by Ruth Rendell
Stephen Lawson came up to her, slipped the fur coat off her shoulders and pulled her arms together. She had thought him repulsive when first she saw him at the police station. It was something to do with his thick and blubbery lips. And now the touch of his hands on her skin made her shiver. It was a strong convulsive shudder she gave.
“Frightened, are you, Ms. Goldsmith? You do well to be.”
She thought Lawson would tie her hands but he had clipped on handcuffs. These frightened her more than the gun.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” she said, angry with herself because her voice sounded cracked and feeble. “You’ve told me nothing.”
Arlen smiled.
“They will come and look for me,”
“Perhaps,” he said. “And they will find you. In your car, which will have skidded on ice and gone over the parapet at Yorstone Bridge. The second dreadful accident to have happened there. No doubt this will prompt some stringent safety measures to be taken to the bridge and Yorstone Lane.”
They took her out of the room, along a different passage and into what seemed to be a servant’s room off the kitchen regions. It was furnished with a single bed, a clothes cupboard, and a table and chair. The door to a shower room was ajar. At least let them take off the handcuffs, she prayed silently to whoever one does pray to in these situations. They didn’t. They manhandled her until she was seated on the bed and then they left her, locking the very solid-looking door behind them.
There was a window, but it had shutters and those shutters were closed. The shower room had no window, only a fan which probably came on when you put the light on. She found she could put the light on by pressing her shoulder against the switch. The basin was half full of water. She thought one of them must have filled it from the cold tap so that she wouldn’t become dehydrated. This she took as an encouraging sign. If they intended to kill her in an hour or so they wouldn’t have bothered to leave water for her.
In books when people like these two took someone prisoner they never killed them at once but kept them locked up somewhere for hours or even days in advance. She had often wondered about this. Did it really happen or was this delay only a device enabling the author to maintain suspense and make a successful rescue possible? Sometimes, of course, it was created for a ransom to be demanded. A ransom wasn’t going to be demanded for her. They didn’t want money, they had money and wanted to go on making it. They wanted her out of the way. What they were up to in Africa and here must be sufficiently lucrative and appalling to make killing her necessary. Yet Arlen had said very little, just a phrase or two about a clinic and doctors…
Damon knew where she was. Hold on to that, she thought, hold on to that.
Now he was at the door Wexford had forgotten what he had come to ask. There was only one answer to find now and he had no reason to think he would find it here. Though he had never found the motive, the elusive why, he had found the perpetrators. Perhaps he had come to this house in an attempt to quiet his perpetual anxiety about the child Brand. To reassure himself that when he left this case behind him he could also leave behind his worries about Amber’s little boy. A word of hope from Brand’s grandfather, perhaps, a look of love from Brand’s stepgrandmother, would help do it. Or news from one or the other of them that the Hillands or Diana’s sister wanted to adopt him…
He had been standing on the doorstep in the cold for several minutes, thinking of possibilities, thinking how hope really does spring eternal. At last he rang the bell. George Marshalson came to the door, an old man now, whose back was bent and whose head was thrust forward as if peering out at a wicked world. Wexford thought he had aged twenty years in four months. He no longer walked, he shambled. His voice had cracked and grown higher-pitched. And his first words deadened Wexford’s hopes.
“My wife’s putting the child to bed, thank God. I can’t stand it, you know, not at my age. All that energy, all that noise. He never gets tired. Not that he’ll sleep. He’ll be yelling as soon as she comes down.”
Wexford shrugged. He had no reply to make to that. He followed Marshalson into the interior designer living room and sat down in the Oriental chair. The noses and foreheads and hands of painted gods poked into his back.
“We have almost reached the end of this case, Mr. Marshalson.” Perhaps that was what he had come to tell him. He might even have thought the man would be interested. “I shall be making an arrest very soon.”
