The Girl Next Door

by Rendell, Ruth

  George, the eldest of the Batchelor siblings still living, was still in the town where he had been born and grown up, a not uncommon phenomenon in the outer London suburbs. This was true also of Alan and Rosemary and almost of George’s brother Stanley, but not of George’s brother Norman. So it was a surprise to walk into George and Maureen’s living room in the sprawling bungalow called Carisbrooke and find Norman sitting beside his brother on a sofa, George’s leg stretched out in front of him and supported on what Maureen called a ‘pouffe’.

  ‘How are you Norman?’ said Rosemary. ‘Long time no see.’ It was a phrase Alan particularly disliked. It was a phrase that she believed the people she called ‘Chinamen’ used.

  ‘I live in France now. I’m not often here.’ Norman went off into a gushing eulogy to French culture, food, drink, transport, the countryside, the health service and his house. A glazed look came over Maureen’s face, the expression of someone who has heard it all before. She got up and returned with a trolley laden with glasses and bottles of various sherries, Oloroso, Amontillado and Manzanilla among others.

  Having accepted a glass of Amontillado, Alan handed George the Daily Telegraph. ‘Have you seen this?’

  George barely glanced at it. ‘Sure. We take the same paper.’ He nodded in a sage sort of way. ‘I built it.’

  ‘What, Warlock?’

  ‘Me and my brother did. Batchelor Brothers. Like we built a good many of the houses on The Hill.’

  Alan knew he meant not that George and Stanley had built these houses with their own hands but that their firm had, and on those fields across which they and all the other children had run when the sirens sounded and then the all-clear.

  ‘When was it, George?’ Rosemary asked.

  ‘Sometime in the early fifties. Fifty-two, fifty-three?’

  ‘OK. Now maybe you can tell me if you think our tunnels were underneath Warlock.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said George. ‘Though that’s what they were, the foundations of a house.’

  Rosemary echoed his last words. ‘The foundations of a house. I never thought of that.’

  ‘They were all gone by the time I acquired the land. We dug new foundations for Warlock. A Mr Roseleaf had it built. Funny name, I thought, that’s why I remembered.’

  Norman, having found fault with the sherry as being Spanish and not French, had fallen asleep but now awoke with a snort. ‘So that’s what they were,’ he said. ‘The foundations of a house. That was a funny name too, Warlock.’

  ‘It means a man who’s a sort of witch,’ said Maureen.‘Very funny, in my opinion.’

  ‘Nothing to do with witches,’ said George. ‘It was because he’d lived in a street called Warlock Road in Maida Vale.’

  ‘Well I never,’ said Norman. ‘You were there, Alan, weren’t you? And Rosemary. And Lewis Newman – remember him? And do you remember Stanley’s dog Nipper? He was a nice dog. My mum hardly ever got cross with us, not with anyone, but was she mad when she found Stanley’d been taking the dog out in the evening without asking.’

  Rosemary smiled, remembering. ‘Nipper was lovely. We longed for a dog, didn’t we, Alan?’

  ‘You didn’t find those hands when you were building that house, did you, George?’

  ‘I think I’d have said, don’t you?’

  George softened his scathing tone by struggling to his feet and refilling sherry glasses. Several guests noticed that he was pouring Amontillado into Manzanilla glasses, but no one said anything. Rosemary got Oloroso instead of Amontillado but she didn’t mind; she really preferred the sweet sherry though she hadn’t asked for it as it was known to make you fat.

  ‘That was where we met,’ she said. ‘In those tunnels.’

  ‘What, when you were ten?’ George asked.

  Rosemary nodded, suddenly embarrassed. Met there, lost each other when someone’s father turned them out, shouted at them to go home and not come back, met again years later, at a dance this time, dated (though that was a term never used then) and got married. It seemed to her that the others were staring at them as if she had described some tribal ritual, ancient and now unknown. Except for her and Alan, they had all been married at least once before, divorced, moved, even lived abroad like Norman.

  She said brightly, trying to cover a kind of shame, ‘Who was it that turned us out of the tunnels? Someone’s father? Michael Woodman? Woodley?’

