by Ruth Rendell
Since I’m being strictly truthful in this account, I’d better add the other consequence of what happened in the wood, even though it does rather go against the grain with me to mention things like that. I made love to Carol that night and it was a lot better than it had been for a long time, in fact it was sensational for both of us. And I couldn’t kid myself that it was due to anything but my adventure with the girl.
Next day I looked at myself in the mirror with all the lights off but the little tubular one over our bed, and I put on the same look I’d given the girl when she turned in my direction under the lamp. I can tell you I nearly frightened myself. I’ve said I’m not bad looking and that’s true but I’m naturally pale and since I’m thin, my face tends to be a bit gaunt. In the dim light my eyes seemed sunk in deep sockets and my mouth hung loose in a vacant mindless way. I stepped back from the glass so that I could see the whole of myself, slouching, staring, my arms hanging. There was no doubt I had the potential of being a woman-frightener of no mean calibre.
They say it’s the first step that counts. I had taken the first step but the second was bigger and it was weeks before I took it. I kept telling myself not to be a fool, to forget those mad ideas. Besides, surely I could see I’d soon be in trouble if I made a habit of frightening women in Queens Wood, on my own doorstep. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I remembered how wonderful I’d felt that evening, how tall I’d walked and what a man I’d been.
The funny thing was what a lot of humiliating things seemed to happen to me at that time, between the Queens Wood incident and the next occasion. A woman at the air terminal actually spat at me. I’m not exaggerating. Of course she was drunk, smashed out of her mind on duty-free Scotch, but she spat at me and I had to stand there in the middle of the ticket hall with all those tourists milling about, and wipe the spittle off my uniform. Then I got a reprimand for being discourteous to a passenger. It was totally unjust and, strictly speaking, I should have resigned on the spot, only I’ve got a wife and son and jobs aren’t easy to come by at present. There was all that and trouble at home as well with Carol nagging me to take her on holiday with this girl friend of hers and her husband to Minorca instead of our usual Salcombe fortnight. I told her straight we couldn’t afford it but I didn’t like being asked in return why I couldn’t earn as much as Sheila’s Mike.
My manhood was at a low ebb. Then Sheila and Mike asked us to spend the day with them, Carol, Timothy and me. They had been neighbours of ours but had just moved away to a new house in one of those outer suburbs that are really in Essex. So I drove the three of us out to Theydon Bois and made my acquaintance with Epping Forest.
There are sixty-four square miles of forest, lying on the northeastern borders of London. But when you drive from the Wake Arms to Theydon along a narrow road bordered by woodland, stretches of turf and undergrowth, little coppices of birch trees, you can easily believe yourself in the depths of the country. It seems impossible that London is only fourteen or fifteen miles away. The forest is green and silent and from a car looks unspoilt, though of course it can’t be. We passed a woman walking a very unguard-like dog, a tiny Maltese terrier . . . That gave me the idea. Why shouldn’t I come out here? Why shouldn’t I try my frightening act out here where no one knew me?
Two days after that I did. It was spring and the evenings stayed light till nearly eight. I didn’t take the car. Somehow it didn’t seem to me as if the sort of person I was going to be, going to act, would have a car. The journey was awful, enough to deter anyone less determined than I. I went straight from work, taking the Central Line tube as far as Loughton and then a bus up the hills and into the forest. At the Wake Arms I got off and began to walk down the hill, not on the pavement but a few yards inside the forest itself. I didn’t see a woman on her own until I had reached the houses of Theydon and begun the return trip. I had gone about a hundred yards up again when she came out of one of the last houses, a young girl in jeans and a jacket, her hands in her pockets.
It was clear she was going to walk to the Wake Arms. Or so I thought. For a while I walked, keeping step with her, but unseen among the hawthorn and crab apple bushes, the tangle of brambles. I let us get a quarter of a mile away from the houses before I showed myself and then I stepped out on to the pavement ahead of her. I turned round to face her and stood there, staring in the way I’d practised in the mirror.
