by Ruth Rendell
“Eating all Carl’s biscuits the way I did this afternoon, I thought I owed you this.”
“Oh, well, thanks.”
“I’ll just have a tiny piece and then I’ll leave you in peace. Sorry, didn’t mean to make a pun.” Dermot cut himself a generous slice. Addressing Nicola as Miss Townsend, he said he supposed she wouldn’t approve of biscuits and rich cake.
She looked doubtfully at him. “Why not?”
“Well, working at the Department of Health like you do.”
How did he know where she worked? she wondered. Strange. She smiled her “beautiful Nicola” smile, with a radiant brightness that illuminated the whole of her pretty face. Fortunately Dermot McKinnon could not see beneath the smile to what she was really thinking.
CARL AND DERMOT were in a café in the Edgware Road, seated at a table covered in animal-print plastic. Dermot had ordered two cappuccinos without asking Carl what he wanted. Carl didn’t protest. He was wondering what Dermot’s motive in following him in here might be. Silence fell, broken by Dermot asking, while running his fingers across the leopard’s spots, if Carl had read in the papers that visitors to zoos shouldn’t wear animal-skin prints because they caused excitement inside the cages. Carl hadn’t read about it and wasn’t interested. The cappuccino, which he had never tasted before, was rich and thick and not much like coffee.
“If I remember rightly,” said Dermot, “there was some of that DNP stuff that Stacey Warren took among your dad’s medicaments.”
An odd word, Carl thought, medicaments. “Was there?”
“Perhaps you didn’t know what it was?”
“I didn’t.” Carl wanted to tell Dermot that he had some nerve, snooping about.
“If you’ve still got it, you ought to throw it away, you know. I expect there’ll be a big story in the papers tomorrow. I expect it will be all about how people shouldn’t use DNP and how it ought to be banned. I mean, the law ought to be changed, with a heavy penalty for anyone who gives it to—well, to someone else.”
THERE WAS INDEED a big story the next day. The front page of the Daily Mail had a glamour photo of Stacey and a picture underneath of yellow capsules in a glass jar labelled DNP.
Carl saw the Mail on the rack outside a newsagent. Initially he wasn’t going to buy it and walked away, then went back when he feared perhaps he might regret not doing so. He read the story as he walked along. It said that as a result of Stacey’s death from “DNP poisoning,” dinitrophenol would soon be banned, which could happen without a new law but through something called an “order.”
“You shouldn’t believe stuff you read in the paper,” Carl said to himself, and from the stare a passing woman gave him, he realised he had said it aloud.
6
LIZZIE MILSOM KEPT hold of Stacey’s keys, both sets. No one seemed to know she had them. The police were not long in Stacey’s flat, and when they had finally gone, three days after the discovery of the body, Lizzie let herself in once more and walked round the rooms, examining pieces of furniture and equipment, looking at the lovely prints of tropical birds that adorned the walls and confirming that all Stacey’s possessions were a lot nicer than anything she had. If she lived here, she wouldn’t have to convince herself of her power by borrowing little knickknacks. She would be powerful already, and confident.
Someone must now be the owner of the flat in Pinetree Court, Lizzie thought, but surely Stacey hadn’t left it to anyone? People of twenty-four didn’t make wills. It would probably go to her aunt Yvonne, or a cousin, or even someone who had never heard of Stacey. Lizzie thought she would stay awhile, perhaps a few days. No one could get in, she was sure of that, for Stacey had told her there were only two sets of keys: the set Stacey carried in her handbag, and those in the outside cupboard. The concierge might have a set, but Lizzie wouldn’t worry about that.
She knew she must be careful that no light in the flat was visible from the street below or the car park at the back. The bedroom and bathroom windows looked down onto a kind of tree-shaded yard whose purpose was unclear. The living room was more of a problem, as it fronted on Primrose Hill Road, but the blinds could be pulled down to cover the window and the curtains drawn to make doubly sure. It was June now, and light till nearly ten, so Lizzie felt pleased with her solution to the problem. She would change and go out, taking both sets of keys with her. It was a pity Stacey had been so overweight—conditioning had made Lizzie never use the word fat—as her clothes would no doubt be a size 16. Yet there Lizzie was only half-right, for investigating the left-hand side of the wardrobe as well as the right, she found that ever-hopeful Stacey had kept all or most of the clothes she had worn in her slim days.
