by Ruth Rendell
Sonovia said in a low, grudging voice that she hoped things would be all right now. “We could let bygones be bygones.”
“Say it, Sonn.”
She screwed up her face in agony at the prospect of an apology passing her lips. The words came out one by one and slowly. “I’m sorry. About the dress, I mean. I didn’t mean to upset anyone.” She looked at her husband. “I-am-sorry.”
Minty didn’t know what to say. This was a situation she’d never before been in. Auntie had quarreled with a lot of people but she’d never made it up afterward. Once you stopped speaking to someone you’d stopped for good. She nodded at Sonovia. As if all the words were new to her, as if in a foreign language she learned as a child but never since then used, she said, “Sorry. I’m the same as you. I mean, about bygones.”
The two women looked at each other. Sonovia took a step forward, with a helpful push from Laf. Awkwardly, she put her arms round Minty and kissed her cheek. Minty stood there and let herself be hugged and kissed.
Laf gave a sort of cheer and held up both his thumbs. “Mates again?” he said. “Pals? That’s the stuff.”
“My deah,” said Sonovia, her normal vitality restored, “to tell you the truth, I was actually quite glad to have this outfit cleaned, I should have had it done myself. After I’d let you have it I remembered there was this nasty ketchup stain on the hem.”
“That’s all right,” said Minty. “That soon came off.”
Laf smiled broadly. “So what we want is that you come to the pictures with us tonight. Not Marble Arch, not after that poor chap getting murdered, but we thought Whiteley’s and Saving Grace. How about it?”
“I don’t mind. What sort of time?”
“We reckoned on the five-fifteen showing and then we can all have a pizza afterward. Now, how about a kiss for me?”
The knife she’d wrapped up she put into a carrier bag, one of the anonymous plain blue ones the corner shops gave you, and walked the hundred yards to the bin in Harrow Road where she’d put her stained clothes. But the bin was full to overflowing, as it often was on a Sunday, bags of rubbish all round it, spilling out their contents on to the pavement. Minty wasn’t going to contribute to that, it was disgusting. She went home again and had her lunch, washing her hands before and after she ate it.
She seemed to remember a group of bins somewhere down Kilburn Lane and she walked a long way up there looking for them. In the end she had to make her way quite a distance down Ladbroke Grove, past the tube station, before she found what she was looking for: clean bins and no mess spilling from them. She opened the lid of a bin. It smelled nasty owing to people like Mr. Kroot not wrapping their rubbish up properly. On the top was a bright green Marks and Spencer’s carrier with nothing dirtier in it than something wrapped up in tissue paper, a couple of cereal packets, and an unused loaf of bread still in its cellophane packing. She didn’t too much mind being associated with any of that, so she thrust the knife in its blue bag in between the loaf and the cornflakes, and closed the lid.
On the way back she stopped for a while and looked down over the bridge to the railway track. The tube wasn’t really a tube at all here but underground trains doing this bit of the track above ground, and it was also the main line to places in the west of England. Here, she knew, just down there below her, the local train and the Gloucester express had collided. Many people had died in that crash, including her Jock. One of the trains caught fire and that was the one, she supposed, he’d been in.
He’d been visiting his mother. Minty thought of her as very old and bent, with wispy gray hair, walking with a stick, or maybe someone like Mr. Kroot’s sister. She ought to have been in touch with Jock’s fiancée, ought really to have come to see her. Minty imagined a nice letter from old Mrs. Lewis, saying how sad it was and inviting her to come and stay. She wouldn’t have gone, of course she wouldn’t. The house was very likely dirty and without much hot water. But she should have been asked. Of course, it was plain why she hadn’t been asked. Once she was in that house or even once she’d answered a letter, Mrs. Lewis would have had to give back the money.
It had begun to rain. Minty shook her head at it, though she knew it would take no notice. As soon as she got home she ran a bath. She scrubbed her fingernails and her toenails and Auntie’s voice said, suddenly coming out of nowhere, “Rain’s filthy stuff. It comes down through miles of dirty air.”
