by Ruth Rendell
“I guessed. I guessed as soon as I saw that girl this morning. She must be my niece. If Mother had ever met that girl, and she would have if …” Vera half-rose as Caroline Snow came into the room. In spite of the shock of it all and the horror, she smiled, gazing at the face which might have been her own twenty years ago.
“This is my father,” said Caroline Snow. “He helped me. He went to the police when we couldn’t find her. Daddy is absolutely marvellous. He promised that when we found her she could come and live with us, but we didn’t find her. Well, not until …”
The man’s eyes met Vera’s. He looked kind, patient, capable of great endurance. He was her brother-in-law. She had a whole family now.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” was all she could say.
“It wasn’t your fault.” George Snow’s blue eyes flashed. “Mrs. Manning, you’re all alone. Come and stay with us. Please say you will.”
“One day I’d like to,” said Vera. “One day when this is all past and gone.” And meet my sister, she thought. “But I have somewhere to go to, somewhere and someone.”
The police wouldn’t let her go yet. They questioned her and questioned her as to where Stanley might be but Vera couldn’t help them. She could only shake her head helplessly. There were so many people in the police station, so many faces, Mrs. Paterson, Mrs. Macdonald and her son, an important key witness, Mrs. Blackmore, the man who delivered peat, and they all reminded her of that old unhappy life in Lanchester Road. She wanted only one person and at last they let her go out to the car where he was waiting for her.
“One day,” he said, echoing her own words, “when this is all past and gone, you’ll get a divorce and …”
“Oh, James, you know I will. It’s what I want more than anything in the world.”
Stanley stayed in the loft until his watch told him it was ten o’clock. He used his last match to see the time, but it was pain rather than the loss of light that drove him down. His body ached intolerably in every joint and he would have come down in any circumstances, even if, he told himself, the house had still been full of policemen.
Very clearly now he saw the trap he had made for himself. He had murdered no one but the body he had hidden had died by violence; by burying Ethel’s cases and Ethel’s ring with it, by using Ethel’s money, he had irrevocably branded himself as a killer and a thief. There was his record too, the record which showed he was capable of such an act. No use now to ask for an examination of the real body of Ethel. By his own desire that body was reduced to ashes, a fine soft powder, delicate and evanescent, far more elusive of analysis than the cobwebby dust which now clung to his clothes and his skin.
Standing on the landing in the shadowy gloom of the summer night, Stanley tried to brush this dust off his clothes until the air was filled with soot-smelling clouds. He wanted to cleanse himself of it entirely, for he felt that it was Ethel who clung to him, enveloping him in ashy vapour. For months Maud had haunted him, appearing in dreams, but Maud was gone now for ever. He seemed to feel Ethel standing beside him as she had stood on the day of her death, listening to Maud’s snores, about to admonish him as she was admonishing him now. He shivered and whimpered in the dusk, brushing Ethel off him, wiping her off his face with shaking hands.
His own body had a smell of death about it. Afraid to use water and set the pipe overflowing again, he made his way down the stairs. His limbs were gradually losing their stiffness and their pain. Life was returning to them and with it fear. He had to get away.
The house was full of creaks and whispers. In the dark Stanley bumped into furniture, knocking the telephone off its hook so that it buzzed at him and made him whimper abuse at it. Ethel was in here too, the very essence of Ethel, waiting quietly for him on the mantelpiece. The room was full of greenish sickly light from the single street lamp outside. He took hold of the urn in fingers which shook and twitched and threw it on to the floor so that grey powdery Ethel streamed across the carpet. And then he had to go, run, escape, leave the house and Ethel in possession of it.
Nobody followed him. No one had been waiting for him. He ran, his heart pounding, until he was far from Lanchester Road, across the High Street and into the hinterland of winding, crisscrossing roads where everyone went to bed early and nearly all the lights were out. Then he had to stop running, stand and hold his aching chest until he could breathe normally again.
