End in Tears

by Ruth Rendell

  The snow contributed to her feeling of isolation. It had been falling steadily since before lunchtime, not the kind of snow that is blown in on the wind in sharp showers, but straight-down feather-soft snow, a lace curtain of thick flakes. Where it fell on grass and leafless shrubs it lingered, wet and sparkling, but on stone it melted where it touched. Warmth and sunshine are company in themselves, but snow, like heavy rain, cuts you off from the world, imprisoning you in loneliness and walling you inside.

  Once antagonistic toward her, she now longed for Mary’s visits, for her cheerful presence, her brisk optimism. But Mary was on duty at the Princess Diana today, as she had been since Friday. If the snow fell heavily enough, if the roads were blocked, Mary might not be able to get to Stowerton tomorrow…

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said aloud. “It won’t settle.”

  Already in possession of her fur coat, Hannah borrowed her mother’s car for the drive to Pomfret Hall. There were two reasons for this. She had never seriously considered using her own car, which was police property and could possibly be recognized as such. Hannah thought this unlikely, even paranoid on her part, but she wasn’t taking any chances. A taxi had been her first choice. The snow was still falling but not settling when she went to bed on Monday and the weather forecast was for a rise in temperature during the night.

  She woke up to a white world, heavy driving snow, and a high wind blowing. The two taxi firms she called were adamant their drivers refused to negotiate country lanes in this weather. That was when Hannah went over to Myringham and borrowed her mother’s four-by-four, a big silver monster, high above the ground and snug inside. With no permit in its windscreen, the monster had no reserved place in the police station car park, so Hannah put it on one of the four-hourly meters in the High Street.

  If she and Bal had been on the sort of terms that existed between them before that fateful trip to Taunton, she would have discussed all this with him, but these days they barely spoke. Besides, he was out with Wexford calling on Lydia Burton, whose school was closed due to bad weather. Burden was at the Princess Diana, where a “body-packer,” at death’s door, was being operated on for injuries from the bag of cocaine that had burst in his stomach. She had already told him and Wexford she would be seeing Norman Arlen again today, but she told Damon Coleman before she went out, just to be on the safe side.

  CHAPTER 29

  * * *

  Driving the monster was so enjoyable, so blissfully high up above roadway and hedges, affording such views, that Hannah wished it weren’t only a matter of seven miles she had to go. Even the lightly falling snow and the snow-covered fields added to the pleasure, giving her the illusion she was forging through Antarctic wastes, like some latter-day (and better equipped) Scott or Amundsen. She had to remind herself severely that vehicles such as this one had been censured as environmentally unfriendly. To join the fight against global warming and climate change one should have an electric car.

  The turning out of Pomfret High Street was wide enough for two cars to pass without difficulty and its surface had been cleared and gritted, but a mile farther on she had to take a narrow lane, deep under virgin snow. The monster handled this with ease. She took it slowly, and farther on the high wind had blown a good deal of what weather forecasters call “precipitation” off the road onto the fields. Some minion of Norman Arlen had cleared his long drive and she drove up to the front door over no more than a thin scattering of flakes melting in the weak sunshine.

  The place had impressed Burden. It slightly intimidated Hannah. Burden, after all, had seen houses of this grandeur and magnitude before, if only when visiting them on holiday or converted into country hotels. Hannah never had, except in pictures or in the distance, beyond wide rivers and against a background of blue hills. She had expected an aggrandized farmhouse. But she got out of the monster, mounted the left-hand set of steps, and after speculating for a moment or two as to what its purpose was, pulled the sugarstick doorbell.

  A woman in black trousers and blouse let her in. She said nothing when Hannah gave the name “Mrs. Smithson” but nodded and led her across a huge hall and along a corridor wider than most normal-size rooms. Burden had said something about meeting Arlen in what he dubbed with irony “the yellow drawing room.” Therefore Hannah knew, when at last they reached their destination, a book-lined place rich with dark wood and leather upholstery, that Arlen had chosen a different venue for her appointment. “The library,” he probably called it. Had Gwenda Brooks come here? Had Sharon Lucas?

