by Ruth Rendell
“Of course we were. That’s why I said that was the first I’d heard of it. Minty had the ashes in a box on the shelf for months, but I noticed they’d gone. She’s just told me she got lost in the cemetery looking for Winnie’s grave. White roses she’d bought because she said her auntie was fed up with tulips. What d’you make of that?”
“We’ve always said Minty was peculiar, Sonn. Remember all that stuff about ghosts?”
Minty had for a moment forgotten all that stuff about ghosts. She went back into her kitchen and through to the living room thinking about Gertrude Pierce and the washing and the evil-smelling clothes she’d brought to be dry-cleaned. In the doorway she stopped. Two women were standing between the fireplace and the sofa, Auntie and an old bent person with a humped back and a witch’s face. Minty couldn’t speak. She stood there on the threshold, still as one of the cemetery statues, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again they were still there.
“You know very well that wasn’t my grave, was it, Mrs. Lewis? You put those roses on a stranger’s grave. How d’you think that makes me feel? Mrs. Lewis was disgusted.”
Auntie had never talked like this to her while she was alive, though Minty had often thought she’d like to but for some reason had resisted. There had been anger in her eyes, this anger that was now coming out, while she said nice things. Mrs. Lewis stood quite still, not looking at Auntie nor in Minty’s direction, staring at the floor, her gnarled old hands clasped.
“Can’t even manage a word of apology. She never could say she was sorry, even when she was little, Mrs. Lewis. There was never a word of regret passed her lips.”
Minty found a voice. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. There, will that do?” Her tone strengthened, though her fear hadn’t lessened, and the words came out in a throaty croak. “Go away, will you? Both of you. I don’t want to see you again. You’re dead and I’m alive. Go back to where you came from.”
Auntie went but Mrs. Lewis stayed. Minty could see Jock’s face in hers, the same features but wrinkled and aged as if by a thousand years. His eyes had looked like hers, defeated and tired, when they’d been to the racing and the dog he’d put money on came in last. One day he might have come to look like her if the train crash hadn’t taken him. The old woman raised her head. She was less solid than she’d been when Minty first saw her and again she was aware of that mirage effect, the watery waviness that made Mrs. Lewis’s loose cardigan and floppy skirt shiver as in a breeze. They stared at each other, she and Jock’s mother, and she saw that the eyes were not blue as she’d first thought but a dull, cold green amid the wrinkles, each one like a bird’s egg in a nest.
If she turned and walked away the old woman would follow her. For the first time, she wanted a ghost to speak, in the midst of her fear she wanted to hear what kind of a voice Mrs. Lewis had. “Say something.”
As she spoke, the ghost vanished. Not immediately but like smoke disappearing into the neck of a bottle. And then she was gone and the room empty.
Chapter 25
WHEN JIMS ARRIVED in Glebe Terrace, Natalie was waiting for him in a bedroom in a flat on the other side of the street. It belonged to Orla Collins, whom she’d met at the dinner party. Orla had had some qualms at first but these vanished when Natalie explained she was spying on a member of Parliament who’d married his wife bigamously while at the same time carrying on an affair with a man on the opposite side of Glebe Terrace. Thursday was the third evening she’d been there, but she wasn’t surprised he hadn’t turned up the previous night. Even Jims might jib at making an assignation with a lover on his wedding day.
In her own words, Zillah had spilled the beans. When Natalie arrived on Wednesday afternoon she was still in the white suit she had worn for her wedding. “I thought you might not be able to take a photograph of me,” Zillah said, “on account of your union or whatever, so I did a Polaroid.” As Natalie was looking at it, she said, “And now I’m going to tell you everything.”