Lizzie and Stacey had been the same size in those days, a 10. Lizzie was still a 10. She hunted enjoyably through the clothes and finally laid out on Stacey’s bed a jade-green jacket, a short jade-green skirt, and a green-and-pink top studded with tiny pink pearls. Why not have a bath before getting dressed? Stacey’s bath was snow-white, wide and deep, a seemingly inexhaustible flood of hot water flowing into it. At home in Kilburn, Lizzie had to rely on a feeble shower that was inclined to splutter, cough, and sometimes stop altogether. Soaking in the hot water, to which she had added nearly half a bottle of Jo Malone nectarine-blossom bath oil, she thought how nice it would be to luxuriate like this every day. Stacey’s towels were not towels but bath sheets. Lizzie wrapped herself in one of them and, having sprayed herself with nectarine scent and dressed in the green ensemble, decided to leave her face fashionably free of makeup. Turning off the lights, she went down in the lift. It was a pleasant summer day, mild and windless. She got into the tube at Swiss Cottage and went the four stops to Willesden Green.
“I’ve never seen that before,” said her mother when she opened the door. “Is it new?”
Lizzie said it was, not exactly a lie. The outfit was new to her.
Her parents’ house was one of the few in Mamhead Drive not divided into flats. Because it was big, with a large garden, Lizzie had always been proud of it without wanting to go on living there after she came down from university. Tom and Dot Milsom had bought it in 1982 for what Tom now called a derisory sum and stayed there with no intention of ever moving. Lizzie wandered into the enormous living room, pursued by her mother with cups of tea and cakes on a tray.
“Dad out on a bus?”
“Gone down south today. Having a look at some houses in Barnes, he said. I hope he’s not thinking of moving.”
“You know he never gets off the bus except to come back,” said Lizzie, thinking of Stacey and refusing a cake her mother called a “millionaire’s macaroon.” Lizzie smoothed the silky stuff of which Stacey’s skirt was made and asked her mother what she thought of the tragedy in Pinetree Court.
WHEN HE RETIRED at the age of sixty-five—as he put it himself, quite a successful man in a small way—Tom Milsom had never been on a bus. With one assistant, later his partner, he ran a business in commercial photography from a shop in Willesden he referred to as an office. It was so near his home in Mamhead Drive that he could walk to work, and when he was called out on a job, for a wedding photo, for instance, or—something of a comedown, this—platters of chicken tikka and lamb biryani for an Indian restaurant chain, he drove there in the elderly silver Jaguar he kept in pristine condition. His photographic equipment he carried with him in the car, and very occasionally, when it needed servicing or a minor repair, he took his camera and adjuncts on the tube. Going on a bus he never even considered. But when the free bus pass for those over sixty came in, without actually using it he thought it a waste not to. So he put it in his pocket and forgot it.
Traffic in central London, traffic anywhere in London, had become what Dot called, using one of her favourite expressions, “a nightmare.” And there was nowhere to park except on the residents’ parking in Mamhead Drive or Dartmouth Place, where people didn’t need to park because they had garages of their own. “Gold dust” in London, as Dot put it.
> Like many men of his age, Tom thought that when he retired, he would find enforced leisure wonderful. He would be free, he would be on a perpetual holiday. What had slipped his mind was how, on the holidays he and Dot had taken over the years, he had been bored stiff trudging along the narrow back streets of little Spanish towns or going on conducted tours to ruined temples in Sicily or trailing up wooded hills in Turkey for the sole purpose of looking at the view from the top. Dot hadn’t been bored or, at least, had never said she was—but then nor had he said so. She said it was a lovely change from the housework. Tom had no hobbies. He knew nothing about golf; he didn’t even watch it on TV. He didn’t care for the cinema, which had nothing on it you couldn’t get on telly. He had never been much of a reader and had never learned to like classical music. Looking back to those holidays, what he mostly remembered was how slowly the time passed; that when he looked secretly at his watch, thinking it must be eleven thirty by now, he saw it was just ten past ten.
