by Ruth Rendell
They had just received the result of a complex analysis of the blood taken from Ann Morgan’s fingernails. Stephen was suddenly conscious again of the scratch on his neck. He actually felt it itch and tingle as Manciple spoke. The blood belonged to group B which was Stephen’s own group and to which only 6 per cent of the population belonged. With highly sophisticated forensic techniques, Manciple explained, they could now narrow down blood types much more closely than that, and further analysis had shown features in the blood found in the fingernails which Stephen’s own didn’t share.
‘Pity that couldn’t have been done before,’ Stephen said. ‘I must say I take rather a dim view of being treated like a criminal for no reason whatsoever.’
But it was over, he hadn’t made a fool of himself, and now he was free. There wasn’t even a threat hanging over him that they might start on him again tomorrow, for they knew now that he wasn’t their man, that it couldn’t be he. His relief was immeasurably greater than that he had felt the day before, walking out of here with Harriet Crozier. It was almost as if — though this was ridiculous — he had done it, had killed those girls, and was sick with joy at having escaped justice.
The sun had come through and the day was going to be hot. Sunlight and mist lay on the distant peaks of the moor and it shimmered in a golden haze. He could go there again, with his freedom the ban was lifted, he could walk there, climb, go whenever he chose.
He went into the hardware shop on the opposite side of the square to the Kelsey Arms and bought rope. It was a self-service store and in the electrical section they had on a display of campers’ flashlights. Stephen chose a big one with a handle like a jug, a tubular element and a battery guaranteed to last for several hours. Because they had large-size jute sacks on cheap offer he bought two with an idea they might come in useful.
The library next for a book on old mine workings. They had one, they said, but it wasn’t in stock. Would he like to order it? Stephen decided against that. It probably wasn’t necessary. He had been successful enough at getting into the Goughdale mine without a book when he was twelve, so why should he need one now?
Dadda, downstairs at Whalbys’, chain-smoked his little cigarettes. With exquisite delicacy and fastidiousness he was replacing the beading on the doors of a glass-fronted cabinet he had just reglazed. He was currently on an emotional peak, at the zenith of his cheerful or manic phase, and he essayed wit, something he did on an average once a year. He looked at the coil of rope and his face split into a nutcracker grin.
‘Happen they’d done away with hanging in this country.’
Stephen laughed heartily. He laughed the way one does at the jokes of a man who needs to make them but hardly ever can. ‘Good Lord, Dadda, I’m not for the high jump this time, I’m glad to say. They’ve let me go without a stain on my character.’
‘I should bloody think so.’ Dadda dabbed on a flick of glue, pressed in another inch or two of carved rosewood. He looked up at Stephen, ‘That aunt of yours has been round asking for you.’ Dadda had never addressed or referred to his in-laws by their given names. ‘That one, Mrs Pettitt, they call her,’ as if they called her something to which she had no right. ‘She wanted to tell you your grandma’s been taken into Hilderbridge General with a stroke.’ He paused reflectively, wiped a spot of glue from a finger. ‘Old Mother Naulls,’ he said, and savagely, ‘the old bitch, the old bitch!’
That policeman had more or less called him a psychopath. His euphoria past, Stephen smarted when he remembered those insults. He would have liked to take action over that, legal action, and get a public apology out of the man, but he had an idea that that kind of thing was privileged. In an interrogation, inside a police station, they could say what they liked to you and get away with it. How much more might they have said, though, if they had known he had once made a violent attack on his grandmother!
Her life was nearly over. He supposed they had taken her into hospital to die. How old would she be now? Eighty or thereabouts. She had always seemed old to him, old as the hills even in those days when he had badgered her about his mother.
‘Why won’t you tell me where she is?’
‘Because I won’t, that’s why. She’s got a family of her own, she’s got a boy and a girl, and she don’t want you upsetting them all. Now then!’
‘But she’s married to —’ He had almost said, ‘married to us.’
‘No, she’s not. She’s married to Mr Evans and she’s got Barnabas and Barbara.’
‘I don’t believe it!’