She wasn’t nervous. She was brave. It was only very briefly that she hesitated. But she didn’t quite dare walk past me. Instead she crossed the road. There’s never much traffic on that road and so far not a single car had passed. She crossed the road, walking faster. I crossed too but behind her and I walked along behind her. Presently she began to run, so of course I ran too, though not fast enough to catch her up, just enough to gain on her a little.
We had been going on like that for some minutes, the Wake Arms still a mile off, when she suddenly doubled back, hared across the road and began running back the way she had come. That finished me for chasing her. I stood there and laughed. I laughed long and loud, I felt so happy and free, I felt so much all-conquering power that I – I alone, humble, ordinary, dull me – could inspire such fear.
After that I took to going to Epping Forest as a regular thing. Roughly speaking, I’d say it would have been once a fortnight. Since I do shift work, four till midnight just as often as ten till six, I sometimes managed to go in the daytime. A lot of women are alone at home in the daytime and have no men to escort them when they go out. I never let it go more than two weeks without my going there and occasionally I’d go more often, if I was feeling low in spirits, for instance, or Carol and I had a row or I got depressed over money. It did me so much good, I wish I could make you understand how much. Just think what it is you do that gives you a tremendous lift, driving a car really fast or going disco dancing or getting high on something – well, frightening women did all that for me and then some. Afterwards it was like Christmas, it was almost like being in love.
And there was no harm in it, was there? I didn’t hurt them. There’s a French saying: it gives me so much pleasure and you so little pain. That was the way it was for me and them, though it wasn’t without pleasure for them either. Imagine how they must have enjoyed talking about it afterwards, going into all the details like Carol did, distorting the facts, exaggerating, making themselves for a while the centre of attention.
For all I knew they may have got up search parties, husbands and boy friends and fathers all out in a pack looking for me, all having a great time as people invariably do when they’re hunting something or someone. After all, when all was said and done, what did I do? Nothing. I didn’t molest them or insult them or try to touch them, I merely stood and looked at them and ran after them – or ran when they ran which isn’t necessarily the same thing.
There was no harm in it. Or so I thought. I couldn’t see what harm there could ever be, and believe me, I thought about this quite a lot, for I’m just as guilt-ridden as the rest of us. I thought about it, justifying myself, keeping guilt at bay. Young women don’t have heart attacks and fall down dead because a man chases them. Young women aren’t left with emotional traumas because a man stares at them. The oldest woman I ever frightened was the one with the Maltese terrier and she was no more than forty. I saw her again on my third or fourth visit and followed her for a while, stepping out from behind bushes and standing in her path. She used the same words the girl in Queens Wood had used, uttered in the same strangled voice: ‘What is it you want?’
I didn’t answer her. I had mercy on her and her little ineffectual dog and I melted away into the woodland shades. The next one who asked me that I answered with professorial gravity: ‘Merely collecting lichens, madam.’
It was proof enough of how harmless I was that there was never a sign of a policeman in that area. I’m sure none of them told the police, for they had nothing to tell. They had only what they imagined and what the media had led them to expect. Yet harm did come from
it, irrevocable harm and suffering and shame.
No doubt by now you think you’ve guessed. The inevitable must have happened, the encounter which any man who makes a practice of intimidating women is bound to have sooner or later, when the tables are turned on him. Yes, that did happen but it wasn’t what stopped me. Being seized by the arm, hurled in the air and laid out, sprawled and bruised, by a judo black belt, was just an occupational hazard. I’ve always been glad, though, that I behaved like a gentleman. I didn’t curse her or shout abuse. I merely got up, rubbed my legs and my elbows, made her a little bow and walked off in the direction of the Wake. Carol wanted to know how I’d managed to get green stains all over my clothes and I think to this day she believes it was from lying on the grass in a park somewhere with another woman. As if I would!