Minty said, “When I’m in here I’m private. Leave me alone,” but Auntie took no notice.
“Getting rid of that knife was wise,” she continued. “It was harboring untold millions of germs.” Was Auntie actually addressing her at last? She seemed to be. “I’ve just seen Jock’s mother. You didn’t know Mrs. Lewis was here with me, did you?”
“Go away.” Minty thought she’d die if Mrs. Lewis manifested herself.
The rain was coming down in sheets when she went downstairs. The house seemed empty. It felt cold, the air gray like twilight. Laf came round at four under a big umbrella with palm trees on it and said he’d be taking the car, it was pouring so. God knew where he’d park but he’d do his best. Auntie’s words had upset Minty. Auntie and Mrs. Lewis might come into the cinema. She started feeling nervous. And there was no wood to touch in a cinema, it was all plastic and cloth and metal.
Kind and gracious, proud of her newfound humility, Sonovia went ahead into their row, smiling over her shoulder. “There you are, my deah, you sit between us. You got the popcorn, Laf?”
He had and it was clean and dry, quite fit for Minty to eat. The cinema was filling up, all the seats in front of them occupied. There was no room for Auntie and Jock’s mother. The lights dimmed and suddenly the screen was filled with the bright flashing colors and ear-splitting noises she associated with her banishing of Jock. Minty delicately picked out the smaller pellets of popcorn and relaxed.
When she did get to see Mrs. Lewis she’d ask what had happened to her money and make the old woman answer. Maybe she’d write it down. They never answered when you spoke to them but they might if it was all down on paper. As the big picture started she was planning what she’d write, how she’d push the paper in front of Mrs. Lewis’s face, and it was quite a long time before she lifted her eyes to the screen.
Chapter 18
JIMS GAVE VERY little more thought to what Zillah had told him of the police’s intention to call on him on Monday morning. He’d be at home, so of course he’d see them, it was his duty as a citizen; he’d answer their routine questions and later he’d stroll across to the Commons. Unaccustomed to spending much time at home, he found this Sunday evening almost unbearably tedious. Leonardo had invited him to a gay club, the Camping Ground in Earl’s Court Square, and Jims would have loved to accompany him but knew where to draw the line. Instead, with Eugenie sitting beside him making critical comments, he watched as much of a Jane Austen costume drama on television as he could bear and went to bed early.
Something woke him at four o’clock in the morning. He sat up in bed in his solitary and rather austere bedroom, remembering that he hadn’t spent the entire weekend in Casterbridge and Fredington Crucis, as last evening he had taken for granted and sent to the back of his mind. Now it resurfaced, but in a different form. On Friday afternoon he’d driven back to London to recover the mislaid notes for his hunting speech. And he couldn’t simply tell the police that, because the notes hadn’t been in his own home in Abbey Gardens Mansions but in Leonardo’s house in Chelsea. A faint but consistent sheen of sweat broke out across Jims’s face, down his neck, and across his smooth golden chest. He switched the light on.
They would want to know why those papers were in Glebe Terrace and even if he could somehow satisfy them on that point, would inquire why, having recovered them, he failed to go home and spend the night with his new wife in Westminster. It wasn’t as if she was away somewhere-they knew she was at home because they had phoned her there, as she’d told him last night. They’d want to know why, instead, he’d passed the n
ight under the same roof as Leonardo Norton, of the well-known London and Wall Street stockbrokers Frame da Souza Constantine. Various options presented themselves. He could omit to tell them he’d returned to London. Or he could tell them he had returned in the afternoon, had found Zillah asleep, and-unwilling to disturb her-had recovered the papers and gone straight back to Dorset. Or he could say he’d come home late in the evening, found the papers, spent the night with Zillah, and left again very early in the morning before the police came. This would necessitate Zillah’s lying for him. He thought it likely she’d agree, and the children didn’t count since they’d both have been in bed asleep.