Again like most men, unless they were accompanying a woman, he seldom if ever went to Oxford Street. Dot, who wanted him out of the way one day while she turned out the living room, suggested he go out and buy himself some socks. Possible shops in Willesden she dismissed. Why not go to Oxford Street, where Marks & Spencer—which she, like the rest of the country, called M&S—had their flagship store?
“Go in the car,” she said. “It won’t take you more than half an hour there and back.”
As if saving time were one of his priorities. “You wouldn’t say that if you were a driver.”
Instead of the car, he took the tube, Willesden Green to Bond Street on the Jubilee Line. On a Tuesday morning, Oxford Street wasn’t crowded. He bought his socks and walked back towards Bond Street station. If half-empty of people, Oxford Street carried a load of buses, so many that Tom fancied their weight would be too much for the road surface and any minute it would crack and sink under this scarlet mass of metal. Where did they all go to? Or come from? Why did they come here, queuing up like animals in a line heading for a water hole? He paused at a bus stop and saw that many buses, six and more if you counted the night ones, were scheduled to stop here. The first on the list was a number 6. He was standing in front of the timetable, which was on a pole and encased in glass, when a bus came looming out of nowhere and bearing down on the bus stop, its light on. The number 6 was on the front of it, and so was its destination: Willesden.
That was the beginning of it, the start of his new occupation. He refused to call it a hobby. Climbing aboard, he waved his pass at the driver, who mimed a touching of this card in a plastic case onto a round, yellow disk that squeaked when contact was made. It was easy, it was rather nice. He got a seat near the front and settled down to be driven home for the first time since he’d come to live in Willesden Green.
That was a year ago, and in that year he had ridden at least half of London’s buses, been everywhere and become an expert. This afternoon he was coming back from Barnes and in the Marylebone Road had changed on to his favourite number 6. A most interesting afternoon it had been, and outside, the sun had come out brilliantly.
MOST PARENTS WOULD be delighted to come home and find their grown-up daughter paying an unsolicited visit. Dot evidently was, plying this vision in jade green and rose pink with cups of tea, plates of cakes, and now something that was obviously a gin and tonic. Since her late teens, when Tom had expected Lizzie to change, to grow up and behave, he had viewed his daughter with a sinking heart, only briefly pleased when she got into what she called “uni.” But her degree in media studies was the lowest grade possible while still remaining a BA. Gradually, as she moved from one pathetic job to another, ending up with the one she had now—teaching assistant, alternating with playground supervisor of after-school five-year-olds killing time until a parent came to collect them—he felt for his daughter what no father should feel: a kind of sorrowful contempt. He had sometimes heard parents say of their child that they loved her but didn’t like her and wondered at this attitude. He no longer wondered; he knew. Walking into the house in Mamhead Drive, he asked himself what lie she would tell that evening, and how many justifications for her behaviour she would trot out.
Dot never seemed aware of her lies and prevarications. Dot and he had talked about it, of course they had, but such discussions usually ended with Dot saying that she couldn’t understand how a father could be so hard on his only child when that child was so devoted to him. As if to prove it, Lizzie now got up and kissed him, letting her scented face rest for a moment against his cheek.
Believing he had chosen a subject for conversation unlikely to lead to lying, exaggeration, or fantasising, Tom said that Stacey’s death had been a sad business. “I remember her of course from when she was a child in the neighbourhood. You and she used to walk to school together. You and Stacey were good friends.” His wife brought him a glass of wine. “You’ll miss her.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” Lizzie said. “So much. You don’t know how much I wish I hadn’t been in her flat and found the body. I don’t think I could ever set foot in there again.”
“I don’t see why you should have to,” said Tom.
“Oh, no, I don’t have to. I shan’t.”
