by Ruth Rendell
Before getting on the plane home on Monday morning, she bought an English newspaper. It was, of course, a paper from the day before, the Sunday Telegraph, and there she read that the dead man, victim of a murderer becoming known as the Cinema Slayer, was Jeffrey Leach.
Most people, however tough and however experienced, feel some pang, frisson, or tremor of nostalgia on learning of a former lover’s death. Natalie had never loved Jeff but she’d liked him, enjoyed his company, and admired his looks, even when quite aware he was using her. In the prime of life, he had met a horrible death at the hands of some madman. Poor old Jeff, she said to herself, what a thing to happen, poor old Jeff.
That horrible death must have taken place no more than an hour or so after his leaving her in Wellington Street. Sitting in the aircraft, that morning’s paper delivered to her and on her lap, Natalie remembered, as they left the restaurant, how Jeff had asked her to go to the cinema with him. If she’d gone, would things have been different? Maybe she’d have chosen a completely different cinema to go to. But another possibility was that she’d have been killed too.
The someone she’d told Jeff she was very happy with was at Heathrow to meet her. They had lunch together and Natalie told him all about it. A journalist himself, though of rather a different kind, he saw what she meant when she said there might be a story in it. “Poor Jeff looked a bit funny when I talked about this Zillah woman. Guilty, I felt. Well, maybe not so much guilty as having something to hide. There’s been something fishy going on. I’m wondering if they were never divorced at all. That would be just like Jeff.”
“It’s easily checked.”
“Oh, I shall check it. Never fear. I’ve already put my researcher on to it. I called her on the flight.”
“You are a fast worker, my love.”
“But first I think I’ll be good and contact the bill and tell them Jeff had lunch with me last Friday.”
Natalie wasn’t alone in believing something fishy had been going on. The investigating officers had never been satisfied by Zillah’s explanation of the letter she had written to Jeffrey Leach. The word he had used to her on some unspecified visit he’d paid to Abbey Gardens Mansions when he’d stolen her credit card wasn’t “cow,” whatever she might say. Zillah Melcombe-Smith wouldn’t be fazed by that. And she had been fazed, she’d been very frightened. Such a woman, doubtless, seldom wrote letters to anyone, she wasn’t that sort; but she had written to Leach under great pressure of-what? Guilt? Extreme fear? Terror of some sort of discovery? Perhaps all those.
When they interviewed Natalie they were glad to be further on with piecing together the ways Leach had spent the day prior to his cinema visit. And she was able to contribute to the history of him they were starting to compile, something of his past. That, for instance, he’d been newly married when he’d first lived in Queen’s Park, that besides his wife there had been many women before her, all owning their homes and able to keep him. Natalie told them things they already knew about Fiona Harrington and Zillah Melcombe-Smith and something they didn’t know: that when she split up from Leach rather more than a year before he had moved back to Queen’s Park, this time to Harvist Road, and there doubtless had found himself another woman. They returned to their scrutiny of the letter.
Mrs. Melcombe-Smith had remarried in March. Her divorce had taken place in the previous spring. Or so she said. There were children involved, questions of custody and child support, so the divorce could hardly have been a simple, quick affair. If the word Leach had used to her had aroused so much terror, might it not perhaps have something to do with that divorce, some factor that had come out in the proceedings or resulted from the process? To check would be easy and uncomplicated, starting with January of the previous year and going on from there.
The sergeant’s wife still had a copy of the Daily Telegraph Magazine in which Natalie Reckman’s piece had appeared; she was one of those people who seldom throw anything away. He hadn’t looked at it the first time round but he did now. He read with particular interest the passage where Natalie wrote that Mrs. Melcombe-Smith appeared to have lived the first twenty-seven years of her life in jobless, manless isolation in Long Fredington, Dorset. No mention of a former husband, no talk of children.
