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The Child's Child

Page 28

by Barbara Vine


  “I said we’d come. Don’t say you’d forgotten?”

  I had but I remembered then.

  “If I phoned three times and got no answer, we’d come over.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes.”

  “You’ll have to come back with me now,” said my mother, “while your front door gets boarded up.”

  So I picked up my handbag from the table and saw that I was right and my keys had gone. I went back with Fay while Malcolm and the policeman went off to try to find Andrew. Fay had seen him only the day before, when he had been well and happy but not willing to talk about me, though she had raised the subject. We each drank some whisky, I remembering this was the last thing I should be doing and pouring it away after the first sip. We wouldn’t sleep, we were sure of that, but Fay, who is more of an optimist than I am, kept saying that now the police knew about it, Andrew would be all right.

  But he wasn’t. Summers and two other friends of Kevin Drake’s found him, in of all innocuous places, coming out of the Odeon cinema in the Fulham Road. James had been with him but wasn’t with him at that precise moment, having gone back to retrieve his mobile, which he thought had fallen down the back of the seat he had been sitting in. In the midst of a jostling crowd, hardly noticed, three knives went into Andrew’s chest and back.

  MY ATTACKER, who turned out indeed to be Gary Summers, had had several hours’ start on us. It was several days before I knew what had happened. Summers had gone straight to Paultons Square, made his way into the block where James lived, and in the foyer checked the number of the flat from the postboxes. You were supposed to get the porter to call up to the flat for you, but Summers avoided the lift and went up the stairs. Finding no one at home in James’s flat, he turned away to come face-to-face with the girl who lived opposite. Yes, she had seen them go out, she knew them quite well, and James had told her they were going to the cinema. She even volunteered the information, unasked, that they’d be out of there by nine thirty and then they’d go and have a meal. She even told Summers the name of the restaurant they often ate at. As it happened, he wasn’t going to need that information.

  It was in the newspapers and on TV, but three days later no arrests had been made. I couldn’t identify Summers, and the men that were with him remained anonymous. But it was, thank God, not murder but attempted murder. Andrew was operated on twice, lay in what hospitals (or maybe only the media) call “critical” condition for three days. Fay was with him most of the time, and I for quite a lot of it, but they wouldn’t allow poor James. What after all was James but a friend?

  “I wish we’d had a civil partnership,” he said to me, “and then I could have counted as his next of kin.”

  The knife thrusts had missed his heart, but one of them had destroyed his spleen. “Who needs a spleen?” he said when he was recovering. “I don’t even know what it does.”

  Did he know I sat beside his bed along with Fay and, as soon as he was allowed to, James? I never asked, and when I knew he was himself again and sitting up and talking, I went into his room in fear and trembling, sure he would turn away and cover his face in the bedclothes. That didn’t happen. He was talking to Fay, saying (in typical Andrew fashion) that she would say the trial ought to be postponed for months whereas . . .

  He looked up when I came in. Holding out his arms, he said, “Mind my wounds. Hi, Sis.”

  © JERRY BAUER

  RUTH RENDELL, writing here as Barbara Vine, has won three Edgar Awards, the highest accolade from Mystery Writers of America, as well as four Gold Daggers and a Diamond Dagger for outstanding contribution to the genre from England’s prestigious Crime Writers’ Association. Her remarkable career has spanned more than forty years, with more than sixty books published. A member of the House of Lords, she lives in London.

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  JACKET DESIGN BY CHIKA AZUMA

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPHS: DOOR © DAVE PORTER PETERBOROUGH;

  BOOK © DUNCAN WALKER

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  ALSO BY RUTH RENDELL

  To Fear a Painted Devil

  Vanity Dies Hard

  The Secret House of Death

  One Across, Two Down

  The Face of Trespass

  A Demon in My View

  A Judgement in Stone

  Make Death Love Me

  The Lake of Darkness

  Master of the Moor

  The Killing Doll

  The Tree of Hands

  Live Flesh

  Talking to Strange Men

  The Bridesmaid

  Going Wrong

  The Crocodile Bird

  The Keys to the Street

  A Sight for Sore Eyes

  Adam and Eve and Pinch Me

  The Rottweiler

  Thirteen Steps Down

  The Water’s Lovely

  Portobello

  Tigerlily’s Orchids

  The St. Zita Society

  THE INSPECTOR WEXFORD SERIES

  From Doon with Death

  The Sins of the Fathers

  Wolf to the Slaughter

  The Best Man to Die

  A Guilty Thing Surprised

  No More Dying Then

  Murder Being Once Done

  Some Lie and Some Die

  Shake Hands Forever

  A Sleeping Life

  Death Notes

  The Speaker of Mandarin

  An Unkindness of Ravens

  The Veiled One

  Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter

  Simisola

  Road Rage

  Harm Done

  The Babes in the Wood

  End in Tears

  Not in the Flesh

  The Monster in the Box

  The Vault

  BARBARA VINE NOVELS

  A Dark-Adapted Eye

  A Fatal Inversion

  The House of Stairs

  Gallowglass

  King Solomon’s Carpet

  Asta’s Book

  No Night Is Too Long

  The Brimstone Wedding

  The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy

  Grasshopper

  The Blood Doctor

  The Minotaur

  The Birthday Present

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  First Scribner hardcover edition December 2012

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  ISBN 978-1-4516-9489-5

  ISBN 978-1-4516-9521-2 (eBook)

 


 

 


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