by Ruth Rendell
Michelle, who had been with her every day up until Thursday, hadn’t been back since. She’d have liked to see her, for her next-door neighbor was the only company she wanted. But Michelle, she supposed, had grown tired of comforting a grief-stricken woman and had doubtless run out of things to say.
Fiona marveled at the intensity of her own sorrow. She was as wretched as any widow after a twenty-year marriage. Her heart was broken. In the past she had laughed at the absurdity of this phrase and others like it: heartbreak, heartbroken. “You will break my heart,” her mother had said to her over some minor offense she’d committed while at university. What nonsense. So she’d thought then but now she understood. Her own heart was broken, shattered to bits, and she told herself that since Jeff died she hadn’t been able to feel it beating. When she placed her hand under her left breast there was no fluttering movement, nothing but a dull ache. Sometimes, sitting alone, she worried over this and took her own pulse, not knowing whether to be relieved or not at its gentle regular throb.
Every day the newspapers had a fresh story in them about Jeff. His marriage, his idle life. Fiona swore not to look at these articles but she couldn’t help herself. They’d said everything they could about the murder and now they were on to Jeff’s womanizing activities, his failure ever to have worked for his living, the base advantage he took of women who kept him and were then abandoned. Reading about this brought her an intense physical pain, which fetched little sobs and moans from her. One woman he’d moved in with five years ago had parted with her savings amounting to two thousand pounds, had later lost her job, and was now living on the benefit. Fiona, still believing herself the great love of Jeff’s life, the one to change him, felt she ought to compensate this woman for her losses.
All this added to her grief. Next week she would have to go back to work. She had grounds no longer for staying away. It wasn’t a close relative she had lost, not a husband or partner in a long, steady relationship, not even really a fiancé. That word had become a dirty one to Fiona, who would never again read it on the page or hear it spoken without recalling how Jeff had not given her a ring and had lied to her about their wedding date. That knowledge did nothing to reduce the strength of her love, but it tinged that love, loss, sorrow, with bitterness.
At work they would all, of course, say they were sorry about her boyfriend, what a shock, what a ghastly thing to happen, and that would be it. Until the police caught the person who’d done it, when their sympathy would be revived and her boss would tell her to take the day off. She’d be a curiosity, to be pointed out as the woman whose boyfriend had been murdered. Forever, probably. Fiona imagined herself at fifty, still single, of course, still alone, the middle-aged solitary whom people got to know, wherever she might live, as the cinema victim’s girlfriend.
She forgot to eat. Having shared an almost nightly bottle of wine with Jeff, she could no longer bear the pain of tasting it. A woman who lost weight easily and quickly, she felt her hip bones protruding, her elbows sharp. At this rate-and she managed a wry joke with herself-Matthew would want her on his program. If only Matthew would come to her! If only Michelle would come! The phone had stopped ringing. Something hindered her from lifting the receiver and making a call herself; she couldn’t physically perform the actions. As for going to them, she had a vision of herself stepping out of her front door, ringing their bell, and, when the door opened, being stared at as if they’d never seen her before, as if she were some stray caller wanting to promote a product or give away a tract.
At night she took sleeping pills, Temazepam. They sent her to sleep but it was an uneasy sleep and full of dreams. Always of Jeff. In one he came back from some foreign trip he’d been on. She’d thought he was dead and felt boundless joy at their reunion, as he promised he’d never go away again. Waking to reality was one of the worst experiences of her life.
The newspapers continued to be delivered and thrown into the recycling bin. She’d need to take it out to the street one day before it got too heavy to lift, but she’d have to leave the house on Monday anyway, somehow get herself to the tube and the City and London Wall. Taking the papers from the doormat on Saturday morning, though hating them, though determined as ever not to look, she caught sight in the front-page photograph of a woman she recognized. It was, surely it was, Jeff’s ex-wife.
