One Across, Two Down

by Ruth Rendell

  Once more he stationed himself at the window, one eye to the division between the curtains. There was a car there all right but it wasn’t Blackmore’s old jalopy. Stanley waited, gazing down. The man retreated from the porch. He was tall and dark and in his middle thirties. Stanley didn’t know him but he had seen him about, mostly going in and out of Croughton police station.

  Christ, he thought, Vera hasn’t wasted much time.

  Stanley prayed the policeman would go back to his car but instead he made for the side entrance, going out of his watcher’s line of vision. Quaking, Stanley crept into Maud’s room. From there he watched the policeman walk slowly round the lawn. He by-passed the heather garden but stopped in front of the cement mixer. Then he walked round it, rather as a man may walk round an isolated statue in an exhibition, looking it up and down with a thoughtful and puzzled expression. Then he gave his attention to the cement sacks, one of which he kicked so that the paper ripped and a thin stream of grey dust trickled out.

  Back in his own bedroom, Stanley stood as still as he could, which wasn’t very still as his whole body was twitching and quivering with fear. It was a job to bring the front garden into focus, particularly as his eyelids weren’t under control. At last he got a blurred image of the policeman going back to his car. But instead of getting into it, he unlatched the Blackmores’ gate and walked up their path.

  Stanley had reached a stage of fear when no stimulant could help him. If he drank whisky he knew he would throw it up. His thoughts raced incoherently. The Blackmores would pass on everything they knew of his relations with Maud. Mrs. Macdonald would tell of finding him prone on the earth after filling in the trench he’d prepared in advance. Flushing away those tablets wouldn’t help him, for there had been at least one other carton, now no doubt handed over to the police by Vera. That would be enough for them to get a warrant and dig and find Maud, bones maybe among her outer coverings like the bird in the loft.

  The loft! He could hide in the loft. It wouldn’t matter then if they broke down the doors to get in. He’d be safe up there. The steps were still where he had left them under the trap-door. Cigarettes in one pocket, bottle in the other, he went up the steps and hoisted himself on to a beam. Then, looking down, he knew it wouldn’t work. Even if he closed the trap, they’d see the steps.

  Unless he could pull the steps up after him.

  Stanley lay down flat, bracing his feet against the galvanised wall of the tank. At first, when he grasped the steps, he thought he’d never do it, but he thought of the policeman and renewed fear brought strength. Dragging them straight up was no use. He’d have to use a sort of lever principle. Who was it said, Give me something to stand on and a long enough pole and I will move the earth? Well, he was only trying to move a pair of steps. Use the edge of the trap as a fulcrum, ease them slowly towards him, then pull them down to rest on the joists. Careful … Mustn’t make a mark on the plaster. He felt as if his lungs would burst and he grunted thickly. But it was done.

  When he was shut in he kept his torch on for a while but he didn’t need light and he found he could listen better in the dark. With the extinction of light he felt something that was almost peace. There was no sound but a tiny lapping in the tank.

  Sitting there in the dark, he felt the twitches beginning again like spirit fingers plucking at his eyelids, his knee, and delicately with the gentleness of a caress, across the skin of his belly. Stanley found that he was crying. He only knew it because the fingers holding his cigarette encountered tears.

  He wiped them away on his sleeve and then, although he couldn’t see them, he spoke silently the name of every object in the loft: joists, beams, bottle, matches, stepladder, storage tank. Clues formed themselves expertly. “Storage tank,” eleven letters, seven and four. “It holds water but rots up with age on the armoured vehicle.” “Stepladder”: “Snake spelt wrong at first for a means of climbing.”

  Oh God, he thought, he must be going mad, sitting in the dark in a loft, setting clues for puzzles that would never be solved, and he rested his cheek against the cold metal in despair.

  4

  Last Word

  22

  When Stanley came down from the loft the whole neighbourhood was asleep, not a light showing anywhere. He rolled into his unmade bed, certain he wouldn’t sleep, but he did and very heavily until past nine in the morning. Fumbling his way downstairs, still in his soiled and sweaty clothes, he found a letter on the front door mat.

