by Ruth Rendell
Yvonne came back into reception with Sophie wearing a wide, white collar designed to prevent her claws from tearing at her wound. In this purpose it was already failing.
“I shall have to have a taxi back,” said Yvonne. “I had to have one here. I couldn’t have Sophie with me loose in the car.”
Dermot would have told her it was against the law anyway, but he had told her that on numerous previous occasions. He called a taxi for her. “It’ll be up to fifteen minutes.”
This was an opportunity too perfect to ignore. True, Sophie was whimpering, but this place reverberated and echoed to the cries and growls of animals. Yvonne was sitting now, murmuring soft words to the cat. “You must be missing your niece, Mrs. Weatherspoon.” Dermot broached the subject with extreme politeness.
Yvonne looked surprised. “Yes, well, of course. It was very sad.”
“Indeed it was. More than that. Tragic really. Drugs are everywhere these days, aren’t they?”
The cat, satisfied that the torture was over and might not recur, had fallen asleep. Yvonne sighed, shook her head. “I’m glad to say neither of my children ever took them.”
Dermot didn’t believe her. “You’re lucky.” He saw the taxi arrive. “It’s worse, I would think, when someone one trusts—a so-called friend—gives or even sells such horrible substances to one’s loved one.”
The seed was planted. Yvonne smiled vaguely, said he was right, and allowed him to carry cat and cat box out onto the pavement. She would remember what he had said, he thought, but he had given nothing away. If things continued as they were, he need reveal no more.
Meanwhile, Sybil had become quite a useful tool. She liked sitting in the garden, as her parents had nothing like it in Jerome Crescent. From what he gathered, Jerome Crescent had nothing much that Sybil liked. The previous Sunday, as they’d walked back together to Falcon Mews, she’d asked him if she could do some weeding. She put her request humbly and with a lot of excuses because she was afraid of offending him.
“Good idea.”
“You won’t have to ask Mr. Martin, will you?” She always called Carl Mr. Martin.
“Good gracious, no. We’re the best of pals. He’ll be grateful.”
So while Dermot slumbered gently in his deck chair the following Sunday afternoon, placing the Observer open on his face to protect it from the sun just as his grandfather used to do, Sybil pulled up nettles, campions, and docks and dug out their roots with a trowel.
From the bedroom window, Carl looked down on them. Getting your garden weeded wasn’t exactly something you could object to. But surely they could have asked? Besides, Dermot’s taking what he would undoubtedly call a liberty would just lead to another. First the deck chairs; now that girl was digging up Carl’s garden. What would be next? He had suggested to Nicola that Dermot’s next move would be to take over one of Carl’s own rooms. No doubt that would soon happen.
But something else did. Not a takeover, but an interference in his personal life.
“Been wining and dining, have you?”
Carl and Nicola had just come in from dinner in Camden with Carl’s mother, Una. Carl didn’t reply and expected Dermot to go upstairs.
But his tenant said, “Could I come in for a minute? I’ve got something I want to say to you.”
Taking over the second bedroom, Carl thought, that was what it would be. He opened the living-room door and Nicola went through to the kitchen. “These things are always awkward, aren’t they?” Dermot smiled with his lips closed. “But I’m not easily embarrassed.”
“What did you want to say?”
Nicola had come back into the room. She had a glass of water in her hand.
“Well, it’s unfortunate, but it’s something that must be said. You were living alone when I first came here, Carl, but now you’re living with this—this young lady. Miss Townsend. This isn’t right. It is in fact far from right. I’m not old-fashioned, I’m a progressive kind of cove, but there I draw the line. I don’t call it living in sin, that would be to go too far, but it is—to put it plainly—wrong. Now I’m sure you’ll agree with me when you think about it.”
Nicola drank the water, all of it down at one gulp. She said afterwards that now she knew the meaning of stupefied.
“How about you living with that woman you bring to the house? That’s different, is it?” Carl asked.