Jims hadn’t much in the way of morals; he was generally unprincipled and unscrupulous and quite capable of telling a “white lie” to the police. But when he thought of asking his wife to lie for him, to tell a detective inspector of the murder squad (or whatever they’d changed its name to) that he had been here when he hadn’t, his blood ran cold. He was a member of Parliament. Last week the leader of the Opposition had smiled on him, patted his shoulder, and said, “Well done!” Other MPs referred to him in the Chamber as the honorable member for South Wessex. The honorable member. “Honor” wasn’t a word Jims often much considered but he considered it now. In his position and capacity, honor was supposed to be attached to him; it was as much invested in him as in any medieval knight or servant of the sovereign. Sitting up in bed, wiping the perspiration off himself with a corner of the sheet, Jims told himself he couldn’t ask someone else to lie for him.
What he’d do was forget all about having come home for those notes. Between now and nine when the police were arriving, it would slip his mind. After all, he hadn’t really needed them and could easily have delivered a successful speech without them. It was only that he disliked going unprepared to any function at which he had to speak. He made an effort to get back to sleep but he might as well have tried to turn time back a couple of days, which he would also have liked to do. At six he got up and found that Eugenie and Jordan had already destroyed the peace of his living room by switching on the television to a noisy and very old black-and-white Western. By the time the police came he was cross and moody, but he contrived to sit on the sofa beside Zillah, holding her hand.
The detective inspector was the same woman who had gone with Zillah to the mortuary. She had another plainclothes officer with her, a sergeant. Zillah asked her if she minded Jims’s wife being present and she said not at all, please stay. Zillah squeezed Jims’s hand and looked lovingly into his face, and Jims had to admit to himself that sometimes she could be an asset to him.
He was asked about the weekend and he said he’d spent it in Dorset. “I went down to my constituency on Thursday afternoon and held my appointments in Casterbridge on Friday morning. At the Shire Hall. After that I drove back to my house in Fredington Crucis and worked on a speech I was making on Saturday evening to the Countryside Alliance. I spent the night there and the following day, made my speech later on, and dined with the alliance. I drove home here on Sunday morning.”
The sergeant took notes. “Is there anyone who can confirm your presence in your Dorset house on Friday, Mr. Melcombe-Smith?”
Jims put on an expression of incredulity. It was one he’d often worn in the House of Commons when some government member made a remark he thought it would become him to regard as ludicrous. “To what are these questions tending?”
He knew the answer he’d get. “They are a matter of routine, sir, that’s all. Is there someone who can confirm your presence? Perhaps a member of your staff?”
“In these degenerate days,” drawled Jims, “I do not have a staff. A woman comes up from the village to clean and keep an eye on things. A Mrs. Vincey. She provides food in the fridge for the weekend when I’m going to be there. She wasn’t there that day.”
“No one called on you?”
“I fear not. My mother spends part of the summer there but mostly she lives in Monte Carlo. She was here, of course, for our wedding”-Zillah’s hand received a squeeze-“but she went back a month ago.”
The police officers looked rather puzzled by this unnecessary information, as well they might. “Mr. Melcombe-Smith, I’m not questioning what you say, but isn’t it rather odd for a young and active man like yourself, a very busy man and newly married, to pass what must have been about thirty hours indoors with nothing much to occupy him but the sort of speech he was well used to making? It was an exceptionally fine day and I believe the countryside around Fredington Crucis is beautiful, yet you didn’t even go out for a walk?”
“You certainly are questioning what I say. Of course I went for a walk.”
“Then perhaps someone saw you?”
“I am unlikely to know the answer to that.”
Later in the day Jims was walking across New Palace Yard toward the members’ entrance. He felt reasonably satisfied with what had happened and was sure he’d hear no more. After all, they couldn’t possibly suspect him of making away with Jeffrey Leach, not him. He had no motive, he hadn’t seen the man for at least three years. In the worst-case scenario, if they found out about his return to London-and they couldn’t-he’d brazen it out, say he’d forgotten. Or give story number four, the one he hadn’t thought of in the small hours, that he’d returned in the night after Zillah was asleep, slept in the spare room so as not to disturb her, and left before she was awake. That would cover everything.
