by Ruth Rendell
“Oh, Carl, you don’t know much about wages, do you? How could you? But you don’t have to. You’ll get twelve hundred pounds next week.”
He would have to tell her the truth. But the truth was so terrible that he would lose her. If she wouldn’t tolerate his selling a drug to Stacey, how could he expect her to accept that he had killed a man? And what would she do about it? Force him to go to the police? But would it take much forcing?
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Where would you like to go?”
“A pub. To have a drink, something strong. I need it.”
THEY WENT TO the Carpenters’ Arms in Lauderdale Road, where they met the local bookshop owner, Will Finsford, and his girlfriend, Corinne. The girls kissed, delighted to see each other. It was still only midday, but Will plied them with wine that Nicola firmly and effectively, and Carl feebly and in vain, refused.
It had been several months since they had seen one another. Corinne and Will sympathised with Carl over Dermot’s death as if his tenant had been a friend and wanted to know if they had found someone new to occupy the top floor. Carl, his head feeling muzzy with alcohol already, was looking at Nicola as she spoke. Nothing compared to beauty like hers: those soft but classical features, those dazzling eyes, and the blondness of her—the pale, glossy hair and the slightly darker, more golden eyebrows. More than her physical beauty, there was her essential goodness. It would all be taken from him when he told her what he had done. As he must, as he had to, in the next few days. She had left him before. Of course she had come back. But she wouldn’t come back this time.
Nicola was telling the others about Sybil Soames’s taking over the tenancy, but she said nothing about Carl’s reaction to Sybil’s appearance and manner. So lovely herself, Nicola spoke of other women as if they were equally beautiful and gentle.
When Carl’s glass was empty, she took one of his hands and whispered to him that it was time to go. She had already got a promise from Corinne that she would phone to accept one of the dates Nicola had given them to come over. Outside the rain had cleared, and the sky was a cloudless blue. Carl had scarcely said a word for the past hour, but now he began on his current favourite subject, his inability to pay for anything and the shame this brought him. The shops of Sutherland Avenue and Clifton Road often had notices in their windows offering work for supermarket staff or restaurant waiters. He would have to apply for such a job. Maybe tomorrow.
They had reached the Rembrandt Gardens, overhung by broad-leaved trees. Nicola sat down on a wooden seat and motioned to him to sit beside her. The seat overlooked a part of the canal where it widened into a lake with an island in its centre clustered over by waterbirds. Nicola knew that Carl wouldn’t take kindly to her telling him he had neither the experience nor the patience for manual work; instead, intent on cheering him up, she reminded him that next week he would have an envelope with twelve hundred pounds from Sybil.
He turned his eyes from the island and the birds and looked at her. “I won’t get it. It won’t come. Let’s go home.”
Nicola felt near to tears. Whatever was the matter with Carl now? What did he mean about the rent’s not coming in? Surely Sybil would pay. Was it the book he was unable to get on with? Was it simply the presence of Sybil in his house?
It wasn’t far to Falcon Mews. When they entered the house, there was no sign of Sybil and no sound from upstairs.
“Shall we have a cup of tea? I’ve got some of those nice biscuits you like, the round, white-chocolate ones.”
She made the tea, set out the white biscuits. They sat down on Dad’s sofa. On the walk back, Carl had decided: he would tell her that he’d killed Dermot. But sitting beside her now, looking at her, so beautiful and loving, he knew it was impossible. He couldn’t even pretend it had happened by accident. He could invent nothing to account for his lifting up that bag with its green pottery contents and bringing it down on Dermot’s head.
“You were going to tell me why you fear Sybil won’t pay the rent next week. You were, weren’t you?”
“She thinks I killed Dermot and she says she’ll tell the police she saw me do it if I make her pay. That’s what it amounts to,” Carl said in a single breath.
Nicola looked shocked. “She can’t. She’s out of her mind. She can’t think that way. Where does she get such an idea? To suspect you of all people, a gentle person like you, of doing such a thing.”