“Ah, very different, Carl. We don’t live together, you see. I have just come back from taking Sybil home to her parents in Jerome Crescent.” Dermot nodded sagely. “Well, I’ve said my piece, got it off my chest, and I suggest that when you think about it, you’ll find I’m right.”
16
“WHERE’S JEROME CRESCENT?”
It was three fifteen in the morning and Carl hadn’t slept at all. Nicola was fast asleep, but she woke up when he asked the question a second time and even more loudly.
She turned over in bed. “What?”
“That woman Sybil lives there.”
“Carl, I have to go to work in the morning.”
“I don’t know why I’m asking. It doesn’t matter. Go back to sleep.”
He thought he would never sleep again. He lay there for a little while, maybe ten minutes, then got up and went down to the kitchen. The house was as silent as if it had been a cottage in a country lane.
Upstairs, two floors up, Dermot would be asleep, deeply asleep in bed, without worries, at peace. He probably drank cocoa or Ovaltine at bedtime, and the mug it had been in would be on his bedside table. There would be a bin for the washing in his room, and before he went to bed he would drop his clothes in it. Things would be like that every night, night after night, unchanging, on and on, while he, Carl, wandered wakeful around the house, growing poorer and poorer, eventually going on the dole or benefits or whatever it was called. For him things would never change, but they would change for Dermot, who would marry that Sybil and have children with her. He’d get a better job, flourish, and one day seek Carl out, and he would be a wretched, broken creature in rags, in a shabby, dirty room, and Dermot would offer to buy the house from him. Offer him half the price the other houses in Falcon Mews fetched because he could. . . .
You must stop this, he told himself, you will drive yourself mad. But what did you do when you were caught in a trap as he was? You had to decide which was worse (or better): to be utterly disgraced, your name all over the papers, your writing career ruined, to be interviewed and photographed as the man who’d sold poison to an unsuspecting young girl and brought about her death; or to escape that by giving up all you possessed, your only means of making a living. He couldn’t see a way out. It was one or the other.
He went into the living room, took a bottle of gin, the only spirits he had, and swigged what remained of it, about a glassful. As he swallowed it, he thought, I am mad, I am crazy, I shall be ill, and he lay down on Dad’s sofa, staring at the ceiling and breathing like someone who had run a race. If he ever had another book published and it was ever reviewed, the journalist would refer to him as “the disgraced author Carl Martin.”
The gin had its effect, swinging the room around, deadening him, knocking him unconscious. Nicola found him four hours later and lay down beside him, holding him in her arms.
OLD ALBERT WEATHERSPOON, who was Elizabeth and Gervaise’s grandfather, used to say that two women could never share a kitchen. It was just one of his many misogynistic maxims, and Elizabeth would have been the first to rise up in wrath at such sexism, along with that of his other sayings, such as that women made bad drivers. But having lived at home with her mother for a couple of months, she was ready to admit that two women could never share a house.
“If you’d known that Gervaise wasn’t going to live in Pinetree Court but was going to announce plans to go off to Cambodia, would you have given the flat to me instead of him?”
“You’d got a home and a husband. How was I to know that you and Leo would split up? There was no warning.”
“How could
there be a warning? When you’re in a relationship, you don’t tell everyone that although things are all right now, they may go wrong in a couple of months’ time, do you?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t lived like you do, jumping about from one man to another.”
“I can’t stay here, I do know that. We have a row every day. And as for that cat, I’d drown it if I could get near it without being torn to pieces.”
“Don’t you lay a finger on my sweet lamb.” Yvonne stood up, quivering. “You can do as you like with the flat. I don’t want it. But I don’t want any trouble. Remember that.” She considered for a moment. “I’d be quite pleased if you could get rid of that Lizzie woman. Milsom, she’s called. I know she was a friend of Stacey, but it can’t be right that she’s still living there. It was your brother who told her she could. Amazing what a pretty face can do, isn’t it?”
“Pretty? I don’t think so.”
YVONNE WAS ALMOST as anxious to get rid of Elizabeth as Elizabeth was to move. Although Sophie was obviously capable of defending herself, Yvonne was afraid her daughter might find a way of doing the cat real harm. Both Elizabeth and Sophie were free to wander about the house at night, and Yvonne began having bad dreams of her daughter’s putting poison in the cat’s dish.
