by Ruth Rendell
Two more officers from Violent Crimes were waiting for him when he got to Kensal Road. Dillon’s mother was in and with her were her teenage boyfriend, her fourteen-year-old daughter, two other men in their twenties, and a child of perhaps eighteen months. Everyone but the baby was drinking gin with beer chasers and the men were playing cards. Ms. Bennett was rather the worse for drink but she agreed to accompany Dillon and the officers into the bedroom he shared-when he slept there-with his sister, the baby, and a brother, aged thirteen, who was out.
Dillon, who hadn’t said a word in the car and had left what talking there was to Kieran, answered the first questions that were put to him with “Don’t know” and “Don’t remember.” But when asked what he and Kieran had done with the knife, he shouted loudly enough to make everyone jump that they’d dropped it down a drain.
Back in College Park reinforcements had turned up. They and the woman officer and Kieran waited. They were unable to talk to him and he said nothing to them. In silence they wondered. Was it possible that these two children had killed Eileen Dring for a shawl, a scarf, a can of drink, and £140?
It was Laf’s birthday and the whole family was gathered in Syringa Road. Julianna was there, her university term having just ended, and Corinne had come over with her new boyfriend. Daniel and Lauren had brought their daughter, Sorrel, and brought, too, the welcome news that Lauren was pregnant. The Wilsons’ youngest child, Florian the musician, would look in some time after supper.
A question of some importance to them was whether or not Minty should be invited. For the sake of everyone’s working hours, the party had to be in the evening. Minty would be at home.
“I thought it was supposed to be just family,” Sonovia had said.
“I think of Minty as family.”
“If I didn’t know you inside out, Lafcadio Wilson, I’d sometimes think you fancied Minty.”
Laf was shocked. A man with a rigid moral code, he was horrified by even the fringes of adultery. His biggest nightmare (after untimely death) was that one of his children should be divorced. A bit premature, as Sonovia always said, since so far only one of them was married. “Don’t you be disgusting,” he said severely. “You know how I hate that kind of talk.”
Sonovia always realized when she’d gone too far. She said rather huffily, “It’s your birthday. You do as you like. Maybe you’d like to ask Gertrude Pierce as well.”
Not deigning to reply, Laf went next door with the paper and invited Minty to his party.
She responded in her usual way, without enthusiasm, without saying thank you: “All right.”
“It’ll be just the family but we think of you as family, Minty.”
She nodded. It was as if, he thought, she accepted these things as her right. But she offered him a cup of tea and the kind of biscuit that brought the adjective clean into his mind, it was so pale, thin, and dry. Rather like Minty herself, in fact. It had worried him in the past that she seemed to see things that weren’t there and to talk to unseen people. Now she was calm, like an ordinary person. And when she arrived at the party she was the same, saying a cheerful “Hello” to everyone, helping herself, if cautiously, to food from Sonovia’s lavish buffet, and when Florian turned up an hour earlier than anyone expected, greeting him with “You are a stranger. Haven’t seen you for a long time.”
The conversation turned to the murder of Eileen Dring. Laf had known it would and hoped it wouldn’t. He refused to take part in it and thought his children ought to have known better than to speculate about one rumor that the chief suspects were a married couple in West Hampstead, and another that two young kids were responsible. He deflected Daniel away from it by reverting to the problem he’d first raised with Sonovia weeks before. Ever since then he’d been thinking of it on and off without coming to any conclusion. “Suppose you killed someone without knowing it was wrong? I mean, suppose you-had a sort of delusion that someone wasn’t what they are but was-well, Hitler or Pol Pot, someone like that, and you killed them. Would that be wrong or wouldn’t it?”
“What’s brought this on, Dad?”
Why did one’s children, better educated than oneself, always ask that question if one ever dared say something out of the ordinary? Why did they always expect their parents to be mindless idiots? “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately.”
“Did he know what he was doing,” asked Corinne, “and if he did, did he know it was wrong?”
