by Ruth Rendell
Nicholas retreated a little. He felt the man’s power. It was the power of money and the power that is achieved by always having had money. There was something he hadn’t ever before noticed about Sorensen but which he noticed now. Sorensen looked as if he were made of metal, his skin of copper, his hair of silver, his suit of pewter.
And then the mist in Nicholas’s eyes stopped him seeing anything but a blur. ‘How much was my bill?’ he managed to say.
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘How much?’
‘Sixty-seven pounds,’ said Sorensen, ‘give or take a little.’ He sounded amused.
To Nicholas it was a small fortune. He got out his cheque book and wrote the cheque to J. Sorensen and passed it across the desk and said, ‘There’s your money. But you needn’t worry. I won’t say I saw you. I promise I won’t.’
Uttering those words made him feel noble, heroic. The threatening tears receded. Sorensen looked at the cheque and tore it in two.
‘You’re a very tiresome boy. I don’t want you on my premises. Get out.’
Nicholas got out. He walked out of the building with his head in the air. He was still considering sending Sorensen another cheque when, two mornings later, reading his paper in the train, his eye caught the hated name. At first he didn’t think the story referred to ‘his’ Sorensen – and then he knew it did. The headline read: ‘Woman Found Dead in Forest. Murder of Tycoon’s Wife.’
‘The body of a woman,’ ran the story beneath,
was found last night in an abandoned car in Hatfield Forest in Hertfordshire. She had been strangled. The woman was today identified as Mrs Winifred Sorensen, 45, of Eaton Place, Belgravia. She was the wife of Julius Sorensen, chairman of Sorensen-McGill, manufacturers of office equipment.
Mrs Sorensen had been staying with her mother, Mrs Mary Clifford, at Mrs Clifford’s home in Much Hadham. Mrs Clifford said, ‘My daughter had intended to stay with me for a further two days. I was surprised when she said she would drive home to London on Tuesday evening.’
‘I was not expecting my wife home on Tuesday,’ said Mr Sorensen. ‘I had no idea she had left her mother’s house until I phoned there yesterday When I realized she was missing I immediately informed the police.’
Police are treating the case as murder.
That poor woman, thought Nicholas. While she had been driving home to her husband, longing for him probably, needing his company and his comfort, he had been philandering with a girl he had picked up, a girl whose surname he didn’t even know. He must now be overcome with remorse. Nicholas hoped it was biting agonized remorse. The contrast was what was so shocking, Sorensen cheek to cheek with that girl, drinking with her, no doubt later sleeping with her; his wife alone, struggling with an attacker in a lonely place in the dark.
Nicholas, of course, wouldn’t have been surprised if Sorensen had done it himself. Nothing Sorensen could do would have surprised him. The man was capable of any iniquity. Only this he couldn’t have done, which none knew better than Nicholas. So it was a bit of a shock to be accosted by two policemen when he arrived home that evening. They were waiting in a car outside his gate and they got out as he approached.
‘Nothing to worry about, Mr Hawthorne,’ said the older of them who introduced himself as a Detective Inspector. ‘Just a matter of routine. Perhaps you read about the death of Mrs Winifred Sorensen in your paper today?’
‘Yes.’
‘May we come in?’
They followed him upstairs. What could they want of him? Nicholas sometimes read detective stories and it occurred to him that, knowing perhaps of his tenuous connection with Sorensen-McGill, they would want to ask him questions about Sorensen’s character and domestic life. In that case they had come to the right witness.
He could tell them all right. He could tell them why poor Mrs Sorensen, jealous and suspicious as she must have been, had taken it into her head to leave her mother’s house two days early and drive home. Because she had intended to catch her husband in the act. And she would have caught him, found him absent or maybe entertaining that girl in their home, only she had never got home. Some maniac had hitched a lift from her first. Oh yes, he’d tell them!
In his room they sat down. They had to sit on the bed for there was only one chair.
‘It has been established,’ said the Inspector, ‘that Mrs Sorensen was killed between eight and ten p.m. on Tuesday.’
Nicholas nodded. He could hardly contain his excitement. What a shock it was going to be for them when he told them about this supposedly respectable businessman’s private life! A split second later Nicholas was left deflated and staring.