Just to be out of that house, to be free of it and not pursued, brought him a tiny shred of something like hope. If he could get hold of some money and some means of transport … Then he could go home to Bures and his river. They wouldn’t look for him there because Vera would tell them how he didn’t get on with his parents and had run away and never wrote. He leant against a wall, bracing himself, trying to get his thoughts into some sort of coherent order, trying to make his brain work realistically, calmly. I’m going home, he said, going home, and then, shuffling at first, then moving faster, he turned his steps in the direction of the old village.
The shop was in utter darkness. Steadier and saner now that he was doing something purposeful, Stanley made his way round the back, checked that the van was there and unlocked the back door. Thank God, he said to himself, he always carried the shop key and the van key in his jacket pocket. In his absence, Pilbeam had got rid of nearly all their stock, and apart from a few hideous and probably unsaleable pieces, the place was empty. Pale light from a metal-bracketed antique street lamp filtered waterily across a huge mahogany table and lay in pools on the floor.
A couple of cars passed in the street and one stopped outside, but it wasn’t a police car. Stanley looked at it vaguely across the shadows and the flowing citron-coloured light and then he opened the till. It contained twenty pounds in notes and just short of another five in silver. He was transferring them to his pocket when he heard footsteps coming round the back. There was nothing to hide behind but a pair of maroon velvet curtains Pilbeam called portieres and which he had rigged up on one of the walls. For a moment Stanley’s body refused to obey him, he was so frightened and so dreadfully weary of being frightened and hunted, but at last somehow he got behind the curtains and flattened himself against the wall.
The back door opened and he heard Pilbeam’s voice.
“That’s funny, me old love, I could have sworn I locked that door.”
“Did you leave anything in the till?”
“You must be half-cut, Dave. That’s what we’ve come for, isn’t it? Should be near enough thirty quid.”
Stanley trembled. He couldn’t see anything but he felt their presence in the room where he was. Who was Dave? The huge man Pilbeam had brought round with him to Lanchester Road? He heard the till open with a squeak like an untuned violin string. Pilbeam said, “Christ, it’s empty!”
“Manning,” said Dave.
“How could it be? They’ll have him behind bars.”
Dave said, “You think?” and ripped aside the left-hand portiere. Leadenly, Stanley lifted his head and looked at them. “Turn out your pockets,” Dave said sharply.
A little courage returned to Stanley. There is always a little left in reserve right up to the end.
“Why the hell should I?” he said in a thin high voice. “I’ve a right to it after what he’s had out of me.”
Dave’s shadow was black and elongated, the shadow of a gorilla with pendulous hands. He didn’t move.
Pilbeam said, “Oh, no, Stan, old man. You haven’t got a right to nothing. You never had nothing, did you? It’s easy giving away what’s not your own.”
Stanley edged behind the table. Nobody stopped him. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
“Cheques that bounce, Stan, that’s what it means. I don’t think you’ve ever been properly introduced to my friend, Dave. Let me do the honours. This is Stan, my partner, Dave old boy. Dave, Stan, is the—er, managing director of the firm that did our decorating.”
Stanley’s mouth went dry. He cleared his throat but still he had
no voice.
“What d’you expect me to do?” Dave said. “Shake hands with him? Shake hands with that dirty little murderer?”
“You can shake hands with him in a minute,” said Pilbeam. “I promise you you shall and I will too. First I’d like to tell my friend Stanley that both his cheques, mine and Dave’s, came back yesterday marked Returned to Drawer. Now I might overlook a thing like that, old man, being as we’re old mates, but Dave … Well, Dave’s different. He doesn’t like sweating his guts out and then being made a monkey of.”
Stanley’s voice came out as a squeak, then grew more powerful. “You shopped me,” he said. “You bleeding copper’s nark. You did dirt on me behind by back. Nothing but lies you’ve told me. You haven’t got a wife, haven’t had a wife for ten years. You …”
His voice faltered. Pilbeam was looking at him almost gently, his eyes mild, his mouth twitching at the corners. Even his voice was indulgent, kindly, when he said, “Let’s shake hands with him now, Dave, shall we?”
