To Fear a Painted Devil

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I’m leaving tomorrow, Max,’ she said. He took the biggest case from her and lifted it into the boot. ‘Such a mad rush! I’ve sold my house and the solicitor’s dealing with everything. Queenie and I—we don’t know where we’re going but we’re going to drive and drive. All the furniture—they’ve bought that too. I shan’t have anything but my clothes and the car—I’ve sold the Mini—and oh, Max! I shall have enough money to live on for the rest of my life.’

  The mask had not slipped at all. Only her lips, russet against the egg-shell brown of her face, smiled and swelled the lineless cheeks.

  ‘Leave, Queenie,’ she said, for Greenleaf, no lover of animals, was caressing the dog’s neck to hide his embarrassment and his fear. ‘She thinks she’s a bird dog. Come into the house.’

  He followed her into the dining-room. The picture had been taken down and was resting against the wall. Was she planning to take it with her or have it sent on? She must have seen him hesitate for she took his hand and drew him to a chair by the window. He sat down with his back to the painted thing.

  ‘You don’t like it do you?’

  Greenleaf, unable to smile, wrinkled his nose.

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Patrick didn’t like it either.’ Her voice sounded like a little girl’s, puzzled, naive. ‘Really, too silly! He wasn’t awfully mature, you know. I mean, people grow out of things like that, don’t they? Like being frightened of the dark.’

  ‘Not always.’ In a moment he would have to begin questioning her. He had no idea how she would react. In films, in plays, they confessed and either grew violent or threw themselves upon your mercy. His mission nauseated him.

  She went on dreamily, apparently suspecting nothing:

  ‘That picture, it used to hang in a room in my grandmother’s house in London. The garden room we called it because it opened into a sort of conservatory. Patrick made an awful fuss the first time he saw it—well, the only time really. My uncle and aunt had come home from America and they stayed a couple of nights with my grandmother. Patrick was terribly spoilt.’ She swivelled round until her eyes seemed to meet the eyes of Salome. ‘He was nine and I was seven. Grandmother thought he was wonderful.’ Her laughter was dry and faintly bitter. ‘She never had to live with him. But she was fair, my grandmother, fair at the end. She left her money to me. So sweet!’

  If only she would tell him something significant, something to make him feel justified in setting in motion the machinery that would send this sprite-like creature, this breathless waif of a woman, to a long incarceration. And yet … Tamsin in Holloway, Tamsin coarsened, roughened in speech and in manners. It was unthinkable.

  ‘That was nice for you,’ he said stupidly.

  ‘I loved her, you know, but she was a bit mad. Patrick’s father committing suicide, it sent her over the edge. It gave her a sort of pathological fear of divorce.’

  This is it, he thought. He needed to hear and at the same time he wanted to stop her. Almost unconsciously he fumbled along the window sill.

  ‘Did you want a cigarette, Max?’

  Taking one from the silver box, he said, ‘I’ve given it up,’ and lit it with shaking fingers.

  ‘What was I saying? Oh, yes, about Grandmother. She knew I wasn’t getting on all that well with Patrick. Funny, she made the match and she wanted us to make a go of it. Just because we were cousins she thought we’d be alike. How wrong she was! After she died we went along to hear the will read—like they do in books. Dramatic, I can’t tell you! Patrick wasn’t mentioned at all. I don’t know if she thought he’d had enough from his father—that went on this house—or perhaps she resented it because he never went to see her. Anyway, she left all her money to me, the income, not the capital, on condition …’

  She paused as the dog padded in and Greenleaf listened, cursing the diversion.

  ‘On condition Patrick and I were never divorced!’

  O God, he thought, how it all fits, a pattern, a puzzle like those things the boys used to have, when you have to make the ball bearing drop into the right slots.

  ‘As if I wanted to be divorced,’ she said. ‘I can’t support myself. They were too busy educating him to bother about me.’

