Collected Short Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  Only a meticulous reader of newspapers would have spotted the paragraph. I am in the habit of reading every line, with the exception of the sports news, and I spotted this item tucked away between an account of sharp practice in local government and the suicide of a financier. I read it. The years fell away and the facts exonerated me. I knew I must do something, I wondered what, I have been thinking of it all day, but now I know I must tell this story to the coroner. My story, my mistake, Daniel’s rage.

  An agricultural worker had come upon an unexploded bomb on farm land near Inchfield in Suffolk. It was thought to be one of a stick of bombs dropped there in 1941. Excavations in the area had brought to light a skeleton thought to be that of a young man who had met his death at about the same time. A curious fact was that shotgun pellets had been found in the cavity of the skull.

  The orchard walls are high and hard to climb. And the place death considering who thou art, if any of my kinsmen find thee here . . .

  Hare’s House

  A murderer had lived in the house, the estate agent told Norman. The murder had in fact been committed there, he said. Norman thought it very open and honest of him.

  ‘The neighbours would have mentioned it if I hadn’t,’ said the estate agent.

  Now Norman understood why the house was going cheap. It was what they called a town house, though Norman didn’t know why they did as he had seen plenty like it in the country. There were three floors and an open-tread staircase going up the centre. About fifteen years old, the estate agent said, and for twelve of those no one had lived in it.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t give you any details of the case.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to know,’ said Norman. ‘I’d rather not know.’ He put his head round the door of the downstairs bathroom. He had never thought it possible he might own a house with more than one bathroom. Did he seriously consider owning this one then? The price was so absurdly low! ‘What was his name?’

  ‘The murderer? Oh, Hare. Raymond Hare.’

  Rather to his relief, Norman couldn’t remember any Hare murder case. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘He died in prison. The house belongs to a nephew.’

  ‘I like the house,’ Norman said cautiously. ‘I’ll have to see what my wife says.’

  The area his job obliged him to move into was a more prestigious one than where they now lived. A terraced cottage like the ones in Inverness Street was the best he had thought they could run to. He would never find another bargain like this one. If he hadn’t been sure Rita would find out about the murder he would have avoided telling her.

  ‘Why is it so cheap?’ she said.

  He told her.

  She was a small thickset woman with brown hair and brown eyes and a rather large pointed face. She had a way of extending her neck and thrusting her face forward. It had once occurred to Norman that she looked like a mole, though moles of course could be attractive creatures. She thrust her head forward now.

  ‘Is there something horrible you’re not telling me?’

  ‘I’ve told you everything I know. I don’t know any details.’ Norman was a patient and easy-going man, if inclined to be sullen. He was rather good-looking with a boyish open face and brown curly hair. ‘We could both go and see it tomorrow.’

  Rita would have preferred a terraced cottage in Inverness Street with a big garden and not so many stairs. But Norman had set his heart on the town house and was capable of sulking for months if he didn’t get his own way. Besides, there was nothing to show Hare had lived there. Rather foolishly perhaps, Rita now thought, she had been expecting bloodstains or even a locked room.

  ‘I’ve no recollection of this Hare at all, have you?’

  ‘Let’s keep it that way,’ said Norman. ‘You said yourself it’s better not to know. I’ll make Mr Hare the nephew an offer, shall I?’

  The offer was accepted and Norman and Rita moved in at the end of September. The neighbours on one side had lived there eight years and the neighbours on the other six. They had never known Raymond Hare. A family called Lawrence who had lived in their large old house surrounded by garden for more than twenty years must have known him, at least by sight, but Norman and Rita had never spoken to them save to pass the time of day.

  They had builders in to paint the house and they had new carpets. There were only two drawbacks and one of those was the stairs. You found yourself always running up and down to fetch things you had forgotten. The other drawback was the bathroom window, or more specifically, the catch on the bathroom window.

  Sometimes, especially when Norman was at work and she was alone, Rita would wonder exactly where the murder had taken place. She would stand still, holding her duster, and look about her and think maybe it was in that room or that one or in their bedroom. And then she would go into the bedroom, thrusting her head forward and peering. Her mother used to say she had a ‘funny feeling’ in the corners of some houses, she said she was psychic. Rita would have liked to have inherited this gift but she had to admit she experienced no funny feelings in any part of this house.

  She and Norman never spoke about Raymond Hare. They tended to avoid the very subject of murder. Rita had once enjoyed detective stories but somehow she didn’t read them any more. It seemed better not to. Her next-door neighbour Dorothy, the one who had lived there eight years, tried one day to talk to her about the Hare case but Rita said she’d rather not discuss it.

  ‘I quite understand,’ Dorothy said. ‘I think you’re very wise.’

  It was a warm house. The central heating was efficient and the windows were double glazed except for the one in the upstairs bathroom. This bathroom had a very high ceiling and the window was about ten feet up. It was in the middle of the house and therefore had no outside wall so the architect had made the roof of the bathroom just above the main roof, thus affording room for a window. It was a nuisance not being able to open it except by means of the pole with the hook on the end of it that stood against the bathroom wall, but the autumn was a dull wet one and the winter cold so for a long time there was no need to open the bathroom window at all.