  She sat down and waited. Norman Arlen came in after about five minutes, looking very different from his London image, a tweed jacket over his cashmere sweater and cord trousers. He shook hands with her and sat down behind a large mahogany desk. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I wouldn’t have been surprised if you hadn’t come, Mrs. Smithson. You drove here in this weather?”

  “My car has four-wheel drive,” she said.

  “Well, I congratulate you on managing these treacherous lanes.”

  She told him she had thoroughly read every word of his brochure and prospectus and, yes, she was in no doubt she wanted to undertake the project. Not daring to equip herself with a recording device, she knew she must get him to come out with an open and unmistakable statement of what she would receive at the end of it. She must somehow make him say she would return from Africa with a baby and a passport for that baby. Instead, so far, he talked only about her starting on the diet regimen as soon as possible, her consultation with the Miracle Tours medical adviser, and the various non-diet treatments she must receive.

  “I want to have a baby,” she said firmly, putting all the sincerity and intensity she could muster into her tone. “I’ll do anything for that. There’s no problem about me doing this diet and any treatment I have to have so long as I have a baby at the end of it.”

  “There has to be some level of trust between us, Mrs. Smithson,” he said. He looked hard at her and she had to prevent herself from squirming under this scrutiny. She was confessing to herself that he was a formidable man. “Unless you can accept that what is stated in the brochure is true or will become true it won’t be possible for us to do business. You’ve met Mrs. Brooks. Mr. Quickwood has told you what is guaranteed and what to expect.” He hadn’t. Should she have gone to him first? “The fact is, Mrs. Smithson, that once you have paid your deposit and embarked on the various schemes, the promises made in the brochure will be carried out.”

  She was starting to assure him that she did trust him, she did believe, it was only that it seemed too good to be true, when the door behind her opened and someone came into the room. Arlen looked up and nodded. He seemed to have expected whoever this was. The newcomer came up to the desk and, walking around it to Arlen’s side and whispering something to him, looked up at her. With difficulty she restrained herself from gasping.

  It was Stephen Lawson, the man who had supplied Rick Samphire with an alibi.

  The gale, which seemed no more than a brisk wind in Kingsmarkham, blew in gusts of seventy miles an hour out in the remote villages. It blew the snow off the fields and into deep drifts in the narrow roads; it blew down a fifty-foot beech tree across the road between Myland and Thatto, blocking all ingress and egress to Hurst Thatto and its handful of houses.

  At two in the afternoon, Sylvia felt the first pain of labor. “Thank God for that,” she said. The second one was so long in coming that she wondered if she’d been mistaken. But, no. She wouldn’t phone Mary yet. No need to bring her out in this weather before she had to. Besides, this ridiculous unseasonable snow, which everyone had said wouldn’t settle, might stop. Studying it critically from the dining-room window, she thought she could see it slackening. The flakes were smaller. Then it came to her that a car might have difficulty getting through.

  Perhaps she should phone Mary now. Leave it half an hour. The friend who was bringing the boys home from school would keep them with her if she feared getting through. That was a
nother phone call she must make, to this woman’s mobile. She was about to give birth. Well, in a few hours, maybe seven or eight. An awesome venture—it always was. I shall go to the Princess Diana in labor, she thought, and no one there will know about Neil and Naomi or that the baby won’t be mine to keep. They’ll congratulate me. They’ll say, “Congratulations, Mrs. Fairfax. You have a lovely baby girl or baby boy.” And I shan’t dare even to hold it…

  But they would clear the roads. They had been good about getting the snowplows out this year. I’d better phone Mother, tell her I shall go to the hospital in an hour or so. She lumbered into the living room and picked up the phone. It was as dead as a toy phone, dead as an unplugged instrument. Could she walk to Mary’s? It was only about two hundred yards. In this snow? Not so much the snow that was falling as the snow that lay. She could imagine slipping over and not being able to get up again. As if to teach her a lesson, a pain took hold of her with an increasingly severe disabling thrust. She leaned over the table, holding on to it and breathing slowly. It grabbed her, squeezed, wrung her out and let her go. Nice when it stops, she thought, almost worth having it’s so nice when it stops. It was getting dark. She tried to switch on a light, but there was no power. She stood in the half-dark, feeling fluid flow down her legs. Her waters had broken.