“Eh?” Laf said.
“It’s a sort of test applied to defendants.”
“But is it wrong?”
“These days a psychiatrist would be called to examine him. And if he hadn’t known what he was doing they’d put him away somewhere in a hospital for the criminally insane. I’d have thought you knew that, Dad. You’re a police officer.”
Exasperated, Laf said, “I do know it. I’m not asking if he’d have committed a crime. I know about crime. I’m asking if what he did would be wrong. What they used to call a sin. Morally wrong.”
His younger daughter, attracted by something more interesting than the conversation her mother had been having with Minty on the subject of spray starches, had been listening. He turned to her. “You’re doing philosophy at university, Julianna. You ought to know the answer. Would it be wrong?”
“That’s not philosophy, Dad. That’s ethics.”
“Okay, but would it be wrong? Would it be a sin?”
Julianna looked as if the word embarrassed her. “I don’t know about sin. You’d have to know you were doing something against your moral code for it to be wrong. I mean, an Aztec who sacrificed a child to please his god would think he was doing right because it would be in accordance with his moral code, but the Catholic conquistador would know it was wrong because it was against his.”
“So there’s no such things as absolute wrong? It just depends on when and where you live?”
“Well, and on whether or not you’re schizophrenic, I should think,” said Daniel.
It was to everyone’s surprise that Minty spoke. “Murder’s wrong,” she said loudly. “It’s always wrong. It’s taking away someone’s life. You can’t get round that.”
“If there was ever a gloomy subject for a birthday party,” said Sonovia, “this crowns it all. Open another bottle of wine, for goodness’ sake, Laf.” She was at the window, where she’d moved when everyone converged on Laf and his problem in ethics. “Minty,” she exclaimed. “Look at this. There’s an ambulance next door. It must be for Mr. Kroot.”
Though midsummer, it was quite dark by now and raining, but they all crowded to the window to see the paramedics come out, not with a stretcher, but a wheelchair in which the old man sat, a blanket over his knees and another over his head.
“Heart attack or stroke,” said Sonovia. “Take your pick. It could be either.”
Julianna was coming round with freshly filled wineglasses when the doorbell rang. The paramedic on the doorstep handed Sonovia a key and said, “He says, will you feed his cat? There’s tins in the cupboard.”
“What’s he got wrong with him?”
“I couldn’t say. There’ll have to be tests.”
Kieran Goodall’s mother, Lianne, finally came home at midnight. Though not verbally reproached for her absence from the house, she obviously believed that the best form of defense was attack. First she told the police officers that she wasn’t Kieran’s mother but his stepmother, so couldn’t be held responsible for his behavior. His mother had disappeared years ago and having married Lianne, his father also had gone. He and she, without claim on one another, had lived here for the past five years. Maybe she was his guardian, no one had made her so, it had just happened. Having asked, “What’s he done?” she hadn’t waited for an answer but had launched into a tirade against the Social Services who, she said, had been only too pleased to “dump” him on her and hadn’t even tried to find his natural parents. Told about the money missing from Eileen Dring’s holdall and
the money found on Kieran and Dillon, she said that crazy old people ought to be stopped from carrying large sums about with them. It was a temptation to young kids. Kieran was asked about the knife. He’d put it in a litter bin, he said, and began shrieking with laughter.
“If you’ve had one of my knives, Kieran,” said his stepmother, “I’ll knock the living daylights out of you.”
Half a mile away in Kensal Road, Dillon Bennett had withdrawn his remark about putting the knife down a drain. He’d never seen a knife. By now, sitting in one of the battered leather armchairs squeezed up against his sister who had one arm round him, he told his questioners Eileen Dring had been dead when he and Kieran came upon her.
“How did you know she was dead, Dillon?”
“She was all over blood. Buckets of it. She had to be dead.”
His head drooped and he fell asleep.