‘At nine that evening Mr Julius Sorensen, her husband, was in a restaurant called Potters in Marylebone High Street accompanied by a young lady. He has made a statement to us to that effect.’
Sorensen had told them. He had confessed. The disappointment was acute.
‘I believe you were also in the restaurant at that time?’ In a small voice Nicholas said, ‘Oh yes. Yes, I was.’
‘On the following day, Mr Hawthorne, you went to the offices of Sorensen-McGill where a conversation took place between you and Mr Sorensen. Will you tell me what that conversation was about, please?’
‘It was about my seeing him in Potters the night before. He wanted me to . . .’ Nicholas stopped. He blushed.
‘Just a moment, sir. I think I can guess why you’re so obviously uneasy about this. If I may say so without giving offence you’re a very young man as yet and young people are often a bit confused when it comes to questions of loyalty. Am I right?’
Mystified now, Nicholas nodded.
‘Your duty is plain. It’s to tell the truth. Will you do that?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Good. Did Mr Sorensen try to bribe you?’
‘Yes.’ Nicholas took a deep breath. ‘I made him a promise.’
‘Which must carry no weight, Mr Hawthorne. Let me repeat. Mrs Sorensen was killed between eight and ten. Mr Sorensen has told us he was in Potters at nine, in the bar. The bar staff can’t remember him. The surname of the lady he says he was with is unknown to him. According to him you were there and you saw him.’ The Inspector glanced at his companion, then back to Nicholas. ‘Well, Mr Hawthorne? This is a matter of the utmost seriousness.’
Nicholas understood. Excitement welled in him once more but he didn’t show it. They would realize why he hesitated. At last he said:
‘I was in Potters from eight till about nine-thirty.’ Carefully he kept to the exact truth. ‘Mr Sorensen and I discussed my being there and seeing him when I kept my appointment with him in his office on Wednesday and he – he paid the bill for my dinner.’
‘I see.’ How sharp were the Inspector’s eyes! How much he thought he knew of youth and age, wisdom and naivety, innocence and corruption! ‘Now then – did you in fact see Mr Sorensen in Potters on Tuesday evening?’
‘I can’t forget my promise,’ said Nicholas.
Of course he couldn’t. He had only to keep his promise and the police would charge Sorensen with murder. He looked down. He spoke in a guilty troubled voice.
‘I didn’t see him. Of course I didn’t.’
The Whistler
Jeremy found the key in one of the holiday flats while he was working for Manuel. The flats were being painted throughout in a colour called champagne and so far they hadn’t found a machine to do this. Jeremy hoped they wouldn’t until the job was done. Manuel was an American citizen though he came from somewhere south of the border – Cuba, Jeremy had always supposed. Jeremy himself came from somewhere a long way north of the border, England in fact, and he had been feeling his way around the United States for a couple of years now, always hoping for his luck to change. The key, he thought, might be a piece of luck.
It was up in a corner of the bedroom windowsill, under the blind. Manuel was in the living room, whistling country music. He whistled all the time he was working, never anything Spanis
h, always Western or country stuff, and he never played the radio which Jeremy would have preferred. The key had a label tied on its head with a piece of string. On the label an address was written. Jeremy started to say, or thought of saying, ‘Hey, Manuel, look at this . . .’ and then checked himself. The whistling went on unbroken. Whatever might be on offer at the address on the key label, did he want to have to share it with Manuel? Or, worse, did he want Manuel to take the key off him?
Finding things in the flats wasn’t unusual. People were very careless. They rented these flats at Juanillo Beach for a couple of weeks in the high season and went off home to New Jersey or Moscow, Idaho, or wherever it might be, leaving their jewellery behind and their cameras, not to mention such trifles as books and tapes and so on. The company who owned the property were supposed to come in and check before Manuel started but they didn’t make much of a job of it. Jeremy had found a roll of banknotes, over eighty dollars, in a kitchen unit, and in a gap between tiled floor and wall, a diamond ring. A jeweller in downtown Miami had given him $250 for the ring and that was probably a fraction of its value. It had been a mistake telling Manuel about it. Manuel hadn’t cared about the banknotes but he had jibbed at the ring. It wasn’t that he was more honest than the next man, but he had this contract with Juanillo Beach Properties Inc. and he didn’t want to lose it. At any rate he had warned Jeremy off helping himself to anything he found in the flats – which was enough in itself to make Jeremy pick up the key and put it in the pocket of his jeans. In the next room the whistling continued, becoming very rollicking and Rocky Mountain.