She had. It was the best story Natalie had secured in fifteen years of journalism. For all that, she didn’t quite dare take Zillah’s word for Jims’s adventures with Leonardo Norton. That would have to be confirmed. She sat in a wicker armchair by the window at Orla Collins’s, eyeing, not for the first time, the photographs Zillah and Jims had taken on their honeymoon. His were of little use to her, for they were only of island views but for a single shot of Zillah bathing in the Indian Ocean. Hers, on the other hand, were a revelation. She admitted to having taken them because even then she felt jaundiced by this mock marriage. Jims and a young man whose face was turned away lay on adjoining recliners, they sat side by side on spread towels on a beach and, best of all, most damning of all, sat at a table alfresco, Jims’s hand resting on the young man’s thigh. It was interesting that Jims was always smiling at him and once into the camera, while Leonardo contrived to hide his face from view. These photographs would make it an easy matter to recognize the MP when he came down Glebe Terrace or stepped out of a car. How would he come? As time passed, as her watch told her seven-thirty, eight, eight-fifteen, Natalie considered the possibilities. Sloane Square was only three stops on the Circle Line from Westminster. He could take the tube and then a cab. Or a cab all the way. Reputedly, he had a large private income. He could drive himself and, since it was past six-thirty, park anywhere on a single yellow line. The idea of a bus Natalie dismissed as too plebeian for the likes of Jims. As for a bicycle…
At twenty minutes to nine he came by the only means she hadn’t considered. On foot. He was even better-looking in the flesh than in the Maldives pictures. Natalie, like many women taking a view never shared by homosexual men, said to herself, What a waste! To her delight, he produced a key from his pocket and unlocked Leonardo Norton’s front door. A blind was down in the window she took to be that of a living room but an upstairs window was uncovered except for an inch or two of curtain showing on either side. Any picture she might take Natalie had grave misgivings about, but she was ready with her camera. Within minutes she almost wished she hadn’t brought it with her, for the shot she got no newspaper editor would dare to use. In the two-foot-wide gap between the curtains Jims and Leonardo were locked in a passionate embrace.
Almost immediately Leonardo, dressed only in a pair of red and white candy-striped briefs, drew the curtains. Natalie remained. She was resolved to stay the entire night in that chair if necessary, eating the sandwiches she’d brought and sipping from the half-bottle of Valpolicella.
But at eleven-thirty Orla wanted to go to bed. “There’s no point in you staying,” she said. “He always stops the night.”
If the police had never reappeared in Holmdale Road, Michelle might have extended her forgiveness of Fiona to forgetfulness. She might have taken the advice Matthew gave her and excused her neighbor on the grounds of her grief, her shock, and the almost unbearable pressure she had been under. After all, she and Matthew had shown their support by accompanying Fiona to the funeral of a man they had both disliked and distrusted. But the police came back on Friday morning to say they’d been unable to find any confirmation of the Jarveys’ presence on the Heath on that crucial afternoon. On the other hand, a car of the same make and color as theirs had been seen parked on a meter in Seymour Place, W1, at the relevant time, and Seymour Place, as they must know, was only a short distance from the Odeon, Marble Arch.
Matthew said, in a cool, almost detached voice, “That was not our car.”
“The witness wasn’t able to take the number.”
“If he or she had, it would not have been the number of our car.”
Michelle, glancing at her husband and then down at her own plump hands that lay in her bulky lap, marveled that anyone looking at the two of them could even momentarily suspect them of committing a crime. A fat (if no longer obese) woman of forty-five who couldn’t climb half a dozen steps without gasping and-as much as she loved him, she had to put it like this-a poor skeleton crippled by his own grotesque phobia. That w
as the last realistic and level-headed thought she was to have for days.
She drew in her breath when the woman asked her, “Can you give us something firmer to establish that you were in your car on the Heath at that time?”
“What kind of thing?” She heard her own voice grown thin and hoarse.
“Or even in Waitrose? The staff don’t remember you there. Well, they remember you”-Michelle thought she detected the suspicion of a grin-“but not which day. Apparently, you often go there.”
The implication was plain, that she and Matthew had purposely planned frequent visits to the supermarket in order to confuse witnesses about the only day they weren’t there.
“And about the Heath, Mrs. Jarvey?”
“I told you, there were other cars there with people in them, but I didn’t know any of them and they didn’t know us.”
After the officers had gone, she clutched hold of Matthew and looked piteously into his face. “I’m so frightened, I don’t know what to do. I thought-I thought, Fiona’s got us into this, she ought to get us out.”