“Frankly, I don’t care,” Marshalson said. “Finding the man who killed her won’t bring her back. I used to hear people say that on the television and I sneered. I sneered, Chief Inspector.” Tears came into his eyes. A frequent occurrence, Wexford thought. Old enfeebled men weep easily and he had much to weep for. “I know what they meant now. I don’t care. I don’t care about anything. She wasn’t a paragon, you know. Well, of course you know. She was immoral, by my old-fashioned standards. She was greedy and lazy and feckless, but I’d give everything I have to have her back.”
“I’m sure you would.”
“So don’t tell me about it. Don’t tell me who you’re arresting and why. Go up and tell my wife. You’ll find her in the boy’s bedroom. You can’t fail to find her, the noise the two of them make.”
Wexford was glad to leave this unhappy man whose sorrow evoked in him a pity that almost brought tears to his own eyes. What had happened to Marshalson he had seen happening to bereaved parents again and again. Following the initial terrible shock, they seemed to adjust, to resign themselves and to come to terms with their loss. But after a while, weeks or even months, realization of the full extent of what they had suffered reached and enveloped them. A sorrowful depression, dull, indifferent, bitter, and beyond hope of relief, took them in its relentless grip, a hold from which some of them never unloosed themselves their whole life long. People who hadn’t cried since they were children broke down in tears at the mention of the lost one’s name.
He began to go slowly upstairs. He had been up here before but only to search Amber’s room. The door to that room was closed, but another at the end of the passage was open, light streaming from inside. There is something curiously warm and hopeful about light pouring from an open door into a dark place. Voices came to him, hers and Brand’s, laughing happy voices, the child’s gleeful. He stood in the doorway silently, looking at them and, seeing their faces, he knew.
It shocked him so much that for a moment he could hardly speak.
CHAPTER 30
* * *
With the coming of darkness it grew colder and half-melted snow froze. Bal went home to the flat he shared with his solicitor friend, thinking he would do what he had been doubting for weeks he should do: phone Hannah and ask her out for a drink. Soon after that awful escapade, the abortive trip to Taunton, rue had set in. Bal liked that word, which perfectly expressed how he felt. “Rue”—more than regret and less than remorse. He had behaved like a prig. Not only moralistic and smug, but acting like someone twice his age and with the code and values of someone three times that. And now he could no longer understand why he had done what he had. What had got into him? Daring to tell an intelligent woman that he was saving her up until he knew her properly? Refusing to sleep with the most beautiful woman he knew on the grounds of some teenage virgin’s principles of keeping a relationship pure until they were totally acquainted with each other’s tastes and needs?
The chances were that she would never speak to him again except in the line of duty. But he could try. He’d be a fool not even to try. His flatmate was out. The living room to himself, he threw himself on to the sofa and dialed her home number, bracing himself for her voice telling him what he could do and where he could go. No answer. Well, it was only seven-thirty. He tried her mobile number. She was bound to answer that. They knew they always had to answer that. It rang and rang, and was abruptly cut off. Odd.
He fetched himself a can of Coke from the fridge, came back and phoned the police station. No, DS Goldsmith had gone.
>
“Gone where?”
“Home, I suppose,” said the duty sergeant. “I haven’t seen her since I came on at four.”
No, of course not, Bal thought. She had gone to see Norman Arlen. Up to London on the train. He had heard Damon telling Wexford when they came back from their abortive attempt to see Lydia Burton. He hesitated for a moment and called Damon on his mobile. What time had it been when Hannah said she was going to London? About eleven, Damon said. Maybe she’d stayed in London for a bit, Bal thought, met a friend or done some shopping. No matter how intelligent, every woman loved shopping. Of course she had probably come home but wasn’t at home now because she was out with some other guy. What could be more likely? Did he think she was staying in night after night, pining for him? They would be dining somewhere now, she looking as wonderful as those times when she had dined with him, and when her new man took her home he wouldn’t be such a fool as to leave her with a chaste kiss.
Bal went out into the kitchen and gloomily fetched himself a Marks & Spencer’s ready meal out of the fridge.
The electricity came on in Pauceley and Thatto at the very moment Mary delivered Sylvia’s baby. Sylvia gave an enormous yell and the biggest final push, and the child came out with a whoosh as the room filled with brilliant light.