Chapter 30
IT SEEMED TO Michelle in vain that she told Violent Crimes she and Matthew scarcely knew where the site of the murder was. This part of London was unknown territory. Like all Londoners, they had heard of the cemetery, but that was all.
“ ‘Before we go to paradise,’ ” quoted Matthew, “ ‘by way of Kensal Green.’ ”
They gave him uneasy smiles but Michelle thought they didn’t believe her. An alibi? They no more had one for this killing than for the one in the cinema. As always, they could only alibi each other and what was the use of that? They’d been in bed, asleep.
When they’d arrived this time, Matthew had just come back from the studios where he’d been making the first in the next series of his program and she’d been in the kitchen chopping mint for sauce. Matthew had progressed with such leaps and bounds that though he wouldn’t, of course, eat lamb, which mint sauce naturally accompanied, he was growing quite fond of having it on potatoes and last week had even eaten a miniature Yorkshire pudding. Violent Crimes fixed his eyes on the knife in her hand, a big thing like a butcher’s cleaver that could only be used to kill someone if you chopped their head off. But she had put it down and covered it and the mint with a sheet of kitchen roll as if she were guilty of the crime they seemed to suspect her of committing.
As usual these days she’d only been able to pick at the meal she’d prepared. But Matthew, by his standards, had eaten heartily of the potatoes and mint sauce, several slices of chicken, with caramel custard to follow. Six months ago he’d have thrown up at the sight of caramel custard. He talked about the program, that this first one concentrated on how taking on a new interest in life, earning money, and meeting new people could have a beneficent effect on the anorexic and citing himself as an example. Michelle always saw him with the eyes she’d seen the thin young man she’d fallen in love with, but even she, once she’d struggled to look at him as a stranger might, could make herself aware that he was very different in appearance from what he’d been the year before. This question of the images a woman might create of others and of herself interested her. She knew now that she’d always seen herself as fat, as a child, as a teenager, all through the years when she was normal-sized, and she did so now after all the weight she had lost. Did Matthew always see himself as emaciated?
She went upstairs and mounted the scales. They registered a weight loss so dramatic that it would have been frightening in anyone who didn’t know the reason for it. Stepping off, she looked at herself in the mirror and tried to apply that “stranger’s eyes” test. Up to a point she succeeded and for a moment or two the woman of twenty years ago looked back at her, a woman with just one chin, with a waist and a stomach which, though hardly flat, no longer made her appear in the seventh month of pregnancy. Once she’d turned away the fat lady was back. But what did it matter? What did any of it matter compared with their situation as suspects in two murder cases?
Matthew was washing the dishes. Or, rather, he had reached the stage of drying them. The mirrored woman, though not truly believed in when her reflection was gone, had just the same given Michelle the kind of self-esteem she hadn’t known for a long time. She trembled when she realized what it was: sexual confidence. She put her arms round Matthew from behind and laid her cheek against his back. He turned round, smiling. It was years since she’d seen that particular look on his face. He put his arms round her and kissed her the way he’d kissed her the second time they’d met, and with a tremor of joy and pain she understood that after the years of terror he was courting her all over again.
Jims had arranged everything, from his solicitor’s letter requesting Zillah to quit Abbey Gardens Mansions by the end of the week to the moving van that arrived at eight sharp on Friday morning. Another letter, this time from Jims himself and couched in the coolest terms, informed her she could keep her car. He would pay for Jordan’s operation to be carried out privately in a Shaston nursing home. Sir Ronald Grasmere, for old friendship’s sake, would permit her to move into Willow Cottage before completion of the purchase. He had already signed the contract.
A man who called himself Jims’s agent (he seemed to have so many) came in and labeled every piece of furniture in the flat either FOR STORE or FOR LONG FREDINGTON. Even Zillah had to admit Jims had treated her handsomely. By now she was resigned to the end of those dreams of TV stardom or fashionable life, Buckingham Palace garden parties, the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and cruises on a peer’s yacht. It was over and the crunch had come. But this time things would be very different. Her native optimism reasserted itself. She had the car. She had a vast wardrobe of new clothes. Willow Cottage was no longer rented from the wicked squire, it was hers.