  But Patrick had been going to divorce her. She would have had nothing. Without money from her Oliver Gage would have been unable to marry her, for the costs of her divorce and Nancy’s would have fallen on him. Like everyone else he must have been deceived about her income until she got cold feet and told him. He pictured her confessing to Gage; then, when he recoiled from her, running ashamed and wretched—for Tamsin, he was sure, was no nymphomaniac—to Marvell, her last resort. When Marvell refused her there was only one way out …

  ‘Doesn’t anybody know?’ he asked sharply, not bothering to conceal a curiosity she must take for impertinence.

  ‘It was so humiliating,’ she said, whispering now. ‘Everybody thought I was quite well-off, independent. But if Patrick had divorced me I would have been—I would have been destitute.’

  It was a sudden bare revelation of motive and it recalled him to the real reason of his visit.

  ‘Tamsin …’ he began. The cigarette was making him feel a little dizzy, and to his eyes, focusing badly, the woman in the chair opposite was just a blur of brown and bright green. ‘I came to tell you something very serious. About Patrick …’

  ‘You mean Freda Carnaby? I know all about that. Please! They were the same kind of people, Max. They really suited each other. If Patrick could have made anyone happy it was Freda Carnaby. But you mustn’t think I drove him to it. It was only because of that—Oliver and me … I was so lonely, Max.’

  He was horrified that she should think him capable of repeating gossip to her and to stop her he blundered into the middle of it, forgetting his doctor’s discretion.

  ‘No, no. I meant Patrick’s death. I don’t think he died of heart failure.’

  Was it possible that, immured here since her return, she had heard nothing of the gossip? She turned on him, quivering, and he wondered if this was the beginning of the violence he expected.

  ‘He must have,’ she cried. ‘Max, this isn’t something that’ll stop me going tomorrow, is it? He was so hateful to me when he was alive and now he’s dead—I can feel him still in the house.’

  So intense was her tone that Greenleaf half-turned towards the door.

  ‘You see what I mean? Sometimes when I go upstairs I think to myself, suppose I see his writing in the dust on the dressing-table? That’s what he used to do. I’m not much of a housewife, Max, and we couldn’t keep a woman. They were all frightened of Queenie. When I hadn’t cleaned properly he used to write in the dust “Dust this” or “I do my job, you do yours”. He did.’

  Were some marriages really like that? Yes, it fitted with what he had known of Patrick’s character. He could imagine a freckled finger with a close-trimmed nail moving deliberately across the black glass, crossing the t, dotting the i.

  Although he knew her moods, how suddenly hysteria was liable to wistfulness or vague reminiscing, he was startled when she burst out in a ragged voice:

  ‘I’m afraid to go in his room! He’s dead but suppose—suppose the writing was there just the same?’

  ‘Tamsin.’ He must put an end to this. ‘How many wasp stings did Patrick have?’

  She was still tense, hunched in her chair, frightened of the dead man and the house he had built.

  ‘Four. Does it matter? You said he didn’t die of the stings.’ The air in the room was pleasantly warm but she got up and closed the door. It was stupid to feel uneasy, to remember the frightened charwoman, the Smith-King children. She sat down again and he reflected that they were shut in now with the strong watchful dog and that all the neighbours were away on holiday.

  ‘How many did he have when he came in from the garden?’

  ‘Well, four. I told you. I didn’t look.’

  ‘And after—when he was dead?’

  He stubbed out the
cigarette and held his hands tightly together in his lap. His eyes were on her as she coaxed the Weimaraner to her chair, softly snapping her fingers and finally closing them over the pearly fawn snout.

  ‘There, my Queenie, my beauty, my beauty …’ Dry brown cheek pressed against wet brown nose, two pairs of eyes looking at him.

  ‘I think he was stung by a bee, Tamsin.’

  At a word from her the dog would spring. For armour he had only the long curtains that hung against the window blinds. Wrapped around him they would protect him for a moment, but the dog’s teeth would rip that velvet and then …?

  ‘Stung by a bee?’

  ‘Perhaps it was an accident. A bee could have got into the bedroom—’

  ‘Oh, no.’ She spoke firmly and decisively for her. ‘It couldn’t happen that way.’ Her mouth was close to the dog’s ear now. She whispered something, loosening her fingers from Queenie’s dew-lap. Greenleaf felt something knock within his chest like a hand beating suddenly against his ribs. But it was ridiculous, absurd, such things couldn’t happen! The dog broke free. He braced himself, forgetting convention, pride, the courage a man is supposed to show, and covered his face as the chair skidded back across the polished floor.