  It was from Vera and headed with the address of that boarding-house at Brayminster.

  Stanley,

  After what you did you will probably think I have changed my mind about the house. Don’t worry, you can still have it. I promise you can and I am putting it in writing as I don’t suppose you would take my word. I am staying here until I find somewhere else to live. Please don’t try to find me. I have been told I could ask for police protection if you did and then get a court order. I never want to see you again.

  VERA.

  Cursing, Stanley screwed it up. It more or less proved she’d been to the police, the bitch. Who else would have told her about getting court orders? Better keep the letter, though. Carefully he smoothed out the creases. Once he got out of this mess, he’d sell the house all right. Get four thousand for it and put the lot in the business. Maybe in the long run he’d make as much money that way as if he’d had Maud’s money and when he did he’d take care Vera got to know about it.

  After another meal of bread and jam, he had a bath and put on clean clothes, and as he had foreseen, the pipe started overflowing again. By this time he had become an expert in getting quickly in and out of the loft and he could manage it without getting too dirty. Stanley passed a reasonably serene day, lying on the sofa, gently sipping whisky and drawing, on the plain side of a sheet of wallpaper, an enormous crossword, eighteen inches square.

  Pilbeam came round about eight. Having first checked that this wasn’t another representative of the law, set on his trail by Vera, Stanley let his friend in. Together they finished the whisky.

  “You look a bit rough, old man.” Pilbeam studied him with the disinterested and unsympathetic curiosity of a biologist looking at a liver fluke through a microscope. “You’ve lost weight. That must be trying, that eye.”

  “The doctor,” Stanley said, “says it’ll just past off.”

  “Or you’ll pass on, eh?” Pilbeam laughed uproariously at his joke. “Not before we’ve made our packet, I trust.”

  Stanley thought quickly. “Would you have any objection if I took a bit of time off? I’m thinking of going away, maybe down to the South Coast to join my wife.”

  “Why not?” said Pilbeam. “I may go away myself. We can close the shop for a week or two. One way of whetting our customers’ appetites. Well, I must be on my way. All right if I have twenty of your classy fags off you? I haven’t got a bean on me but we’re more or less one flesh, aren’t we, like it says in the marriage service?”

  Pilbeam laughed loudly all the way up the path.

  The cheque was all right, then. He’d given it to Pilbeam on Monday and today was Thursday, so it must be all right. And in the morning he would go away. Not to Vera but to his mother and father. I’m going home, Stanley thought. Even if I have to hitch all the way, even if I arrive penniless on the doorstep, I’m going home. But he cried himself to sleep, weeping weakly into the dirty pillow.

  Early on Friday morning, when Vera was told that she was urgently needed at Croughton police station, she went to catch the first train but Mrs. Horton had alerted James and he was waiting for her with his car. They reached Croughton by ten-thirty.

  Pilbeam had already been with the police for two hours by then.

  She passed him coming out as she was taken into the superintendent’s office but neither knew the other. There were a great many people coming and going whom Vera didn’t know but whom she suspected were connected with the case against her husband. She avoided Mrs. Blackmore’s sharp eye
and the curious fascinated gaze of young Michael Macdonald. The superintendent questioned her closely for an hour before he let her go back to James and weep in his arms.

  Stanley awoke with a splitting headache. Another hot day. Still, better to stand by the roadside in sweltering heat than pouring rain. His reflection in the mirror showed him a seedy, nearly elderly man with a pronounced and very apparent tic. Maybe his appearance would arouse pity in the heart of those arrogant bastards of motorists from whom he hoped to cadge lifts.

  He bundled up a spare pair of trousers and the two clean shirts he had left and stuffed them into a suitcase. It was nearly noon. God, how deeply he slept these days! He was sitting on the bed, combing his hair, when he heard a car draw up. Blackmore home for lunch. Without getting up, he shifted along the bed and put his eye to the crack between the curtains.