He said nothing for a moment. He was wondering what she would say if he told her the truth.
“Of course the poor woman’s mentally ill. But to accuse you with her insane belief? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I don’t know. But now you can see why I can’t risk her going to the police with this story.”
“But it isn’t true, Carl. They wouldn’t believe her. You’d tell them the truth and then ask her to get out of this house. You would find someone else for the flat.”
“Nic, my sweetheart, I can’t do that. Leave it now. You know what the situation is. Wait till tomorrow or Wednesday, say, and if the rent comes, we’ll know she’s thought better of her accusation and all is well.”
But all would not be well. He knew that. Strangely, for he had always believed that telling a lie, and as monstrous a lie as this one, could never make you feel better, this one did.
30
ON MONDAY—A dry day apart from the inevitable occasional showers—Tom set off on a trip to Leyton Green on the number 55. He picked it up at Oxford Circus, having got there on his favourite number 6 from Willesden. The number 55 proceeded through Holborn and Clerkenwell to Shoreditch. Tom hardly knew these places and found them shabbier than he expected, with the exception of Shoreditch, which had been much smartened up and seemingly filled with trendy shops and restaurants.
The bus might be full of schoolchildren in an hour’s time, but now it was half-empty. From the laughter and shouting, a lot of young people appeared to be upstairs, but Tom never now went to the upper deck; he preferred to be downstairs at the front on the right, where his fellow travellers were mostly women and a few girls.
One young man did get on, though, as the bus moved into Hackney; or Tom thought it must be Hackney. To find his bearings when in an unfamiliar district, he usually looked at the newsagents’ shop fronts or a post office or a police station where lettering over the front entrances told the observer that this was Clapton News or Islington Central Post Office. But he saw no clues of that sort as the bus proceeded along wide streets and shabby, narrow ones, heading for where he had no idea.
The young man who had got on at the possible beginnings of Hackney stayed downstairs and settled himself on the left-hand side in a seat next to the window. Tom had expected him to go to the upper deck, but he hadn’t. Black-haired, beardless, and with very white skin, he carried on his back what Tom would have called a satchel. He kept it on his back as the bus went on into what a post-office sign told Tom was Clapton.
At the next stop, a crowd of women and children got on and the young man got off. Most of the mothers and children went upstairs, and those who remained went to the back of the bus, where you could sit facing each other. Tom then saw that the young man had left his bag behind, on the floor, pushed into the corner. It no longer looked like a simple satchel but rather more threatening—a container for something dangerous. It would be hard to say what suggested this; it might only have been that its shape gave the impression of having something heavy and metallic inside. A heavy metal zip went all the way round it. Tom didn’t like the look of it at all.
He went up to the driver and told him about the bag, told him about the young man who had got off, leaving it behind.
“It’ll go to the lost-property department,” said the driver.
“Yes, but that won’t be for several hours. It ought to be dealt with now.”
“I tell you what. I’ll have it taken off and left in the garage when we get to Leyton Green.”
With that Tom was expected to be sat
isfied. But he wasn’t. He admitted afterwards that he had been thinking of his own skin just as much as the children eating ice-cream cornets in the backseats of the bus, and the noisy young people upstairs. He didn’t select the place where he got off with the bag; it just happened to be beside a patch of open space, where people were strolling about under the trees and someone was picking chrysanthemums. Tom had once told a woman to leave the flowers alone and got a mouthful of abuse.
He carried the heavy bag up to the railings and set it down on the pavement. Things happened fast after that. He was a little way away from it, back at the bus stop reading the timetable up on the post, when with a huge, blinding flash and a roar, the sinister black bag exploded.
When Tom came to, he was lying on the pavement and a woman and a small boy were beside him, both prone. The woman was bleeding, Tom couldn’t see where from, only that she was alive. The boy struggled to sit up, then get to his feet. Blood was pouring from his left arm.
