by Ruth Rendell
When they came down, should he make them tea, or at least offer it? he wondered. The thought of sitting down with them and talking about Dermot—what else could they talk about?—was so dreadful that he gasped aloud. He went out into the hall when he heard their feet on the stairs. They were all carrying bags that must have been Dermot’s, and the bags were stuffed full of the bits and pieces Dermot’s mother had talked about. Carl wondered if much of it was his property, as almost all the furnishing of the flat had been, all of it inherited from his father. But he didn’t care.
Dermot’s mother expressed his own desire precisely: “We’ll go and leave you in peace.”
The aunt said, “It was nice to meet you.”
Sybil, nodding as if to confirm this meaningless statement, added, “See you soon.”
From the window he watched them make their way along Falcon Mews in the direction of the tube station, or perhaps a bus. They had shown no overt grief, no horror at what had happened, only a dull acceptance. Carl felt sick. He asked himself if there would be any further developments, any more visits, police enquiries, relatives or friends of Dermot’s turning up. If so, it must be faced, and it was nothing compared to what Carl had been through these past months.
You’re free now, he told himself, You didn’t mean to kill him, not at first, and when you did, no one saw you or connected you with his death. It’s all over. Hold on to that.
Nicola came home earlier than usual, carrying two bags full of food: a roast chicken, a selection of cheeses from the local delicatessen, white grapes, a mango and a large pineapple, and the ingredients for a special kind of salad. The wine she had bought was being sent, she said, but for one bottle of rosé, which she had with her.
“I’ll soon have money,” Carl said. “Just wait a couple of weeks and then I’ll advertise the flat. There’s such a demand round here that it’ll go at once.”
She put her arms round him. “There’s no hurry, sweetheart. Wait a little. It will look rather . . . well, not like you or me, come to that . . . grasping. We could go away somewhere first. You’re in need of a holiday and I’ve got a couple of weeks owing.”
He wanted to tell her not to remind him he had no work and no money, but he restrained himself. Maybe he could start writing again soon. “We’ll see. What I’d like to do would be to go out to eat—to celebrate.”
She pulled away and stared at him. “Celebrate what?”
“I don’t know why I said that. I wasn’t thinking.” He started to tell her about the visit that afternoon of Dermot’s mother and aunt. “I think they live up north somewhere. They were going to take huge carrier bags full of bric-a-brac on the train.”
“I’m sure you were nice to them, Carl,” she said, but her tone was that of someone who believed the reverse was true.
It was scarcely a quarrel, but it left him feeling sore and resentful. Nicola put away the food and drink she had bought and opened the wine, still cold from the chill cabinet of the shop. They sat side by side on the sofa and she said, “Let’s go to one of those boat cafés on the canal. That wouldn’t trouble your conscience so much because they’re cheap.”
The phone rang. He knew it must be his mother because no one else used the landline. Her astonishment and horror at Dermot’s murder had already been voiced. This time she wanted to tell him about his grandmother’s shingles. Carl made appropriate noises.
“Now, darling, the most important thing: I’ve got a tenant for your flat. Aren’t I clever? An estate agent, that’s me, and I don’t charge a fee.”
“No, Mum, not yet, it’s too soon. I mean, thanks, it’s brilliant, but I don’t want to let it yet.”
“But why not, darling? You’re in need of the rent, aren’t you? You told me you were.”
“Of course I am. But I can wait a few weeks. You haven’t told this person they can have it, have you?”
“No, of course not. And by the way, it’s horrible the way you use a plural when you mean a singular. It’s not just you, it’s everyone under thirty, and a lot over.”
“Sorry, Mum. I’ll try not to, but I can’t promise.”
Nicola asked what that was about. He told her. “You were quite right to say no. Let’s go out, shall we?”
They had another glass of the rosé first. Nicola’s approval was nice, but still he asked himself why he had turned down his mother’s offer.
“Why was I right to say no?” he asked Nicola as they walked down the mews. “I’m beginning to think I shouldn’t have.”
