by Ruth Rendell
In newspapers a tremendous story is always followed by a period of anticlimax. The tension cannot be sustained. Some cataclysmic revelation has burst upon the world and there can be follow-ups, but sometimes these are unusable, due to the principal being dead or due to appear in court or missing. But something must be found to fill the gap between the shock and triumph and the next amazing journalistic coup. Natalie had outed Jims and ruptured his discretion, but was chary of writing much more about him while he seemed to be suspected of Jeff Leach’s murder. The time had come to produce a history of Jeff’s life, a catalogue of his women. So far only his wife and the woman he was living with had been publicly named. A stunning move might be to acknowledge that she herself had been among his lovers. She had no inhibitions at all about doing this, and her boyfriend was as hardheaded about things as she. But who else should feature in her story?
She had often thought of “the funny little thing” he had mentioned at lunch the last time they’d met, a woman with a peculiar name. The more Natalie thought about her, the more she remembered. He called her Polo and she lived near Kensal Green Cemetery. It might be a good idea to hunt this woman down. An interview with Fiona Harrington was a must and maybe another with Natalie’s own predecessor. She knew very well that hadn’t been Jeff’s ex-wife but a woman called-she tried for a while to remember her name. It would come back to her. Jeff had talked of her frequently enough, and mostly with bitterness, while he and she were together.
A restaurateur? A doctor? The chief executive of some agency or charity? She’d let her memories of Jeff’s references to this woman and the few sentences he’d spoken about “Polo” lie at the back of her mind. There was no hurry. One day soon she’d delve down into the jumble in there and maybe some interesting things would come to the surface.
Chapter 29
HOUSE-TO-HOUSE inquiries were conducted in the neighborhood surrounding the spot where Eileen Dring had died. Officers called at the Wilsons’ but left as soon as they discovered who Laf was. He’d already told them of his trip to the theater on Saturday night with his wife and their friend from next door, had sent in his report by Sunday evening, as soon as he heard about Eileen’s death on the radio. In it he described how he and Sonovia and Minty had seen the old woman alive, well and awake at five minutes to one on Sunday morning. He talked in more detail to the superintendent in charge of the case, but he said nothing about Minty’s curious behavior in the tube on the way home, her hallucinations and talking to herself. After all, as he said to Sonovia later, she was a friend and you didn’t say things about a friend behind her back. You didn’t, for instance, say she’d had too much to drink.
Minty was at work the first time they called. Sonovia had told them over and over that she would be, but they still called. Getting no answer, they went to the next house, and Gertrude Pierce came to the door. As soon as they told her who they were and what they wanted she called her brother. “Dickie, there’s a woman been murdered at the end of the street.”
Mr. Kroot appeared, hobbling on two sticks. His already pale face drained of color. He had to sit down. Gertrude Pierce gave him something to inhale and something else to swallow for his angina and the police officers wondered if he was going to drop dead in front of them. But after a minute or two he rallied. “You want to put that woman next door through the third degree,” he said in his wavering old voice. “She’s a funny one. Her and her auntie, they’ve not spoken a word to me for twenty years.”
“That’s right, Dickie,” said his sister. “I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d murdered me.”
Jims had taken a taxi up to Park Lane. There he sought out prestigious West End estate agents, handed them the keys to the Abbey Gardens Mansions flat and those to Fredington Crucis House, and requested them to sell both properties. His agent would handle everything. He was going abroad for an indefinite time.
This idea for his future had come into his head on the spur of the moment. In fact, he had no plans and could hardly see beyond the present. He strolled down to Hyde Park Corner and decided to return to Westminster, as he had read MPs living in north London used to do, by walking on grass. Once you could have come all the way from Bayswater through Hyde Park, Green Park, and St. James’s Park, and barely set foot on stone or tarmac. This was no longer quite possible but still he managed to walk on turf and under trees as far as the palace and, having crossed a couple of wide thoroughfares, was once again in a cool and leafy paradise. No one recognized him, no one stared. He thought about never having to set eyes on Zillah again. He thought about the very large sums of money that would accrue to him through the sale of his houses, something in the region of £3 million. Jims wasn’t in need of the money, he had plenty, but it was nice to know it was there and more of it coming in.