It was starting to get hot and the air conditioning had broken down. Or Juanillo Beach Properties had taken the fuse out, Jeremy thought. He wouldn’t put it past them. By noon it would be up in the nineties. Well, it was for the climate he’d come down here and for the climate he stayed. It is easier to be poor in a warm climate. He thought of England with horror, of being deported and having to go back there as his worst nightmare. It couldn’t really be like that, it wasn’t, but he remembered his native land as green and cold, full of rich elderly people who had log fires going all the year round, a land of joblessness and privilege where, though he had been born there, he had never felt welcome. Now the blind was up he could see the subtropical garden in which the apartment block was, palms and citrus and Indian paintbrush and oleander and here and there the sliced spear leaves of a banana. Yellow and black striped zebra butterflies flitted among the thick shiny leaves. And the sun blazed from a clear blue sky. It suited him here, or would if he had a bit of money.
In London he had had a very small room, for which he paid £25 a week, and had shared bathroom and kitchen two floors down with four other tenants. Here he had a motel room with bath – well, shower – for less than that. And he didn’t need a kitchen because eating out was cheap. But sometimes he thought he’d come to the United States too late to seek his fortune, maybe fifty years too late. That was what Josh who owned the motel said. Josh didn’t know he was there illegally of course. Or if he did he didn’t say.
After work he and Josh sometimes had a beer together on the porch at the rear of the motel office building. The motel was in a rough area and was pretty shabby but if there was one thing Josh kept in repair it was the screens round that porch. All the mosquitos of the diaspora came down there, Josh said, driven out of more prosperous parts.
Jeremy remembered the address on the key. ‘Where’s Eleventh Avenue?’
There were two more cans of Coors on the table, sweating icy drops, and a bag of toasted pecans. A little brown lizard ran up the screen on the outside.
‘What d’you mean, Eleventh Avenue? Eleventh Avenue where?’
‘Miami.’
‘There’s not so many cities in this country you’ll find the avenues numbered. Streets, yes. Why? What d’you ask for?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Take LA, take Philly – they don’t have numbered avenues.’
‘New York has.’
‘New York’s different,’ said Josh which was something Americans always said, Jeremy had noticed.
‘So how about Miami?’
‘Sure Miami’s got an Eleventh Avenue. Downtown. There’s a street plan in the office.’
Jeremy had a look at it. The address on the key was 1562A Ave. 11. No city, no state. The label was rather smudged and there had been more of the address there, a couple of capital letters, in fact. The second letter was certainly a J or a Y. Y for York? J for Juanillo? He knew without enquiring that there was no First Avenue in Juanillo, let alone Eleventh. Come to that, could he be sure the writer had meant Eleventh Avenue? Ave. 11 was a funny way of putting it, more a European way, except that Europeans don’t number their streets much.
It wasn’t likely to be Miami. People from Miami wouldn’t rent a flat at Juanillo Beach. But he could try. Burglary would be so simple, scarcely dishonest even, when you didn’t have to break in. That evening he was going to eat out with Manuel and Lupe in a Thai restaurant out in posh Fort Cayne where Manuel lived. But first he’d make a little trip downtown and try the key on the front door of 1562A Eleventh Avenue.
The place wasn’t guarded, all was quiet. He rang the bell, waited, rang again, tried the key. It didn’t fit. In the taxi going out to Fort Cayne he thought about what Josh had said about not many American cities having numbered avenues. Of course Josh might be wrong, he had only named three cities . . . Wasn’t it more probable anyway that the key opened an apartment in New York? What was Eleventh Avenue, New York, like and how far uptown would 1562A be? If it was 1562 Fifth they were talking about he’d have some idea. He imagined a gorgeous New York apartment full of treasures waiting for someone to walk in and take them. The trouble was that the fare to New York was something around $300 round trip.