That attack on me deterred me. It didn’t put me off. I let three weeks go by, three miserable yearning weeks, and then I went back to the Wake road one sunny July morning and had one of my most satisfying experiences. A girl walking, not on the road, but taking a short cut through the forest itself. I walked parallel to her, sometimes letting her catch a glimpse of me. I knew she did, for like it had been with the girl in Queens Wood, I could sense and smell her fear.
I strolled out from the bushes at last and stood ahead of her, waiting. She didn’t dare approach me, she didn’t know what to do. At length she turned back and I followed her, threading my way among the bushes until she must have thought I had gone, then appearing once more on the path ahead. This time she turned off to the left, running, and I let her go. Laughing the way I always did, out loud and irrepressibly, I let her go. I hadn’t done her any harm. Think of the relief she must have felt when she knew she’d got away from me and was safe. Think of her going home and telling her mother or her sister or her husband all about it.
You could even say I’d done her a good turn. Most likely I’d warned her off going out in the forest on her own and therefore protected her from some real pervert or molester of women.
It was a point of view, wasn’t it? You could make me out a public benefactor. I showed them what could happen. I was like the small electric shock that teaches a child not to play with the wires. Or that’s what I believed. Till I learned that even a small shock can kill.
I was out in the forest, on the Wake road, when I had a piece of luck. It was autumn and getting dark at six, the earliest I’d been able to get there, and I didn’t have much hope of any woman being silly enough to walk down that road alone in the dark. I had got off the bus at the Wake Arms and was walking slowly down the hill when I saw this car parked ahead of me at the kerb. Even from a distance I could hear the horrible noise it made as the driver tried to start it, that anguished grinding you get when ignition won’t take place.
The offside door opened and a woman got out. She was on her own. She reached back into the car and turned the lights off, slammed the door, locked it and began walking down the hill towards Theydon. I had stepped in among the trees and she hadn’t yet seen me. I followed her, working out what technique I should use this time. Pursuing her at a run to start with was what I decided on.
I came out on to the pavement about a hundred yards behind her and began running after her, making as much noise with my feet as I could. Of course she stopped and turned round as I knew she would. Probably she thought I was a saviour who was going to do something about her car for her. She looked round, waiting for me, and as soon as I caught her eye I veered off into the forest once more. She gave a sort of shrug, turned and walked on. She wasn’t frightened yet.
It was getting dark, though, and there was no moon. I caught her up and walked alongside her, very quietly, only three or four yards away, yet in among the trees of the forest. By then we were out of sight of the parked car and a long way from being in sight of the lights of Theydon. The road was dark, though far from being impenetrably black. I trod on a twig deliberately and made it snap and she turned swiftly and saw me.
She jumped. She looked away immediately and quickened her pace. Of course she didn’t have a chance with me, a five-foot woman doesn’t with a six-foot man. The fastest she could walk was still only my strolling pace.
There hadn’t been a car along the road since I’d been following her. Now one came. I could see its lights welling and dipping a long way off, round the twists in the road. She went to the edge of the pavement and held up her hand the way a hitchhiker does. I stayed where I was to see what would happen. What had I done, after all? Only been there. But the driver didn’t stop for her. Of course he didn’t, no more than I would have done in his place. We all know the sort of man who stops his car to pick up smartly dressed, pretty hitchhikers at night and we know what he’s after.
The next driver didn’t stop either. I was a little ahead of her by then, still inside the forest, and in his headlights I saw her face. She was pretty, not that that aspect particularly interested me, but I saw that she was pretty and that she belonged to the same type as Carol, a small slender blonde with rather sharp features and curly hair.
The darkness seemed much darker after the car lights had passed. I could tell she was a little less tense now, she probably hadn’t seen me for the past five minutes, she might have thought I’d gone. And I was tempted to call it a day, give up after a quarter of an hour, as I usually did when I’d had my fun.
I wish to God I had. I went on with it for the stupidest of reasons. I went on with it because I wanted to go in the same direction as she was going, down into Theydon and catch the tube train from there, rather than go back and hang about waiting for a bus. I could have waited and let her go. I didn’t. Out of some sort of perverse need, I kept step with her and then I came out of the forest and got on to the pavement behind her.
