by Ruth Rendell
By now the police had dismissed the idea of Kieran Goodall and Dillon Bennett as Eileen Dring’s killers. But they were useful witnesses. If their fantasies of how they disposed of the knife had varied and changed from hour to hour, their separate stories of the time they arrived at the murder site and what they saw when they got there tallied in every detail. They had arrived on the scene at one-thirty on Sunday morning, a fact both knew because Dillon was wearing his new watch. This watch was another cause of speculation, dismissed for the time being on the grounds of there being more important things to attend to. It was stolen, that went without saying, though Dillon’s stepmother swore she’d given it to him for his birthday the previous month. Wherever it came from, it showed exactly one-thirty. Both boys had looked at it. Watching videos had taught them the significance of noting the time at crime scenes, for they knew this was a crime, though they weren’t frightened. Another interesting-and appalling-factor was that neither saw anything out of the way in being out in the streets in the middle of the night. Nocturnal wanderings were what they did. They slept half the day and mostly missed school.
Kieran and Dillon had lifted Eileen Dring’s head, remarking that it had felt warm to the touch and not stiff, pulled out the bag, emptied it onto the pavement, and helped themselves to its contents. The money was an unexpected windfall. They took everything but Eileen’s cardigan for which they had no use, and carried off their haul to the abandoned shop where they had a sanctuary they called their camp. If they’d seen anyone on the streets in those small hours they hadn’t noticed or weren’t telling. The police were done with them. It was now a case for the Social Services.
The two police officers sat in Fiona’s living room, listening to the history of her encounters with Eileen Dring through the years. Too late, Fiona understood what she’d done in volunteering information that might have remained undiscovered. Gradually it seemed to dawn on these two officers that here was a prime suspect, a woman who’d been living with one victim and been friend and benefactor to the other.
“You mean she sometimes slept in your garden?”
“No, but I offered her the use of my shed. Only I felt awful about it. I thought I should have said to come inside and sleep in the house and I said that to her. But she told me she’d got a room of her own if that was what she wanted. Sleeping indoors didn’t suit her and she wouldn’t have my shed either.”
“Why did you make these offers, Miss Harrington?”
“I suppose I was sorry for her.”
“Did you ever give her money?”
“She wasn’t a beggar.”
“Maybe not, but did she ever try to get money from you?”
Were they implying Eileen had blackmailed her? Fiona felt herself trapped in a snare of her own devising. She remembered various occasions of quixotry, a handful of change here, a five-pound note there, and Jeff’s indignation.
“Jeff told me not to give her anything, but I did sometimes. I tried not to do it near here. I’d give her money if I came upon her somewhere else-near a flower shop, I mean. She told me a lot about herself. Her children had died in a fire. They got her out but hadn’t been able to save the children. That turned her brain, I think. She’d been strange ever since.”
She could tell by their faces that these facts were already known to them. They asked her if she could account for her movements on Saturday night but she could only say she’d been in bed asleep. With Jeff’s death, she said, staying up late, going out in the evenings, had come to an end for her. They told her to phone the bank and say she wouldn’t be in, and they asked her to accompany them to the police station. She was too horrified to argue, too aghast even to ask for an explanation. There she sat on a hard chair in an interview room for several hours, answering a string of questions but turning over in her mind how she could prove she’d been at home on Saturday night.
Then the answer-or an answer-came to her. She hadn’t slept well. She never had since Jeff died and her dependency on sleeping pills troubled her. Night after night she tried to sleep without taking one and almost always she succumbed. So it had been on Saturday. Sometime after midnight, nearly an hour after, she thought, she had got up and gone to the window, hearing as she crossed the floor a door closed in the house next door. That was all you ever heard, the shutting of a door or a light being turned on or off. And when she drew back a curtain she saw the light from Michelle’s and Matthew’s bedroom window go out. It had shed a bright rectangle onto their front lawn, a light that was abruptly withdrawn, she told Violent Crimes.
And she saw at once that they doubted her. “We’ll see if we can get some other neighbor to corroborate that.” It would let you and those Jarveys off the hook, she could tell they were thinking. She clasped her hands together, almost praying. If she could undo the harm she’d done to Michelle and Matthew she’d be as happy as if she’d exonerated herself.
Calling next door when they’d let her go brought fresh unjustified guilt. She felt the police must be watching her. Who, for instance, was that boy on the other side of the street? He looked no more than eighteen but he was probably twenty-five. He was sitting on a garden wall, apparently reading the Standard. Fiona thought he could be a policeman who had been sent to follow her home and see what she did. She was looking over her shoulder at him when Michelle opened the door. He’d think she and the Jarveys were in some sort of conspiracy together.
When Michelle heard Fiona’s story of her day, she couldn’t help feeling a flash of exultation that her neighbor, who had brought all this trouble on Matthew and her, was now in the same jeopardy as themselves. And even as she thought this she reproached herself for her mean-spiritedness. It was such a far cry from the way she’d felt about Fiona a month ago. Michelle took Fiona’s hand and kissed her cheek to make things better but still they weren’t better. Matthew opened a bottle of wine and Fiona drank hers greedily.
“I’m sure he’s a policeman on surveillance.”