“It shows respect for Dermot. I know he treated you badly, but he had such a horrible death. Any decent person would feel pity and—well, indignation. You didn’t want another tenant in there yet; you wanted to wait.”
Carl said nothing. It didn’t matter if he waited, say, a couple of weeks.
THERE WAS NO sign of Sybil the next day. Carl hoped that she might have gone away on holiday with her parents, although the season appeared to be over, and most people were back at work.
While Nicola was having a shower in his bathroom, he went upstairs to use the bathroom that had been Dermot’s and found the place full of what Sybil would call “toiletries.” These bottles and jars were the sort that came from back-street pharmacies or the soap-and-shampoo department of a supermarket. She might not want them but she need not think she could dump them on him. He was thinking how he must tell her to take them away when he realised he had no phone number for her, and although he knew where she lived, no email or postal address.
Just as he was deciding he must go to Jerome Crescent and put a note through her door, he heard her footsteps on the stairs. But now that his chance had come, he felt rather awkward telling her he had had a shower in the bathroom that had been Dermot’s. He waited, listening, and when he heard her leave, he felt sure she wouldn’t come back again. She would have completed whatever tasks had brought her back to Dermot’s rooms. He went upstairs and found the bathroom just as it had been. Full of her things. What did it matter that a few jars of bath oil and sachets of cheap shampoo were left behind? Leave it a day or two and then he would throw them all away.
Carl found that he was becoming acutely aware of Sybil’s presence, though he didn’t know how. On Saturday evening, Nicola asked him how he knew Sybil was in the house, and he couldn’t tell her, he just knew. Nicola had heard nothing. She conceded he had been right when she saw Sybil walking down the mews next morning on her way to church, prayer book in hand. She had clearly spent the night upstairs. It was another fine, sunny day, and Carl and Nicola went to Hampstead Heath, Carl painfully conscious that every item of food and every drop of drink they bought was still purchased with Nicola’s money.
That kind of one-sided spending looked to be coming to an end on Monday morning, however, when the post brought a letter from Carl’s agent telling him that a short story Carl had written three years before, and forgotten about, was to be read on radio, for which he would be paid a hundred pounds.
Susanna apologised for the smallness of the sum, but it felt like a fortune to Carl. Income from his writing, recognition of his talent! A happy start to the day, it seemed, not to be spoilt by the sound of Sybil’s feet in heavy shoes marching about on the top floor. So she hadn’t gone. She had spent two nights up there. It was time to tell her to leave, and to take her pots and jars with her. He went upstairs and knocked on the door.
She looked at him, unsmiling, as if she had never before seen him. He noticed that it wasn’t shoes she was wearing, but heavy brown leather boots.
“What was it you wanted?”
Not to be left on the doorstep, he thought. “Can I come in?”
“If you want.”
He stepped over the threshold. She left the door open. She was still in the mourning clothes that were perhaps to become a permanency.
“I’d like you to take your things out of the bathroom. When you go home.”
“I’m going out now. I’ve got to go to work.”
“Yes, of cours
e. But later on you must come back here and take your stuff.”
She nodded, a meaningless gesture. “Dermot told me when we first started courting that we would live here together.”
Courting: the word shocked him rather than the content of what she said. He had never before heard anyone use it. “Yes, it’s very sad what happened. I’ll see you later.”
From his front window he watched her go. In her walk was a familiarity with her surroundings that made her look as if she had lived here all her life. He realised he didn’t know where she worked or what she did: Why should he know or care? She would be gone by the end of today and he would never have to see her again.
SYBIL RETURNED FROM work before Nicola did. Carl wouldn’t have known this if he hadn’t been watching for her. He went out into the hall just as she had her heavily booted right foot on the lowest stair.
“Sybil?” Had he ever before called her by what she would no doubt refer to as her Christian name? “You’ll be going home this evening, I assume. Don’t forget to take your stuff from the bathroom.”
In a calm, straightforward tone she said, “This is my home. This is where I live.”