‘Don’t you call me a liar, young Stephen.’
He had been ‘young’ Stephen then, small Stephen who didn’t come much more than up to her shoulder. A year later he had grown six inches, and in the following year …
‘He’ll be towering above me soon,’ said Arthur Naulls, ‘towering above me.’
‘You can tell me her address. I could write to her.’
‘You’ll not get it from me, Stephen, it wouldn’t be fair. You’ve got to let bygones be bygones.’
She turned her back on him. He had become in that instant an animal, without the power to reason or reflect, and she — what had she become? He had never quite known and he didn’t know now. The quintessence of woman perhaps. But no, he loved the women in his life, Lyn, the memory of his mother. The evil inherent in women, then, in some women. He saw only a womanly shape, though, and a bush of soft womanly hair, and then even that was lost in a hot dazzling blur as he leapt on her and seized her by the neck …
Stephen seldom thought about it now. Nothing like that had ever happened since. The police would have made something of it, though, with their cheap, untried psychology. The interrogation must have had some kind of shock effect on him, for even the sensation of relief didn’t last long and for several nights he slept badly and dreamed badly, which was something he hardly ever did. Ann Morgan’s mother came on television and appealed for clues to the identity of the Vangmoor killer. Someone must know him, someone must have noticed a man, friend, lodger, neighbour, behaving oddly. She begged that person, those people, to come forward. Stephen dreamed of her. He dreamed that he and she were in the avenue of the Foinmen and she was refusing to tell the police they had been together in the Kelsey Arms at the time of her daughter’s murder. Stephen made a rush at her, seized her throat and was shaking her when Lyn woke him up and said he had been shouting and thrashing in his sleep.
To go out on the moor would have been the best remedy for this. He had his rope and his powerful torch and a packet of candles, and he had planned to attempt Apsley Sough at the weekend. But the long spell of dry weather broke and on Saturday it rained all day, the driving torrential rain of midsummer. Next day the foins were shrouded in a drizzle that was more than mist and less than rain.
Stephen wrote for ‘Voice of Vangmoor’: ‘Now that the summer is well and truly with us, several places of interest in the “Foinland” area have been opened to the public. The historic gardens of Jackley Manor may be viewed any Sunday from now until 30 September between 2 and 5 p.m., and in response to popular demand, Mr David Southworth is for the first time opening the gardens and some of the rooms at Chesney Hall on Saturdays, also from 2 till 5. Visitors will be able to see the study in which Tace wrote the famed Chronicles of Bleakland and also, I understand, one of the actual pens used …’
‘And why isn’t Cinderella hastening back to her hearth this evening?’ said Nick.
‘Stephen’s gone to see his grandmother. He’ll be late home.’
‘I wish you’d said. We could have gone out somewhere. The way things are, we never do anything but this.’
Lyn sat up in bed. She started to laugh. ‘I don’t claim to know much about these things but I understood that was something men never never said.’
His face was serious. He took one of her hands and held it in both his. ‘I dwell in the suburbs of your good pleasure, don’t I?’
She looked at him inquiringly. ‘It comes in Julius Caesar,’
he said. ‘Portia says it to her husband, I think, to Brutus. “Dwell I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure?” That’s how you make me feel. I thought I was going to be more than that to you, Lyn, I thought we could be more to each other. Here’s something else you probably thought men never never said. I don’t see much point in casual affairs.’
Her heart was beating hard with fear and wonder. She was a lifetime away from laughter now. ‘But when your uncle gets better you’ll go away. You’ll go away anyway in August.’
‘And that’s all there is to it? I’ll court more women and you’ll couch with more men?’
It wasn’t at all the answer she had expected. She didn’t know what she had expected. ‘I won’t do that,’ she said. ‘I didn’t before. I don’t see much point in casual affairs either.’
He got up. He pulled on jeans and a shirt and went out into the kitchen where she heard him starting to make coffee. When he came back he sat on the bed beside her and lifted her up in his arms and held her against him. His words surprised her.
‘You’d never go out on the moor alone, would you, Lyn? Promise me you never will.’
