Collected Short Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  It was an amazingly young-looking Alice, her hair rinsed primrose, her figure the trimmest it had been in ten years, who met Guy and Pamela at the station. She was driving a new white Lancia coupé and wearing a very smart knitted suit in a subtle shade of burgundy.

  ‘I love your suit,’ said Pamela.

  ‘I made it.’

  ‘I really must take up knitting again. I used to be so good at it, didn’t I? And think of the money one saves.’

  On the following evening, a Sunday, after they had spent most of the day on the beach, Pamela again reverted to the subject of knitting and said her fingers itched to start on something straightaway. Alice looked thoughtful. Then she opened the bottom drawer of the chest and took out the saxe blue wool.

  ‘You could have this if you like, and this pattern. You could make it for Guy.’

  Pamela took the pattern which had apparently been torn in half and mended with sticking tape. She looked at the hanks of wool. ‘Has some of it been used?’

  ‘I didn’t like what I’d done so I undid it. The wool’s been washed and carded to get the crinkles out.’

  ‘If you’re thinking of making that for me,’ said Guy, ‘I’m all for it. Splendid idea.’

  ‘All right. Why not? Very fine needles it takes, doesn’t it? Have you got a pair of fourteens, Alice?’

  A shadow passed-across Alice’s face. She hesitated. Then she picked up the plastic envelopes one by one, but desultorily, until Pamela, fired now with enthusiasm, dropped on her knees beside her and began hunting through the drawer.

  ‘Here we are. Number fourteen, two millimetres, US double O . . . There’s only one needle here, Alice.’

  ‘Sorry about that, it must be lost.’ Alice took the single needle from her almost roughly and made as if to close the drawer.

  ‘No, wait a minute, it’s bound to be loose in there somewhere.’

  ‘I’m sure it isn’t, it’s lost. You won’t have time to start tonight, anyway.’

  Guy said, ‘I don’t see how you could lose one knitting needle.’

  ‘In a train,’ said Pamela, peering into each needle packet. ‘It could fall down the side of the seat and before you could get it out you’d be at your station.’

  ‘Alice never goes in trains.’

  ‘I suppose you could use it to unblock a drainpipe?’

  ‘You’d use a big fat one for that. Now if this situation happened in one of my books I’d have it that the needle was a murder weapon. Inserted into the scalp of a person who was, say drugged or drunk, it would penetrate the covering of the brain and the brain itself, causing a subdural haemorrhage. You’d have to sharpen the point a bit, file it maybe, and then of course you’d throw it away afterwards. Hence, you see, only one number fourteen needle in the drawer.’

  ‘And immediately they examined the body they’d find out,’ said his wife.

  ‘Well, you know, I don’t think they would. Did you know that almost all men over middle age have enough signs of coronary disease for a pathologist, unless he was exceptionally thorough, to assume that as the cause of death? Of course your victim would have to have a good head of hair to cover up the mark of entry . . .’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, let’s change the subject,’ said Pamela, closing the drawer, for she had noticed that Alice, perhaps because of that tactless reference to coronaries, had gone very white and that the hands which held the wool were trembling.

  But she managed a smile, ‘We’ll buy you a pair of number fourteens tomorrow,’ she said, ‘and perhaps I’ll start on something new as well. My mother always used to say that the devil finds work for idle hands to do.’

  Front Seat

  Along the sea front, between the pier and the old town, was a row of wooden seats. There were six of them, regularly spaced on the grass, and they faced the dunes, the sea wall, and the sea. To some people, including Mrs Jones, they were known by name as Fisher, Jackson, Teague, Prendergast, Lubbock and Rupert Moore. It was on this last, the one that was curiously known by the Christian as well as the family name of the man it commemorated, that Mrs Jones invariably chose to sit.

  She sat there every day, enjoying the peace and quiet, looking at the sea and thinking about the past. It was most pleasant on mild winter days or on those days of summer when the sky was overcast, for then the holiday visitors stayed in their cars or went off to buy prawns and crabs and expensive knick-knacks. Mrs Jones thought how glad she was that last year, when Mr Jones had been taken from her, she had bought the house in the old town, even though this had meant separating herself from her daughter. She thought about her son in London and her daughter in Ipswich, good loving children that they were, and about her grandchildren, and sometimes about her good fortune in having a comfortable annuity as well as her pension.