  15

  For one of those seconds that take an age to live through he was caught up in fear and fettered to the chair. His eyes closed, he waited for the hot breath and the trickling saliva. Tamsin’s voice came sweet and anticlimactic.

  ‘Oh, Max, I’m awfully sorry. That floor! The furniture’s always sliding about.’

  I make a bad policeman, he thought, blinking and adjusting his chair back in its position by the window. But where was the dog and why wasn’t he in the process of being mauled? Then he saw her, puffing and blowing under the sideboard in pursuit of—an earwig!

  ‘You baby, Queenie. She’ll hunt anything, even insects.’ It was all right. The drama had been nothing but a domestic game with a pet. And Tamsin, he saw, had noticed only that he was startled by the sudden skidding of a chair. ‘Talking of insects,’ she said, ‘it’s funny about the bee. It’s a coincidence, in a way. You see, that’s what happened when Patrick first saw the picture. I’d never seen him before and I was watching from the garden. He ran into the conservatory and there was a bee on a geranium. He put out his hand and it stung him.’

  The shock was subsiding now.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked rather shakily.

  Tamsin shrugged and pulled Queenie out by the tail.

  ‘Why, nothing happened. It made me laugh. Children are cruel, aren’t they? Grandmother and my aunt, they made a dreadful fuss. They put him to bed and the doctor came. I remember I said, “He must be an awful coward to have a doctor for a bee sting. I bet you wouldn’t have got the doctor for me,” and they sent me to my room. I told him about it when we were older but he wouldn’t talk about it. He only said he didn’t like bees and he couldn’t stand honey.’

  ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that he might be allergic to bee stings?’

  ‘I didn’t know you could be,’ she said, her eyes wide with surprise.

  He almost believed her. He wanted to believe her, to say, ‘Yes, you can go. Be happy, Tamsin. Drive and drive—far away!’

  Now more than ever it seemed likely that the bee had got there by chance. Hadn’t he opened the window in the balcony room himself? Wasps stung when they were provoked; perhaps the same was true of bees and Patrick’s killer, alighting on his exposed arm, had been alerted into venom by a twitch or a galvanic start from the sleeping man. If Tamsin were guilty she would clutch at the possibility of an accident and no law could touch her.

  ‘I asked you about an accident,’ he said. ‘Could a bee have stung him by accident?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Marvell is wrong, he thought. She isn’t clever. She’s stupid, sweetly stupid and vague. She lives a life of her own, a life of dreams sustained by unearned, unquestioned money. But dreams can change into nightmares …

  Then she said something that entirely altered the picture he had made of her. She was not stupid, nor was she a murderess.

  ‘Oh, but it couldn’t!’ Dreamy, vague children often do best in examinations, drawing solutions from their inner lives. ‘I know it couldn’t. Crispin told me something about bees once. They’re different from wasps and when they sting they die. It’s like a sort of harakiri, Max. They leave the sting behind and a bit of their own inside with it. Don’t you think it’s horrid for them, poor bees? The sting would still have been in Patrick’s arm if it had been an accident. We’d have seen it!’

  Unwittingly he had given her a loophole. A guilty woman would have wriggled through it. Tamsin, in her innocence, was confirming that her husband had been murdered.

  ‘Max, you don’t mean you think I …?’

  ‘No, Tamsin, no.’

  ‘I’m glad he’s dead. I am. I tried everything I could to make him forgive me over Oliver and give that woman up. But he wouldn’t. He said I’d given him the chance he’d been waiting for. Now he could divorce me and Freda’s name wouldn’t have to be brought into it at all. Oh, outwardly he was perfectly friendly to Oliver, but all the time he was having his flat in town watched. Oliver and Nancy must come to the party. Then, when he’d got everything lined up he was going to drop his bombshell.’ She paused and drew a little sobbing breath, rubbing away the frown lines with her ringless fingers. ‘He liked to make people suffer, Max. Even the Smith-Kings. Did you see how he was torturing Denholm at the party?’ When Greenleaf said nothing she went on in a shaky voice that fell sometimes to a whisper, ‘Oh, that awful party! The evening before, he went straight to Freda’s house. I was desperate, I cried and cried for hours. Oliver came but I couldn’t let him in. All those weeks when we were at the flat he’d been hinting that he’d get Nancy to divorce him. My money would pay for that and keep us both. I had to tell him there wouldn’t be any money. I did tell him at last, Max, I told him at the party.’