Tom felt for his mobile phone, but it wasn’t needed; he could see three other people on their phones. Somewhere a siren was braying. It seemed to belong to an ambulance that roared to a halt at the bus stop. The paramedics tumbled out. Tom was amazed by the speed with which they had got there, and then by the arrival of a second ambulance, and one police car after another. Holding on to the bus-stop pole for the support he suddenly needed, he watched the police holding the uninjured people back from the place where the bomb had gone off; the place where he’d put it. The woman and the boy with the bleeding arm were already being loaded onto stretchers. He looked away as another woman on a stretcher was covered with a white sheet, which meant death.
A paramedic was telling him he must get into the proffered wheelchair and be taken to hospital when a policeman interrupted them and asked him if he had seen what had happened.
“He’s a hero,” said the woman who’d been with the small boy. “I saw him carry that bomb thing off the bus. He saved all the people on the bus.”
Tom was dreadfully embarrassed.
“Is that a fact, sir?” said the policeman.
“Well, yes. I suppose so. I’m not a hero, though. I’m going to get on the next bus.”
“Not yet,” said a paramedic. “Your leg is bleeding and your right arm doesn’t look too good. Come along, into the chair, and we’ll get you seen to.”
So the wheelchair was unfolded and Tom was put into it much against his will. Sitting down, he could see a wound in his knee and blood leaking from his arm. The paramedic, pushing him to the second ambulance, said, “You were very brave. If that had gone off a couple of minutes sooner, it’d have blown you to kingdom come.”
Lifted into the ambulance, Tom looked back at the scene. Most of the people had been picked up from the pavement, but signs of them remained, blood lying in shallow pools. He wanted to go home.
31
“ONE GOOD THING has come out of it, though,” said Dot Milsom on the phone. “This ghastly bomb has put an end to all his junketing about on buses.”
“You ought to be proud of him.” Lizzie was still at an age to enjoy setting her parents against each other. “He was amazing. A hero—that’s what people are saying about him. Where is he now?”
“He was brought home last night. I suppose you’ll come over and see him?”
“I will tomorrow. I have a dinner date tonight. Say hello to him for me.”
“I know it’s trendy to say that, but wouldn’t it be a lot nicer to send your love?”
But Lizzie had put the phone down.
Adam Yates, her basenji date from the clinic, had been to the Iverson Road flat several times by now. He said he liked it, and that she was lucky to have a self-contained place of her own. He owned a flat in Tufnell Park, and although he made little of it, he couldn’t disguise its considerable size and pleasant, leafy location. This evening, she thought, he would come back with her, and this time—would he stay?
In half an hour’s time he was calling for her and they were going to the Tricycle Theatre, just down the road. You didn’t dress up for the Tricycle, but it wasn’t jeans and Primark tee-shirt wear either, so Lizzie put on her best black trousers and a white shirt with a cardigan. Reviewing her conversation with her mother, she liked the idea of inviting Adam to one of her family dinners, but first she must take all that stuff belonging to Dermot McKinnon to his old flat in Falcon Mews. Perhaps she could do it one night next week, before she went to visit her parents?
The front doorbell rang absolutely on time. No previous boyfriend had ever been so punctual. The trouble was that she still felt fearful when someone rang the bell, after what had happened with Redhead and Scotty.
As she went to answer the door, she thought, I’ll tell Adam how I feel and then tell him the whole story. He won’t be like Gervaise Weatherspoon; he’ll believe me.
CARL SLEPT WELL that night but awoke next morning to a weight of dread that shaped itself into sickness. He could eat nothing, drink nothing, not even coffee. He waited for Sybil’s footsteps on the stairs, holding his breath. They sounded, a heavy clumping, and then came the front door’s banging with more of a crash than usual.
Nicola went to work. She’d told him she would be late home because she was going out in the evening with two of her old flatmates, and the boyfriend of one of them. Carl had been asked but he had said no, he was sorry but he didn’t feel up to it. She said good-bye to him that morning with more than usual tenderness and love, and he was sure this was due to that convincing lie he had told. Perhaps he should lie to her more? But, no, he had only a few hours left if he was to do what he meant to do. And he must.