  But mostly, sitting on Rupert Moore, between Fisher and Teague, she thought about the first man in her life to whom even now, after so long, she always referred to as her darling. She had so accustomed herself to calling him this that to her the endearment had become his name. My darling, thought Mrs Jones, as some other old woman might have thought of John or Charlie or Tom.

  She felt closer to him here than anywhere, which was why she chose to rest on this seat and not on one of the others.

  On 15 July, St Swithin’s Day, Hugh and Cecily Branksome sat in their car, which was parked on the promenade, and looked at the grey choppy sea. Or, rather, Hugh looked at the sea while Cecily looked at Mrs Jones. The temperature was around ten degrees, according to Cecily who moved with the times, or fifty, according to Hugh who did not. It was not yet raining, though the indications were that it soon would be. Hugh was wishing they had gone to the Costa Brava where there would have been high-rise blocks and fish and chips and bull fights, but at least the sun would have shone. Cecily had got it into her head that it was bourgeois and unpatriotic to go abroad for one’s holidays.

  ‘I wonder why she always sits there,’ said Cecily.

  ‘Who sits where?’

  ‘That old woman. She always sits on that particular seat. She was there yesterday and the day before.’

  ‘Didn’t notice,’ said Hugh.

  ‘You never notice anything. While you were in the pub yesterday,’ said Cecily with emphasis, ‘I waited till she’d gone and then I read the inscription on that seat. On the metal plate on the back. D’you know what it says?’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ said Hugh, opening the window to let out cigarette smoke. An icy breeze hit him in the face.

  ‘Do close the window. It says: “Rupert Moore gave this seat to Northwold in thanks for his deliverance. I was in prison and ye came unto me, Matthew, chapter twenty-five, verse thirty-five.” How about that?’

  ‘Remarkable.’ Hugh thought he knew all about being in prison. He looked at his watch. ‘Opening time,’ he said. ‘We can go and get a drink, thank God.’

  On the following morning he went out fishing without her. They met in their room before dinner, Hugh bracing himself to face certain sarcastic questions, not without precedent, as to whether he had had a nice day. Forestalling them by telling her they had caught only one small mackerel, for the censure would be greater if he had enjoyed himself, he was soon interrupted.

  ‘I’ve got the whole story about the seat out of that nice man with the beard.’

  Hugh’s memory was poor and for a moment he didn’t know which seat she was talking about, but he recognized the nice man from her description. A busybody know-all who lived in Northwold and hung about the hotel bar.

  ‘He insisted on buying me a drink. Well, two, as a matter of fact.’ She smiled archly and patted her hair as if the bearded know-all had, at the very least, invited her to Aldeburgh for the weekend. ‘He’s called Arnold Cottle and he said this Rupert Moore put that seat there because he’d murdered his wife. He was put on trial and he was acquitted and that’s what it means about “deliverance” and being in prison.’

  ‘You can’t say he murdered his wife if he was acqui
tted.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Cecily. ‘It was ages ago, in 1930. I mean, I was only a baby.’ Hugh thought it wiser not to point out that at ten one is hardly a baby. ‘They acquitted him, or he got off on appeal, something like that, and he came back here to live and had that seat put there. Only the local people didn’t want a murderer and they broke his windows and called after him in the street and he had to go.’

  ‘Poor devil,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that, Hugh. From what Arnold said, the case was very unsavoury. Moore was quite young and very good looking and he was a painter, though he had a private income. His poor wife was much older and an invalid. He gave her cyanide they’d got for killing wasps. He gave it to her in a cup of coffee.’

  ‘I thought you said he didn’t do it.’

  ‘Everyone knew he’d done it. He only got off because the judge misdirected the jury. You can’t imagine how anyone would have the nerve to put up a sort of monument, can you, after a thing like that?’

