The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  After a while she excused herself and went upstairs. The door had a lock and a key, so she locked it in case Alistair came up. Then she unlocked it because locking it was absurd. She lay on the bed and thought, I would like Dorothea here or Judith, I would like someone just to be with me. I would like Leo. I hardly know him, I’ve only spent a few hours with him, but I would like him here now. Anyone but Alistair. Why does it have to be Alistair?

  She can’t be dead. But of course she can be. She was old, very old.

  The age of the person who has died doesn’t make any difference to those left behind. It’s just as bad for them to lose someone of eighty-five as someone of forty-five or twenty-five. Leo would understand. He knew about death and she needed someone who knew about it. When she went downstairs again Alistair was watching television. He turned his head.

  “Feeling a bit better?”

  She nodded, though the nod meant nothing.

  “There’s nothing for you to do. I washed up my own plate and our glasses.”

  It was an effort to stop herself thanking him, but she made the effort and succeeded.

  “I’m going to stay the night here with you, Mary. You shouldn’t be alone.”

  “Really, that’s not necessary, Alistair.”

  “I’m going to stay the night. I should never forgive myself if I abandoned you.” In the tone of someone who expects to be told no spare room would be needed, he could sleep with her, he said archly, “Isn’t there a spare bedroom going begging?”

  She suddenly remembered telling her grandmother that she and Leo must meet when her holiday was over. Tears came into her eyes. She said good night, picked up Gushi, and took him upstairs to bed with her. She locked the door and this time it stayed locked. After a while she heard Alistair padding about, searching for an airing cupboard, then fumbling in it for bed linen.

  The night was long but she slept at last.

  11

  In the days when he lived in Bryanston Square as manservant to the late Anthony Maddox, Bean had come to hate his employer. Anthony Maddox had a dog, a spaniel, whom he never treated with much kindness, though it was an affectionate creature, and when one day during a bout of teasing it bit him, Maddox made Bean take it to the vet to be destroyed.

  It was not in Bean’s nature to feel self-disgust, but he many times reproached himself for obeying Maddox’s order in this matter. He should have said no. He should have given in his notice rather than have Philidor put down. Meekly, though with sorrow in his heart, he had taken the spaniel to the veterinary surgery and asked for the deed to be done. But after that he took a slow, if largely concealed and invisible, revenge. In ways of which Maddox knew nothing until the day before his death, Bean made his life a misery.

  He never guessed that into every bowl of soup Bean brought him, his manservant had first spat. Nor that a spoonful of Bean’s urine went into every cup of tea and coffee. The caterpillars that Bean harvested from plants in the park (and in relation to which Maddox had a phobia) he did see, only to be told by Bean that increasing shortsightedness made cleansing lettuce of these creatures impossible. Maddox was very fond of salad but he stopped eating it. He was three times summoned for nonpayment of rates because, unbeknownst to him, Bean had appropriated the local authority’s demands before they reached him.

  He parked his car on the resident’s parking to which he had a right in the City of Westminster, but many times, during the night, Bean moved it onto a double yellow line. Valuable books he borrowed from the London Library unaccountably disappeared. His electric blanket caught fire. Bean contaminated his goose liver pâté with a culture he had made out of a ham and cheese waffle removed from a park dustbin and gave him gastroenteritis. At first the doctor thought it was salmonella and this pulled Bean up short. He didn’t want to kill the man and be done for murder.

  Anthony Maddox had a stroke on his sixty-sixth birthday. It seriously affected his speech. Bean cared for him devotedly, but on the day before Maddox was due to be transferred permanently to a nursing home, he unburdened himself totally to his employer.

  Maddox was having his lunch. That is, it was lunchtime and Bean was feeding him, or about to feed him, soup followed by peach yogurt. The soup was a delicate pale green, prepared by Bean from fresh Aideburgh asparagus, chicken stock, and cream. He was quite aware of the incongruity of these three ingredients with the fourth. It was from such anomalies that he derived his entertainment. He would have called it his sense of humor.