  ‘It was Michael Winwood’s dad,’ said Norman. ‘They lived on The Hill next door to the Joneses, the Winwoods did. And Bill Johnson’s people lived further up The Hill. Winwood found out we were all going into the tunnels in the evenings. I suppose Michael told him. He just walked across the road, found the entrance and shouted down to us to come out and not come back.’

  While he was speaking, his brother Stanley had come into the house very quietly by the back door. Norman jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder, got to his feet and the brothers embraced. Rosemary said afterwards to her husband that she hadn’t known where to look, brothers hugging each other. Whatever next! Alan thought it was rather nice but he said nothing. Throughout his marriage he had often taken refuge in saying nothing. They were always weird, those Batchelors, said Rosemary on the way home. For instance, the way Norman, the youngest, used to go about telling people he’d been born on the kitchen table.

  George, more conventionally, shook hands with his brother and pointed to his hip with a doleful look. ‘We were talking about those Winwoods. Remember them?’

  ‘They lived next door to Daphne Jones on The Hill. I remember her all right.’

  That name again, Alan thought. He’d forgotten her and now her name had come up three times in – what? The past couple of hours? At least he hadn’t blushed. What did Stanley mean by that ‘all right’? Alan’s voice sounded squeaky and he wondered if anyone noticed. Rosemary might. ‘Is she still alive? She was older than any of us.’

  ‘She wasn’t. She just looked sixteen when she was twelve. She wasn’t really older.’ Stanley nodded knowledgeably. ‘I’ve sort of kept in touch with her.’ He seemed proud of it. ‘She’s been married three times and now she’s called Daphne Furness. Lives in Hampstead or St John’s Wood or somewhere. We don’t all cling to our roots.’

  Aware of feeling envy, Alan wondered what had come over him. How must it feel now to have known and possibly often seen Daphne Jones over the years? He suppressed the thought. He was an old man, a great-grandfather, and George was hoisting himself to his feet once more and stood as if about to make a statement, swaying. ‘It’s just come to me. I’ve got a photo – a snap we used to call them – of us in the tunnels. Well, me and my brothers and my sister Moira in the entrance. Robert’s not there, he took the snap. Where’s that photo got to, Maureen? Can you lay your hands on it?’

  ‘Of course I can. How can you ask?’

  Alan expected a little black and white or even sepia photograph. Instead Maureen brought out an album that looked too heavy for a small woman to lift. It was brown, with pages of thick card to which what seemed like hundred of photographs had been pasted. Familiar with the contents, though she hadn’t been one of the children in the tunnels, she opened the album at a page with the date 1944 printed on it, and laid it on the coffee table. George shifted along the sofa and gingerly set his foot to the ground, lifting his left leg with both hands. Stanley sat beside him, squeezing between him and Norman.

  ‘Now let Alan and Rosemary have a shufti,’ said Maureen. ‘You lot can see the pics whenever you want.’

  Eventually the album was rearranged so that everyone could see but no one could see very well. George placed one finger on a dim-looking snap of five children crowded together in what was apparently the entrance to a small cave. It was out of focus and as a result looked as if Robert Batchelor had taken it through a thick fog. ‘Me and Stanley and Norman and poor Moira,’ said George. He called her ‘poor’ because she, the youngest but one of them, like Robert, the eldest, was dead.

  ‘Who’s that?’ said
Rosemary, pointing to a boy with a mop of curly hair.

  ‘Don’t know.’ George produced a magnifying glass, enlarging the boy’s face to a blur. ‘Could be Bill Johnson.’

  The other photographs on the page were of little interest to Alan and Rosemary, being of interiors of the Batchelor house in Tycehurst Hill, of Stanley holding a cricket bat, and, mysteriously to anyone not familiar with Norman’s life history, a small shot of a table covered in a checked cloth.

  ‘Look at that,’ said Norman. ‘I took that. Fancy you keeping it, George. I was born on that table. My mum was walking about the house, waiting for the nurse to come, in labour of course, though we were never told that part. It was never put into words, though that’s what it was. George and Moira carried it out into the garden for Robert to get that shot on account of it was too dark in the kitchen. Fancy you keeping that. Can you unstick it, George, and let me have it?’

  ‘No, I can’t. It’d spoil the album.’ George looked around him. ‘You want to see any more? I ask because my leg’s giving me hell.’

  ‘Give it here,’ said Maureen. ‘Let Alan and Rosemary have a closer look.’