Only she wasn’t his ex-wife. They’d never been divorced. Fiona felt a shaft of intense pain run through her body as if she too had been stabbed with a long, sharp knife. She was indifferent as to whether Zillah Melcombe-Smith had knowingly committed bigamy or not. Jeff had lied again and this lie was infinitely worse than telling her he’d booked a wedding date when he hadn’t. He couldn’t book a date, as he was married already.
Fiona dropped the paper. She lay facedown on the hall floor in an agony of grief and, strangely, shame.
“I shall sue these trashy rags for libel,” Jims said when, for five minutes, Violent Crimes left him alone with his solicitor. He had completely forgotten deriding Zillah for making much the same threat.
“Have you got a million pounds to spare?” Damien Pritchard was a little older than his client, but not unlike him to look at, being also tall, dark, classic-featured, and gay. “A million you wouldn’t mind dropping down a drain or giving to a beggar?”
“Of course I haven’t. I wouldn’t need to. I’ll win.”
“Oh, please. Do me a favor. Let me tell you something. A solicitor came to live next door to my parents when I was a kid. I’ve always remembered my father saying to my mother, he’s a lawyer, don’t touch his ears. Actually, I think it had a lot to do with making me want to be one. Well, the same goes for newspaper editors. Don’t touch their ears.” Damien shook his head in exasperation. “And now, can’t you really come up with a better alibi than what you expect the Plod to swallow? Oh, God, here they are, coming back.”
Jims could, of course, improve on his alibi. He could have told the truth. But that seemed almost the worst thing he could do and its results the worst that could happen to him. Once more he sat down at that bare table with Damien next to him and Violent Crimes and Miss Demeanor facing them. They all sat in the kind of chairs Jims wouldn’t even have had in his garden shed. At least they were still calling him by his surname and honorific, though he wondered how long that would last.
“The difficulty is that no one confirms your presence at Fredington Crucis House during Friday afternoon and evening, Mr. Melcombe-Smith. Two callers at the house noticed that your car was absent.”
“Who?”
“You know I’m not at liberty to tell you that. You still maintain you spent Friday evening there? And stayed over Friday night?”
“My client,” said Damien, “has already told you so. Several times.”
Jims was starting to get cross. “Why would I have killed the guy, anyway? For what possible reason would I have stuck a knife in him?”
“Well, Mr. Melcombe-Smith,” said Miss, or Detective Inspector, Demeanor, “he was married to the lady with whom you’d been through a form of marriage.” She smiled very faintly as Jims winced. “It would have been very much in your interest to have him out of the way, especially if he’d threatened to reveal the truth to, say, a newspaper.”
“So what? Everybody else reveals it. Anyway, he wasn’t blackmailing me. I thought Zillah and he had never been married. I hadn’t seen him for years.” Like many in his position, Jims was anxious to be scrupulous about telling the truth in every area of questioning except one. “Well, two years.”
The words “so you say” were plainly written on the woman’s face. “You came back to London on Friday afternoon, didn’t you, Mr. Melcombe-Smith?”
Jims was silent. He was hesitating. He could feel doubt, a loss of confidence in his friend and client, by some strange means emanating from Damien. Violent Crimes was looking at him. Behind them, on the ocher-colored wall, a crack in the plaster ran from ceiling to skirting board. It was shaped, Jims thought, like the silhou
ette of a man with an erection. He looked away.
Damien, who was a good guy, a real friend in need despite his wavering trust, said softly, “If you don’t mean to charge Mr. Melcombe-Smith, and I don’t think you do, you’re obliged to let him go home now.”
Violent Crimes knew a trick worth two of that. “You drove back to London to fetch something. Something you’d forgotten. I’ve been wondering if it was the notes for your speech to the Countryside Alliance. It’s a coincidence, but the chief constable of Wessex happened to be there.”
Jims tried to remember if he’d referred to the missing notes and his return to retrieve them when he was making that speech. He couldn’t remember. And it wouldn’t matter whether he’d referred to them or not. It was enough that this policeman had the sense, the skill, if you like, to suggest that he had. It didn’t even matter whether it was true about the chief constable. He looked at Damien in despair and Damien said nothing.