  And Gage had sat beside her gloomily, Greenleaf remembered. There had been no close sensual dancing after that.

  ‘He went on and on about it. He even tried to think of ways of upsetting the will. But d’you know something? I don’t want to be married. I’ve had enough of marriage.’ Her voice grew harsh and strident. ‘But I’d have married anyone who would have supported me. Can you see me working in an office, Max, going home to a furnished room and cooking things on a gas ring? I’d even have married Crispin!’

  ‘Marvell hasn’t any money,’ he said. ‘His house is falling down and he won’t get much for the land.’

  She was thunderstruck. The mask slipped at last and her big golden eyes widened and blazed.

  ‘But his books …?’

  ‘I don’t believe he ever finishes them.’

  To him it was the saddest of stories, that Marvell should have to leave the house he loved, that her nightmare of the room with the gas ring might become real to him. Because of this her ringing laughter was an affront. Peal upon peal of it rang through the room; hot laughter to burn and cleanse away all her old griefs. The Weimaraner squatted, alert, startled.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  She no longer cared what he might think or say.

  ‘It’s mad, it’s ridiculous! He spent the night here, you know, the night Patrick died. He spent it with me. I was so scared when you made me sit on the bed in the back bedroom. I felt you must sense that—that I hadn’t been alone. Oh, Max, Max, don’t you see how crazy it is?’ He stared, his hurt suspicion melting, for he saw that she was laughing at herself. ‘I wanted to marry him for his money,’ she said, ‘and he wanted to marry me for mine, and the mad thing is we hadn’t either of us got a bean!’

  16

  She walked with him to the gate. He shook hands with her and impulsively—because he was ashamed of the thoughts he had harboured—kissed her cheek.

  ‘Can I go tomorrow? Will it be all right, Max?’ She spoke to him as if he were a policeman or a Home Office official. In de
nying the possibility of accidental death she had declared, if not in words, that Patrick had been murdered. But Greenleaf knew she hadn’t realised it yet. Sometime it would reach her, surfacing on to her mind through that rich, jumbled subconscious, and then perhaps it would register no more strongly than the memory of a sharp word or an unfriendly face. By then she might be driving away on the road that led—where? To another terse young company director who would be fascinated for a time by witchlike innocence? Greenleaf wondered as he drew his lips from her powderless cheek.

  ‘Good-bye, Tamsin,’ he said.

  When he came to the Linchester Manor gates he looked back and waved. She stood in the twilight, one hand upraised, the other on the dog’s neck. Then she turned, moving behind the willows, and he saw her no more.

  He entered Marvell’s garden by way of the orchard gate. The bees were still active and he gave the hives a wide berth. It occurred to him that Marvell might still be out but if this were so he would wait—if necessary all night.

  By now it was growing dark. A bat brushed his face and wheeled away. For a second he saw it silhouetted against the jade-coloured sky like a tiny pterodactyl. He came to the closed lattice and looked in. No lamps were lit but the china still showed dim gleams from the last of the light. At first he thought the room must be empty. The stillness about the whole place was uncanny. Nothing moved. Then he saw between the wing and the arm of a chair that had its back to the window a sliver of white sleeve and he knew Marvell must be sitting there.

  He knocked at the back door. No footsteps, no sound of creaking or the movement of castors across the floor. The door wasn’t locked. He unlatched it, passed the honey-laden table and walked into the living room. Marvell wasn’t asleep. He lay back in his chair, his hands folded loosely in his lap, staring at the opposite wall. In the grate—the absurd pretty grate that shone like black silver—was a pile of charred paper. Greenleaf knew without having to ask that Marvell had been burning his manuscript.