  She lifted the album and laid it across Alan’s knees. ‘Robert took some more of the tunnels on the next page,’ said George.

  Alan turned it over and there she was, sitting on a pile of bricks with Stanley on one side of her and Michael Winwood on the other. She was wearing a summer frock and her hair, a nearly black dark brown, hung in ripples over her shoulders and halfway down her back. Alan started at the sight, something like a shiver, sudden enough to make Rosemary turn on him a look of concern. That hair – she sometimes wore it in pigtails and the waves appeared when the plaits were undone.

  ‘There she is,’ said Stanley, craning his neck to see. ‘She doesn’t look like that now, but you can still see the young Daphne in her.’

  Hurriedly Alan turned the page to a set of some ten or eleven photos of Stanley’s dog.

  ‘Nipper. There he is, my first dog. I reckon I’ve had ten since then, they all lived to a good age.’ Stanley sighed. ‘Alfie died last year aged eighteen. I won’t have another, not now. It’d be sad for him if I went first, and I easily might at my age.’

  A thin blight settled on the meeting after that. They were old and hadn’t long to last and they shirked facing it. Alan asked where Stanley was living now and was told Theydon Bois, a not-far-distant village in the forest. He wanted to ask more about Daphne but hesitated and asked after Michael Winwood instead. North-west London, he was told, and then he stood up to go.

  ‘Should we get in touch with the police?’

  ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ said Stanley. ‘Or bones, should I say?’

  ‘Better let them know.’ George shifted his bad leg and winced. ‘I’ll tell them, if you like. I mean, I built Warlock and I’ve got those pictures. I’m the one to do it. They’re not taking my album out of the house, though.’

  ‘We could try to find some of the others too,’ said Norman. ‘Maureen could do that. Genius with the technology, aren’t you, Maureen?’

  ‘More like the phone book,’ said his sister-in-law.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ALAN AND ROSEMARY walked back up Traps Hill. In the days when they both belonged to the tennis club, they used to run up that hill. Now Rosemary was proud of walking up without getting more than slightly out of breath. They knew every inch of Loughton; when they were children, it had been called ‘the village’. ‘I’m just going down the village,’ you said when you went shopping.

  After the meeting at a dance, the remembering knowing each other as children, the going about together and getting engaged, they had married and bought a house in Harwater Drive; later, when the children came along and Alan was doing well, a bigger and better one in Church Lane. The pretty fields and woods that had begun where the best road of all met the top of The Hill and Borders Lane had all been built on, acres and acres, miles and miles, and called the Debden Estate. The wealthy people of Alderton Hill shuddered at the coming of this spillover from the East End of London. Living in less prestigious but still admired and sought-after streets, the parents of Alan and Rosemary and their neighbours also shuddered. Some moved away. Out, of course, out into Essex as far as Epping and Theydon Bois, only to be deterred by the coming of Harlow New Town. ‘Nimby’ – not in my back yard – was a word that was unknown then, but Nimbys were what they were.

  Alan and Rosemary got married at St Mary’s Church in Loughton High Road and Alan’s friend Richard Parr, who had also been in the tunnels, was his best man. A week later, when Alan and Rosemary were away on their honeymoon in the Isle of Wight, Richard emigrated to Canada. He and Alan kept in touch for a while, exchanging airmails handwritten on flimsy blue paper. Making phone calls was far too expensive.

  Now great-grandparents – their second great-grandchild had been born three years before – Rosemary and Alan had sold the house in Church Lane, a house they had lived in for nearly half a century. They had bought it for eight thousand pounds and sold it for three million. They moved into a flat. It was a luxurious first-floor flat in Traps Hill, for they were very fit for their age and with a shiver rejected the idea of sheltered housing.

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ said Freya, their younger granddaughter. A social worker and sometime psychotherapist, she was in Loughton for a conference in the Lopping Hall. ‘I’m getting married.’

  Alan said, ‘Congratulations. Or should I say “best wishes” when it’s the bride?’ but Rosemary said, ‘Is it David?’

  In a sharper tone than usual, Freya said, ‘Well, considering we’ve been together for five years, of course it is, Gran.’

