by Ruth Rendell
“I don’t want to talk any more about it. You have to pay the rent and that’s all there is to it.”
Carl was barely out of the room when he heard his tenant putting the coffee cups in the sink and tipping the contents of the frying pan onto a plate.
Without that rent, what was he going to live on? It would take him months, if not years, to finish Sacred Spirits, and already he had no confidence in his work. But this was all hypothetical. He would have his rent and let that criminal bastard, that blackmailer, do his worst. He would ignore him. He would get back to his writing.
This brave stance buoyed Carl for a while. But when he sat down at the computer again, he found that nothing would come. All he wrote, without really knowing that he was doing so, were the words that kept running in a continuous loop through his head: It’s not against the law, it’s not against the law, it’s not against the law.
9
THE SUTHERLAND PET Clinic was within easy walking distance of Falcon Mews. Dermot could be there in less than ten minutes. Like Saint Matthew, who was a kind of tax collector, he sat at the receipt of custom, but unlike the saint, since there was no animal welfare in the Holy Land, he made appointments and received payment for neutering, injections, operations, checkups, and, sadly, euthanasia. It was not unknown for Dermot to bow his head and weep a little when Jake or Honey had to be put to sleep. That was the terminology he preferred; he had been known to admonish a cat or dog owner who spoke of “putting down” an animal.
The area of his job he liked best was as a salesman, such as when he was called upon to advise a client about which variety of cat food he would recommend for sixteen-year-old Mopsy or kitten Lucy. Which artificial bones would he suggest for the incorrigible biter Hannibal or breath deodorant for ancient Pickwick? His finest contribution to the social life of the clinic was the Pet of the Month competition he had invented. This was popular. Owners submitted their pet’s details to him with a photograph and some instances of bravery or achievement, and he judged which was the top dog or cat. Up on the wall for the rest of this month was a charming photograph of Pippa, a cuddly British Blue whose howls at midnight had alerted her owners to the presence of a burglar in the house. The announcement of the competition winner he timed—so that he couldn’t forget it—for his rent day. This of course would no longer be a factor, so he would have to fix on some other way of remembering to reveal the result.
The day after his encounter with Carl, Dermot was sitting behind his desk at the clinic, contemplating the list of clients expected that day, when Yvonne Weatherspoon arrived with Sophonisba, her Maine coon, in her cat box. Her appointment was for nine thirty and it was now twenty past. Sophonisba, always called Sophie, was due for a flea and worm check.
Close on fifty but retaining her fine blond good looks and slender figure, Yvonne had already confided in the sympathetic Dermot about her niece’s death, hugging Sophie and squeezing out a tear or two.
“You know who I’m talking about, don’t you, Dermot?”
“Ah, yes. That poor young lady Miss Stacey Warren, the beautiful actress. What a sad event that was.”
“Well, we were very close, you know.” Dermot did know, but continued to listen with great interest. “She left me her flat. Well, she didn’t actually leave it to me, but I am her next of kin, her heir. I’m not going to live in it. I’ve already got a lovely house of my own, what the government calls a mansion, and dear Sophie wouldn’t put up with moving. Cats hate a change of home, as I’m sure you know.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“I’m going to hand it over to my son. Gervaise. He and poor Stacey were very close.”
“He’s a very fortunate young man.”
Further conversation was terminated by the appearance of Caroline, the head vet, come to fetch Yvonne and Sophie. The cat, no doubt aware of what was in store for her, set up a howling, and Dermot, left to his thoughts, said a thank-you to God, but in a whisper, because the deity could hear everything.
The thanks to the Almighty were not for the outcome of his interview with Carl, but for the news imparted by Yvonne Weatherspoon. Carl already knew about Dermot’s acquaintance with Yvonne, but not that her son was moving into Stacey’s flat. And this knowledge would confirm to Carl something that Dermot was sure Carl had doubted: that at almost any time, and in an intimate manner, Dermot could impart the details of the DNP sale to Yvonne. Perhaps, if he could fix it, he could also tell Gervaise, he who had been so close to “poor Stacey.”
Carl had called him a blackmailer. Dermot hadn’t liked that. Not at all. He didn’t see himself that way. You could almost say he was the reverse of a blackmailer, because instead of taking money from Carl as the price of his silence, he was withholding it. He had never disliked Carl and didn’t now. To dislike anyone would be unchristian. To love your neighbour as yourself was a tenet of Dermot’s faith, and he was proud of loving himself a lot. In any case, there was nothing in the Bible about blackmail. Or reverse blackmail.
The street door opened and Mr. Sanderson came in with his dalmatian, Spots. Not Spot, but the plural—“Because he’s got lots of them,” the dog’s owner had once said. “I counted, and there were a hundred and twenty-seven.”
Very privately, Dermot thought all the clients were mad.
CARL WAS FORCING himself to write. He read and reread what he had written and tinkered with words, but with no noticeable effect. He was writing stiffly: the little dialogue he attempted was stilted and strangely outdated, and his characters spoke to each other as if they lived in the middle of the last century.
