The Girl Next Door

by Rendell, Ruth

  As he read the report a second time – it came both on screen and as printed sheets of paper or hard copy – he thought once more, the way he had been thinking since he was first assigned to this case, that – well, who cared? These two whose hands were being investigated had lain in the clay for nearly seventy years. Someone no doubt long dead had killed them and placed the hands in a biscuit tin for some unfathomable reason. Quell wasn’t shocked by this, he had seen too much of man’s iniquity to react in that way, but he was shocked at the idea of taxpayers’ money being wasted on an investigation. If nothing was discovered, well and good, but if, after months of painstaking examination, he managed to find who had killed and buried them, Quell, recalling a smidgen of sixth-form Latin, asked himself, Cui bono?

  An invitation had come to Freya’s wedding and it seemed to Alan that Rosemary could talk of nothing else. Like most men, he was not particularly interested in weddings, not even his granddaughter’s. There was no mention of a church or even of a town hall on the pretty card but only of the hotel by the river at Kew where both Norrises assumed ‘the wedding breakfast’, as Rosemary called it, would take place.

  ‘I suppose the ceremony will be there as well,’ said Alan.

  ‘I sincerely hope not.’ Rosemary scrutinised the card again. ‘If it’s going to be one of those peculiar arrangements in a hotel lounge, I for one shan’t feel they’re married at all.’

  ‘It’s their choice. Nothing to do with us. I’ve heard of this place by the river. It’s supposed to be very pretty.’

  Rosemary said she had better get on with the dress she was making, this time for herself, and headed for her sewing room. Alan stopped her, saying that on a lovely day like this one they should go out for a walk. He intended to go and he didn’t want to go alone. ‘Buy yourself a dress for once,’ he said. ‘We can afford it. We can afford designer – isn’t that what they call it?’

  She made no reply to this but agreed to the walk, and although neither of them felt up to their marathons of a few years ago, the round trip of down The Hill and along Brook Road to the High Road and the cricket field, up Traps Hill and home was quite within their power. Alan had told himself he didn’t want to go alone, but in fact he did want to. To walk in the spring sunshine along these familiar streets, past these familiar houses and gardens and to think was what he wanted. As it happened, Rosemary wasn’t saying much. She also was perhaps thinking, and in her case of the lamentable state society was in when it countenanced young couples getting married in hotels instead of St Mary’s Church. But he mustn’t be disloyal even in thought.

  He put his hand in his jacket pocket to touch the card that had been in there for the past ten days or so. Its presence troubled him a little because it shouldn’t be there; he should never have picked it up, or at least he should have destroyed it when he got home. Instead he had read it several times over: Daphne Furness, it said, 67A Hamilton Terrace, London NW8. Then came an email address, a mobile phone number and a landline. He thought of her as she had been in George Batchelor’s living room, looking years younger than any woman there, her wonderful legs, those shoes. Don’t go there, he told himself, using an injunction Freya or maybe Fenella had taught him. Don’t.

  Rosemary laid her hand on his arm, then closed her fingers on it. ‘You shivered,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘Look where we are. You didn’t know, did you? You’ve been in a dream.’

  They were outside Warlock. The house itself looked deserted, all the blinds pulled down at the windows. The great pit, excavated to make a basement, was covered by sheets of tarpaulin in which the heavy rain of a few days before had made shallow puddles.

  ‘Rather sad, isn’t it? Such a lovely home. Will it ever be the same again?’

  Alan, who usually conditioned himself to agree with everything Rosemary said, found himself violently disagreeing. He wanted to say that with its white stucco and chocolate-coloured half-timbering, it wasn’t lovely, it never had been, and if it wasn’t the same again, all the better. And when did she start calling a house a ‘home’? But he didn’t say any of that. He only wondered if this unspoken disloyalty was going to continue, if he could rid himself of it. He withdrew his arm from her hand and felt into his pocket, where the card seemed to move under his fingers as if it was alive. His fingers remembered the feel of hers when she put her hands into his.