“A lovely little girl,” said Mary, holding up the baby as she yelled lustily. “And not so little. I’ll be surprised if she weighs less than four kilos.”
“I don’t know what that means. What is it in pounds?”
“I’ll weigh her in a minute. Here, take her.”
“No, no, I mustn’t! She mustn’t come any nearer. Take her away. Oh, God, God, take her away.”
Mary hadn’t told her. She did so now, quickly, as the tears poured down Sylvia’s face and she put up her arms to take her baby. Mary watched them together, then left them together. The electricity was on, so she could make tea. She made it, put a cake she had baked herself on a large plate, loaded the tray, and went back upstairs. Sylvia was cuddling the baby, a beatific expression on her face, a half-smile, an adoring look.
“Is that true,” Mary said, “about you and Neil?”
“Give me some of that cake, would you? I’m starving. Of course it’s true. After all, he was my husband for years and years. Why did the fool have to tell her? I never would have. Isn’t she a gorgeous baby? I would have given her up, you know, and it would have killed me.”
“What are you going to call her?”
“Mary. What else?”
The news of Mary’s birth reached Wexford as Donaldson drove him back from Brimhurst. His wife’s excited voice poured out developments he could hardly take in and he came off the phone with a confused impression of a split between Neil and Naomi, a candlelight delivery of his nine-and-a-half-pound granddaughter, and the unexplained “appalling and immoral conduct” of Sylvia.
“I never want to see or hear of any more babies as long as I live,” he said.
“Pardon, sir?” Donaldson sounded quite shocked.
“Nothing. I was thinking aloud.”
Tomorrow he would make arrests and he would tell them all. No, tell Burden first, then the Chief Constable and the others who had worked so hard to this end. This awful end…
In spite of the conclusion he had come to about Hannah’s whereabouts, Bal tried to phone her several times more in the course of the evening. He concentrated on her mobile and when he found it was now switched off, began to feel increasingly uneasy. Hannah never switched off her mobile. He remembered all those chaste dinners they had shared, all those proper returns home to her flat. Several times her mobile had rung and she had always answered it. He had been annoyed on one occasion and asked her, for God’s sake, to turn that thing off, it won’t be for work. But she hadn’t. She wouldn’t. Why, then, was she doing it now?
At ten he phoned her mother in Myringham. Was Hannah with her?
Mrs. Goldsmith seemed not to find this question odd. Hannah wasn’t with her. She hadn’t seen her since the morning when her daughter came in to borrow her car.
“Borrow your car? But she was going by train to London.”
“Pomfret was what she told me,” said Hannah’s mother.
She couldn’t come to much harm in Pomfret, could she? He’d been right the first time. She was out with someone else. She wouldn’t thank him for calling her at home at midnight, especially if this guy was there with her, but to hell with that. He’d do it or he wouldn’t sleep.
Her mobile had been in the pocket of her mother’s fur coat. That was now in Arlen’s possession. They had her bag as well. Hannah would have liked to know the time. Her watch was on her wrist, but try as she might, twisting her cuffed hands as far as she could to the left, then to the right, she couldn’t see what time it was. She couldn’t even see the watch because her sweater sleeve covered it. She lay down on the bed because there was nothing else to do and thought about her plight. The first duty of a prisoner is to escape. She repeated that and said it a third time. What about a handcuffed prisoner?
Would they really kill her, put her in her mother’s car, drive it to the Yorstone Bridge, and push it over? It would take more than two of them to do that, but maybe Arlen could muster more than two. The woman in black trousers, for one. Damon would tell everyone before anything like that could happen. He’d tell Bal or Karen or Wexford himself. Her left arm was going numb. Was that a gun Arlen had pointed at her? It might have been no more than a piece of piping, even a cardboard tube. How could you tell when your judgment was affected by fear?