  Hugh started to run his bath. Resignedly, he accepted the fact, from past experience, that part of the evening would be spent in the company of Arnold Cottle. Cecily was not, and never had been, particularly flirtatious except in her own imagination. It was not that. Rather it was that she liked to get hold of causes or what she called examples of injustice or outrage and worry at them, roping in to assist her any helper who might be on hand. There had been the banning of the proposed motorway, the petition against the children’s playground, the eviction of the squatters down the road. She was not always reactionary, for she worshipped free speech and racial equality and health foods and clean air. She was a woman of principle who threw herself whole-heartedly into upheaval and change and battles that right might be done, and sometimes into cults for the improvement of her soul. The unfortunate part of all this, or one of the unfortunate parts, was that it brought her so often into the company of bores or rogues. Hugh wondered what she was up to now, and why, and hoped it might be, though it seldom was, a flash in the pan.

  Two hours later he found himself with his wife and Arnold Cottle, standing on the wet grass and examining the inscription on the Rupert Moore seat. It wasn’t yet dark and wouldn’t be for an hour. The sky was heavily overcast and the sea the colour of a recently scoured aluminium pot. No one would have supposed, thought Hugh, that somewhere up there in the west was the sun which, contrary to all present evidence, science told him was throwing off light at the rate of two hundred and fifty million tons a minute.

  The others were too rapt to be distracted. He had a look at Fisher (‘In memory of Colonel Marius Fisher, VC, DSO, 1874–1951’) and at Teague (‘William James Teague, of this Town, lost at the Battle of Jutland’) and then he prodded Rupert Moore and announced, for something to say, ‘That’s oak.’

  ‘It is indeed, my dear old chap.’ Arnold Cottle spoke to Hugh very warmly and kindly, as if he had decided a priori that he was a harmless lunatic. ‘You could get oak in those days. This one was made by a chap called Sarafin, Arthur Sarafin. Curious name, eh? Corruption of Seraphim, I daresay. Fine craftsman, lived up the coast at Lowestoft, but he died quite young, more’s the pity. My father knew him, had some of the furniture he made. You can see his initials up there where the crossbar at the top joins the post. AS in a little circle, see?’

  Hugh thought this most interesting. He had done a bit of carpentry himself until Cecily had stopped it on the ground that she needed his workshop for her groups. That had been in the days when she was into Gestalt. Hugh preferred not to think about them. He had a look at Prendergast (‘This seat was placed here by the Hon. Clara Prendergast that the weary might find rest’) and was about to ask Cottle if this one was oak or teak, when Cecily said: ‘Where did he get the cyanide?’

  ‘Moore?’ said Cottle. ‘It was never actually proved that he did get it. He said they kept some in their garden shed for killing wasps and his wife had taken it herself. In point of fact, Mrs Moore had written to her sister, saying her life wasn’t worth living and she wanted to put an end to it. But this gardener chappie said he’d thrown the wasp killing stuff away a year before.’

  ‘It must have come from somewhere,’ said Cecily in such a hectoring tone and looking so belligerent that Hugh felt even more sympathy for Rupert Moore.

  Cottle didn’t seem to mind the tone or the look. ‘Moore had been to several chemists’ shops in the area, though not actually in Northwold, and tried to buy cyanide, ostensibly for killing wasps. No chemist admitted to having let him have it. There was one in Tarrington, up the coast here, who sold him another kind of vespicide that contained no cyanide and got him to sign the poison book. Dear Cecily, since you’re so interested, why don’t you read up the case in the library? Perhaps I might have the pleasure of taking you there tomorrow?’

  The offer was accepted with enthusiasm. They all went into the Cross Keys where Hugh bought three rounds of drinks and Arnold Cottle bought none, having failed to bring his wallet with him. Cecily fastened on to the barman and elicited from him that the old woman who always sat on the Rupert Moore seat was called Mrs Jones, that she had come to Northwold the year before from Ipswich and was of Suffolk, though not Northwold, origins.

  ‘Why does she always sit there?’

  ‘Ask me another,’ said the barman, presumably meaning this rejoinder rhetorically, which was not the way Cecily took it.

  ‘What’s so fascinating about that seat?’