“No, no.” Nervous as he was, he had to treat her as if she were simple. That was a word his father had used, one that predated political correctness. “You live with your parents in Jerome Crescent. Now give me my key. You won’t need it again.”
“I live here. I must go up now. I’ve things to see to.”
“No, Sybil. I’m very sorry about Dermot, but I shall have a new tenant coming in. That’s why you need to go. That’s why I need the key.”
“I’m the new tenant. I told you Dermot said I was to live here.” Suddenly her voice took on the tone of an ordinary, determined woman who knew exactly what she was doing and saying. “I have to hold on to the key. I’m taking over my fiancé’s tenancy.”
He said nothing. To think that he had believed her naïve, an ignorant fool. He went into the bathroom and threw up. Because he had eaten nothing all day, he vomited only yellow liquid.
He was still in the bathroom when Nicola came home. He had reached a stage where he had to remind himself that she didn’t know he had killed Dermot. Sometimes, when he thought about it, he seemed to remember telling her, and her forgiving him or overlooking it or something.
She doesn’t know. Hold on to that, he told himself. But I can tell her about Sybil, what Sybil said. I must ask her what to do. “Sybil is here. She says she’s the new tenant. She won’t give me the key.”
“She must. Tell her you’ll get the police to put her out.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Then I will.”
“No.” The idea of the police coming meant only one thing to him: Dermot’s murder. They would be in the house and they would know what had happened to the previous tenant. They would become suspicious. “No, Nic. We can’t do that. Would it be too bad to have her as the new tenant? I mean, she’d be steady and quiet and regular in her habits—I know I sound like an old-time landlady—and she wouldn’t make trouble.”
“I’m not hearing this.”
“Yes, you are, you are. I’m saying let’s have Sybil as the new tenant. It would make things easy. There’d be money coming in. She’d be on her own. She wouldn’t bring men home.”
“What’s happened to you, Carl? You’re young. You don’t talk and think like that.” In a scathing tone she said, “She wouldn’t bring men home. She wouldn’t make trouble, she’d be quiet and steady.” Nicola didn’t wait for his defence. “What’s got into you? You have to turn her out, and do it now. She can go back to her parents’. I don’t want her here. We’ll find someone else.”
He spoke to Nicola in a tone he had never thought possible. “This is my house. I decide about tenants, not you.”
She didn’t argue. Her face went white. “I’m sorry. Let her stay. I just hope you won’t regret it.”
She had said you, not we. Whatever happens now, Carl thought, this is the beginning of the end for us.
27
MOST OF THE pet owners at the clinic accepted Lizzie without question. One of the few exceptions was Yvonne Weatherspoon, who had known Lizzie when she’d been a friend of Stacey’s. Yvonne hadn’t much liked Lizzie then, and she didn’t seem to like her now.
“Where’s Dermot?”
Lizzie didn’t know what to say. Surely Yvonne knew? It had been all over the papers and even on the London regional news. “Didn’t you see it on TV?”
“What do you mean, on TV?”
“Well, he was murdered. It was on TV and in all the papers. They still haven’t got anyone for it.”
“I saw about that Dermot, but I didn’t connect it with our Dermot. My God, what a dreadful thing. I’m really shocked.” Yvonne pointed to the occupant of the cat box. “Sophie knows. You can tell, can’t you? It’s been a shock to her as well, poor angel.” Yvonne mouthed kisses to the cat through the bars of the carrier. “A nasty animal from down the hill has scratched her and I think it’s got infected. I do hope Caroline can see her. I think she’s got a temperature.”
Caroline could see her this time and would keep her in to operate on the abscess. Perhaps Mrs. Weatherspoon would like to leave her here and come back for her at four? Like was not the word, but Yvonne had to agree.
They closed the clinic for an hour at lunchtime, and Lizzie went across the street to the Sutherland Café for a sandwich and a Diet Coke. She still found it hard to sit quietly on her own. Her mind played nasty tricks, returning to the horrific days she so much wanted to forget.