Letting herself and the children in, she found the place even better than she’d been led to believe. The whole house carpeted and curtained, everything new in the bathroom and kitchen, gold taps and marble counter tops, built-in cupboards in all the rooms, a huge television and video. Almost with enthusiasm she arranged the furniture and made up the beds. She picked up the new phone and called her mother.
Eugenie surveyed the place without fervor. “I liked it better the way it was.”
“Well, I didn’t,” said Zillah.
“Want to see Titus.” On painkillers, Jordan was bemused but he’d stopped crying. “Want Titus and Rosalba and Daddy.”
Zillah’s eyes and Eugenie’s met, as if they were the same age. “Perhaps Annie will bring Titus and Rosalba round later.”
Annie didn’t come round later but someone else did. He tapped on the back door at eight o’clock, just after Zillah had put Jordan to bed. Zillah had no idea who this very tall, rather good-looking man in his fifties might be and she stared at him, smiling uneasily.
“Ronald Grasmere. I live up at the big house, pal of old Jims.”
Zillah introduced herself by her Christian name alone. She was vague about what her surname might actually be these days. “Sir Ronald, please come in.”
“Call me Ronnie. Everyone does. I’ve brought you a few strawberries from the kitchen garden and the last of the asparagus. It’s not what it was a month ago but I think it’s still worth eating.”
So this was her bogeyman, the slum landlord, the grinder of the faces of the poor, the fascist beast, as Jerry used to call people of his kind in their student days. The strawberries he’d brought were crimson, glowing, dewy, and firm, rather different from what was on sale in Westminster shops. Eugenie appeared in her dressing gown.
“There’s nothing to drink,” Zillah said. “You could have a cup of tea.”
Sir Ronald laughed. “I think you’re wrong there, my dear. Just take a look inside that cupboard.”
Gin, whisky, vodka, sherry, several bottles of wine. Zillah gasped.
“Don’t look at me. Nothing to do with me. That chap of old Jims saw to it when he came in the other day. Now what do you think of this little place? Not bad, is it, though I say it myself.”
The begging letter that came through Fiona’s letter box, along with a flyer for a restaurant in West End Lane and her American Express monthly account, was from a woman she’d
never heard of, someone called Linda Davies. As soon as she realized what it was she recoiled from it, screwed it up, and was on the point of throwing it away. Then she remembered a resolve she’d made when first she’d read in the newspaper about Jeff’s past. Slowly and with a certain amount of distaste, she retrieved it, smoothed out the creases in it, and read to the end.
Linda was one of the women Jeff had lived with and used. “Preyed on” was the expression she employed. She wrote that she had taken out a mortgage on her Muswell Hill flat so that he and she could start a business together. Soon after she handed him the money he’d disappeared. Then followed a tale of disaster piled on disaster: Linda Davies’s loss of her job, her struggles to pay her now huge mortgage, her succumbing to chronic fatigue syndrome. She’d read about Fiona in the newspaper, that she’d been living with Jeff when he died, was well-off and successful. All she was asking was for a thousand pounds to pay off her debts and enable her to make a new start.
Fiona felt physically ill when she read it. There seemed no end to Jeff’s perfidy. How many other women had he wronged? Did the police know? One of them might be guilty of his murder. Throughout the investigation she had never really thought about who might have killed Jeff. She had given the police the names of a few possible enemies but not with much conviction. It didn’t matter to her. If she had considered it at all it was some semi-underworld character that she’d vaguely settled on. Now she thought it might have been one of these women.
But when there was a second death, an old woman murdered by the same means, she revised her view. The perpetrator must be someone who knew both victims. And who fitted that description better than a woman from his past? Who better than herself? She phoned Violent Crimes as soon as she thought of this and before they had a chance to fasten on to her. But she didn’t mention Linda Davies.