Michelle went to the window, noticing as she did so how easy it was now for her to get up out of soft cushions and how lightly she walked. “It’s not a policeman,” she said. “He’s the nephew of the woman who lives there. He hasn’t a key and he’s waiting for her to come home.”
“You don’t think I’d have harmed Jeff or Eileen, do you?”
Michelle didn’t answer. It was Matthew, always brave and always one to speak his mind, who said, “You thought we had.”
Fiona said nothing. She walked to the window, stood by Michelle, and gazed out into the street. Suddenly she wheeled round and said, “I’ve had a begging letter. From a woman Jeff-got money out of.” Michelle laid a hand softly on her shoulder. “Oh, I know what he was. I’ve learned a lot since he died. She wants a thousand pounds.”
“You’re not going to give it to her, I hope,” said Matthew. “She’s hardly your responsibility.”
“I am going to. I’ve just decided, just this minute. I can afford it. I won’t even notice the difference.”
Chapter 31
MILL LANE WAS a very different place in July from what it had been in December. Or perhaps it was that Zillah was a different woman, for the weather was cold for the time of year and this was the kind of day when an anticyclone would as likely create a misty chill as it would warm sunshine. She was coming back from the Old Mill House, where she’d left Eugenie and Jordan playing on Titus’s new climbing frame while she went to the supermarket. Jordan was due to go into the hospital for his operation in four days’ time but these days cried only when he fell over. Zillah was dressed in the new natural-colored linen trouser suit she’d bought in a boutique in Toneborough and, though she wasn’t quite warm enough, she knew you had to suffer to be beautiful.
Treading carefully, watching her feet on the flat stones of the ford so as not to wet her narrow-strap sandals, she looked up to see Ronnie Grasmere approaching down the lane, accompanied by an enormous dog like an animated black hearthrug. For a moment she thought the dog was going to l
eap on her and, more to the point, on her suit. Ronnie, who was carrying a gun, said a quiet but commanding “Sit,” and the animal immediately did so, its forepaws straight, head held high. Zillah was impressed and said so.
“No point in having a dog if he’s your master.”
Zillah nodded. Never before had she known a voice to be so plummy and old Etonian. “And where are you off to, my pretty maid?”
Resisting an impulse to say she was going a-milking, Zillah told him.
“I say, d’you have to do your own shopping? What a shame.”
“Most people do, don’t they?”
His answer was hearty laughter. “Shoot, do you?”
She was more than ever aware of the gun sort of folded over his arm. Broken, did they call it? “I never have.” Sensing it was the kind of thing he’d like a woman to say, she added, “I’d be scared.”
“Not you. I’ll teach you.”
“Would you really?”
“Look, I have to take this great beast walkies, so alas I must leave you. But why don’t you have dinner with me one night? Tonight?”
“I couldn’t tonight.” She could have but playing hard to get was never wrong.
“Tomorrow, then?”
“That would be nice.” It would be her birthday.
Ronnie said he’d pick her up at seven. They’d go to a pleasant little unpretentious place outside Southerton called Peverel Grange. Zillah knew its reputation as the best restaurant in South Wessex. She walked back to Willow Cottage feeling better than she had for months. Annie would probably babysit for her or she’d know someone who would.
None of the neighbors in Holmdale Road had been able to confirm Fiona’s story. They were Londoners and took very little notice of what the people next door or the people opposite did. Their requirement in the neighbors was that they should keep from playing music at night, control their children, and keep their dogs in. Only one couple had even known the Jarveys’ name. All of them knew more about Fiona, whose notoriety came from her having been the murdered man’s partner. But where she had been that Saturday night, home or away, no one could tell. On the subject of cars they were more vociferous. Violent Crimes and Miss Demeanor had nothing to do with motor vehicles, except the ones they drove themselves, and were uninterested in the conduct of users of the two train stations who clogged West Hampstead streets with their parked cars. When would Camden Council introduce residents’ parking was the question four out of five householders asked. Violent Crimes neither knew nor cared. They were no nearer having a clue where the Jarveys and Fiona Harrington had been that night than when they started.
Newspapers had begun asking when the Cinema Slayer would strike again. It would have been easier for them if the two victims hadn’t been such disparate characters, if they’d been, for instance, young women. Then the stories they carried might have included warnings that no girl was safe on London’s streets. But what had a young, good-looking, comfortably situated man in common with an elderly female vagrant, except that neither had any money or owned property? All they knew was that there was nothing rational about this killer, no plan of action, and apparently no particular category of victims he or she targeted. Not politicians or vivisectionists, prostitutes or rich old women, capitalists or anarchists. What did the killer get out of it? No financial benefit, no sexual satisfaction, restored security, or freedom from menaces. Newspapers started calling the murderer the “mindless” or “aimless” killer.
The neighbors in Holmdale Road had known Michelle and Matthew only well enough to say “Good morning” or “Hi” (according to age) and Fiona only as the woman who had lost her fiancé in a very dreadful way. Being questioned as to these people’s movements on the night Eileen Dring was killed changed their attitude to this no longer harmless couple and this no longer blameless young woman.