‘I promise,’ she said.
Without the knitter and the old man to be stimulus and audience, Stephen didn’t know how to talk to his grandmother. She was in bed for the evening visitors to the Lady Clara Stillwood Ward, and she seemed more limp and structurally collapsed than at Sunningdale. The apoplexy had pulled her face down on one side, giving a quirk to the mouth. Her skin had blanched to the matt, rubbery whiteness of a fungus. She moved one of her hands and made an inarticulate sound when she saw him.
Stephen put the box of jellies down on the white coverlet beside her. One of Mrs Naull’s hands was paralysed. Though he had never loved or even liked her, though he had come to hate and fear her, then feel a deep guilt towards her, it went to Stephen’s heart to see that one sound hand fumbling ineffectually with the cellophane wrapping while the other lay useless, while his grandmother’s face, or the mobile part of it, contorted with piteous frustration. He unwrapped the box, fed her an orange jelly and then a green one, wiped away the coloured trickle that came out of the corner of her mouth.
‘How’s Midge, Leonard?’ said Mrs Naulls in a new, slurred voice.
‘I’m Stephen.’
There seemed to be no more to say. He gave her a red jelly and she managed to eat it without dribbling. He thought of how he had held her throat and shaken her like an animal shakes its victim animal, desiring to break its neck. She had struggled and clawed at his hands to prise off the fingers and gasped out an address to him. His hands slackened and he gave a sort of sob and she said it again, choked it out, an address in Vancouver.
He was ready with his apologies, to go on his knees to her if necessary. Dadda’s temper, Dadda’s violence, that had raged in him, had burned itself out with a fizzle. She had got up with surly resentment, rubbing her neck, straightening her dress and her apron. The back door opened. Arthur Naulls was coming back from what he called his ‘constitutional’. She began getting their tea without a word, she never mentioned it again, never told anyone.
More than half his life ago. He felt that he disliked her no less intensely now than he had done then, yet he came regularly to see her, more regularly than her own children, so that he had a reputation in the family of being ‘good’ to her. Why did he come? Why would he go on coming, to sit by her and feed her with sweets, until she died? Because she was his only link with his mother and that illustrious ancestry? Did he, even now, hope for revelations or some gratuitous gift? A long-passed-over message from Canada? A tale of Tace?
‘Arthur’s not been in once,’ said Mrs Naulls.
Stephen didn’t feel he could say her husband had been dead eight years. ‘He’s not been too well.’ That in a way was true. But she had forgotten, it seemed, the man and the grievance, and was gazing vaguely at him, clouded blue eyes, mushroom-white cheeks. He kissed her, put another jelly in her mouth, patted her shoulder. As he went she lifted her hand in the way she had done when he came. Going down the stairs, he met his aunt Joan and his aunt Kay coming up, carrying lupins from the Pettitt garden and a bottle of Lucozade.
‘Stephen’s always been good to his grandma,’ said Mrs Pettitt.
‘There was a lot about you in the paper, Stephen,’ said Mrs Bracebridge. ‘It was nice you putting that in about Dad working for Mr Tace.’
She must have thought ‘descendant’ meant ‘ancestor employed by’ or some such thing. The elder Naullses were all more or less illiterate. Conversely, that reminded him. ‘Does anyone ever hear from Peter?’
‘Peter?’
‘My cousin, Peter Naulls.’
‘You’ll have to ask your uncle Leonard about that,’ said Mrs Pettitt. She spoke in the tone of one cautioning a former associate of the Prodigal Son. ‘Nobody condescends to tell us, do they, Kay?’
They went on up, whispering together, tip-toeing. They were the kind of women who behaved in hospital as if they were in church. Stephen got into his car and drove home the long way round via Byss and Loomlade. The rain had stopped and it was warm and humid, the sky feathered all over with tiny golden clouds. The evening sunlight lay like a gilding over the distant reaches of the moor. Stephen, thinking of his grandmother, remembered those letters he had written while in his teens to Mrs Brenda Evans at Tobermory Park Road, Vancouver, and to which he had received no reply. His grandmother, probably, had given him a false address. What did it matter now? He was sure he no longer cared. He had put away childish things.