Both those Melcombe-Smiths were behaving oddly, to put it mildly. No one could be found who had seen the MP in Fredington Crucis on Friday or Saturday, but two people had told the local constable that his distinctive car, which he always left parked outside the front door of Fredington Crucis House, wasn’t there after 9 A.M. on Friday. The postman who delivered a package at 8:45 A.M. on Saturday took it away again because no one answered the door. Irene Vincey, coming in to clean half an hour later, found the house empty and no sign that Jims’s bed had been slept in.
No porter at Abbey Gardens Mansions had seen him between midday on Thursday and Sunday afternoon. The most damning thing for Jims was when the manager of the Golden Hind in Casterbridge called to say that Mr. Melcombe-Smith had canceled his table reservation for lunch and someone had told him this was information to interest the police. A man called Ivo Carew, the chairman of a cancer charity, reluctantly confirmed this, using a few choice epithets about the Golden Hind manager.
With no idea of what might lie in store for him, Jims made a speech in the Commons about the Conservatives being the party of old-fashioned values but new-fashioned kindness, consideration, and true freedom. Quentin Letts quoted it in the Daily Mail (wittily and with a few snide comments) and rumors began running around the Palace of Westminster that the member for South Wessex was tipped for an under-secretaryship. Shadow, of course, which rather reduced the glory.
Jims thought the police fools, anyway, and probably too much in awe of him, landed gentry as he was, to trouble him again. He was so young, so good-looking, and so rich. That night he dreamed a new version of a dream he’d sometimes had in the past, but this time when he came down the steps of Number Ten Downing Street to the waiting cameramen he had Zillah on his arm, the youngest and most beautiful First Lady in living memory. God was in His heaven, thought Jims, and everything more or less right with the world.
Chapter 19
ZILLAH RATHER SURPRISED herself by discovering how little she cared about Jerry’s death. Could she ever have loved him? It made the years she’d spent more or less with him seem a waste of time. Of course, she’d got the children out of them, there was that. Back into the routine of driving them to and from their schools, she felt a sublime indifference toward everyone but herself and them. With a free morning before her to do as she liked, she put the police out of her mind, she even forgot Jims and the difficulties he seemed deliberately to create for her, and reveled in just being alone for three hours. She celebrated by buying a Caroline Charles dress and a Philip Treacy hat to wear at a royal garden party.
Whenever she bought clothes, Zillah formed a picture in her mind of herself wearing the new garment in some particular, usually glamorous, scenario. Sometimes she would be accompanied by a man-up until she married him it was often Jims-and sometimes, very occasionally, by her children dressed in equally ravishing outfits. It was an innocent form of fantasizing that gave her a lot of pleasure. As she alighted from a taxi in Great College Street, the rosebud-sprigged dress in a bag in one hand, the pink straw hat in a bandbox, she was imagining herself on a sunny lawn with a glass of champagne in her hand. She had just curtsied with exceptional grace to the Queen and was listening to the admiring words of a young and handsome hereditary peer who was obviously deeply attracted to her. The events of the past few days had almost been erased from her mind.
It was twenty past eleven. She just had time to go up to flat seven, hang up the dress, put the hat away, and have a quick cup of coffee before driving off to fetch Jordan. She ran up the steps to the art nouveau double doors, pushed them open, and tripped into the foyer. There, sitting on one of the gilt and red velvet chairs, was the journalist who had been so rude to her and had written that horrible piece
for the Telegraph magazine.
Zillah could hardly understand how a woman would choose to wear the same black suit on two consecutive visits to the same person. And not even vary her shoes or her jewelry. That same curiously shaped gold ring was on her right hand. “Were you waiting for me?” She barely paused in her rush to the lift. “I have to go out again immediately to fetch my son from school.”
“That’s quite all right, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith. I’ll wait.”
Zillah went up in the lift. While she was hanging up the dress she thought maybe she ought to have asked the woman-Natalie Reckman was her name, how could she have forgotten even for a moment?-to come upstairs and wait for her. But journalists really weren’t the sort of people to leave alone in one’s home. They might do anything, pry into one’s private drawers, read one’s letters. They were worse than Malina Daz or, come to that, poor Jerry. She no longer fancied coffee. A brandy would have been more beneficial but she wasn’t going to start down that road. Instead of returning to the foyer, she went all the way down in the lift to the basement car park, and fifteen minutes later had picked up Jordan and brought him back.