After a while he set foot on the bridge that spans the lake and, pausing in the middle, looked from Buckingham Palace on his right to Whitehall, Horse Guards, and the Foreign Office on his left. It hadn’t changed much in a hundred and fifty years, apart from the addition of the London Eye, the great wheel that rolled across the sky behind Downing Street, silver and shining, all spokes and capsules like big glass beads. The sunlight glittered on the water, the weeping trees made deep shadows, swans glided under the bridge, and the pelicans gathered on their island. But the idea of leaving had begun to take hold. He would go abroad. It might be years before he returned. How long before he saw that view again?
On the move once more, he recalled a story he’d heard about a chamberlain at some Oriental court who, inadvertently breaking wind in the presence of the potentate, was so stricken with shame that he fled immediately and wandered the earth for seven years. Jims, however, felt not in the least ashamed, he simply wanted to avoid the argument, recriminations, inquests, speculation, and need to defend himself. “Must,” said the first Queen Elizabeth, “is not a word to use to princes.” Well, “why” and “explain” and “justify” were not words to be used to him. He’d go tonight. The car, of course, must be left for his agent to garage somewhere or sell. He didn’t want to be encumbered by it. The same applied to his clothes. It occurred to him that if he ever wore a suit again it would be purely for the pleasure of admiring the look of himself in the mirror. But really he preferred his appearance to be admired by someone else.
Morocco, he thought, he’d always wanted to go there and for some reason never had. New Orleans, Santiago, Oslo, Apia-all places he hadn’t yet been to. Politics had enslaved him, kept him to the grindstone, stolen all his time. It was over now. As he entered Great College Street from the northern end, Big Ben was striking five. He had never before noticed how sonorous and deep-throated were its chimes and how forbidding. The porter who had done their shopping was standing behind the desk.
“Is Mrs. Melcombe-Smith back yet?” He thought this a cunning way of phrasing it.
The porter said she’d just gone out again. To take “Master Jordan” to an appointment in Harley Street, he thought. Relieved, Jims thanked him. Was there anywhere else in the world where a child of three would still be referred to in these terms except this tiny spot of England, London, Westminster, the environs of Parliament? Pity, really. He liked feudal ways and would soon be leaving even their vestiges behind.
Not quite convinced, he entered the flat cautiously and, finding it as empty as he’d hoped, threw essentials into an overnight bag along with his passport. The estate agent had promised a valuation of the place by the following afternoon. His garage, which had his car keys, would pick up the car at much the same time. They could get on with it, he wouldn’t be here. Quietly, he went down by the stairs and out into the street by the car park. There he hailed a taxi and asked the delighted driver to take him to Heathrow. The first flight going somewhere he’d never been he would take.
As he sat back in the cab, all his worries, his real anguish at hopes blighted and ambition wrecked, vanished like smoke in the wind. At first he couldn’t define the source of his sudden surge of happin
ess and then, all at once, he could. It was called freedom.
Minty had just got out of the bath at six-fifteen when the police came back. The police are nearly as likely to be favorably impressed by cleanliness, neatness, and respectability as anyone else. In almost everyone’s mind, crime is associated with dirt and squalor, with late rising and late retiring, a routineless existence, head lice, drugs of all sorts, blocked drains, and unidentifiable smells-and with bizarre dressing, too, punk hairstyles, body piercing, an excess of leather, boots, and fingernails painted anything but red or pink.
Minty smelled of soap and lavender shampoo. Her fine soft hair, the color of dandelion down and freshly washed, looked windblown. The bath hadn’t cleaned makeup off her face because she had never worn it. She was dressed in pale blue cotton trousers and a pale blue-and-white-striped T-shirt. The house was no less clean than its owner and French windows were open on to a neat if sterile garden.