“Mr. Melcombe-Smith?”
They contrived by the tone of their voices to make his name ridiculous. Jims thought of appealing to them to keep what he might confess to them a secret. Would they agree? Or should he trust to luck? He considered the procedures he read about in the newspapers that preceded murder trials, or any court cases come to that. The police never told the media how they arrived at arresting someone or charging someone or how they agreed to or exploded alibis. There must be something in law which forbade their doing so. Not for the first time he wished he’d read law instead of history and practiced for a while at the criminal bar.
“Mr. Melcombe-Smith?”
“All right, I did come back to London.” He dared not look at Damien. “I had, as you say, forgotten my notes. I started the drive back soon after one and had something to eat at a-well, a sort of cafe on the A30.” A sound, something between a sniff and a grunt, came from Damien. Or maybe not, perhaps he’d imagined it. “I’m not sure where. They might remember me. The traffic was bad. I didn’t get home till seven.”
It was interesting, almost disconcerting, the way they accepted that up till now he’d lied. They didn’t comment. Neither said, “So you’ve been lying to us” or “Why didn’t you tell the truth before?” It was as if they were entirely used to a kind of endemic mendacity, it was what they expected. Jims began to feel sick.
“So you went home, Mr. Melcombe-Smith?”
Nothing but the truth would do now. “I’d left the notes at a friend’s house.”
“Ah,” said Inspector Demeanor. “And where might that be?”
He gave her Leonardo’s address. Beside him Damien seemed to swell and palpitate, though when he turned to look at him the solicitor was sitting there, immobile and calm. Jims wanted to fall on his knees before them and beg them to say nothing, to tell no one, to accept his word, just as Zillah had wanted to kneel to him. He stayed where he was, his face expressionless.
“And Mr. Norton will confirm what you say?”
The truth once told starts a train of truth. “I didn’t see him until eight-thirty. As I was going out to eat I met him coming in.”
“So you left Casterbridge at-what? Half past one?”
“About that,” said Jims.
“And you reached Glebe Terrace at seven? Five and a half hours to drive a hundred and fifty miles, James?”
Something he’d said, or simply because he’d admitted to lying, had reduced him in their eyes. He’d taken away his own dignity and thereby lost the privilege of being treated courteously. “I know it took a long time,” he said. “I’ve never taken so long before. There were miles of roadworks. That bit took me nearly an hour to get through. Then there was a pile-up near Heathrow.”
They would check, of course, and find it was true. It hardly helped him. “The Merry Cookhouse”-it pained him to utter the words-“where I had lunch was just before the roadworks, if that’s any use.”
“It may be. The relevant time is between 3:30 and 4:30 P.M. Did anyone see you enter the house in Glebe Terrace?”
How could he have forgotten, even for a moment? Relief flooded him. It was like drinking something warm and sweet when in a state of shock. “The woman next door-it’s 56a, I think-she gave me her key.”
“And now,” said Damien, “perhaps you’ll let Mr. Melcombe-Smith go.”
When the phone rang or when someone came to the front door, every time these things happened, Michelle thought it was the police. The joke aspect of being treated with suspicion had gone. She’d got it into her head it would be impossible to find witnesses to her and Matthew’s whereabouts that Friday afternoon and, though she wasn’t usually a nervous woman, she saw them both high on the list of suspects. Miscarriages of justice did happen, people were mistakenly tried and falsely imprisoned. She’d only once encountered the police before and that was when the Jarveys’ car was broken into and the radio stolen.
Matthew did his best to reassure her: “Darling, I think you must believe that when they say an inquiry is routine it is routine.”
“I hated being questioned like that. It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
That made him laugh, but not unkindly. “No, it wasn’t. The worst thing that’s ever happened to you was when you thought I was going to die through my stupid food fads.”
“Not stupid,” Michelle said hotly. “You don’t mean that. You mean your illness.”