There was no concerted campaign of ostracism and no dramatic shunning. But the woman whose nephew Fiona had suspected might be a detective began looking the other way when she passed her and the man next door to her, who’d always looked up from his weeding to comment on the weather, now kept his head down. The red graffiti that appeared on Fiona’s gateposts might have nothing to do with the murders, it might be coincidence, but, if it was, the aptness of the graffitist spraying KILL, KILL on the stucco wasn’t lost on her.
Fiona thought it was the police back again when the doorbell rang on a Saturday morning about ten. She felt like telling them to arrest her and have done with it. A point had been reached when she was beginning to understand how people made false confessions of murder so that they would be left alone and have a little peace. She opened the door to a woman about her own age. It wasn’t Miss Demeanor but someone of similar build, age, and dress. Another police officer?
“Good morning,” the woman said. “My name is Natalie Reckman. I’m a freelance journalist?”
Fiona said, rudely for her, “What do you want?”
“They’ve made a real mess of your gateposts, haven’t they?”
“They’re brainless morons. I don’t suppose it’s personal.”
“No? May I come in? I don’t want to talk about Jeff’s murder or who did what to whom. I was once his girlfriend too.”
“When?” Fiona’s mouth had dried. She felt a frisson of terror.
“Oh, long before you. Don’t worry. A woman from Kensal Green came between me and you.”
Fiona had to know. She couldn’t resist it. “Come in.”
Though the feature on the women in Jeff Leach’s life had been shelved, Natalie hadn’t been able to put it into the back of her mind as she had hoped. It kept surfacing. And one morning, when she woke after a dream in which she was hunting for the missing Jims Melcombe-Smith in Guatemala, the name of her predecessor came back to her. There it was, absolutely clear as if her memory had never mislaid it: Nell Johnson-Fleet and she’d worked for a charity called Victims of Crime International, or VOCI. Of course, Johnson-Fleets are not exactly thick on the ground, and Natalie soon found her address and number in the phone book.
Perhaps something was telling her the time had come to concentrate on this story. She made herself recall that last conversation she’d ever had with Jeff. In Christopher’s in Covent Garden it had been and when she’d asked who came after her he’d said, “A funny little thing who lived opposite Kensal Green Cemetery. I don’t think I’ll tell you her name. I called her Polo…” Knowing Jeff as she did and in possession of this limited information, had she a chance of finding this woman? For a start, he probably hadn’t meant she lived precisely opposite the cemetery but on the other side of Harrow Road in one of the streets that lay behind it. Natalie got out her London atlas and turned to page 56. There was a positive web of little streets in that hinterland. Instead of making a list of them, she photocopied the atlas page. At a cost of £200 you could buy access on the Internet that would give you the names, addresses, and a dossier of every single citizen of the United Kingdom. Or so she’d read in some cyberspace magazine. But would it help? She thought she still preferred the old-fashioned electoral register.
Why would he have called the woman Polo? He had that peculiar addiction to Polo mints, chewed up a tube of them every couple of days, so this woman must have had something in common with them. Incongruously, she remembered Jeff’s funeral and the wreath of white rosebuds his father and the person called Beryl had sent. It had looked just like a mammoth version of a mint with a hole in it. Mint, she thought, mint, hold on to that, as she consulted the voters’ list for the London Borough of Brent.
A woman called Minton was perhaps what she was looking for. Could you be called “Peppermint”? She turned page after page. Those eligible to vote were listed in the electoral register according to street, not name. If she was very young or a lunatic or a peer she wouldn’t be listed, but she couldn’t be under eighteen, could she? Jeff had surely never gone for very young girls. If she wasn’t a British citizen she wouldn’t be there either. Natalie thought that a distinc
t possibility as she ran her finger down the side of the pages. A lot of immigrants settled in this area, many of them waiting for naturalization. Surely, when he’d briefly talked of “Polo,” said where she lived and that he owed her money, he’d have mentioned that she was Asian or African or from Eastern Europe.
She’d started a long way back, almost as far as North Circular Road, the borough limit, and now she’d come close in her search to Harrow Road and the cemetery. Only Lilac Road remained after Syringa and then she’d have to acknowledge that this line of investigation had failed. Her finger on the left-hand margin stopped. Here, at number 39, was something. Knox, Araminta K. No one else in the house, apparently. Just this one single woman.
“Minta,” she probably called herself. That would be a gift to Jeff, who would immediately have thought of his Polos. She could hear him saying it. “I shall call you Polo.” Polo, Polo, the rick-stick Stolo, round tail, bobtail, well done, Polo. She lived alone, so very likely owned her house. Natalie remembered Jeff trying to make her take out a second mortgage on her flat to start some business he enthused about. By then she knew him well enough to be quite sure he’d do no such thing, but spend the money on horses and other women. Was that how he came to owe this Polo a thousand pounds? Because he’d got her to mortgage her house?
It was a bit farfetched, perhaps. Certainly a woman living in that neighborhood, in Syringa Road, wouldn’t be well-off; she wouldn’t be able to afford to lose such a sum.
“I don’t want to hear this,” Fiona said, wishing she’d never asked this Reckman woman in and determined not to mention Linda Davies.