9
Chesney Hall was a mid-eighteenth-century house with a central portico equal to the whole height of the building. This portico had a double tier of Corinthian columns and windows set in massive dressings of ashlar between which nestled the blue plaque: Alfred Osborn Tace, Novelist, lived here 1883–1949. But the public were required to enter by a side door into a garden room from which, it seemed to Stephen, they were almost furtively huddled first to the study, then to the drawing room, lastly to the library, being carefully kept away from those regions private to the South worth family. He began to wish he hadn’t come, though he had felt that now at last the opportunity was offered to him it was impossible to stay away. He recalled stories he had read of dispossessed or unrecognized heirs returning to their ancestral homes as servants or in guises nearly as humble. That was how he felt.
Southworth was there but not, as he put it to the visitors who entered somewhat cautiously among the cane furniture and potted plants, himself doing the honours. This was the province of a guest in the house, a professor of English at an American university. Southworth could be heard telling the rector of St Michael’s that this friend of his was a world authority on Alfred Osborn Tace. He was a big rangy bearded man in jeans and the kind of full flowing smock worn by nineteenth-century painters. When Stephen came into the study he was holding forth, the centre of a circle of visitors, most of whom had never heard of Tace until the Bleakland series came on television. His words, learned, scholarly, uttered in the harsh accent of the Middle West, issued from out of a luxuriant brownish-greyish-fairish mass; moustache, beard, hair all meeting and intermingling to leave only a few bare centimetres about the nose and between the eyes. The expressions of his listeners were bewildered as he led them on into the drawing room.
To move around like this with the herd Stephen felt an injury to himself as Tace’s grandson. He resented the professor, his learning, his enthusiasm, his seeming indifference to his audience as individual people. Yet he was once or twice on the point of going up to the man, and if it were possible to interrupt his flow of talk, of declaring himself as Tace’s descendant. But the professor, he was sure, would only ask which university he had been to, a question to which he was always sensitive.
Lyn walked about, admiring furnishings, pictures, first editions, but Stephen could only feel more and more aggrieved. It was especially humiliating to have to take his turn in a queue before he could look at the p
hotographs in their silver frames, Tace with his parents, Tace up at Oxford, Tace with his wife. The drawing room was spacious, the ceiling high, the walls panelled in white and apple green, and set about were those chairs Dadda claimed Whalbys’ had refurbished. Over the marble fireplace was John’s portrait of the novelist, in a glass-fronted cabinet his favourite reading matter, Gibbon, Fielding, Defoe.
It made Stephen’s heart swell, it was almost painful, to think that all this might have been his, that if the law in the 1920s had been what it was today, very probably would have been his. Only the other day he had read in the Echo about a man who had died without making a will, yet his illegitimate daughter, whose mother at the time of her birth even had a husband living, had nevertheless been allowed to inherit all her father’s property.
Thinking of this, he looked up from a rather bitter scrutiny of Tace with Lady Ottoline Morrell photographed at Garsington, to meet the eyes of a member of the Echo’s staff. Harriet Crozier was standing by the grand piano, taking notes on a small pocket pad. She was differently dressed today, wearing blue jeans and a white blouse, but once more her hair was hidden, tied up in the same blue, green and white patterned scarf.
‘I’m trying to get some impressions for a sort of atmosphere story,’ Harriet said. ‘Something to tie in with the TV series.’ Pointing to the photograph of Mrs Tace, she asked rather naïvely, ‘Was that your grandmother?’
‘Good Lord, no.’ Stephen gave her a mysterious smile. ‘Mine is a bar sinister connection, I’m afraid.’ She obviously didn’t understand. ‘The wrong side of the blanket,’ he explained.
She looked confused. He would have said more but for Mrs Newman and Joanne coming up to them. He scarcely recognized Lyn’s sister. The ballooning shape was the same, enveloped in a tent of flowered cotton, but a crop and short tight curls transformed Joanne’s face.