“What does that mean, my darling?”
“I thought, we could ask her to say she saw us on the Heath, she drove up there as soon as she got home-I mean, she could say she got home an hour sooner than she did-and saw us and spoke to us. Or-and this would be better-she could get a friend of hers to say she saw us, someone from down the street, she knows the woman at a hundred and two, I’ve seen them together, and she could-”
“No, Michelle.” Matthew was gentle as always but tough too, as he used to be long ago. “You’d be inciting her to perjury. It would be wrong. And apart from the morality of it, you’d be found out.”
“If she can’t do a little thing like that for us I’ll feel like never speaking to her again.”
“You don’t know. Maybe she would do it. You haven’t tried her-and, Michelle, you’re not going to.”
“Then what will become of us?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Innocent people don’t find themselves in court on a murder charge,” though he was by no means sure of that. “You’re being silly. This is simply hysteria.”
“It is not!” She began sobbing and laughing at the same time. “It’s not, it’s not!”
“Michelle, stop it. I’ve had enough.”
She looked up at him, the tears streaming down her face. “And now she’s made us quarrel. We never quarrel.”
Fiona had returned to work on the previous Monday. People said how sorry they were about Jeff, but those who couldn’t remember his name referred to him as “your friend,” and Fiona thought this reduced him to the status of someone she’d happened to know at college. But she faced more curious glances and inexplicable silences than she would have done if Jeff had died of cancer or a heart attack. Murder marks its victim’s loved ones forever. Fiona knew her name would never again be mentioned among acquaintances without some qualifying phrase defining her as the woman “who lived with that chap who was murdered in a cinema.” Added to this was her bitter regret that she’d mentioned the Jarveys’ names to Violent Crimes. She no longer knew why she had and was driven to the conclusion that, as is often the case in these circumstances, she had come out with it because she had nothing to say, knew nothing, and could think of no real help to offer.
Michelle’s declaration of forgiveness hadn’t been accompanied by much warmth. This quiet, sad woman wasn’t the affectionate and demonstrative maternal creature she’d known, but subdued, retired into herself. Fiona had been into the Jarveys’ house three times since Sunday’s contretemps, so often, she now believed, in the ever-renewed hope that this time Michelle would have changed back into her familiar self, but though perfectly courteous and hospitable, she never had. This Friday afternoon Fiona was there again, using the back door to demonstrate an intimacy she desperately wanted to re-establish. And for a moment it looked as though she was approaching it, for Michelle came out to meet her and kissed her cheek.
Matthew’s manner seemed heartier than usual. It was Michelle, not he, who generally offered her a glass of wine. He fetched a bottle he’d had on ice, filled a glass for her and one for his wife. To her dismay she saw that Michelle’s eyes had filled with tears. “What is it? Oh, what is it? If you cry you’ll have me crying too.”
Michelle made the effort. “The police were here this morning. They don’t believe we were where we said we were that-that day. Someone saw a car like ours parked near the cinema. They want us to prove we were up on the Heath and we-we can’t, we can’t. We’ll never be able to.”
“Yes, you will. I’ll help you. It’s the least I can do. I can’t say I saw you there because the people in my office have already told them I was there till five. But I can find someone who’ll say it. I know someone-I mean, I know her well-who lives in the Vale of Health, and she’ll say you were there, I know she will. She’s just the sort of person who’d go to the police and tell them she’d come to offer evidence to support your story. Let me do it, please. I know it’ll work.”
Michelle was shaking her head, but Matthew had begun to laugh as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
Because he was holding his appointments in Toneborough on Saturday morning instead of Friday, Jims had postponed his constituency by twenty-four hours. In spite of an announcement of his marriage appearing in Thursday’s newspapers and the evident loss of police interest in him as a murder suspect, a good many of his fellow Conservatives in the Commons still cold-shouldered him. But the chief whip had said nothing more. That morning, the leader had nodded to him and even managed a slight smile. Jims was beginning to be confident that the people who mattered believed he’d been ignorant of his wife’s marital status when first he married her.