The police, who were the same pair that had called next door, remained uninfluenced by the ramblings of a paranoid old man. They found Minty transparent and saw that answering the questions put to her gave her no problems. She seemed conspicuously innocent and was, for the only old women in the neighborhood she’d been interested in were Auntie and Mrs. Lewis. One of them had apparently disappeared and the other she had herself got rid of. The name Eileen Dring meant nothing to her, but when they asked if she remembered seeing her on the seat by the flower bed just before one on Sunday morning, she nodded and said yes, because Laf had told her yesterday he and Sonovia were going to say yes, they’d seen her, and she, Minty, had been with them. As it happened, she couldn’t remember at all well just what she had seen at that point, she’d been so angry and at the same time so determined, now that at last she had Mrs. Lewis in her grasp. But if Laf said this Eileen Something had been there, no doubt she had been.
“And then you said goodnight to your friends, went home and maybe straight to bed?”
“That’s right. I locked up and went to bed.” She wasn’t telling them how she’d gone straight out again and found Mrs. Lewis and dealt with her once and for all.
“Did you look out of your bedroom window at all?”
“I expect I did. I usually do.”
“And did you see anyone in the street?”
“Not in the street, I didn’t. Her from Iran opposite, the one who wears the black thing covering her up, all her lights were still on. That lot never goes to bed.”
“Thank you, Ms. Knox. I think that’s all. Unless you can think of anything we ought to know.”
She couldn’t, but still she added a word or two about how wicked murder was and people who committed it ought to be put to death. She was all for bringing back hanging, she said. And that was all. There was no point in telling them about Mrs. Lewis, they wouldn’t believe her, they’d be like Laf and Sonovia. Apparently they were satisfied because they soon went away.
After she’d come back that night, the first thing she’d done had been to wash the knife and her own hands at the same time. Of course she’d had a bath afterward, but she’d have done that whatever time she’d got in. The knife still worried her. It was back in the knife drawer but she couldn’t get it out of her mind, she’d been thinking about it on and off all day while she was ironing those shirts. She pictured it contaminating all the other knives in the drawer. That she’d scrubbed it in detergent and disinfectant-the whole place smelled of TCP, she’d used so much-made no difference. She’d have to get it out of the house. The bins in Harrow Road were full again, she’d noticed on her way home, and the idea of carrying it up Western Avenue or all the way down Ladbroke Grove made her feel nauseous. She remembered how it had been last time, having to wear that dirty knife next to her skin. In fact, the way she thought of it now, not only didn’t she want it near her, she didn’t want it anywhere near her own property, let alone in her clean knife drawer. She wanted it miles away. But could she bear to carry it for miles?
She’d have to. As Auntie always said, the world was a difficult place to live in but it was all you’d got. In some ways she was rather sorry Auntie had gone away. Without Mrs. Lewis, Auntie was okay to have around. She was company. Maybe she’d come back one day. Minty opened the knife drawer and took out the fateful one. She’d thought so much about it and it now loomed so large and important in her consciousness that, like Macbeth, she fancied she saw “gouts of blood” on its blade and dried blood in the crevices where blade joined handle. Ghost juice, that was, not real blood. It couldn’t be so, she’d scrubbed it too thoroughly, but it was as if her eyes knew nothing of what her hands had done. With a little cry of disgust she dropped it on the floor. This only made things worse, for she had to pick it up again and then scrub the floor where for a few seconds it had lain. Everything in that drawer would have to be rewashed and the drawer itself washed, of course. There seemed no end to it and she was already weary.
She wrapped the knife in newspaper, inserted it into a plastic bag and strapped it against her leg. With no idea of where she was going, she left the house and walked up the street to Harrow Road. It was a fine, sunny evening and a lot of people were about. But not in the vicinity of the seat by the flower bed which was cordoned off with blue-and-white crime tape. Minty, who had never seen this sort of thing before, supposed it was something to do with the council clearing up the flower bed, getting rid of all that filthy greasy paper and the fried fish skins and chocolate bar wrappers. It was time it was done. People lived like pigs.
