our information, came into this house by the basement door.’

  ‘I can’t help that.’

  ‘Then perhaps you can tell me if Mr Sothern was friendly with anyone else living here.’

  ‘I don’t know any more than I’ve told you,’ said Montserrat. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘That depend
s on what it is.’

  She asked if people got at him, ‘mocked’ was the word she used, because of his ginger hair.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said stiffly and left, saying in an ominous sort of way that he would want to see her again.

  Montserrat tried once more to call Preston and this time he came to the phone. ‘You didn’t tell him anything, did you?’

  ‘I told him I’d spoken to Rad once but he didn’t believe me. Who d’you think can have told him they saw me talking to him and letting him into the house?’

  ‘I don’t know why you ever agreed to do what Lucy wanted and conduct him through the house to her room. It was treachery to me.’

  ‘Being a psychopomp,’ said Montserrat who had recalled the word. ‘Lucy was my friend, not you. Before you start blaming me you want to remember that I haven’t done anything wrong. I didn’t push anyone down the stairs, I just helped you.’

  ‘All right, Montsy, all right. I know. Are the police going to talk to me?’

  ‘They didn’t say. I didn’t mention you, of course I didn’t. I hope I know the meaning of loyalty.’

  Preston said he knew that. He hardly knew how he could have managed without her. ‘You’ll want to know that I’m moving out this evening and into my new flat in Westminster. Meet me there, will you? We’ll go out to eat. It’s 25 Medway Manor Court.’

  Lucy cried a lot. She spent a large part of every day howling and sobbing. Rabia heard it from the nursery floor and worried because Thomas also heard it and said so. ‘Mummy cry.’

  What could she say? ‘Poor Mummy cut her finger.’

  After it had gone on intermittently for days, Rabia went downstairs while Thomas was having his afternoon sleep and found Lucy in the drawing room. She looked quite unlike herself. Tears had washed away her make-up and her hair hadn’t been washed at all.

  ‘Can I bring you a cup of tea?’ Or provide something more needful. ‘Maybe run you a nice bath?’

  ‘I don’t want anything. My heart is broken.’

  ‘Thomas was unhappy. I have told him you cut your finger.’

  ‘He has nothing to be unhappy about. I’m the unhappy one.’ Lucy scrubbed her eyes with her fists. ‘My husband has moved out. He means to sell the house. What am I going to live on?’

  Rabia felt something turn over inside her, an upheaval like a child shifting in the womb. She said the reverse of what she thought and believed. ‘Everything will be all right. The children will be yours whatever happens.’

  ‘How can I look after them on my own?’

  Rabia dared say, ‘I shall be with you,’ and added, ‘Shan’t I?’

  ‘How do I know? Maybe I can’t afford you. All he tells me is that I have betrayed him and he can never trust me again. He never thinks how he was out night after night, never at home with me. What did he expect me to do?’

  Rabia knew the answer but couldn’t utter it. She heard the school bus draw up outside and excused herself to run out into the hall and let Hero and Matilda in. Nausea had risen in her throat and with it a dreadful feeling of fullness, though she had eaten nothing all day but a sandwich with Thomas at lunchtime. She was conscious all the time of the weight of that cigarette case in her pocket.

  Matilda glared at the drawing-room door. ‘Thank God she’s stopped that racket,’ she said like a woman three times her age.

  When she was the second Mrs Preston Still, thought Montserrat, as she came up the escalator at St James’s Park station, she would never travel by Tube again. Taxis for her or even a replacement for the VW if they lived in a place where the residents’ parking was satisfactory. She caught a glimpse of herself reflected in a shop window in Victoria Street and felt pleased with what she saw. What beautiful hair she had, a glossy dark brown cloak of it falling in ripples over her shoulders. There was no doubt she should wear make-up more often, especially crimson lip gloss. Who would believe her eyelashes were her own, entirely natural? But no harm in that. Her weight loss showed. She must keep up the non-eating and the shunning of spirits. Passing a stack of Evening Standards, she picked up one and walked along reading the front page and smoking a cigarette. Another picture of Rad with Rocksana, a new picture of Rad with his previous girlfriend, but nothing, luckily, of or about Rad and Lucy.

  The expected kiss from Preston never came. His ‘Hi there’ was offhand in the extreme but after a moment or two of looking her up and down he did say she ‘looked very nice’. The flat was minimalist, not to say stark, the floor part laminated wood, part marble. It felt hot but looked cold. Preston had already laid in a stock of spirits and aperitifs and in spite of her resolution she accepted a Campari soda. Campari wasn’t spirits, was it?

  ‘I got in touch with the police. I thought it wise. In fact it was. They were very courteous. I said I would be happy to talk to them and they came here. A carrot-topped fellow. He’s not long gone, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘What did you say about Rad?’