  Norman thought he would have a go at re-tiling the downstairs bathroom himself and went to the library to look for a do-it-yourself decorating manual. The library, a small branch, wasn’t far away, being between his house and the tube station. Unable at first to find Skills and Crafts, his eye wandered down through Horticulture, Botany, Biology, General Science, Social Sciences, Crime . . .

  Generally speaking, Norman had nothing to do with crime these days. He and Rita had even stopped watching thriller serials on television. His impulse was to turn his eyes sharply away from these accounts of trials and reconstructions of murders and turn them away he did but not before he had caught the name Hare on the spine of one of the books.

  Norman turned his back. By a happy chance he was facing the section labelled ‘Interior Decoration’. He found the book he wanted. Then he stood holding it and thinking. Should he look again? It might be that the author’s name was Hare and had nothing at all to do with his Hare. Norman didn’t really believe this. His stomach began to feel queasy and he was conscious of being rather excited too. He turned round and quickly took the book off the shelf. Its title was Murder in the Sixties, the author was someone called H. L. Robinson and the cases examined were listed on the jacket: Renzini and Boyce, The Oasthouse Mystery, Hare, The Pop Group Murders.

  Norman opened it at random. He found he had opened it in the middle of the Hare case. A page or two further on were two photographs, the top one of a man with a blank characterless face and half-closed eyes, the other of a smiling fair-haired woman. The caption said that above was Raymond Henry Montagu Hare and below Diana Margaret Hare, née Kentwell. Norman closed the book and replaced it on the shelf. His heart was beating curiously hard. When his do-it-yourself book had been stamped he had to stop himself actually running out of the library. What a way to behave! he thought. I must get a grip on myself. Either I am going to put Hare
entirely out of my mind and never think of him again or else I am going to act like a rational man, read up the case, make myself conversant with the facts and learn to live with them.

  He did neither. He didn’t visit the library again. When his book had taught him all it could about tiling he asked Rita to return it for him. He tried to put Hare out of his mind but this was too difficult. Where had he committed the murder was one of the questions he often asked himself and then he began to wonder whom he had killed and by what means. The answers were in a book on a shelf not a quarter of a mile away. Norman had to pass the library on his way to the station each morning and on his way back each night. He took to walking on the other side of the street. Sometimes there came into his mind that remark of Rita’s that there might be something horrible he wasn’t telling her.

  Spring came early and there were some warm days in March. Rita tried to open the bathroom window, using the pole with the hook on the end, but the catch wouldn’t budge. When Norman came home she got him to borrow a ladder from Dorothy’s husband Roy and climb up and see what was wrong with the catch.

  Norman thought Roy gave him rather a funny look when he said what he wanted the ladder for. He hesitated before saying Norman could have it.

  ‘It’s quite OK if you’d rather not,’ Norman said. ‘I expect I can manage with the steps if I can find a foothold somewhere.’

  ‘No, no, you’re welcome to the ladder,’ said Roy and he showed Norman the bathroom in his own house which was identical with the next-door’s except that the window had been changed for a blank sheet of glass with an extractor fan.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Norman, ‘but just the same I’d rather have a window I can open.’

  That brought another funny look from Roy. Norman propped the ladder against the wall and climbed up to the window and saw why it wouldn’t open. The two parts of the catch, a vertical bolt and a slot for it to be driven up into, had been wired together. Norman supposed that the builders doing the painting had wired up the window catch, though he couldn’t imagine why. He undid the wire, slid down the bolt and let the window fall open to its maximum capacity of about seventy-five degrees.

  On 1 April the temperature dropped to just on freezing and it snowed. Rita closed the bathroom window. She took hold of the pole, reached up and inserted the hook in the ring on the bottom of the bolt, lifted the window, closed it, pushed up the bolt into the slot and gave it a twist. When she came out of the bathroom on to the landing she stood looking about her and wondering where Hare had committed the murder. For a moment she fancied she had a funny feeling about that but it passed. Rita went down to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. She looked out into the tiny square of garden on to which fluffy snow was falling and melting when it touched the grass. There would have been room in the garden in Inverness Street to plant bulbs, daffodils and narcissi. Rita sighed. She poured out the tea and was stirring sugar into her cup when there came a loud crash from upstairs. Rita nearly jumped out of her skin.

  She ran up the two flights of stairs, wondering what on earth had got broken. There was nothing. Nothing was out of place or changed. She had heard of haunted houses where loud crashes were due to poltergeist activity. Her mother had always been able to sense the presence of a poltergeist. She felt afraid and sweat broke out on her rather large pointed face. Then she noticed the bathroom door was closed. Had it been that door closing she had heard? Surely not. Rita opened the bathroom door and saw that the window had fallen open. So that was all it was. She got the pole and inserted the hook in the ring on the bolt, slid the bolt upwards into the slot and gave it a twist.