  A key was turning in the lock. She drew a deep breath, went out into the hall to Mary.

  “I’ve started.”

  “So I see. Okay, darling, let’s get this cleared up and I’ll examine you in a minute. There’s no way I’m going to be able to get you to the Princess Di. There’s a tree down and the road’s blocked.”

  Sylvia’s eyes grew very wide. “What shall we do?” Who is more helpless than a woman in labor? “What shall we do, Mary? The electricity won’t work and the phone won’t work.”

  “No, but your mobile will, my love. Didn’t think of that, did you? So there’s two things we can do. I can phone the emergency services and see if they can get a helicopter out to you. Or you can have a nice quiet home delivery with a highly qualified midwife in attendance.”

  “At least this time we haven’t lost the electricity,” Dora said. “I just hope it doesn’t freeze and then maybe I can get over to Thatto. Sylvia’s started. She called me on her mobile. Her what-do-you-call-it phone’s not working.”

  “Landline.” Wexford sighed. “I can’t take much interest in this baby, I’m afraid. I suppose I’ve schooled myself not to.” He looked out of the window. “I could take you to the Princess Diana if you like. I’ve got to go out again. They’re gritting the roads.”

  “She’s not in the Princess Diana. They couldn’t get there. A tree’s come down across the road. Mary Beaumont’s with her.”

  “Maybe it’s better if you’re not there,” he said. “You don’t want to witness the handover of your grandchild to Naomi Wyndham.”

  “And you don’t care, I suppose.”

  He was so much taller and bigger that he towered over her. Standing above her, holding her by the shoulders so that for a moment she was his prisoner, he said, “Dora, the worst is to come. If we are against each other who will be for us? We must be united, truly together, not putting on a front. I’m going now. Give me a kiss.”

  She kissed him. When he moved away from her he saw that she was crying.

  Donaldson drove him to Brimhurst Prideaux. The snow had stopped two hours before, the temperature had begun to rise, and the four-inch-deep crust had reached the stage of a melting sorbet. Water ran into the gutters and a fine rain began to fall. But there were no longer any blocked roads or impassable lanes. November’s freak blizzard had come to a sudden end.

  Although Wexford wasn’t much concerned about Ross Samphire’s love affairs, he intended to call on Lydia Burton for any information she might be prepared to give him on the Samphire brothers. As had been the case at his earlier visit with DC Bhattacharya, no one was at home. Donaldson drove slowly down Mill Lane through ridges of half-melted snow and pools of water. The early dusk had come and he saw that number three Jewel Terrace was in total darkness. Perhaps she had gone to another assignation at Colin Fry’s flat. He still had to decide, he reminded himself, what action to take over that. Bring him to court for keeping a disorderly house or simply tell him these activities of his must stop? Something came back to him quite suddenly. On the night Amber was killed, Lydia Burton had been out with a man, had been dining with him somewhere. He had brought her home in his car at midnight. Ross or someone else? Now that was something he must find out, for Ross claimed to have entertained Norman Arlen that evening…

  Candles were lit in the hall and living room. The single oil lamp Sylvia and Mary could muster was in Sylvia’s bedroom. Mary had lit two coal fires, but there was no means of cooking.

  “What are you going to do about boiling water?”

  That made Mary laugh. “Boiling water is only in books, my love.”

  The woman who had fetched Sylvia’s children from school had phoned her mobile to say she would bring them back if she could or keep them for the night. When the doorbell rang that was who Mary thought it was. It wasn’t. It was Naomi.

  “You’ve been very prompt. The baby’s not here yet.”

  Naomi looked ravaged. To Mary, who had never before seen her less than well-groomed, perfumed, and painted, she seemed ill, an unkempt distraught creature, her hair wild, tears on her face, her shoes and trousers soaked. Mary told her to come in and, following her, explained how it had been impossible for Sylvia to get to the maternity home.