When she’d first got home, she had thought about phoning Swithin Campbell and confronting him with her suspicions that he’d been in cahoots with Scotty and Redhead. But what would happen if he was dangerous? It might be better to leave things as they were, with Scotty and Redhead as far away from her as possible.
If only she had someone clever to advise her.
BACK AT THE pet clinic, nothing much happened until four o’clock. In the operating theatre, a small room in the back, Caroline lanced Sophie’s abscess and laid her comfortably in her cat carrier to sleep until Yvonne Weatherspoon came for her. But at five past four it was Yvonne’s son who called at the clinic.
“Hi, Gervaise.” Lizzie was surprised and pleased to see him. He must have cancelled his trip to Cambodia or wherever it was. Or perhaps he just hadn’t left yet.
“Well, if it isn’t little Lizzie. What are you doing here?”
“I work here.”
“Do you really? My mother didn’t say.” Caroline came out with the cat, still asleep in her carrier. “Can I pay with a credit card?”
“Sure you can. That’ll be a hundred and eighty pounds.”
“I’ll have to get that back from my mum.” He looked at Lizzie again. “Lizzie, I owe you an apology.”
“Do you? Whatever for?”
He slipped his card into the machine. “Last time I saw you, I said you could stay in Stacey’s flat while I was away. But then my sister wanted to live there, and you must have had to move out.”
“I did. But that’s all in the past now.” What he’d said had given her an idea. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure you can.”
“I need some advice.”
Gervaise looked interested, as Lizzie had thought he might. “OK. Shall we meet in the café opposite after you finish here? Let me get this animal home first.”
NEXT MORNING CARL watched Sybil in the garden before she went to work, pulling up the few weeds she had allowed to take root there, cutting off the dead heads from flowers he didn’t know the names of.
She probably worked as someone’s cleaner, he thought. That was what she looked like. Perhaps she would clean for him. Maybe she could do decorating as well as gardening. It began to appear as if he had done rather well in not getting rid of her.
He must get her a rent book, something he had never done for Dermot. It would be more businesslike. He’d draw up anothe
r contract and have Nicola witness it. He had hoped to raise the rent this time, but now he realised he could hardly do that. Sybil wouldn’t earn that much; maybe ten pounds an hour was what he had heard cleaners’ wages amounted to. No, keep the rent to what Dermot had paid—or hadn’t paid in recent months.
He sat down at the laptop and contrived a sort of contract for Sybil Soames to pay Carl Martin one thousand two hundred pounds per calendar month—a good touch that, calendar month—for a one-bedroom apartment at 11 Falcon Mews, London W9. He’d arrange the signing down here in his living room. When Nicola came home from work, she usually went straight upstairs to their bedroom to change into jeans and a tee-shirt, and after that he and Sybil would sign the document.
He asked himself why he was treating the process with such weight and formality. Dermot’s contract had never been handled like this. His mother had told him he could now get much more than twelve hundred a month, but he had said no, and she had supposed he was being generous, that asking more would be greedy. No one could know—no one would ever know—that he shuddered whenever he thought of profiting from the death of a man he had murdered.
Sybil came back at five. Her shoes made a flapping sound as she walked upstairs. A bit less than an hour later Nicola arrived, carrying a basket of strawberries, a carton of cream, and a bunch of pink and purple flowers she said were zinnias. Carl showed her the contract.
She nodded. “You’re still going through with this, then?”
“You agreed it was a good idea.”
“I don’t think so, Carl. As you said, it wasn’t for me to agree or disagree. It’s your house.”
“Well, will you witness Sybil and me signing this contract?”
“If that’s what you want.”
She went up to their bedroom to change. The beginning of the end for them, he had thought their argument was. But it had passed, and perhaps the end wouldn’t happen. He hoped not. He picked up the phone and called Dermot’s number. He couldn’t yet think of it as Sybil’s.
“Can’t you come up here?” she said.