  ‘It seems to fascinate you,’ said Hugh. ‘Can’t you give it a rest? The whole thing’s been over and done with for going on fifty years.’

  Cecily said, ‘There’s nothing else to do in this damned place,’ which displeased the barman so much that he moved off in a huff. ‘I’ve got a very active brain, Hugh. You ought to know that by now. I’m afraid I’m not content to fuddle it with drink or spend ten hours pulling one poor little fish out of the sea.’

  The library visit, from which Hugh was excused, took place. But books having been secured, a journey had to be made to the house in which Rupert Moore had lived with his wife and painted his pictures and where the crime had been committed. Arnold Cottle seemed delighted at the prospect, especially as the excursion, at Cecily’s suggestion, was to include lunch. Hugh had to go because Cecily couldn’t drive and he wasn’t going to lend his car to Cottle.

  The house was a dull and ugly mansion, now used as a children’s home. The superintendent (quite reasonably, Hugh thought) refused to let them tour the interior, but he had no objection to their walking round the grounds. It was bitterly cold for the time of year, but not cold enough to keep the children indoors. They tagged around behind Arnold Cottle and the Branksomes, making unfriendly or impertinent remarks. One of them, a boy with red curly hair and a cast in his eye, threw an apple core at Cecily and when reproved, used a word which, though familiar, is still unexpected on the lips of a five-year-old.

  They had lunch, and throughout the meal Cecily read aloud extracts from the trial of Rupert Moore. The medical evidence was so unpleasant that Hugh was unable to finish his steak au poivre. Cottle drank nearly a whole bottle of Nuits St Georges and had a double brandy with his coffee. Hugh thought about men who had murdered their wives, and how much easier it must have been when you could get wasp killer made out of cyanide and weed killer made of arsenic. But even if he could have got those things, or have pushed Cecily downstairs, or fixed it for the electric wall heater to fall into the bath while she also was in it, he knew he never would. Even if he got away with it, as poor Rupert Moore had done, he would have the shame and the fear and the guilt for the rest of his life, again as had been the case with Rupert Moore.

  Not that he had lived for long. ‘He died of some kidney disease just twelve months after they let him out,’ said Cecily, ‘and by then he’d been hounded out of this place. He had Sarafin make that seat and that was about the last thing he ever did in Northwold.’ She scanned through the last chapter of her book. ‘There doesn’t seem
to have been any real motive for the murder, Arnold.’

  ‘I suppose he wanted to marry someone else,’ said Cottle, swigging brandy. ‘I remember my father saying there were rumours he’d had a girlfriend but nobody seemed to know her name and she wasn’t mentioned at the trial.’

  ‘She certainly wasn’t,’ said Cecily, flicking back in her book so rapidly that she nearly knocked Hugh’s coffee cup over. ‘You mean there was no clue as to who she was? How did the rumours start, then?’

  ‘Dear Cecily, how do rumours ever start? In point of fact, Moore was known often to have been absent from home in the evenings. There was gossip he’d been seen in Clacton with a girl.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Cecily. ‘I shall spend the rest of the day thoroughly studying all this literature. You and Hugh must amuse yourselves on your own.’

  After a dreadful afternoon spent listening to Cottle’s troubles, how enemies had prevented him making a success at any career, how his two attempts at getting married had been scotched by his mother, and how his neighbours had a vendetta against him, Hugh finally escaped. Though not before he had lent Cottle ten pounds, this being the lowest of the sums his guest had suggested as appropriate. Cecily had a wonderful time, making herself conversant with the Moore case and now she was in the bath. Hugh wondered if a mighty thump on the bedroom side of the bathroom wall would dislodge the heater and make it fall into the water, but this was merely academic speculation.

  After dinner he went for a walk on his own in the rain while Cecily made notes – for what purpose Hugh neither knew nor cared. He poked about in the ruins of the castle; he bought two tickets for the repertory theatre on the following night, hoping that the play, though it was called Murder-on-Sea, might distract Cecily; he wandered about the streets of the old town and he had a drink in the Oyster Catcher’s Arms. On the whole, he didn’t have a bad time.