by Ruth Rendell
As he walked along Rossmore Road, a sign pointing to Jerome Crescent reminded him of something. Of course—Dermot’s girlfriend, Sybil Soames, lived there with her parents. He turned into Jerome Crescent, where trees grew on a triangle of green grass, and decided to sit down there and wait for Sybil. She would come; she would be bound to come this way on her way home for her lunch. Somehow he knew she was the kind of girl—an only child sheltered and protected by her working-class parents—who would go shopping arm in arm with her mother on Saturday mornings, and on weekdays always go home for her lunch, which she would call dinner. Dermot, with his quaint, outdated morality, would have had no difficulty in persuading her to go along with his wish for a chaste relationship. Carl asked himself why he wanted to talk to her—why he wanted to see her even—but came up with no answer.
She did come, but took a long time about it. He saw recognition and something that might have been fear in her eyes. She would have avoided him, turned off the path across the green, but for his saying, “Sybil.”
On his feet now, he stood in front of her. “Sybil, I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Is something wrong? Is he ill?”
You know what he’s doing to me, don’t you? Carl wanted to say. You know he’s stopped paying me rent, he’s taking over the house, he’ll force me into one room and then out altogether. But confronted by Sybil, poor ignorant creature that she was, he couldn’t do it. “It’s nothing. I just went for a walk and then I remembered you lived down here.” In a low, weak voice, quite wrong for such a cheerful remark, he said, “It’s a beautiful day.”
“I’d better get on home. My mum’ll be worrying.”
He watched her cross the road and turn into a doorway. Slowly making his way back up Lisson Grove, leaving behind all these pastel-painted blocks of flats and their green gardens, he realised again what he dreaded most in Dermot’s threats. It wasn’t the loss of income. It was the humiliation he feared. He couldn’t live with the shame.
18
AT LEAST SHE could see. They had deprived her of speech and to a great extent of movement, but neither of the men who had abducted Lizzie had blindfolded her, so she was able to lift her head high enough to see some street signs.
When—if—someone came to rescue her, they would want those sorts of clues to where she was. The car had gone over one of the river bridges and, for a moment, had drawn alongside a number 36 bus going north in the opposite direction. Lizzie thought fleetingly of her dad: Could he be on the bus on his way back to Mamhead Drive? What would happen if he chanced to look over at the car and saw her—his only daughter—on the backseat, bound and gagged? But the traffic lights changed, and the bus moved on, and there was no help for her, no possibility of rescue. As her eyes filled once more with tears, she struggled to read the names of the places she was passing before, finally, the driver turned into an alley.
It occurred to Lizzie that these two men weren’t good criminals. They had the right sort of language and did the right sort of things, like putting on the gag and the handcuffs. But professional kidnappers, real criminals, wouldn’t have left her eyes uncovered, they wouldn’t have left her able to see everywhere they were taking her. Such as the lane off Abbotswood Road where they were now, and the alley with its row of lockup garages.
The driver must have used a remote, for the door of number 5 went up. Inside, the garage was empty and she could see there was no other way in or out of it. Lizzie thought they might speak to her now, but they didn’t. They got out of the car, the driver first, then the redhead. Then she remembered a film she had seen of someone’s dying from being left in a car in a garage with carbon monoxide exuding from somewhere and poisoning them. Crying out or just crying was no use. She watched them moving out of the garage, leaving her inside the car, noting the height and size of them, their hair. And she thought of Swithin.
The garage door went down and closed, and deep darkness descended. When thinking about what to expect, Lizzie had forgotten darkness. She had forgotten air too. But they must not want her to die because the driver had left his door open a little way and the engine was turned off.
They would be back. They must be back.
UPSTAIRS ON THE number 36 bus, heading north, Tom was thinking about his daughter. He’d long hoped for a change in her lifestyle and character, and now he clung to small steps towards improvement. She needed to find a nice young man with a job. Not a good job, not yet, that would be too much to ask in this day and age, but a man with a job in an office nine till five, and preferably Lizzie at home cooking his dinner. These flights of fancy continued until the bus reached Queen’s Park and Tom got off to wait for one to take him to Willesden.
When the bus had dropped him at the end of Mamhead Drive and he was in the house, he learned from Dot that Lizzie was expected to supper. Also coming, though not exactly invited, was Eddy Burton, from next door. His parents had moved in a month ago, and his mother was going out for the evening and had asked Dorothy if she would be kind enough to give him dinner. Tom thought feeding a man of twenty-eight who wasn’t disabled or with learning difficulties was taking spoiling to an absurd extent. Surely Dot couldn’t be matchmaking? Tom felt rather cross. He wanted to see his daughter on her own.
He didn’t know how many times he had said to Lizzie that punctuality was the politeness of princes, yet still it was never any good expecting her at a specific time. He wondered if Prince Charles was punctual. He must be, with dozens of people fussing around to make sure he was on time for all those engagements. The Milsoms regularly ate at seven, and Lizzie was a Milsom, who knew their ways if anyone did.