  ‘That I’d never met him. He’d never been in the house. I knew nothing about your friends, I said. Your father was a friend of my wife’s father, I said, and that was all I knew of you.’

  ‘Thanks a bunch,’ said Montserrat.

  ‘Surely there was no harm in that. Isn’t it best if we seem hardly to know each other? Especially now I’m living over here. This chap Rickards didn’t seem to want to talk to me again. It may well be that by this time they’ve talked to other people who claimed to have talked to Sothern after you did.’

  ‘But they didn’t,’ said Montserrat. ‘Nobody could have talked to him. He never came out of your house alive, right? Remember? You kicked him downstairs and it killed him.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Preston, looking this way and that as if he feared police spies lurking behind the floor-length iridescent curtains. ‘What’s the point of saying things like that? It was an accident anyway, you know that. Shall we go out and eat?’

  Not to Shepherd’s in Marsham Street, as she had hoped, but a poky little Italian restaurant off the Horseferry Road. There was no temptation to eat much. Once they had exhausted the subject of Rad Sothern’s disappearance and the newspapers’ verdict on it, Montserrat realised they had nothing to say to each other. She hadn’t been in love with Ciaran or any of his predecessors, but they could communicate, have a bit of a giggle, talk about a film they’d seen or music they liked. Preston just sat there, his expression set, unsmiling, his mouth turned down at the corners. She’d read the term po-faced somewhere and hadn’t known what it meant. She knew now. But she would marry him. The process had begun and would continue every day. Outside the restaurant she was afraid he would suggest she go home and put her into a taxi, but, no, she’d come back with him, wouldn’t she? When they got there, he opened a bottle of wine and put on a CD. She didn’t recognise the music but, by its turgid tunelessness and lack of any sort of beat, she could tell it was classical. He started talking again about the police and what they might suspect and whether they would come back, but when she asked him about Lucy and if she had confessed to the affair with Rad, he snubbed her.

  ‘We don’t have to discuss that.’

  On the dot of eleven he said that if she would like to get into bed, he would join her in ten minutes. No man had ever before spoken to her like that. She wanted to tell him she didn’t believe it and what planet was he living on, but instead she told herself yet again that she would marry him, and off she went meekly enough. In the night he woke up, sat up, and began talking to himself. Most of what he said was a mumble except for one clear sentence.

  ‘It was an accident!’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A part from Thanksgiving dinner for the Kleins at the last house in the street who were Americans, it was otherwise not a special day in Hexam Place except for the November meeting of the Saint Zita Society in the Dugong. The principal item on the agenda was the absence from Damian and Roland’s guest list of any member of the ‘staff’. Thea had been asked of course.

&n
bsp; ‘But I’m not a servant,’ said Thea.

  Jimmy had proposed to her earlier in the day while having lunch with her, but Thea had said she didn’t know, she would have to think about it. He appeared to have taken it for granted that she would rush to accept and was accordingly enormously upset. He had brought his late mother’s engagement ring with him rather like Prince William and now he would have to take it away again.

  ‘It’s no use you getting in a state. I don’t like the idea of marriage. But I’ll think about it and now you’ll have to go because I’ve got to go downstairs and see about Miss Grieves.’

  Proud of what she had done, Miss Grieves, lighting a cigarette for herself and one for Thea, told her how she had given the police an account of the times she had seen Montserrat talking to Rad Sothern and admitting him to number 7. She agreed to come with Thea to the Saint Zita meeting and seemed to regard it as a reward for her achievement as a police informer. June took the chair and Montserrat was also there, unaware of Miss Grieves’s part in the discovery of Rad’s running to earth in the area of number 7. Beacon hadn’t come, being occupied in driving Mr Still home to Medway Manor Court. Sondra was there and Henry, and Dex, silent in a corner, the only member of the society to drink Guinness, the tall black glass with its crown of creamy foam particularly appropriate this evening when his head and face, furred with luxuriant dark hair and beard, was topped with a whitish knitted tam-o’-shanter.

  When Thea had given the society an enthusiastic account of Miss Grieves’s early years as a maid-of-all-work in the Elystan Place home of Lady Pimble and the new member had been unanimously accepted, they discussed what June called ‘the sorry business’ of Damian and Roland’s snobbish and exclusive conduct.

  ‘You could boycott the event,’ Jimmy said to Thea. ‘You and Montserrat.’

  ‘Boycotting it won’t make them ask all the rest of you.’ Thea spoke roughly and as if she wanted to add ‘you fool’, though she didn’t. Jimmy was hurt, a familiar feeling now. He was thinking about the early days of their courtship, no more than weeks away, and wondering what he had done wrong apart from being himself. Perhaps it was that which was wrong and she was just realising it. She was a lot cleverer than he was. He thought of her as an intellectual.