So Yvonne went to Pinetree Court to speak to the concierge. He knew who she was and would have much preferred her as the occupant of the flat. As far as he was concerned, she was the owner of what he called “the property,” and the sooner she moved in, the better. Yvonne could understand this. A handsome, obviously wealthy woman in the prime of life—she would never call herself middle-aged—was a more suitable occupant than a twenty-four-year-old. That it would actually be her daughter who would be living there wasn’t his business, she thought. She would like the lock changed—could he arrange that? Of course she understood that changing the locks on the entrance to the whole block would not be possible.
“I’ll do what I can,” said the concierge. “It may take a few days.”
MRS. WEATHERSPOON PHONED Lizzie and asked her to vacate the flat on the following day, as her daughter would be moving in and the lock would be changed. Lizzie put up a weak defence that she was here at Gervaise’s invitation, and Yvonne told her not to be silly. It was five in the afternoon and Lizzie had just returned from play school. She poured herself a large vodka and orange—the first of a new bottle—and decided that there was nothing for it but to get out the next day.
Swithin Campbell, her phone said, ringing musically. “Come out with me tonight, Liz? I’ll call for you at seven.”
It gave her little time to get ready, but five minutes would have been enough. She rushed into the bedroom and got into a bright red bra and pants and Stacey’s black dress with the white lace panel down the front. Jo Malone’s pomegranate noir was sprayed down her cleavage. She slid her feet into Stacey’s most uncomfortable shoes, the red ones with the four-inch heels. By the time she was sitting down again, finishing off the vodka, the doorbell was ringing.
It wasn’t Swithin. The man at the door told Lizzie he was Mr. Newman’s driver, sent to fetch her. Mr. Newman was waiting outside in the car.
Swithin wasn’t called Newman but Campbell, but Lizzie didn’t think this important. Newman was probably his business partner or something.
He stepped inside, and Lizzie felt something rammed into her spine and let out a shriek that no one was around to hear. He showed her the gun, then replaced it on her spine. “We’re going to walk downstairs, you first.”
Of course she did, trembling by now. The gun wasn’t real. It was a toy that the driver had borrowed from his five-year-old nephew, but Lizzie didn’t know that. It felt and looked like a gun. They walked past the concierge’s office and out into Primrose Hill Road. A car was there, but the man in it was someone Lizzie had never before seen, a big redhead in a leather coat and ragged jeans. The driver bundled her into the back.
Lizzie was so frightened she couldn’t speak. She tried to, stammering and hesitating and gasping, but no real words came out. She wanted to ask her abductors where they were taking her, but it was useless to try. The redhead held her hands behind her back and put what felt like handcuffs on her wrists while the other man told her to bite on something he held across her mouth. She had seen this done on TV but had never thought how horrible it must feel, the bandage or scarf or whatever it was tied so tightly that it felt as if it must split her lips. The driver gave her a great shove so that she fell across the backseat with no hands free to struggle or defend herself.
The redheaded man took the gun from the driver, thrust it into her ribs, and they were off. Few people were about, but even if the street had been crowded, Lizzie realised that people didn’t look into parked cars, or moving cars for that matter. Not being able to use her hands made her into a disabled creature. It was the worst part of it. The gag was horrible, but only because it hurt, not because it made it impossible to utter a sound. She hadn’t been able to speak before it went on, and somehow she knew she wouldn’t be able to speak now even if they took it off. Would they remove the gag and the handcuffs when they got her to where they were taking her? If they didn’t, the time might come when she wouldn’t be able to go on breathing just through her nose. The thought of this made her give a little whimper, and the redhead hissed at her, “Shut the fuck up.”
Like most Londoners, the only part of London Lizzie really knew was the bit round where she lived, in her case the area between Willesden and the Marylebone Road. They seemed quickly to have left that behind. Swithin would be ringing her doorbell now. Would he raise the alarm? Unlikely. A kind of fog spread across Lizzie’s brain, although she was fully conscious, and she began to cry, tears falling down her cheeks onto the stretchy cotton stuff of the gag.