The reason for his failings was obvious. His mind was full of Dermot’s threat to withhold the rent or ruin Carl’s reputation. The rent was due on July 31, though in the usual course of things it would not be brought to him until the first or second day of August. Would it be brought at all this time? Would Dermot carry through on his threat? Carl had avoided his tenant since their conversation, but he often heard his footsteps on the stairs. He thought about him constantly, and if he could manage to fall asleep at all, he woke in the small hours and stayed awake for the rest of the night, tossing and turning and no doubt disturbing Nicola, creating all possible variations on what would happen if the rent didn’t come, what he would do and what Dermot would do.
Carl had said nothing about Dermot’s threat to Nicola, reasoning that if he told her, he would also have to tell her about selling the DNP to Stacey. He should have told her long ago. She knew that something was worrying him. Would she understand? Nicola was almost indifferent to money, seldom bought clothes the way other girls did, never used makeup. Unlike the other women he knew, she was always reading books—books made of paper, not in cyberspace—and listening to what he called classical music and she called real music. That was one reason he had been attracted to her. She had loved Death’s Door. She was his biggest fan. So why hadn’t he told her about Stacey?
The longer he waited, the more difficult it became. Once, anticipating her return from work at six thirty, he found himself wishing she hadn’t moved in. He reproached himself for that, telling himself that this dread would pass, that it would one day be gone but he would still have her.
“I don’t believe you’ve got any food in the house,” she’d said the previous evening. “I think you’ve lost weight, and you can’t afford that.” A note of anxiety came into her voice. “You look as if you’ve been ill, which you haven’t, I know.”
“I’ve been a bit under the weather,” he said, in Dermot mode.
On the way back from doing the shopping together, he thought he might tell her. He’d make her promise not to tell anyone, and once he’d got that undertaking from her, he’d confide in her, tell her everything he’d done, starting with the collection of medicines and remedies he had inherited from his father. She had, of course, seen them in the bathroom they shared, but they had never discussed them. Then he’d go on to talk about Stacey and her weight, her despair, and how she had begged him to let her ha
ve the yellow capsules. If he put it like that, Nicola would see how impossible it’d been for him to refuse.
“You’re very quiet,” she said now. “You really are worrying about something, aren’t you? I’ve sensed it for a while.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“As soon as we get home, we’ll have a glass of that Chablis. We could both do with it. I’ve had a bit of a rough day.”
Not compared to his day, Carl thought, or the eleven or twelve days he’d lived through since Dermot had threatened him. And as he thought of Dermot, as they made their way into Falcon Mews, his tenant approached from the other end. He was walking jauntily, in Carl’s eyes, and carrying tulips.
“Snap!” said Dermot, and to Nicola, “What a coincidence. Long time since we’ve seen you round this neck of the woods.”
Carl muttered to himself that he had never before seen a man buy flowers for himself, but Dermot didn’t hear because Nicola was telling him how nice it was to see him. She was out all day and their paths never seemed to cross. They let him go into the house first. Carl was thinking with longing of that glass of Chablis. He seldom bought wine. He had let Nicola buy two bottles, explaining in the shop that he couldn’t afford it, though he still had some money from this month’s rent. But was it the last he would receive?
Nicola put the food in the fridge and poured the wine generously. “Waiters and barmen always fill your glass only half-full. Have you noticed? It never used to be like that.”
He didn’t say anything. He could hear Dermot pacing around two floors up. It sounded as if he was leaping up and down. Carl took his wine into the living room.
“Shall we have some music, Carl? I’ve bought you a new CD.”
“Not yet. I’ve got something to tell you.”
The face she turned to him was aghast. It was the only possible word.
“No, no. Nothing that’s going to affect you. For God’s sake, don’t look like that.” He set his glass down, hesitated, and then picked it up again to take a great gulp of his wine. Seated now on the sofa, he patted the cushion beside him; when she sat down, he took her face in his hands and kissed her with a gentleness that surprised even him. “There. I don’t know what you’ll think. And better not say a word to Dermot after what I tell you; I mean, if you felt like going up there and having it out with him.”
“What is it?”
“It has to do with Stacey Warren. You didn’t really know her, did you?”
“I’d met her, of course. She was your friend. Is that what’s been bothering you? Her death?”
He waited for her to say how fat Stacey had become, but she didn’t.
“Nicola, you know those medicines—well, I suppose you’d call them quack remedies—my dad left in the house? Stacey came to see me one day, and she found these pills. Well, capsules. They’re called dinitrophenol.” It sounded better using that word, as Nicola might have read the name in the newspaper. “I didn’t know anything about the pills, but she said they could help her lose weight. She asked me if she could have some.”
Nicola took a sip of her wine.
“There were about a hundred in the packet. I let her have fifty.” An idea came to him. “Would you like to see them? I’ve still got the rest.”
Nicola nodded. They went upstairs and she followed him into the bathroom. He took the packet of yellow capsules out of the cupboard and she held it in her hand. “You gave her fifty?”
There was no point in telling her at all if he failed to tell her the truth. So why was it so hard? He looked into her beautiful, gentle face. It would be fine; she just wanted clarification. “As a matter of fact, I sold them to her. A pound each, that’s the price that was listed on the package.” Nicola nodded, but gave no indication what she was nodding about. She handed back the capsules and walked out of the room. He went after her, but she moved slowly. On the stairs, she turned and said over her shoulder, “And she died? Did she die because of the dinitro-whatever?”