It was now half an hour since she’d seen Natalie Reckman and she was tempted simply to carry on with her day as if she hadn’t seen her. She microwaved a couple of chicken nuggets for Jordan’s lunch, poured him a glass of orange juice, and sat him at the table. While she was making herself a sandwich the house phone rang. The porter’s voice said. “Shall I send Miss Reckman up, madam?”
“No-yes, I suppose so.”
The journalist might not have changed her outfit, but her manner had undergone a transformation. Gone was the cool intellectual approach and in its place a warm friendliness. “Zillah, if I may, I’m very anxious to have another chat with you. It’s so good of you to see me.”
Zillah thought she hadn’t had much choice. “I was just going to have my lunch.”
“Nothing for me, thank you,” said Natalie, as if she’d been asked. “But I wouldn’t say no to a glass of that delicious-looking orange juice. Is this your little boy?”
“That’s Jordan, yes.”
“He is so exactly like his father, the spitting image.”
Zillah tried to remember if there had been any photographs of Jerry in the papers, apart from the one she took of him with baby Eugenie, but she was sure there hadn’t been. He’d never allowed anyone to take his picture. “Did you know my-Jerry-that is, Jeff?”
“Very well indeed at one time.”
Natalie was sitting down now, nursing her orange juice. Her tone was subtly changing again and her manner sharpening. She gave Zillah one of the searching stares that had been so much a feature of her previous visit. “How otherwise do you think I knew you’d been married to him and had two children? You did read my article about you, Zillah?”
“Oh, yes, I read it.” Zillah took a hold on her courage. “If you want to know, I thought it very unkind.”
Natalie laughed. She drank the juice and set the glass on the table. It was rather too near Jordan for his taste and he pushed it out of his way with a petulant shove. The glass fell onto the floor and broke. He let out a howl of dismay and, picked up by his mother, beat his fists against her chest, shouting an emotional demand he hadn’t given expression to for weeks, “Jordan wants Daddy!”
Rather in the manner of a social worker, a children’s officer perhaps, Natalie shook her head sorrowfully. She got down on her knees and began picking up broken glass.
“Oh, leave it!”
Natalie shrugged. “As you like. I only read of your husband’s death yesterday. I’ve been in Rome, working.”
What did she care? She set Jordan down on the floor with a box of bricks and two miniature cars but he immediately got up and ran to her, embracing her knees with sticky hands. Then Zillah took in what Natalie had said. “He wasn’t my husband.”
“Are you sure?”
Zillah forgot the stickiness on her legs, the pool of orange juice on the floor, the mess on the table, the time, Jims, her new dress and hat-everything. A cold shiver, like an ice cube dropped on the back of her neck, ran down her spine. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well, Zillah, it’s a funny thing but I spent a long time yesterday, I and my assistant actually, looking through quite a lot of records. We were trying to trace your divorce from Jeff, and the extraordinary thing was that we couldn’t find it.”
“What business was it of yours, I’d like to know?”
“Goodness, your teeth are chattering-are you cold? It’s very warm in here.”
“I’m not cold. Oh, for God’s sake go and play with something, Jordan. Leave Mummy alone.” Zillah lifted up a white face in which frightened eyes glittered. “I asked you what business you had to go rooting through my private affairs?”
“Do you really think your affairs, as you quaintly call them, are so private? You’ve been in all the papers. Don’t you think your readers have a right to know what you get up to?”
“You journalists are all the same, you’ll do anything and say anything. Now I’d like you to go, please.”
“I shan’t be staying much longer, Zillah. I was just hoping you could help me, perhaps give me a firmer date for when your divorce actually took place. I-and, incidentally, the police-had the idea it was some time last spring but that doesn’t seem to be so.” Natalie had no idea whether the police were pursuing the same line of inquiry as her own and it was only by chance that she was correct. “Still, I’m sure you can set us right. Was it perhaps the year before?”