17
“I KNOW WHAT you’re going to say,” said Carl. “I know it by heart. So don’t bother. I could recite it. You don’t have to say it.”
They were in Carl’s bedroom on a Sunday afternoon, and Nicola had brought them two mugs of tea. Hers was half-drunk, his untouched. Down below the window Sybil Soames was chopping down stinging nettles with shears while Dermot sat in one of the deck chairs reading what Nicola thought might be the parish magazine.
“I wouldn’t put it past him to ask me to buy a lawn mower.”
“You have only to say no.”
“Look, the rent was due weeks ago, but it didn’t come, and it won’t. It won’t come at all, will it? It will never come. At least he pays his gas and electricity bills, but he soon won’t, you’ll see. He’ll ask me a favour, and the favour will be that I take on those bills.”
“Aren’t you going to drink your tea?”
“No, I’m fucking not going to drink my tea.” He rolled over and put his arms round her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t talk to you like that.”
It was a beautiful day. They walked across to Regent’s Park, where it seemed the whole of London—except for those in Hyde, St. James’s, and Green Parks among others—were gathered, lying on the grass, playing ball games, eating and drinking, admiring the rose garden. The sun was hot, the leaves were green. Nature proclaimed that the winter had been mild and wet and the spring and summer warmer than usual.
“Suppose he starts rearranging my private life?” said Carl. “What if he tells me that if you continue to live with me, he’ll have to tell the Weatherspoon woman what I did? If he asks for the other bedroom, the one next to mine? What do I do then? I can’t say no, can I?”
Nicola sighed. “Carl, you know what I’ll say to that.”
EVEN FOR A local weekly paper, the Paddington Express had a small circulation. But the current issue was selling better than any other had for years. It led with the photograph of Stacey Warren that had previously appeared in the Evening Standard and various other dailies. The text surrounding it told that Stacey had obtained her dinitrophenol not online but by purchase from “an unknown source.”
Dermot was given a copy of the news
paper by Sybil, who knew nothing of the DNP story but wanted Dermot to see an ad for a secondhand bed to replace the broken-down one that had been Carl’s father’s. Carl’s tenant, if such he still was, carefully left the newspaper on the table that was the only piece of furniture in the hallway of Carl’s house on Falcon Mews.
The account in the Paddington Express didn’t say anything new. But Carl, who found the newspaper where Dermot intended him to find it, lead story headline uppermost, read everything into it that wasn’t in fact there. He felt as though he was about to faint, though he had never fainted in his life. There was nowhere to sit down. He staggered dizzily into the living room and subsided into an armchair. Nicola had gone to work, as had Dermot.
Reason was disappearing. Carl was past the stage of looking calmly at the situation; long past. The sanity he clung to was that he knew he was being irrational. He knew that what Nicola said was true and that a rational person would do what she kept telling him to do. But with his increasing disgust at Dermot had come fear, and fear was now changing into terror. He was beginning to imagine horrible actions Dermot might take against him. This newspaper account was the beginning of them, for he had no doubt Dermot had fed the story to the Paddington Express. Probably even now he was passing the insinuations on to the Evening Standard or tomorrow’s Mail. No imagining was needed for the takeover of his garden, the dropping and noisy shifting of pieces of furniture, the banging of doors and the spurts of music that gushed out for five minutes at a time when the front door to the top-floor flat was opened.
Carl had found that going out and walking, especially in green places and under the heavy-hanging foliage of trees, was somehow remedial. He could tell himself that whatever happened at home, however much Dermot tightened the screw and in so doing deprived him of every penny of his income, he would still have his health and strength and these green trees to walk under and lawns to look at. His walk this morning took him across Maida Vale and a little way down Lisson Grove in the direction of Rossmore Road. If he continued along Rossmore Road, he would come out onto Park Road and from there onto the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park. Plenty of greenery in there, great trees densely in leaf and shrubs in pink and white flower.