“They said at the inquest that it contributed to her death. Come back and finish your wine, and then we can make supper.”
“Where does Dermot come into it?”
Carl saw now that bringing his tenant in would make things much worse. Should he tell her that Dermot was threatening him? Instead, he repeated the phrase: “The pills are not against the law.”
“Then they should be.”
“Maybe.” He began to reel off the stories he had taken from the newspapers of people who had used DNP and lost weight but been OK. Their temperatures had risen dangerously and they had felt ill, but they’d got thin and now they were absolutely fine. “Please, can we have another drink?”
“Not for me.”
“What’s wrong, Nic?”
There was no need to ask. The tears were falling silently down her cheeks. He had never seen her cry before. “Why are you crying?”
“You know. Of course you do. I love you, or I thought I did. But I don’t think I can love someone who did what you did. Gave her pills—sold her pills—that you must have known were dangerous. It’s horrible.”
Carl shook his head. “I’m not hearing this.”
“Yes, you are. Don’t you see it was bad enough giving her the stuff, let alone selling it to her?” She wiped her eyes with a tissue. “I can’t believe you’ve kept all this a secret from me. I should never have come to live here.”
“Don’t go, Nic. Please don’t go.”
“I’ve nowhere to go to. The girls have let my room in the flat. I’ll have to sleep in the spare room.”
Carl had never felt such despair. It enclosed him in its cold emptiness. He drank about half the second of the bottles of wine they had bought—no, Nicola had bought. He went into the kitchen and ate a slice of bread and a hunk of cheese. It seemed that he lived on bread and cheese these days. Later, after he had slept awhile on Dad’s sofa, he heard Nicola getting ready for bed, using the bathroom, fetching herself a glass of water. He held his breath, hoping against hope that she had changed her mind and gone into their bedroom. But, no, she hadn’t.
The spare-bedroom door creaked a little when it closed, and now he heard the creak before the click of the lock.
10
THE FLAT IN Pinetree Court could never become her permanent home; Lizzie knew this from the moment she’d moved herself in there. She had known it when she discovered Stacey’s body. But the trouble was, she was getting accustomed to it. It had begun to feel like hers. She even cleaned it, which was the first time she had ever cleaned anywhere. Her mother came round and hoovered and dusted her place in Kilburn, but the flat in Pinetree Court was so beautiful, so luxurious, that Lizzie couldn’t bear the idea of its getting dirty, so she did it herself.
She wondered why no one had taken the place over. It was weeks since Stacey had died, and it must by now belong to someone. It must have been left to someone. Perhaps the person it had been left to didn’t want to live here because he or she had a place of his or her own. Lizzie tried to think who besides Stacey’s aunt Yvonne this person might be. Stacey had once been Carl Martin’s sort of girlfriend, or had been till she got so obese, but though Lizzie had known Carl years ago, they had not had any contact recently. She couldn’t go up to him in the street and ask him what was happening to Stacey’s flat. And he probably wouldn’t know anyway.
But what about that chap who lived in the top half of what she had heard from Stacey was Carl’s house? Lizzie liked walking through the mews, imagining what it would be like to live there. One time she’d seen that chap come out of the front door. This was before she’d started at the school and when she’d been doing old Miss Phillips’s typing. Imagine being called miss in this day and age! One day Lizzie had to take Miss Phillips’s pooch, a fat pug, to the vet’s, and there was that chap from Falcon Mews on reception. Was he a vet, then? No matter; she would think of a reason to go into the clinic and ask him whether by any chance he knew if Carl now owned a flat in Pinetree Court.
Lizzie w
as going out to dinner with a new man. She’d met him at a coffee bar near Stacey’s flat. He seemed posh, promising, though she couldn’t yet call him her boyfriend. His name was Swithin Campbell. She was meeting him at Delaunay’s in the West End, and afterwards he would bring her back here in a taxi and she would ask him in for coffee or something out of one of those exotic bottles of Stacey’s. Lizzie had never before met anyone called Swithin; she had only heard of it in connection with St. Swithin’s Day. Sometime in July it was, and if it rained that day (it always did), it would keep on raining for forty days, or so her father said.
Lizzie never went to hairdressers. She had thick, glossy, caramel-coloured hair that only needed washing. She put on what she judged to be Stacey’s best dress, more a gown than a dress, in a gorgeous blue-green. It was called teal, Lizzie thought, and the neckline was encrusted with what looked like turquoises. She had bought nail varnish in the same colour on the way back from the play group but decided against it. Men only liked red varnish.
At ten to seven, she went downstairs to walk to Chalk Farm tube station. She was trying not to spend money on taxis.
TOM MILSOM HAD had a lovely day, down to Holborn on the number 98, lunch in a nice pub where they served good fish and chips, then back on the 139, which didn’t go where he thought it would, but dropped him outside a tube station on the Jubilee Line. The train took him to Willesden Green. Then it was just a short walk to Mamhead Drive.