  It was later, afternoon slipping into evening, and Rosemary, in spite of what he had said about a designer dress, was back at her sewing machine, when he told himself he must choose one of two options: throw the card away, or call the phone number on it. Like a man choosing between infidelity and faithfulness – nothing could be further from his thoughts – he must decide. Of course he wouldn’t make that phone call. He looked back on his chaste and blameless life, reminded himself of his age and hers, and then thought of the many occasions that summer when Daphne had borrowed her father’s car and, parking it under the trees on Baldwins Hill, they had made love on the back seat or in the forest itself. Thou art fair, my love. Our bed is green. The beams of our house are cedars; our rafters are firs. Where had he remembered that from? He opened the sewing room door an inch or two, said to Rosemary, ‘I’m going out for a bit of a walk.’

  She didn’t lift her foot from the treadle. ‘You’ve already had a walk.’

  ‘I know, but I need another. Don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind, darling. Remember it’s supper at seven, though, won’t you?’

  There were only the two of them, it would only be cold meat and salad, yet it had to be at seven? Why? Because it always was. He knew he couldn’t change it. Down the hill, across the High Road and up York Hill past the bungalow called Carisbrooke and along Baldwin’s Hill to that paved apron of land that jutted into the green sward bordered by the forest. Here had been the place where young couples parked their borrowed cars. But no longer, Alan thought, not these days, when a teenage boy or girl brought a lover home to spend the night under the parental roof. In his day, parents wouldn’t even have considered allowing that. No son or daughter would have dreamed of asking. Thirty years later, his own son Owen had asked and been briskly turned down by Rosemary. If it had been left to him, he would have said yes, remembering the secret meetings with Daphne in her father’s car and the drive up here. The forest had been dark, car headlights going out one by one.

  There were no cars here now. He remembered exactly where Daphne had parked hers, tucking it in under overhanging branches. Our bed is green . . . She was afraid of nothing, or if she was, she didn’t show it; he, believing stories of boys and girls being arrested and had up in court for indecent behaviour in a public place, was always fearful. But he was young and his nervousness wasn’t enough to impede him when he was in the back with Daphne. He was passionate and greedy and so was she, even when the moon came out from behind clouds and he thought the light was from a policeman’s torch. There had been maybe a dozen occasions. Unlike other users of Baldwin’s Hill, who were afraid of pregnancy or, in the case of the girls, of not being virgins when they married, he and Daphne went ‘all the way’, as the phrase had it. She didn’t get pregnant, though he had done nothing to prevent it.

  He wrote to her and she wrote to him, but they were a long way apart, and though her family still lived in Loughton, three months is a long time when you’re only twenty. Their letters ceased, though once, two years later, he had a Christmas card from her. Now, standing on the small treeless expanse and looking across the darkening woodland, he wondered what would have happened if he had sent her a card back. But by this time he was going out with Rosemary, his ‘childhood sweetheart’, as his mother embarrassingly called her, and there was no Baldwin’s Hill in the back of a car for them, for Rosemary was saving herself for marriage.

  He turned away and began to make his way back down Stony Path and Harwater Drive. Tiredness hit him as he crossed Church Hill. For an old man he had walked a
lot that day, several miles. He was in his seventies. What had he been doing, mooning back to a long-lost youth and a woman who had had three husbands? When he got home, he would find the scissors and cut up the evidence, like you did with an out-of-date credit card, and drop the pieces in the bin. Episode Daphne over, he thought.

  As he unlocked his front door, he heard the soft buzz of the sewing machine and he felt a quite unwarranted anger rising in his throat like bile. But he opened the sewing room door to tell Rosemary he was back.

  ‘All right,’ she said, getting up. ‘I’ll make supper.’