Sybil was asking to die as Dermot had, another thing the two had in common: a propensity to invite their own death. But this death couldn’t come from the stairs or a fall from a window. Instead, some impulse sent him up to the bathroom and the store of alternative medicines his father had accumulated.
The fifty capsules of the DNP that Stacey had not purchased were in the front of the cabinet and behind them too was the powder-to-liquid variety in sachets. It said on the box that the sachets should be dissolved in water and then drunk down. This was what Carl was looking for. Offering Sybil the DNP powder would be no more murder than selling DNP to Stacey had been. The last thing he had wanted was to kill Stacey, but he wanted this concoction to kill Sybil.
But had Sybil read the coroner’s report in the newspaper? Would she know about DNP? Probably not. Sybil didn’t impress Carl as the type who would read much of any newspapers, including the tabloids.
Carl took the box of sachets down to the kitchen, opened one, and dropped the contents into a glass of water. It turned bright yellow. This, he told himself, was just a trial run: now he knew how it reacted. He found a leaflet inside the box, which stated that DNP was for rapid weight loss. That it was a dangerous drug, likely to cause death if taken in large quantities, was mentioned at the end in small print. The only difficulty now, he thought, was how to get Sybil to take it.
If Nicola came upon it, she would know what it was. She must never see it. But she wouldn’t be home this evening before about ten, and by that time the deed could be done. Sybil would arrive home between five thirty and six, and he must catch her in the hallway and make some friendly overture to her, using Nicola’s absence as his reason for such unlikely behaviour.
At lunchtime he went out. Nicola had left him some money, a twenty-pound note, and although he knew she had meant it for food, he spent it on two bottles of wine and fed himself from the fridge, bread that he toasted and the end of a piece of cheese. Before Sybil was due home, he placed a couple of DNP sachets on the hall table on top of the leaflet on which he stood the glass he had used. She came in at ten minutes to six, and ten minutes later he found her standing over the table, reading the leaflet. His heart thumped.
“I’m glad I’ve caught you. I wanted to ask you in for a drink; it doesn’t have to be alcohol. Nicola’s away for the evening, you see, and I wanted some company.�
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She looked him in the face, puzzled. “Well, OK, I don’t mind.”
“I thought it would be a good idea for us to try to be friends. I know we haven’t been on very good terms, but that ought to change, don’t you think?”
Astonishingly, she seemed to believe him. “I’ll just go up and leave my stuff.”
He went back into the living room, but came out after a minute to see if she had taken the sachets on the table. She hadn’t. Would she ask him about them? He could only wait and see.
She returned more quickly than he expected, having changed her tee-shirt and cardigan for a fussy pink blouse with a frill round the neck and her boots for court shoes from which her feet bulged. Was she trying to look attractive for him? He found that disgusting. He offered her Nicola’s breakfast orange juice; it was all he had of the soft-drink kind.
“You’re having wine, aren’t you? I’ll have some of that,” she said, evidently not as abstemious as Dermot had been.
Carl handed her a glass of the pinot grigio he had bought that afternoon.
She took it without a word, then said, “Haven’t you got any nibbles?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“You want to get some in. I shouldn’t have them, though. I don’t want to put on any more weight.”
Again he felt that thump of the heart. Should he mention the sachets and the leaflet in the hall? Better not. “Snacks between meals aren’t a good idea.” He could hardly believe he had uttered such a sentence. “Are you on a diet?” was the nearest he would get to touching on the substance and the directions in the hallway.
“I like my food too much for that.” She drank a long draught of her wine. “Does wine put weight on you?”
“I don’t know, Sybil.”
“Give me a fill-up, will you?” He did, willingly, now that he could sense the question that was coming. “What’s that stuff out in the hallway?”