Eddy had arrived early, bringing his pug with him, an uninvited guest, and had already got through a liberal helping of wine, pushing the empty glass into a prominent position where his hostess couldn’t fail to see it. The pug, whose name was Brutus, ran around the room, leaping onto laps and licking faces. Dot refilled Eddy’s glass, and Tom’s. Clicking her tongue, not at all pleased, she phoned Lizzie’s mobile.
The only answer she got was that the call had been transferred to a number consisting of about fifteen digits.
“She’s forgotten,” said Tom. “Or she’s out with some bloke.”
Eddy looked embarrassed. He had been giving his hosts his dog’s complicated life history, too complicated considering the animal was only eight months old, and both Tom and Dot were trying not to show their boredom.
“I suppose we’d better eat,” said Dorothy, and persuaded Eddy to shut the dog in the kitchen.
The doorbell rang in the middle of their dessert, lemon meringue pie. Tom was sure it must be Lizzie and went to answer it with “Lost your key, have you?” on his lips.
The roving fishmonger was on the doorstep, asking if Tom wanted some beautiful cod fresh out of the Atlantic that morning.
Dorothy phoned Lizzie again later, but again the voicemail was transferred to that long number. Both she and Tom thought this meant that Lizzie had either gone home with the man she was no doubt out with or had turned off her phone. They disliked the idea of her spending the night with a man, but they never said so, not even to each other. It was what girls did these days, and nothing was to be done about it.
SOUTH OF THE river, Redhead and the squat, little man who had been the driver came into the garage, switched a light on, and opened the nearside rear door of the car. Lizzie heard Redhead call the other man Scotty and thought how stupid he must be to reveal his name to her. Then, with a sob, she understood that he might do this if he didn’t care if she knew his name. He didn’t care because he meant to kill her.
Redhead got in the driving seat while Scotty got in the back with her. When he undid the gag, Lizzie had a strange feeling in her mouth and throat. It was like a block on her voice so that all she could do, no matter how she tried, was grunt and gasp like an animal.
“Gone loco,” said Scotty.
“Good. Don’t want her screaming the fucking place down.”
Th
e clock on the dashboard had showed Lizzie that it was a quarter past three in the morning. Redhead reversed the car out of the garage and into Abbotswood Road. In silence, Lizzie laid her head back against the upholstery.
Fear of urinating was keeping her silent and tense. She contracted her muscles as if they were fists closing tightly. It was called a sphincter, she thought; this was what kept her bladder holding it in. If her urine leaked out of her in front of them, she thought she would die. Tears trickled from her eyes. If only the water from her eyes would take some of the water that wanted to pour out of her bladder. Was that the way it worked? Redhead was turning the car into a row of marked-out parking places at the foot of a squalid-looking block of social housing. She had no idea where they were. She didn’t care, concentrating only on holding her sphincter tight shut.
No one was about. Redhead and Scotty took her inside and up a flight of stone stairs, holding her between them. If someone had followed them, he or she would have seen the handcuffs still on Lizzie’s wrists. No one was there to see.
Let into a flat by Scotty, she said, “Toilet,” and Redhead pushed her through a door, slamming it behind her. The relief was so great, the joy, that for a moment she was almost happy, taking great breaths, indifferent to her cuffed hands, leaning her upper body forward to press onto her knees.
Scotty was outside the door, but even so she couldn’t have gone anywhere. If your hands were tied behind your back, it was as bad as tying your feet, worse maybe. Scotty walked her into a living room, holding her shoulders. Redhead was in there, talking on his phone. He put it down when he saw her. Had he been talking to her parents?
“They haven’t got any money,” Lizzie said.
“What you on about?” Scotty pushed her down onto a battered and ragged couch. “He was talking to his husband.”
So they were gay. Or Redhead was. And likely Scotty too. This comforted her. All the time she’d been in that car in the garage, she’d feared that one or both of them would rape her. Gay men wouldn’t. “What are you going to do with me?”
“You know something?” said Redhead. “We’re like the filth, we ask the questions, not you. You shut the fuck up.”
He produced a mobile phone and dropped it in her lap. He seemed to have forgotten she couldn’t use it without her hands. Leaning towards her, his face close to hers and his breath smelling of curry, he said, “Tell me your mum’s number.”
“I don’t know what it is.”
Of course he didn’t believe her. They gave her two pills after that, capsules really, half-red and half-green. Redhead held her down on the couch while Scotty forced the red-and-green things into her mouth, sitting on her legs and holding her lips crammed together with both hands. She swallowed them in saliva, not daring to hold them in her mouth.
Lizzie thought she would have a few minutes to take in the room in all its squalid detail, note that outside it was now getting light, but unconsciousness was coming fast. She just had time to wonder why Redhead had asked for her mum’s phone number, and not her mum and dad’s, when a black door slammed over her eyes and she passed out.
19
TOM AND DOT were vaguely concerned that they had still not heard from Lizzie, but they had become used to her disappearing for days on end, only to find that she hadn’t really disappeared, just gone off to lead her own life. And she was of course a young woman in her twenties, not a teenager any longer.