The restaurant was called the Phumiphol and it was in one of those glossy malls. Jeremy got there first and ordered a vodka on the rocks. Put it on the check, please. It was going to be a bit awkward meeting Lupe again. Nothing he couldn’t handle, of course, but he did need that vodka.
Her real name was Guadelupe or Maria del Guadelupe or some such thing and she was an illegal immigrant like him. A small dark beautiful girl with the huge eyes and symmetrical features of those Mexican film stars of thirties Hollywood. She resembled a photograph he had seen of Dolores del Rio. Manuel was going to marry her and she too would become an American, as much a citizen as the President’s wife or a Daughter of the American Revolution.
The vodka came and a little dish of something that looked like salted beetles but couldn’t be. Jeremy had first met Lupe in Manuel’s apartment. Not that she lived there with him. Manuel was very strict and very Spanish about that sort of thing. His affianced wife had to be a virgin and manifestly seen by all the world to be a virgin.
Oddly enough, Lupe had been. Jeremy had never actually come across one before. She lived in a room in a Cuban lady’s house and every day she came to clean Manuel’s apartment for him and iron his shirts. Manuel put his shirts through the washer himself but Lupe ironed them. Wherever she came from she didn’t want to go back there and that, Jeremy had been sure, was why she was waiting on and obeying Manuel in the hope of marrying him. Manuel was an ugly devil, very thin and somehow spiderlike with a pockmarked hatchet face while Jeremy was tall, blond and good-looking which was partly, no doubt, why Lupe had fallen in love with him.
Or whatever you called it. At any rate she hadn’t resisted much. Manuel had had to go home because his father was dying. He died before Manuel got there, so he was only away two days but that was enough. Jeremy and Lupe were making love in the apartment at Hacienda Alameda before Manuel got on the plane. Lupe’s virginity was a surprise and bit daunting but after the third or fourth time it was all the same as if it had been gone five years.
The trouble was that they couldn’t stop and at last Manuel found out. One stupid afternoon when Jeremy had the day off and Lupe was cleaning the apartment they forgot discretion and succumbed. They might so easily
have gone to the motel, he thought afterwards. Manuel didn’t find them, nothing so crude as that, he found a blond hair and a long chestnut wavy hair on the pillow where only a black-haired man slept.
Jeremy was finishing off his vodka when Manuel and Lupe came in. Manuel looked cheerful and pleased with himself, talking about the holiday he would take away from Florida when the really hot weather started. Make it a honeymoon, was what Jeremy would have said a few months back. They say Alaska’s a great place in the summer. Something stopped him saying it now. Manuel hadn’t mentioned marriage since that night.
They had some transparent soup with flowers floating in it. A jar of sake and a bottle of Perrier water. Neither Manuel nor Lupe drank much. Then came little pancakes, shredded vegetables, perfumed duck. It was all as if dolls had cooked it. Lupe ate daintily, chewing every mouthful twenty times, keeping her head bent.
‘I want to act like a civilized man,’ Manuel had said, and pathetically, Jeremy thought, ‘Like an American gentleman.’ He looked ridiculous when he was unhappy, a black crow with mud on its feathers. ‘My ancestors would have killed you and her too.’
Jeremy had cast up his eyes at that. Oh, Christ . . .
‘Times have changed. With me it will be as if it had never happened.’ Manuel looked at Lupe. ‘But it must never happen again.’
‘It won’t happen again,’ said Lupe.
‘Of course not.’ Jeremy didn’t want her any more anyway. All this fuss was enough to put one off more desirable women than Lupe Garcia.
‘Then you stay working for me,’ Manuel said to Jeremy, ‘and bygones shall be bygones.’ He smiled. He insisted on shaking Jeremy’s hand. Then he went to the kitchen to open a bottle of wine, whistling ‘The Tennessee Waltz’ as he went. An apposite if tactless choice, Jeremy thought, but perhaps Manuel didn’t know the words. Lupe tried to catch his eyes but Jeremy wouldn’t look.
That had been two months ago and this was the first time since then that he had seen Lupe. It was archaic the feeling the whole set-up gave him that by that one initial act, let alone the others, he had spoiled her for Manuel, she was damaged goods. She had grown more subdued. She didn’t look unhappy. They ate little cakes of dough in syrup sauce.