When Michelle told her the murdered man in the cinema was Jeff, Fiona had suffered that momentary loss of consciousness once apparently common in women but now rare. She fainted. Michelle, who a few weeks ago couldn’t have got down to the floor, did so with ease, sat beside her stroking her forehead and whispering, “My dear, my poor dear.”
Fiona came to, said it wasn’t true, was it? It couldn’t be true. Jeff couldn’t be dead. She’d seen a paper which said it was someone called Jeffrey Leach. Michelle told her the police were coming. Would she feel able to see them? Fiona nodded. The shock had been so great, she couldn’t take much else in. Michelle got her onto the sofa, helped her put her feet up, and made milky coffee with plenty of sugar in it. A better remedy for shock than brandy, she said.
“Was he really called Leach?” Fiona asked after a moment or two.
“It seems so.”
“Why did he tell me he was called Leigh? Why did he give me a false name? He’d been living with me for six months.”
“I don’t know, darling. I wish I knew.”
At her interview with the police-the same woman who had taken Zillah to the mortuary and would speak to Jims the next morning-Fiona suffered the beginnings of disillusionment to add to the pain of her loss. That his name was truly Jeffrey John Leach was confirmed, that he was in touch with his former wife, and that he appeared to have had no employment for several years, not perhaps since his student days. The police asked her where she’d been on Friday afternoon and to that she gave very little thought. She could easily name half a dozen people who saw and spoke to her at her merchant bank between three and five. “I wouldn’t have harmed him,” she said, a tear running down her face. “I loved him.”
They examined Jeff’s clothes and what they called his “personal effects.” As a result of watching television programs, Fiona asked tentatively if she would be needed to identify Jeff. They said that wouldn’t be necessary, as Mr. Leach’s former wife had already done so. Fiona found this more upsetting than anything she’d so far heard and she began to sob. Through her tears she made it known that she’d like to see Jeff and they said that could be arranged.
When they’d gone she fell into Michelle’s arms. “There’s never been anyone I felt about the way I did about him. He was the man I’d been waiting for all my life. I can’t live without him.”
Most people would say eight months’ acquaintanceship wasn’t enough for life, and Fiona’s sorrow would pass, but Michelle had known Matthew for only two when she married him and what would she have felt if he’d died? “I k
now, darling, I know.”
Fiona thought how unkind she’d been to Jeff that evening in Rosmarino when she’d told him to save his silly stories for their baby, she was grown-up. She remembered how she’d reproved him for not being as nice as he might have been to Michelle. Oh, why hadn’t she loved him as he’d deserved?
Responsibility for the recycling and rubbish bins in the neighborhood of Ladbroke Grove station was not Westminster’s or Brent’s but that of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The men who came to empty them on Monday regarded anything in them worth having as their especial perks, and discarded goods were generally picked over with an eye to unconsidered trifles.
The green Marks and Spencer’s bag was still fairly near the top of one of the bins and the younger of the recycling men spotted inside it something wrapped in tissue. It looked as if whoever had used it as a waste receptacle-it was sure to be a she, he said scornfully to his mate-had forgotten she had left a newly bought item inside. And so it was. Investigation revealed a pale blue cashmere sweater, which would do admirably as a birthday present for the recycler’s girlfriend.
Something else was in the bag. They unwrapped it. By that time everyone in the country who read a newspaper or watched television knew the police were looking for the weapon used by the Cinema Slayer. This might well be it.
The cemetery desecration made an even better story than Natalie Reckman had expected. Witchcraft appeared to have been involved, and an interview with an English resident in Rome revealed the possibility of satanic rites carried out near the burial place of Shelley’s heart. Building a new theater was a project she thought she might work up into an article if she described what was happening on the Palatine Hill and recommended something similar for London as a sort of follow-up to millennium celebrations. It might be called the Millennium Theatre or even, thought Natalie, her imagination running away with her, the Natalie Reckman Theatre.