Tom had observed, with interest, that when your child is living in the parental home, you worry when she is out in the evening after eleven, say. You are worried sick if she is still out after midnight. You watch the clock and pace and open the front door every ten minutes to try to spot her coming down the street. Sleep is out of the question. But when she is no longer living at home, although you know she goes out in the evenings just as much, stays out just as late, if not later, you scarcely worry at all. You go to bed and sleep. You wake up in the morning and have no doubt—if you even think about it—that she came in at midnight or one or two, safe and sound. Why was this? Why did you worry when she was living with you but not when she wasn’t? He had asked other parents about this, and they all felt the same.
“She probably got the wrong day and thinks she’s due here to supper on Friday rather than last night,” he said to Dot. “She’ll turn up.”
LIZZIE AWOKE TO broad daylight. It hadn’t been a natural awakening. One of them—Scotty, she thought—had shaken her while the other pressed an ice-cold rag against her face. It felt as if it had been in the freezer.
“We want a phone number,” Redhead said.
“But I haven’t got my bag. I haven’t got my phone. How can I have a number?”
“You’ve got a memory, haven’t you? You know your own mum’s number.”
What had her mother to do with anything, Lizzie thought, and why would she give these obviously violent men her parents’ number? “I don’t know,” she lied. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
Her voice was breaking again. She tried to say she couldn’t think, but the words wouldn’t come. Scotty slapped her face hard and she burst into howls. Her hands were shaking in the cuffs, which were wet with sweat. Yvonne, she thought suddenly. She took deep breaths in and out as slowly as she could as she thought about Stacey’s beautiful flat, and how unfair it was that Yvonne, who had her own mansion in Swiss Cottage, had inherited this too.
No, she decided in a fit of spite, she wouldn’t give Scotty and Redhead her mum’s number; she’d give them Yvonne’s instead. She knew her telephone number too and could almost visualise it from when she’d seen it on the pet-clinic computer screen that day. Closing her eyes and concentrating hard, she recited the number to her captors.
A LITTLE PATH runs down from Lisson Grove, a shortcut into the pink- and green- and blue-painted blocks that fill the area north of Rossmore Road. Nicola and Carl had walked through the Church Street market, bought some fruit and a couple of avocados, which Carl put in his backpack.
Nicola was surprised to see the antique shops at the other end of Church Street. She had never before been there and wanted to go into every shop. They held no interest for Carl, but once inside, the various vases and urns and small pieces of furniture caught his attention, even distracting him momentarily from his general despair. A chess set with half the big chessmen carved from golden wood and the other half from white attracted him so much that if he’d had the money, he would have bought it. The cost would have been beyond his means at any time.
Nicola fell in love, as she put it, with a green goose in a shop called Tony’s Treasury. The ornament, of no possible use, had its charm, being made of pottery, green with white edges to each of its feathers and a purple head with red wattles and beak. It was big, rotund, the size of a football, and heavy to lift.
“It would look lovely on your hall table,” she said. “I’ll buy it for you.”
Impossible to say he didn’t want it and equally impossible to get up much enthusiasm. He didn’t ask how much it was but found out when he saw her hand the shop owner two twenty-pound notes and a ten. The goose was so heavy he had to carry it in his backpack with the groceries.
They crossed Lisson Grove and he led the way down the little path that ultimately brought them into Jerome Crescent. These streets here, Carl thought, could aptly be called respectable. They were clean, the buildings in a good state of decoration, and the postcode one of the most prestigious in London. No one called the blocks council flats anymore—it would have been politically incorrect—but that was what they were.
“Up there is where Sybil Soames lives.” It was the first thing Carl had said to her since they left the antiques shop. “That bastard’s girlfriend. Those flats that are painted green, that’s where she lives with her mum and dad.”
Nicola followed his gaze. She took in the bicycle on the balcony and the net curtains. “You only call them that because you’re a snob. You’d call them her mother and father if you didn’t despise them.”
He said nothing. He was looking at the yellow nasturtiums in a flowerbed, the scaffolding on the block opposite the green one, and the stack of bricks on the pathway. The goose in the backpack weighed heavily on his shoulders.
“Why did we come here?” she asked.
“Something seems to draw me to this place. I can’t get away from him, you see. And he’s here. He may be up there now. I dream about him. I don’t want to let him out of my sight and yet I hate him. I loathe him.”
“Oh, Carl.” She took his arm, held it, and clutched his hand. “What shall we do?”
“What you want me to do I can’t do. I never will. Come on. Let’s go home.”
As they walked back to Falcon Mews, along the sunlit streets, under the green trees, Carl became increasingly agitated, uttering angry denunciations of Dermot, cursing him, going over once again, twice, three times, what had happened and what his tenant had done.
NICOLA KEPT SILENT; she had nothing to say because she had said it all. Now she was thinking what she must do. Should she force Carl to take some drastic step, perhaps? Leave the house in Falcon Mews, rent a room for both of them, find himself a regular day job? Or should she abandon him, leave him behind? She thought, I used to love him—do I still love him? He hardly speaks but to rage against Dermot. He sleeps a little, dreams violently, cries out, and sits up fighting against something that isn’t there. I would be better without him, but would he be better without me? She didn’t know the answer.