Jordan sat on the floor and began howling like a puppy. “I don’t remember the date.” Zillah was driven beyond exasperation now. She wanted to scream and afterward hardly knew how she’d controlled herself “You just have to accept it. What’s it to do with you, anyway?”
“It’s in the public interest. Hadn’t you thought of that? You’re-er, married to an MP, you know.”
“What do you mean, ‘er, married’? I am married. My first husband is dead.”
“Yes,” said Natalie, above Jordan’s squalling. “I’d noticed. I’ll get out of your hair now. There seems to be something wrong with your little boy. Isn’t he well? I’ll let myself out.”
Going down in the lift, she remembered how, a few years back, she’d been in some American city in the Midwest where she’d interviewed a police chief. She was talking to him about crime statistics, various kinds of crime, and she’d asked him about some woman she’d heard of who’d remarried without first being divorced.
“Lady, we have nine murders a week in this city,” he’d said, “and you’re asking me about bigamy.”
But would the police here take the same attitude? Hardly. Jeff had been murdered and his wife or whatever she was had married an MP. Natalie decided not to write anything yet, for she was very much alive to the risks involved in saying in print that Zillah wasn’t legally married, just in case it turned out that she was. Some day soon she’d write a magazine piece about all Jeff’s women; it would be quite sensational. But first she had to go and talk to the Violent Crimes Task Force and at the same time make sure she got in with her exclusive story before anyone else did. In a thoughtful frame of mind she took a cab home.
Zillah had always deplored and clicked her tongue over those people who were up in court for cruelty to children. They belonged, she’d believed, to a different breed from herself. Now, walking up and down with her heavy, screaming, damp child in her arms, as if he were three months rather than three years old, she began to understand. She’d have liked to throw him out of the window. Anything to stop that noise and stem those ever-ready tears.
As she paced, she told herself over and over that things would be all right, it was all right now, because Jerry was dead. You couldn’t be a bigamist if your husband was dead and you’d married again. It was really only a matter of having said she was single when in fact she was a widow, or was soon to be one. She’d never actually said she was divorced until today, she just ha
dn’t mentioned Jerry at all-had she? She didn’t have to be divorced if her husband was dead. Anyway, none of it was her fault. It was these journalists poking their noses in where they weren’t wanted. And the main thing was she was a widow now, or would have been if she hadn’t married Jims.
To her surprise, Zillah found that Jordan had fallen asleep. He looked lovely when he was asleep, pink-flushed rosebud skin, incredibly long dark eyelashes, damp curls clustering across his forehead. She laid him down on the sofa and eased his shoes off. He rolled away from her and stuck his thumb in his mouth. Peace. Silence. Why had she agreed to get married in that fancy crypt place? Why had she wanted to? She couldn’t remember. Somehow it wouldn’t be so bad if she and Jims had fixed it up in a hotel or a town hall. In a place like that she wouldn’t have had to hear those awful, or perhaps she should say awesome, words. Yet they hadn’t seemed awe-inspiring at the time, she hadn’t really taken them in, she’d been thinking about her dress and what the newspaper photographs would be like… As ye shall answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed, that if either of ye know any just cause or impediment why ye should not be so joined, ye are to declare it. And then there came a bit about as many as are married without declaring it weren’t really married at all, neither is their matrimony lawful. Jims would kill her if he found out his matrimony wasn’t lawful. But it must be lawful, Zillah thought, this unhappy merry-go-round circulating in her head, because her husband was dead and if he hadn’t been dead in the middle of March he soon was, only a few weeks later.
She had to wake Jordan to take him with her and meet Eugenie from school. He whimpered and whined. He was wet too. She took his jeans and underpants off. There was a big smelly stain on Jims’s cream silk sofa. It was terrible having to put a three-year-old into a diaper but she didn’t dare not to. On the way back she’d stop at a chemist and do something she’d sworn she never would do, buy a pacifier to stuff in his mouth. And then she must phone her mother.