His drive down to Dorset was uneventful. All the roadworks had been completed and the cones and speed limit signs taken away. He reached Casterbridge in time to have a reconciliation lunch with Ivo Carew. Ivo’s sister Kate joined them for a drink and had a good laugh over a little bit of help the two of them, with Kevin Jebb, had given Jims on the previous day. Jims spent the afternoon visiting a retirement home, housed in a neo-Gothic mansion, where elderly gentlefolks of his own political persuasion ended their days in luxury suites. There, he talked to each resident in turn, toured the library and the film theater, and made a little speech-not to encourage them to vote Conservative, which exhortation would be unnecessary, but to vote at all, and he assured them of the comfortable transport available to take them to the polls. Before they sat down to their four-course dinner, he drove to Casterbridge station on the Great Western line, where he picked up Leonardo off the London train.
This was indiscreet. He’d never done it before, but he told himself no one could possibly find out. Of course they wouldn’t dine out together. Jims had brought a cold chicken, a game pie, some asparagus, and a livarot with him. Fredington Crucis House was always plentifully stocked with drink. By the time he got home the cheese was stinking up the car, for it had been a warm day, but this only served to make them laugh companionably. On the following afternoon, after Jims’s appointments were over, they thought they might drive down to Lyme, where Leonardo, a Janeite, wanted to renew his acquaintance with the spot from which Louisa Musgrove jumped off the Cobb.
There was no need to be in Toneborough the next morning until ten-thirty, so they stayed in bed till nine and would have stayed later still but for sounds from outside which alerted Jims. Leonardo slept on. He was accustomed to hearing traffic noise from his bedroom, to voices shouting, taxi engines pulsing, and lorry drivers applying squeaky brakes. So was Jims but not here, not in the grounds of Fredington Crucis House where, if anything awakened him, it would be birdsong. He sat up and listened. Mrs. Vincey’s radio? But no. He’d expressly told his cleaner not to come. Besides, the noise was coming from outside. It was a mingling of voices with a crunching on the gravel drive. A car door slammed. Jims got up, put on a dressing gown and went to a window. The floor-length curtains were drawn but there was a
gap perhaps half an inch wide between them. He put his eye to the gap and leaped back with an exclamation. “Oh, my God.”
Leonardo stirred, turned over, muttered sleepily, “What is it?”
Without replying, Jims threw off his dressing gown, pulled on the jeans he’d changed into the night before and a dark sweatshirt. He went upstairs to the second floor where, at these smaller windows, the curtains remained undrawn. Jims knew that, unless you are staring purposefully, it is almost impossible to see anything from a distance through a window with no light behind it. He advanced on all fours and pushed his head above the sill, up to the level of his nose.
About fifty men and women were outside, some wielding cameras, others with notebooks and recording devices. Their cars were there too and they were leaning against them or sitting inside them with the doors open. A woman, accompanied by two others and a young man, was pouring something from a flask into plastic cups. All were chattering and laughing. Even from this distance Jims could see his drive was already littered with cigarette ends.
It was a dull morning but by no means dark. These small rooms up here had once been servants’ bedrooms and were always rather dim. Still, there was no excuse for what Leonardo did. Entering the room behind him, dressed only in boxer shorts and exclaiming, “What the hell are you doing, crawling about like a dog?” he switched the overhead light on.
A roar went up from the crowd, bulbs flashed and the whole mob surged forward as one, toward the front steps.
The newspaper which had bought Natalie’s story was not one that was normally delivered to 7 Abbey Gardens Mansions. Zillah had put in a special order for it. She woke up very early on Saturday morning, about two hours earlier than usual, happily anticipating the arrival of the papers. On the previous afternoon, having checked that her generous monthly allowance from Jims had been paid into her bank account, she had phoned Moon and Stars Television. They would send a car for her first thing on Monday morning so that she could appear on A Bite of Breakfast. Mrs. Peacock having dismissed herself, Zillah had made an arrangement with the young Iranian girl who cleaned at number nine to stay over Sunday night and be there for Eugenie and Jordan in the morning. At the same time, putting her house entirely in order, she’d fixed an appointment with a child psychiatrist.