“Well, it’s not really fear of being arrested that’s upsetting you, is it? It’s not being suspected of a crime or interrogated, it’s indignation at Fiona’s behavior.”
“More than that, Matthew.” She went close behind the chair where he sat reading the Spectator, and put her arms round his neck. He looked up into her face. “It’s real pain over what she did. I’ll never be able to think of her, let alone speak to her, without remembering what she did.”
He said very seriously, “You’ll have to get over that.”
“Yes, but how? I wish I weren’t the sort of person who remembers forever hurtful things people have said or done. But I am. I do. I don’t like it, I know I ought to forgive and forget. If only I could. I remember unkind things people said to me when I was at school. I mean, thirty years ago, darling. The words they used are as fresh in my mind as when they first said them.”
Although he knew it already, she’d told him before, he said to her in a light, amused tone, “I shall have to be very careful what I say to you, then.”
She was vehement, intense. “You never never say those sort of things. You never have. It’s one of the reasons I love you and go on loving you, because you never hurt my feelings.”
Again he lifted to her his wizened, skeletal face. “Not because I’m so sexy and charming?”
“That too. Of course.” She was entirely sincere, unsmiling. “And the thing about Fiona is, it was true what she told the police, that I disliked Jeff, that I hated him, if you like. I hated him because he said those cruel things. He’s dead and he died in a horrible way, but I don’t care. I’m glad. It won’t matter how I try, I shall never forget the things he said.”
Matthew covered her hands with his. “Not even if you get thin and I get fat?” He knew now that she was trying to lose weight and he supported her, though without admonition for the past or congratulations for the present. “Not even when I’m Large and you’re Little?”
As she was trying to answer him the doorbell rang. Michelle put up her hands to her face, her eyes suddenly bright and staring. “They’ve come back. On a Sunday. They don’t care when they come, they don’t even let us know they’re coming.”
“I’ll go,” Matthew said.
He walked quite quickly these days and could stand almost upright. The bell rang again before he got there. Fiona was on the doorstep, a new, unattractive Fiona, her dirty hair in rats’ tails, her face swollen from weeping, and her eyes red. The trousers she wore were several sizes too big for her and looked like a man’s. A shirt that should have been white, tucked into the waistband, showed how thin the past week
had made her.
“Come in.”
She put her face close to his and kissed him on both cheeks. It was the kind of kiss the recipient isn’t required to return. “I have to see you. I can’t be alone any longer. I’m going back to work tomorrow. I think it will kill me.”
Michelle blushed brightly when they came into the living room. She got up and took two, then three, awkward steps toward the visitor. Matthew wondered what she’d say, if she’d even refer to her contention.
Fiona stepped toward her, they met, and the bereaved woman threw her arms round Michelle, breaking into sobs. “Why haven’t you come to me? Why have you deserted me? What have I done?”
The silence was profound. Then Michelle said, in a voice Matthew had never heard before, “You know what you’ve done.”
“I don’t, I don’t. I needed you and you left me alone. I’ve no one I care about but you. What have I done? Tell me, you must tell me. I swear I don’t know.”
“You don’t know that you told those police people that Matthew and I disliked Jeff? You told them that and now they suspect us? You don’t know that?”
“No, darling, they don’t suspect us,” Matthew said firmly. Fiona had broken into fresh tears. She threw out her arms wildly, her face streaming. “Sit down, Fiona. Come on now, calm yourself. I’ll make some tea.”
“Not until Michelle says she’ll forgive me. I didn’t know what I was doing or saying. I said anything that came into my head. I’d give everything I’ve got to take it back now.”
Michelle was looking at her sadly. “The difficulty is that you can’t take things back.”
“Then say you’ll forgive me. Say it can be as if it never happened.”
“I’ve forgiven you already,” Michelle said dryly and went into the kitchen to switch on the kettle. But I haven’t forgotten, she thought. Why is it so much easier to forgive than to forget?