  All the blood receded from the muscles of his face. He crushed the comb in his hands and a bunch of teeth came off into his palm. A police car was parked outside. As well as the man who had been there before, there were three others. One of them opened the boot and took out a couple of spades. The others marched up the path towards his front door.

  Stanley climbed up the steps, clutching his suitcase. At the moment his hand touched the trap-door he heard his callers hammer on the front door. He gave a violent shiver. Almost as soon as the hammering stopped the door bell rang. Someone was keeping his finger on the button. Stanley clambered through the square aperture, lay across the joists and hauled on the steps. Afterwards he didn’t know how he’d managed to lever the steps up without dropping them to ricochet over the banisters, or how he lifted them at all, his whole body was jumping so violently. But he did lift them and, almost by a miracle, succeeded in laying them soundlessly down beside him. He wiped his hands on his trousers to avoid making marks on the outer surface of the door, and then he dropped it into its frame.

  When it was done he rolled on to his back and lay in the dark, murmuring over and over, “Oh, Christ, Christ, Christ …”

  Stanley pressed his ear to a very thin crack, more a join than a crack, between the boards of the door and listened. Yes, he could hear something now, the sound of someone forcing open the back door. He heard the lock give and footsteps in the kitchen. How much of his movements could they hear? Would even the most minute shifting on the old joists send a great reverberation to those on the ground floor?

  They were coming up the stairs.

  The wood creaked under his ear and then someone spoke.

  “I reckon he’s gone, Ted. Pilbeam said he’d do a bunk and Pilbeam wouldn’t lie to us. We’ve got too much on him.”

  Judas, thought Stanley, bloody double-crossing Judas with his “me old love” and his Stan this and Stan that. Footsteps moved across the landing. Into the bathroom, Stanley thought. Ted’s voice said: “They’ve started digging, sir. There’s quite a crowd in the Macdonalds’ garden. Shall I put up screens?”

  “They’d have to be sky-hooks, wouldn’t they?”

  They stopped talking and Stanley heard “Sir”—an inspector? A chief inspector? A superintendent?—moving about in the bedrooms. Ted went downstairs.

  So they knew now. Stanley held his body as still as he could, clenching his hands. They knew. Vera had told them and Blake had put his spoke in and somehow or other Moxley had supported them. In a minute they would scrape away the peat and find Maud’s body.

  No one would hear him now if he struck a match. They weren’t looking for him, anyway, they had said so, but searching the house for evidence of how he had killed Maud. Without getting up, he felt for the box, took out a match and struck it in front of his face. The flame sent strange long shadows like clasping and unclasping fingers rippling across the beams and up into the roof. He looked at his watch. He thought that hours and hours had passed but it was only twelve-thirty. Would they go away when they had found what they had come to find, or would they leave a man in the house? He could do nothing about it but continue to lie between the joists, walled in by wood as if he were already in his own coffin.

  Stanley had no idea how much time passed before “Sir” and his assistants returned to the landing. Again it seemed like many hours. His limbs ached and every few seconds sharp burning pains stabbed his knees, his shoulders and the joints of his arms. He wanted to scream and scream to let the fear out of him, for he was like a man possessed of a devil which could only be released in a scream. He clasped his hand over his mouth to stop the screaming devil leaving him and tearing down through the floor to those below.

  Someone slammed the back door.

  Feet, many feet, tramping up the stairs, sent vibrations through his body. There was about eight feet, he thought, between the landing floor and ceiling and he was perhaps a foot above the ceiling. That meant “Sir’s” head might be only three feet away from his. He pressed his mouth against raw splintery wood to muffle his ragged gasping breath.

  “Thirteen quid in pound notes, sir,” someone said. “They were between the pages of this annual.”

  For a second the words were meaningless. They were nothing like those he had expected. Why didn’t they speak of Maud? Maud, Maud, he mouthed into the wood. She must be lying down there now amid the ruins of his garden, bones in her own feathers.

  “Sir’s” voice broke up the fantasy and Stanley felt his body stiffen. “They smell of violets like the inside of that handbag.”

  “And the thirty Harry Pilbeam handed over to us, sir.”