Stanley ducked, then overturned the table with a crash so that it made a barricade between him and the other two men. Dave kicked it, planting his foot in the centre of its glossy top. It skidded back until its legs struck the wall and Stanley was penned in a wooden cage.
They came for him, one on each side. Stanley thought of how he had fought with Maud, centuries, aeons ago. He felt behind him for a vase or something metal to throw but all the shelves had been emptied. He cringed, arms over his head. Dave pulled him out, holding him by a handful of his jacket.
When he was in the middle of the shop, Dave held him, locking his arms, and as he kicked and wriggled, Pilbeam caught him under the jaw with his fist. Stanley sobbed and kicked out. For that he got a kick on the shin from Dave, a kick which made him scream and stagger.
In wordless dance, the three men edged round the overturned table, Stanley hoping for a chance to grab its legs and send the heavy mass of wood toppling to crush Dave’s feet. But he was limping and shafts of pain travelled from his shin up through his body. When he was back against the wall again he cringed back cunningly to make them think he was done for, and as Pilbeam advanced slowly upon him, Stanley twisted suddenly and grabbed the velvet portieres. There was a scrunch of wood as the rail which held them came apart from the wall. Stanley hurled the heavy mass at his assailants and for a moment they were enveloped in velvet.
Right at the back of the shop now, within feet of the door, Stanley found a weapon, a nine-inch-long monkey wrench Pilbeam had left under the till counter. As Dave emerged, struggling and cursing, Stanley threw the wrench as hard as he could. It missed Dave’s head and struck him in the chest, just beneath the collar bone. Dave howled with pain. He flung himself on Stanley as Stanley reached the door and was struggling with the handle.
For perhaps fifteen seconds the two men grappled together. Dave was much taller than Stanley but he was impeded by the pain in his chest and even then Stanley might have got away but for the intervention of Pilbeam who, creeping along the floor, suddenly grabbed Stanley’s legs from behind and threw him face downwards.
Dave picked him up, held him while Pilbeam pummelled his face and then, holding him by the shoulders, banged his head repetitively against the wall. Stanley’s knees sagged and he dropped, groaning, into the pile of velvet.
When he came to he thought he had gone blind. One of his eyes refused to open at all, and with the other he could see only implacable blackness. He put his hand up to his face and it came away wet. With blood or with tears? He didn’t know because he couldn’t see. His fingers tasted salty.
Then gradually something took vague dark shape before him. It was the table, set up on its legs again. Stanley sobbed with relief because he wasn’t blind. The place was so dark only because the street lamp had gone out.
The velvet he was lying on was soft and warm, a tender gentle nest like a woman’s lap. He wanted to bury himself in it, wrap it round his tired body and all the hundred places that ached and throbbed. But he couldn’t do that because he was going home. The green Stour was waiting for him, the fields that were silver with horse beans and emerald with sugar beet.
He sat up in the darkness. The place he was in seemed to be a sort of shop without any goods for sale. What was he doing there? Why had he come and where from? He couldn’t remember. He knew only that he had passed through a time of great terror and pain and violence.
Had he always trembled and jumped like this, as if he had an incurable disease? It didn’t matter much now. The beckoning of the river was more urgent than anything. He must get to the river and lie on its banks and wash away the tears and the blood.
Vaguely he thought that someone was after him but he didn’t know who his pursuers were. Attendants in a hospital perhaps? He had run away from a hospital and fallen among thieves. When he stood up he rocked badly and walking was difficult. But he persevered, shuffling, his arms outstretched to fumble his way along by feel. Outside somewhere he thought there was a car and it was his car because he had an ignition key in his pocket. He found the car—in fact, he bumped into it—and opened the door with his key.
When he was sitting in the car he switched on the light and looked at his face in the mirror. It was black and bruised and there was dried blood on it. Over his left eye was a cut and under the cut the eye jerked open and shut.