  Daphne’s card was still in his pocket. Of course it was. Rosemary was the soul of honour, the last woman to forage through his clothes in search of incriminating evidence. What was happening to him that he was thinking of the possibility of deceiving his wife? But he was deceiving her already. That visit to Baldwin’s Hill with its attendant reminiscing was itself a deception. His thoughts now were a kind of deceit. Suddenly they deflected to the excavation he and Rosemary had gone to look at, and to the hands found there. A man and a woman. Had they been lovers, placed there in their grave by a vengeful husband or, come to that, a vengeful wife? So long ago, perhaps, that the reason for their burial would never be known.

  He was still holding Daphne’s card. Instead of cutting it into pieces or otherwise disposing of it, he put it back in his pocket.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHEN JO HAD died some few months before, Lewis Newman had received letters of condolence from people he had known during the various phases of his long life: one fellow medical student whose name he couldn’t even remember, a neighbour from the Birmingham days, those of his friends who were still alive and his partner in the practice where he had last worked. There was also a letter from someone he had been at school with – primary school, as they called it these days. Most of these people, apart from the friends, read the announcement of Jo’s death in The Times. That was what such announcements were for, Lewis supposed, and now he wondered why he had agreed to his cousin’s (‘beloved wife of’) insistence that it should be put there.

  He replied to these letters, as was polite. In Jo’s lifetime, she had done this sort of thing, and, writing to one of the Birmingham people, he thought to himself that this was the first such missive he had ever written. He saved answering the schoolfriend’s letter till last because it was the most interesting. It came from Stanley Batchelor and was scarcely a letter of condolence at all. True, Batchelor did say he was sorry to hear of Jo’s death, but the tone, Lewis thought, was rather that a man who had looked after a woman ‘through years of illness’ must to some extent be relieved by her demise. This was so much Lewis’s own sentiment – something he could never dream of revealing to anyone – that it endeared Stanley Batchelor to him.

  The Batchelors. How memories of the family came back to him now across seven decades. His own family had lived in Brook Road and the Batchelors in Tycehurst Hill. Stanley had had a dog called Nipper. Amazing to remember that. One of Stanley’s brothers, the youngest perhaps, was called Norman and he used to boast about being born on the kitchen table. The address on the letter was Theydon Bois. So Stanley hadn’t moved far from Loughton, or if he had, had come back again. There was an email address as well. Most people of their sort of age didn’t send emails, hardly knew what an email was. The last line of the letter, before the bit about ‘deepest sympathy’, read, If you haven’t thought about this neck of the woods for years, the newspaper stories about Warlock will have brought it back to you. An extraordinary business. It would be good to meet sometime if you feel like it.

  Death, thought Lewis, was something that brought old friends, long separated, back together. He had liked Stanley Batchelor very much when they were children. Would he like him now? Like or not, he was the very person with whom to discuss if not the Warlock business, the place they’d called something strange – what was it? – yes, the qanats. He couldn’t remember why. That and something else which, though it had never troubled him, never come near to making him unhappy, had been there on the edge of his consciousness ever since he was not much older than the age he had been when he and Stanley Batchelor had been friends. It had bothered his mother. She and Uncle James – no one ever called him Jim – had been close all their lives, though she was seven years older than he. Perhaps because she was seven years older and, as was common in the twenties, had had to look after him when she was a big child and he four years old.

  Lewis had often thought about Uncle James. When they were first married he had told Jo about him, and his curious disappearance.

  ‘He got killed in the war, didn’t he?’

  ‘For that to have happened he would have to have joined up, and it seems he didn’t.’

  ‘It doesn’t much matter now,’ said Jo.

  ‘It matters to me and to Mum. He just disappeared.’

  ‘I read somewhere that lots of people did. They were in houses that got bombed. Or they were drafted to work in mines and got buried.’