  It had been rather windy but the wind had dropped. Next day the weather began to warm up again. Norman opened the bathroom window and it remained open until rain started. Rita closed it.

  ‘That window’s not the problem I thought it might be once you get the hang of using the pole,’ said Norman.

  He was trying to be cheerful and to act as if nothing had happened. The man called Lawrence who lived opposite had got into conversation with him on his way home. They had found themselves sitting next to each other in the tube train.

  ‘It’s good to see someone living in your place at last. An empty house always gets a run-down look.’

  Norman just smiled. He had started to feel uneasy.

  ‘My wife knew Mrs Hare quite well, you know.’

  ‘Really?’ said Norman.

  ‘A nice woman. There was no reason for what he did as far as anyone could tell. But I imagine you’ve read it all up and come to terms with it. Well, you’d have to, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Norman.

  Because he had his neighbour with him he couldn’t cross the street to avoid passing the library. Outside its gates he had an almost intolerable urge to go in and take that book from the shelf. One thing he knew now, whether he wanted to or not, was that it was his wife Hare had murdered.

  Some little while after midnight he was awakened by a crash. He sat up in bed.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘The bathroom window, I expect,’ said Rita, half-asleep.

  Norman got up. He took the pole, inserted the hook into the ring on the bolt, slid up the bolt and gave it a firm clockwise twist. The rest of the night passed undisturbed. Rita opened the window two or three days later because it had turned warm. She went into their bedroom and changed the sheets and thought, for no reason as far as she could tell, I wonder if it was his wife he murdered? I expect it was his wife. Then she thought how terrible it would be if he had murdered her in bed. Hare’s bed must have stood in the same place as their own. It must have because of the position of the electric points. Perhaps he had come home one night and murdered her in bed.

  A wind that was more like a gale started to make the house cold. Rita closed the bathroom window. About an hour after Norman got home it blew open with a crash.

  ‘It comes open,’ said Norman after he had shut it, ‘because when you close it you don’t give the bolt a hard enough twist.’

  ‘It comes open because of the wind,’ said Rita.

  ‘The wind wouldn’t affect it if you shut it properly.’ Norman’s handsome face wore its petulant look and he sulked rather for the rest of the evening.

  Next time the window was opened petals from fruit tree blossom blew in all over the dark blue carpet. Rita closed it an hour or so before Norman came home. Dorothy was downstairs having a cup of tea with her.

  ‘I’d have that window wired up if I were you,’ said Dorothy, and she added oddly, ‘To be on the safe side.’

  ‘It gets so hot in there.’

  ‘Leave it open then and keep the door shut.’

  The crash of the window opening awoke Norman at two in the morning. He was furious. He made a lot of noise about closing it in order to wake Rita.

  ‘I told you that window wouldn’t come open if you gave the bolt a hard enough twist. That crashing scares the hell out of me. My nerves can’t stand it.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your nerves?’

  Norman didn’t answer. ‘I don’t know why you can’t master a simple knack like that.’

  ‘It isn’t me, it’s the wind.’

  ‘Nonsense. Don’t talk such nonsense. There is no wind.’

  Rita opened the window in order to practise closing it. She spent about an hour opening and closing the window and giving the bolt a firm clockwise twist. While she was doing this she had a funny feeling. She had the feeling someone was standing behind and watching what she did. Of course there was no one there. Rita meant to leave the window open as it was a dry sunny day but she had closed it for perhaps the tenth time when the phone rang. The window therefore remained closed and Rita forgot about it.

  She was pulling up weeds in the tiny strip of front garden when a woman who lived next door to the Lawrences came across the road, rattled a tin at her and asked for a donation for Cancer Research.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my telling you how much I like yo
ur bedroom curtains.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Rita.

  ‘Mrs Hare had white net. Of course that was a few years back. You don’t mind sleeping in that bedroom then? Or do you use one of the back rooms?’

  Rita’s knees felt weak. She was speechless.

  ‘I suppose it isn’t as if he actually did the deed in the bedroom. More just outside on the landing, wasn’t it?’

  Rita gave her a pound to get rid of her. She went upstairs and stood on the landing and felt very funny indeed. Should she tell Norman? How could she tell him, how could she begin, when they had never once mentioned the subject since they moved in? Norman never thought about it anyway, she was sure of that. She watched him eating his supper as if he hadn’t a care in the world. The window crashed open just as he was starting on his pudding. He jumped up with an angry shout.

  ‘You’re going to come with me into that bathroom and I’m going to teach you how to shut that window if it’s the last thing I do!’

  He stood behind her while she took the pole and inserted the hook into the ring on the bolt, pushed the bolt up and gave it a firm twist.

  ‘There, you see, you’ve turned it the wrong way. I said clockwise. Don’t you know what clockwise means?’

  Norman opened the window and made Rita close it again. This time she twisted the bolt to the right. The window crashed open before they had reached the foot of the stairs.

  ‘It’s not me, you see, it’s the wind,’ Rita cried.

  Norman’s voice shook with rage. ‘The wind couldn’t blow it open if you closed it properly. It doesn’t blow it open when I close it.’