She was lying. He could always tell. He could tell by the tone of her voice and the look on her face, a combination of piety and virtue. They sat down to supper, Lizzie picking delicately at the mushroom omelette that was one of her mother’s specialities. Dot wanted to know who owned Stacey’s flat now, and Lizzie said she had no idea. She wished she did. It was a lovely flat, luxurious and spacious.
“That’s an estate agent’s word,” said Tom.
“I couldn’t think of another one. What would you say?”
“Roomy.”
Lizzie went into detail about how beautiful the flat was, the carpets, the sleek black-and-white furniture, the Audubon bird drawings, and this time Tom knew she wasn’t lying. Lizzie’s love of and knowledge of bird artists and birds themselves was her only intellectual interest. He thought—he couldn’t help himself—about the place in Kilburn she lived in and on which he paid half the rent. Nobody would call it beautiful or luxurious, but she was the sole occupant, which was more than you could say for most of her friends, people who shared or had just one room or still lived at home with their parents. He felt hard done by, a state Lizzie’s presence usually left him in. She was telling her mother about the shopping spree in Knightsbridge she had been on that had resulted in the purchase of the green suit among other garments. He thought of the portion of her rent he paid and then, looking at her face, knew that the Knightsbridge story was also a lie and she had spent nothing.
STACEY’S FLAT IN Pinetree Court was in darkness when Lizzie got back. She had left the heating on low, and it was pleasant to be lapped in warmth. She turned on the television to a police drama and went into the bedroom, where she took off the green suit and wrapped herself in the dark blue silk dressing gown she found in Stacey’s cupboard. Another cupboard, in the kitchen this time, was well stocked with all kinds of wines and spirits. Lizzie made herself a tequila sunrise and settled down in front of the screen with her golden drink.
7
“IS EVERYTHING ALL right between you and Miss Townsend?” said Dermot, passing Carl outside his bedroom door the next morning.
Carl thought this a fearful impertinence. “Of course it is. Why do you ask?”
“Just being friendly. To tell you the truth, I thought you and she would have put things on a more permanent level by now.”
“What does that mean?”
Dermot smiled, baring his awful teeth. “Well, once it would have meant marriage, wouldn’t it? More like getting engaged these days.”
Carl thought quickly. It wouldn’t do to make an enemy of Dermot. “It takes two to make an engagement,” Carl said rather gruffly.
Dermot shook his head. “I hope I haven’t upset you. I wouldn’t do that for the world. The way Miss Townsend looks at you, anyone coul
d tell she’s crazy about you.” He hesitated. “How about a coffee? Your place or mine?”
“I’ll make the coffee,” said Carl, wishing he had said no. “You won’t mind instant?”
“To be perfectly honest with you, I prefer it.”
When Dermot had finally drunk his coffee and gone back upstairs, Carl decided that now was the time to tell Nicola about Stacey. It was Saturday, and she was spending the weekend with her former flatmates. He tried the landline, but there was no reply. Strangely, he couldn’t bring himself to try her mobile number. Was it because she would almost certainly answer it?
He needed to talk to Nicola about Stacey, but for some reason, he couldn’t. At least not on the telephone. The last time he had gone to dinner with his mother, her friends Jane Porteus and Desmond Jones had been there, and as soon as he came in, Jane had begun talking about Stacey and her horrible death. It would be the same with Nicola.
He asked himself why he didn’t want to talk about Stacey. He had done nothing wrong; in fact he had been doing her a favour as far as he knew. It wasn’t his fault that she had taken an overdose of the pills. She could have checked them on the Web. The label had advised using care. All he had done was give her—well, sell her—fifty slimming pills that in some circumstances, for some people, caused nasty symptoms. “And death,” an inner voice reminded him. Death could be caused by taking DNP. He had by this time been to several dinitrophenol websites, which all mentioned death as a possible result of taking the stuff. Not inevitable, of course, but possible. He had to accept that, painful though it was.
Really, the whole situation was his father’s fault. He had died after a heart attack, and one of the websites had said DNP could damage the heart. Could it be . . . ? No, Wilfred had been an old man, and old men died from heart attacks. Young women didn’t.