  “Yes. I never thought I’d say, thank God for Harry Pilbeam. But he knows which side his bread is buttered, that lad. Shop his own wife for a quid if she hadn’t divorced him ten years back. When I told him we were on to his little game, faking antiques and selling them for the genuine article, he couldn’t wait to get back in good with us by passing over the carriage clock and that piece of china.”

  Someone laughed.

  “I must say it’s given me some satisfaction to know that he conned Manning properly. The moron’s actually handed Pilbeam—Pilbeam, I ask you!—nearly two thousand quid all told. God knows where he got it from.”

  “What had Pilbeam in mind, d’you know?”

  “Bleed him for as much as he could get and then do a bunk’s my guess.”

  Silence fell. Stanley lay as still as a corpse, letting the words flow and pass over him. He didn’t understand. What were they doing there? What were they hoping for? They had dug but they hadn’t found Maud. Why not? A tiny thrill of hope touched him. Was it possible that they hadn’t been looking for Maud at all but for stolen goods, something that Pilbeam had put them on to?

  From a long way away a voice came. Unidentifiable, the words a jumble of sound. They were in Maud’s room now, now moving back to the landing. The muzzy sound cleared into distinguishable words like a picture coming into focus.

  “That’ll have been the mother-in-law’s room, Ted.”

  “What’s happened to her, then? Gone off with the wife?”

  “No, no. The old woman’s dead. Died of a stroke round about the time Manning …”

  Again the voices swam away into a jumble and the footfalls receded. Stanley had been holding his breath. Now he let it out carefully. His heart was hammering. It was true, they hadn’t found Maud. They hadn’t found anything but a handful of pound notes. He was hiding in vain. They only wanted to question him about Pilbeam. And he’d tell them, everything they wanted to hear and more besides. An eye for an eye … Revenge on Pilbeam would be sweet indeed. They had nothing on him, nothing. By a miracle they had guessed nothing, found nothing, and they thought Maud had died a natural death.

  He moved his right hand and brought it in silence across to the handle on the inside of the trap-door. The cramped fingers closed over the handle and then Stanley hesitated. If he came down now they’d think he had something to hide. Better let them go, let them leave the house, then come down and tell them what they wanted of his own volition. “Sir” and his assistants were directly underneath him again now an
d someone was descending the stairs. They were leaving. Once more Stanley held his breath.

  More than anything in the world now he wanted one of them to speak the words that would tell him he was free, cleared of any suspicion, just a fool who had allowed himself to be taken for a ride by a con man. The briefest sentence would do it. “We only need Manning for a witness” or “I reckon Manning’s paid enough already for trusting Pilbeam.” They must say it. He could almost hear them saying it.

  The footsteps went down the stairs.

  Ted said, “I suppose we’ll have to get Mrs. Huntley for the identification, sir,” and “Sir” said softly and slowly, “There’s not much doubt, though, that this is the body of Miss Ethel Carpenter.”

  23

  “You poor dear,” said Mrs. Huntley. In the police station waiting room she moved her chair closer to Vera’s and touched her hand. “It’s far worse for you than any of us.”

  “At least I didn’t have to identify her. That must have been awful.”

  Mrs. Huntley shuddered. “But for the little ring, I wouldn’t have known her. She’d been in the ground for—oh, I can’t bear to speak of it.”

  “He—my own husband—he killed her for fifty pounds. They found the wound on her head where he struck her. If there’s any comfort for me at all, it’s that Mother never knew. I’ll tell you something I won’t ever tell anyone else….” Vera paused, thinking that there was one other person she might tell, one person to whom in time she might tell everything. “I thought,” she said softly, “I thought he’d killed Mother for her money, but now I know that was wrong. There’s a mystery there that’ll never be cleared up. You see, if he’d killed Mother, he wouldn’t have needed that fifty pounds. Thank God, Mother never knew anything about it.”

  “There were a good many things poor Mrs. Kinaway never knew,” said Mrs. Huntley thoughtfully. “Like who was the father of Miss Carpenter’s child. She told me one day when she was feeling low. You know now, don’t you?”