An 18 bus came and she got on it. At the Edgware Road crossing she got off and changed onto a 6 that took her to Marble Arch, and there a number 12. At Westminster, though she had no idea where she was, she could see the sparkle of sun on the river. She walked toward it. The traffic was heavy and the crowds huge. Most of the people were young, a lot younger than herself. They surged, but sluggishly, along the pavements, taking photographs of the tall buildings, stopping to stare over the parapet of the bridge. She’d thought, when first she saw that flash of water, that she could drop the knife into the river, but now she was near it she saw how difficult that would be. And it might be against the law. Minty was always threatened by two disasters when she thought of breaking the law. One was the loss of her job and the other that it would cost her money. Also, lately, she’d been very conscious of people thinking there was something odd about her. Looking at her as if she weren’t normal. Laf and Sonovia had looked at her that way when she’d talked to Mrs. Lewis in the Underground. Of course they couldn’t see Mrs. Lewis, she’d known that. They hadn’t been able to see Jock. It was a well-known fact that some people couldn’t see ghosts. But that was no reason to treat a person as if she were mad. If she went onto that bridge and dropped a long, funny-shaped parcel over and into the water, that was what onlookers would think, that she was odd, crazy, mad.
She wandered along in a westerly direction where the crowd had thinned to not more than a couple of people going into the Atrium and a couple more waiting on the steps of Millbank Tower. It wouldn’t do to get lost. She must stick close to a bus route. At Lambeth Bridge she turned up Horseferry Road. Traffic was dense but the pavements were deserted. Finding herself quite alone and unwatched beside a litter bin, Minty dropped the knife into it and walked quickly away toward the bus stop.
That evening, while Minty was roving Westminster, the police in Kensal Green caught two boys climbing through a window into an abandoned shop. Once it had sold crystals and flower remedies and substances used in ayurvedic massage, but business had never been good and it had closed forever more than a year ago. The windows at the front had been boarded up and so had the door at the back. This led to a little yard enclosed by a high wall, the rear of the house in the street behind, and a temporary structure of chipboard, corrugated iron, and two doors from a demolished house. Although the only access to this yard was by way of a narrow alley blocked by a locked gate, it was full of rubbish, cans and broken bottles, newspapers and crisp bags. Across the back doorw
ay itself a board had been nailed diagonally with another pinned across it, but a small window had been left unboarded and had long since been smashed. The only law-abiding tenant among twelve in the house behind had seen the boys climb in through this window and had phoned the police.
They were children, both under ten. When the two officers found them they were upstairs in a dark little hole of a room where they had lit a candle and spread a brightly colored crocheted shawl on the floor. This served both as something to sit on and keep them off the rough and splintery wood floor, and as a tablecloth. Laid out on it, as for a picnic, were a can of Fanta, two cans of Coke, two cheeseburgers, two packs of cigarettes, two apples, and a box of Belgian chocolates. Although still warm outside, it was cold in here, and the younger of the boys had wrapped a woolly scarf round his neck. Neither officer recognized it but one of them remembered that a long red scarf was missing from the holdall found beside the dead woman. It had been such a feature of Eileen Dring’s habitual winter dressing that a lot of people identified her by it. They took the boys out of the house and back to their homes.
At first neither would say where he lived. A difficulty was that the police are not permitted to question children below the age of sixteen except in the presence of a parent or guardian. Eventually, after a lot of nudging and kicking from his friend, one of them gave his name and address and then, rather defiantly, the name and address of the other. Home for Kieran Goodall was half a housing association house in College Park and for Dillon Bennett a flat in a block on a council estate on the banks of the Grand Union Canal. No one was at home when they reached the street at the intersection of Scrubbs Lane with Harrow Road, but Kieran, aged nearly nine, had a key. The place was dirty, untidy, and furnished with grocers’ boxes, two ancient leather armchairs, and a card table. It smelled of marijuana; the centimeter-long stubs of two joints, still transfixed by clips, lay in a saucer. The woman officer stayed with Kieran while the man phoned for assistance and then drove Dillon home.