“My name is George Carpenter,” he said to the stranger in the mirror, “and I live at …” He couldn’t remember where he lived. Then he tried to recall something—anything—out of the past, but all he could see were women’s faces, angry and threatening, swimming up out of darkness. Everything else had gone. No, not quite…His own identity, he hadn’t lost that. His name was George Carpenter and he had been a setter of crossword puzzles, but he had become very ill and had had to give it up. The illness was in his brain or his nerves and that was why he twitched so much.
An unhappy life, a life of terrible frustration. The details of it had gone beyond recall. He didn’t want to remember them. When he was a boy he had been happy, fishing in the river for miller’s thumbs and loaches. The miller’s thumbs had faces like coelacanths. They were fish left over from another age when there were no men in the world. Stanley found he liked to think of that time; it eased the pressure in his head.
Loach was a funny name. Useful if you were setting a puzzle and had to fit a word into “1” blank “a” blank “h.” “Loach: For this fish the Chinese pronounces another.” He turned the ignition key and started the van.
Stanley had been driving for so long that by now he drove quite mechanically, as if the van were not something he had to operate but an extension of his own body. He had no more need to think about driving than he had to think about walking when he moved across a room. The streets he drove through seemed familiar but still he couldn’t place them. On the bridge by the lockkeeper’s house he stopped and looked down into the canal. He wasn’t far from home then, for here was the Stour, lying limpid between its green willows, his green river, cold and deep and rich with fish. It wasn’t green now but black and ripple-free, a metallic gleam on its flat surface.
Soon the dawn would come and then the river would go bright as if its green came, not from the awakening sky, but from some hidden inner source of colour. And people would appear from those black unlighted houses, whose outlines he could just see cutting into the horizon, and walk in the fields as the morning mist rose and spread and pearled the grass.
There was a white police car on the other side of the bridge, a stationary car with its headlights full on but trained away from him. A speed trap, he thought, although there were no cars but his to trap. They must be waiting for someone, some runaway villain they were hunting.
They would have no chance to trap him, for he wasn’t going their way. He was going to take the towpath and drive slowly along it until the dawn came and then, when the river became a dazzling green, lie on the bank and bathe his hurt face in the water.
The surface of the path
was hard and bumpy like ridged rock. Each time the van shuddered a spasm of fresh pain made him wince. Soon he would stop and rest. The dawn was coming up ahead of him, the black sky shredding apart to disclose the thin pale colour behind it. Bures and the Constable villages lay before him. He could see the shape of them now in a crenellated horizon.
Stanley switched off his lights, and in the distance he saw another car following him. They must be coming, he thought, to warn him off the river. Someone had fishing rights here and he’d be poaching. When had he ever cared for anyone else’s rights?
They wouldn’t be able to see him now his lights were off. He knew his river better than they did. Every bend in it, every willow on its banks was as familiar to him as a solved crossword.
Once he was home and safe he’d start doing crosswords again, bigger and better ones, he’d be the world’s champion crossword puzzler. Even now, weak and trembling as he was, he could still make up puzzles. He found he had forgotten the words that made up his own name, but that didn’t matter, not while he had his skill, his art. “Undertake the fishing gear”: “Tackle.” “Sport a leg in fruity surroundings”: “Fishing.” “Undertake …” Stanley shivered. There was some reason why he couldn’t find a clue for that word, that ugly word which had dealings with death. He drove faster, the van’s suspension groaning, but his mind was calmer, he was almost happy. Words were the meaning of existence, the panacea for all agony.
“Panacea”: “Cure is a utensil with a twisted card.” “Agony”: “The non-Jew mixes with an atrocious pain.” He could do it as well as ever.
There was a bend ahead at this point. Very soon the bank veered to the left, following the river’s meander, and when you could see his village, just a black blot it would be on the grey fields, you had to brake and turn to the nearside. “Meander”—a beautiful word. “I and a small hesitation combine to make the river twist.” Or better perhaps, “Dear men,” (anag. seven letters) or, how about “Though mean and red, the river has a curve in it?”