  Having no champagne, Alan poured three glasses of sherry. It seemed to be turning into a sherry day. Freya looked at her glass suspiciously before she sipped the contents. It occurred to Alan that she might never have tasted sherry before.

  ‘Mind you come to our wedding. It’ll be sometime in July,’ she said as she was leaving.

  ‘It used to bother me a lot,’ said Rosemary, ‘her living in – well, in sin.’

  ‘That’s a very outdated expression. Her parents lived together before they married and so did her sister and Giles. Things have changed. Norman Batchelor lives with a woman he’s not married to.’ Alan searched for a word. ‘It’s perfectly respectable these days.’

  ‘Not to me,’ said Rosemary, adding, ‘I don’t want the rest of this sherry. We’re drinking too much.’

  Alan said nothing. He had thought of taking Rosemary out for supper, maybe to the King’s Head, but her moralistic attitude, very much in evidence recently, changed his mind. ‘Do you think we’ve led a dull life?’ he asked her. ‘I mean, marrying early, two children, staying married, me working nine till five, you a housewife, gradually moving up the property ladder but never moving out of Loughton. We’ve been abroad, but only to France and Spain. We’ve never even been to America.’

  ‘What are you getting at, Alan?’

  She rarely called him by his given name. It was always ‘darling’ or ‘dear’. ‘I just asked if you thought we’d led a dull life.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think so. I’d have said we’ve had a happy life, not very adventurous, but those sort of lives are full of trouble. We haven’t committed adultery or gone in for domestic violence or anything like that. We’ve brought up our children decently. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, but he thought, ‘Everything.’

  He took a pack of smoked salmon out of the fridge and made scrambled eggs to go with it while Rosemary pinned and then tacked up the sleeves of the dress she had been making for Freya that morning.

  George Batchelor could manage an invoice or a receipt, but when it came to a letter, he got Maureen to do it for him. She took the photograph of George and Stanley and Norman and Moira and the possible Bill Johnson to the instant print place in the High Road and had it photocopied. She addressed her letter with enclosure to The Chief Inves
tigating Officer, the Metropolitan Police, and took it to the police station in Forest Road herself. Once she was there, she might as well pay her monthly or sometimes weekly visit to Clara Moss, who lived higher up the road. It was a call of duty, not pleasure, and George usually did it. He didn’t mind it, enjoyed it, she thought. But he wouldn’t be able to do it until his leg was better, so she had taken over. He said it was the least he could do for poor Clara, but Maureen knew it made him feel quite young, or at least middle-aged. Though he was old, Clara was even older, must be getting on for ninety.

  She pounded on the knocker because Clara was deaf. She came to the door without her stick because she could hold on to the furniture. She said, ‘Hallo, Mrs Batchelor,’ and Maureen said, ‘How are you, Clara?’ and stepped over the threshold into the small, dark living room.

  Norman was still staying with his brother and sister-in-law at Carisbrooke, York Hill, and running his bulbs and seedings mail order company on his smartphone while in constant communication with Eliane, whom he spoke of as his ‘lady partner’. George continued to sit on the sofa with his bad leg up, except when the physiotherapist came and put him through his paces. In the privacy of their bedroom he told Maureen that he was sure Norman stayed and stayed in order to have someone to complain to about the state of the country.

  ‘He hasn’t got a woman here, has he?’ Maureen asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised. He always liked two strings to his bow. Better ask Stan. Stan always knows things like that.’

  ‘I forgot to tell you. Stan’s got a new dog. And after him saying he wouldn’t have another in case he passed away and it pined. It’s a puppy, this one, coal black. Not a bit of white on it but it’s called Spot. All the rest have been Nipper, I reckon Spot was the only other doggy name Stan could think of.’

  Initially quite keen on the job of finding out the provenance of the Warlock hands, as they were starting to be called, Detective Inspector Colin Quell lost interest when forensics discovered their age. If they had been two or three years in the ground, there would have been some challenging investigation to be done, but they turned out to be sixty or seventy years old. It was fairly obvious that they, this man and this woman, had been killed. No one, not even a crazy person – a crazy undertaker? – removes the hands from the bodies of those who have died naturally. No one buries those hands away from their mutilated bodies. Still, it was a case to which he had been assigned, and he had to do it, no matter that the perpetrator – the killer and dissector – must have been long dead himself.