  He said no more. He knew it hadn’t been like that. Uncle James had been staying with them in Brook Road, and while he was there he seemed to join the army. Up till then he’d been unfit on account of having some minor thing the matter with him, a badly fallen arch on his left foot. On a second try they took him. He was going to go home to London, where he lived with an aunt and uncle, but he never got there. His uncle tried to trace him. James hadn’t told him where he would be stationed, that wouldn’t have been allowed, but he did have the names of two men he would be starting his training with, and their addresses. Both of them replied. They had never heard of Private James Rayment. The army had never heard of him, though he’d said he had joined up. Efforts to find him had failed. He had disappeared.

  That was sixty years and more ago and Uncle James had never been heard of since. As Jo said, people disappeared in wartime. It was a good time to change your identity or vanish or hide from authority. In those days you had an identity card and you had a ration book but that was all. No bus passes, no credit cards, no mobile phones; since you never drove, no driving licence, probably no bank account. You were free. Free to hide, free to be someone else, free to disappear. Lewis’s family did all they could to find Uncle James but they failed. After a time his disappearance mattered less, receded into a sort of semi-oblivion. It wasn’t as if he had died but rather as if he had gone a long way off, perhaps to live on some distant continent where no one ever went. Perhaps he had. People did very rarely go to those places, but sending airmail letters was troublesome and the cost of phoning was prohibitive. Uncle James might have tried to phone but failed to get through, as often happened.

  Lewis’s mother clung to a belief that he would one day turn up out of the blue and present himself on her doorstep. James had often stayed with them in Brook Road, and Gwen Newman, looking back over the past couple of years, now remembered that while there, her brother had gone out a lot in the evenings. Not every evening, but often, and she had had a feeling that he only stayed in with her and her husband and Lewis because it was expected of him as a guest. When James couldn’t be found, she remarked on this behaviour, and what she said had stayed with Lewis all these years.

  ‘I should have asked him where he was going but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. After all, he was a grown man. He used to get back very late, or I suppose he did. I was always asleep.’

  ‘Now you mention it,’ said Lewis’s father, ‘I heard him come in after midnight once or twice.’

  ‘I did ask him once if he’d had a nice evening but he only said “Lovely, thanks” and didn’t tell me any more.’

  ‘I sometimes wondered why he wanted to stay with us. It must have been rather dull with nothing to do in the evenings.’

  ‘He had something to do,’ said Gwen. ‘A girlfriend. A woman. He’s gone off with her and maybe she was married. That’s why he never told us.’

  Theydon Bois was one of those suburbs in Surrey or Essex or Hertfordshire on the
edge of London. The tube went to Theydon. It was desirable commuter land with shops, big and small houses, a village green, and it was in Epping Forest. Unfortunately, you could hear the distant roar of the motorway, the M25, not yet built when Stanley first lived there in the sixties. Thinking themselves clever and polyglot, visitors pronounced its name Theydon Bwah, but ‘Boys’ was correct.

  Stanley and George, Batchelor Brothers, had built several of the houses in Theydon, and Stanley and Helen lived in one of the larger detached ones. Stanley had bought it when his children left home, his first wife died and he married a woman twenty years younger than himself. When he had written back to Lewis Newman and invited him to lunch, Stanley had supposed he would drive, but Lewis, who had given up his car six months before Jo’s death, chose the tube. Ealing was at one end of the Central Line and Theydon at the other, so he could sit in the train for an hour or more reading one of his favourite and frequently reread books, The Count of Monte Cristo.

  Stanley met him at the station with Spot on the lead. Much to Spot’s dismay, they sat down on a seat outside the Bull, because Lewis wasn’t a great walker.

  ‘Quite like being in the countryside,’ he said.

  ‘We are in the countryside.’

  This was answered by a half-smile from Lewis and a shrug of his arthritic shoulders. ‘My brother George is coming to lunch,’ said Stanley. ‘He’s looking forward to seeing you again.’

  George was the only one of the Batchelors Lewis hadn’t liked. Too bossy and go-ahead.

  ‘He’s recovering from a hip replacement.’

  ‘It comes to us all,’ said Lewis the GP, trying to be generous.

  ‘Not to me, I trust. I try to keep all that sort of thing at bay by regular walks with Spot.’