I walked along, gaining on her, but quietly. The road dipped, wound a little. I got two or three yards behind her, going very softly, she didn’t know I was there, and then I began a soft whistling, a hymn tune it was, the Crimond version of The Lord is My Shepherd. What a choice!
She spun round. I thought she was going to say something but I don’t think she could. Her voice was strangled by fear. She turned again and began to run. She could run quite fast, that tiny vulnerable blonde girl.
The car lights loomed up over the road ahead. They were full-beam, undipped headlights, blazing blue-white across the surrounding forest, showing up every tree and making long black shadows spring from their trunks. I jumped aside and crouched down in the long grass. She ran into the road, holding up both arms and crying: ‘Help me! Help me!’
He stopped. I had a moment’s tension when I thought he might get out and come looking for me, but he didn’t. He pushed open the passenger door from inside. The girl got in, they waited, sitting there for maybe half a minute, and then the white Ford Capri moved off.
It was a relief to me to see that car disappear over the top of the hill. And I realized, to coin a very appropriate phrase, that I wasn’t yet out of the wood. What could be more likely than that girl and the car driver would either phone or call in at Loughton police station? I knew I’d better get myself down to Theydon as fast as possible.
As it happened I did so without meeting or being passed by another vehicle. I was walking along, by the village green when the only cars I saw came along. On the station platform I had to wait for nearly half an hour before a train came, but no policeman came either. I had got away with it again.
In a way. There are worse things than being punished for one’s crimes. One of those is not being punished for them. I am suffering for what I did of course by not being allowed – that is, by not allowing myself – to do it again. And I shall never forget that girl’s face, so pretty and vulnerable and frightened. It comes to me a lot in dreams.
The first time it appeared to me was in a newspaper photograph, two days after I had frightened her on the Wake road. The newspaper was leading on the story of her death and that was why it used the picture. On the previous morning, when she had been dead twelve h
ours, her body had been found, stabbed and mutilated, in a field between Epping and Harlow. Police were looking for a man, thought to be the driver of a white Ford Capri.
Her rescuer, her murderer. Then what was I?
A Case of Coincidence
Of the several obituaries which appeared on the death of Michael Lestrange not one mentioned his connection with the Wrexlade murders. Memories are short, even journalists’ memories, and it may be that the newspapermen who wrote so glowingly and so mournfully about him were mere babes in arms, or not even born, at the time. For the murders, of course, took place in the early fifties, before the abolition of capital punishment.
Murder is the last thing one would associate with the late Sir Michael, eminent cardiac specialist, physician to Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Albany, and author of that classic work, the last word on its subject, so succinctly entitled The Heart. Sir Michael did not destroy life, he saved it. He was as far removed from Kenneth Edward Brannel, the Wrexlade Strangler, as he was from the carnivorous spider which crept across his consulting room window. Those who knew him well would say that he had an almost neurotic horror of the idea of taking life. Euthanasia he had refused to discuss, and he had opposed with all his vigour the legalizing of abortion.
Until last March when an air crash over the North Atlantic claimed him among its two hundred fatalities, he had been a man one automatically thought of as life-enhancing, as having on countless occasions defied death on behalf of others. Yet he seemed to have had no private life, no family, no circle to move in, no especially beautiful home. He lived for his work. He was not married and few knew he ever had been, still fewer that his wife had been the last of the Wrexlade victims.
There were four others and all five of them died as a result of being strangled by the outsized, bony hands of Kenneth Edward Brannel. Michael Lestrange, by the way, had exceptionally narrow, well-shaped hands, dextrous and precise. Brannel’s have been described as resembling bunches of bananas. In her study of the Wrexlade case, the criminologist Miss Georgina Hallam Saul, relates how Brannel, in the condemned cell, talked about committing these crimes to a prison officer. He had never understood why he killed those women, he didn’t dislike women or fear them.