She went into the bathroom, bent over the basin and lapped up some of the water. Immediately it struck her that it “tasted funny.” There was a chemical taste about it, something ferrous, metallic, anyway. Her common sense came to her aid, telling her that she would think that way, it was her fear made her think that way. Drinking water often tasted like that. It was something to do with purification. Why hadn’t she stuffed her mobile into her cleavage or even into her trouser pocket? They hadn’t searched her. She realized they hadn’t searched her because they had already felt the mobile through the folds of the fur coat.
How would they kill her? Not by shooting. Not if they wanted her death to look like an accident. Pushing her over the bridge inside the four-by-four would be enough to do it. Maybe they would rely on that…She sat on the bed and listened. These nether regions of Pomfret Hall were utterly silent, not a footfall, not a closing door. She thought, absurdly, I’d like to have had one night with Bal before I died, though when she was dead it would hardly matter…
Before you panic, he told himself, try her mobile again. He tried it at midnight, got no answer, undressed, and went to bed. Of course he hadn’t been able to sleep. That dream he had had must have come from the time he and Hannah went to interview Gwenda Brooks and that pathetic woman had showed them Norman Arlen’s house and garden in a magazine. He and Burden had been there and he had seen an object he was now sure couldn’t have been a gun. He dreamed of picking up the thing that wasn’t a gun and its going off with a bang, which woke him. Immediately he thought of Hannah and where she might be. Not in London but at Pomfret Hall. That was where she had gone, he was sure of it. She should have taken him with her, Bal thought, and probably would have done but for their ridiculous quarrel. On the other hand she must have been up to something that required her to be alone, a woman on her own, a woman in a fur coat…
He wouldn’t disturb his flatmate, bring him into this. The guy slept like the dead anyway. Bal dialed Burden’s number. Burden took a long time to answer and when he finally did, growled, “What is it?”
Bal told him. “I don’t believe it,” Burden said. “Arlen wouldn’t. He wouldn’t dare.”
“You remember when we went there, sir. He had a gun.”
“You mean you think you saw a gun.”
“Okay, that’s what I mean but can we dare take a chance?”
“Leave it with me,” said Burden with a low groan, “but go down t
o the station and get Damon too.”
“I don’t want anyone armed,” Wexford said. “I don’t believe in Arlen’s gun. A man like that wouldn’t have left a gun lying about in his living room. Not here. Not in this country.”
“We’ll be taking a chance.”
“Mike, we take chances every day. Remember, Arlen’s a villain but he’s not a Yardie, he’s not a teenage thug. Now, how many people can we get together at this hour?” Wexford looked at his watch. “It’s half past two.”
“Four from Uniform,” said Damon. “You, sir, and Mr. Burden and me and Karen and Bal.”
“Right. Nine of us in three cars. Make a show. Lights but no sirens.”
There was a small bed lamp in the room, but try as she might, Hannah couldn’t switch it on. She could just manage to turn on the top light by leaning against the wall and pressing the switch with her elbow. The bed lamp worked from a plug in a socket on the skirting board under the bed. Though she could see it she couldn’t reach it except with her feet. Her toes, which might have operated the socket switch, were enclosed inside socks she couldn’t remove.
The choice she had was between sitting here in bright light or deep darkness. The light was dazzlingly bright, putting her in mind of what prisoners in certain countries were subjected to, which constituted torture. On the other hand the darkness would be more frightening, would probably add to the panic she was trying so hard to keep at bay, and if she fell asleep—an unlikely happening but possible—when she awoke she might for a second or two think she was at home in her own bed. She kept the light on.
Thinking of the bright-light torture reminded her of how, when reading in the paper or watching on television some poor hostage pleading for his or her life, she had resolved in case she was ever kidnapped never to do that herself. Never mind if they stood over her while she read a written statement. Never mind if they hit and kicked her, she wouldn’t humiliate herself by begging the British government or anyone else for her life. Sitting under the hundred-and-fifty-watt unshaded lamp above her head, she said aloud, “Did I really think that? Did I think I would hold out when those brave people couldn’t? Was I mad? I’d go down on my knees and beg for mercy, I know I would. Give me half a chance. I’d offer them anything, anything I could do or give up or promise, in exchange for my life.”