  “I don’t want to see her,” Naomi said. “I never want to see her again.”

  “Why did you come, then?”

  “I was determined to come. I saw the tree was down and I left my car on the other side of it and walked. That’s why I’m so wet. I had to come. Now you’re here I don’t have to see her. I can tell you.”

  “Naomi,” Mary said, “you had better take your shoes and socks off. Sylvia can lend you shoes. She’s about your size.”

  Naomi kicked off her shoes and pulled off her socks. Her long narrow feet were white from the cold and so wet that when she lifted them up water dripped from her toes. The expression in the eyes she lifted to Mary was that of someone who has seen a dreadful sight, a sight so horrible and searing on the vision that it can never be forgotten. But before Mary could inquire, Sylvia’s voice from upstairs came calling, “Mary, Mary…”

  “I’ll be back soon. Sit in front of the fire and warm yourself. I’ll make you a hot drink when I come back.”

  Mounting the stairs, Mary decided not to tell Sylvia who had come. If Sylvia had heard a voice she wouldn’t have been able to tell who it was, this house was so big, so cavernous. Whatever had got Naomi into this state it was better for a woman in labor not to know about it. Mary went into the bedroom and examined Sylvia.

  “That’s fine, my darling,” she said. “Everything’s going excellently, but you’ve a way to go. Yell if you want. No one minds.”

  “Who’s no one?” said Sylvia on a gasp. “I heard a woman’s voice.”

  “Only my next-door neighbor, who’s collecting for Save the Children.”

  “It sounded like Naomi.”

  “Really?” said Mary. “I suppose some other people do sound like her, my love. I’ll get rid of her and I’ll be back.”

  “I don’t want a hot drink,” said Naomi. “I’ve come to tell you what’s happened. I thought I’d have to tell Sylvia, but I’m glad I shan’t have to. I never want to see her again.”

  “So you said.”

  Naomi held out her feet to the fire, leaned forward, staring at her knees. “Neil’s gone,” she began. “I’ve thrown him out. I don’t know where he’ll go and I don’t care. He told me, Mary. We were going to get married tomorrow and we were, well, sort of confessing our past. I mean, things we’d done and thought it was better for the other one to know.” She gave a racking sob and momentarily put her head in her hands. Mary waited in silence, thinking about
the woman upstairs. “I hadn’t much to tell him,” Naomi said in a broken voice. “I’d told him everything when we were first together.” She lifted her head and looked into Mary’s face.

  “But he had?”

  “You know?”

  “I don’t know anything, my dear. And I have to get back to Sylvia in one minute.”

  “He told me how they got this baby. It wasn’t what-do-they-call-it, AI, artificial insemination. They had sex. They had sex. Here. The afternoon in February he came to do the AI. And he said that she said, ‘We may as well do it. It’s easier and more sure.’ That’s what he says she said. He was unfaithful to me with her and this is the result. I don’t want this baby. I never want to set eyes on it. I couldn’t bear to touch it. You tell her that.”

  It was clear that Stephen Lawson had recognized her before she recognized him. That was what he must have whispered to Norman Arlen. They would throw her out now and that would be that. She got up. Arlen said, in a voice that varied not at all from the tone he had used previously, “Sit down, Mrs. Smithson. Or should I say Detective Sergeant Goldsmith?”

  There was no point in denying it. She nodded, said, “Very well, I’ll leave.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  It wasn’t the first time Hannah had seen a man in serious possession of a gun. In those early days when she was on the beat a “Yardie” had fired a sawn-off shotgun at her and the shot had flashed past her right ear. A drunk involved in a street fight had pulled a heavy army revolver when she and another officer appeared but had been overpowered before he could use it. These two had both been high and maddened, but Norman Arlen was chillingly calm, just sitting there staring at her, holding something in his hand. It seemed like a very small pistol, though his large broad hand concealed most of it. She could see its barrel, pointing straight at her. He slowly got to his feet, told her to stand up, holding the gun almost buried in the palm of that big hand. She got up, aware that in these situations you had better do as you are told.