  A damask napkin, washed, starched, and ironed by Bean, was spread across Anthony Maddox’s shriveled throat, concave chest, and protuberant belly. The old man’s mouth was drawn down to one side and his eyes bulged. They seemed to be, but probably were not, fixed upon the glorious prospect visible through the long Georgian window, of Sir Robert Smirke’s church, St. Mary’s, Wyndham Place, its pediment, its columns, and its Tower-of-the-winds capitals. The sun shone upon its cupola, turning the brownish stone to a rich coppery gold.

  Lifting the spoon to his employer’s parted lips—they were always parted these days—Bean said, “I spat in this soup while I was heating it up, sir. It’s been a habit of mine to do that these fifteen years.”

  Maddox’s eyes bulged farther and he recoiled from the spoon. His mouth worked.

  “Some mornings I’ve brought up a lot of phlegm, sir, and that’s gone into your soup too.” Bean spoke in his customary deferential tone. “Smarmy” was the word applied to it by one of Maddox’s friends. “I’ve pissed in your tea and coffee. Not every cup, probably every third cup. You drink rather a lot of those beverages, sir, and I couldn’t keep pace.”

  Maddox vomited the soup he had already taken. His face was paper-white. Bean was very tender with him, giving him a blanket bath, making him comfortable, but Maddox had a heart attack and died in the night.

  Few people kept a manservant in the eighties. Single men living on their own got in a team of cleaners once a fortnight, ate take-away or TV dinners from the microwave, had their washing done and delivered by the mobile laundry, and never needed to make their beds because they used duvets. Bean had his name on the agency’s book for months. He was living on his savings in a rented room over a newsagent’s in Lisson Grove. Anthony Maddox had left him nothing in his will, which made Bean even more pleased with himself for confessing about the spit and urine.

  One day he got a job offer. The man who interviewed him was, in Bean’s own words, “weird.” He was plump and bald with a fringe of thin reddish hair growing round the naked pate and, although it was ten in the morning, wore a black silk suit over a shirt with a frilly jabot. The apartment—you couldn’t call something on two floors a flat—had weapons hanging round the walls, mostly whips, but guns too with ornamental stocks. There was a picture of a nearly naked young man with a halo round his head and his body stuck full of arrows and an even larger one of another haloed man being grilled like a piece of steak. Not that Bean ever ate steak but he sometimes cooked it—and sometimes spat on it—for Anthony Maddox.

  His interviewer was called Maurice Clitheroe, a stockbroker, though he told Bean nothing of this at their first meeting. His voice was high and fluting and his way of speaking rather puzzled Bean because it seemed that everything was “painful” to him and he “suffered” a lot.

  “I am painfully aware of the need of someone to look after me,” he said. “Of course I realize that you would contribute to my sufferings but that I could endure if not with equanimity, with resignation. I am afraid you may find me rather a sore subject.”

  Bean had no idea what all this meant but he took the job. Beggars can’t be choosers and, living in Lisson Grove, he saw quite a lot of beggars. On bad days he imagined joining them, sitting in a porch, cap on the pavement, a dog maybe to keep him company and supply pathos. It was at first a matter of regret that Maurice Clitheroe had no dog, but later, when he understood about the whips, the visitors to the apartment, and the meaning of Clitheroe’s funny talk, he was glad. God knows wha
t might have become of a dog in all the excitement that was so often the order of the day in York Terrace.

  The boys who came had been in the straightforward beating business and some of them hardly knew their own strength. Several times Bean had to put Clitheroe to bed with arnica on his bruises and cortisone cream on his weals. The young ladies were more refined, put saddle, bridle, and bit on Clitheroe and rode him up the stairs and through the bedrooms. Once or twice since his employer’s timely death and his coming into his inheritance, Bean had happened to see one of those visitors in the street. He was out and about so much, it was inevitable.

  She was soliciting in Baker Street and wearing very poor quality thigh boots and a miniskirt with a broken zip. Bean was in his new bomber jacket and baseball cap. Taking him for an American, she asked him in a mid-Atlantic accent if he would like to buy her a cocktail. For answer, he gave her one of his looks, a stare, and then a sudden swift baring of the teeth. She recoiled before telling him to sod off. That look of his always made people wince and few recovered as fast as this girl.

  He went into Europa Foods, which stays open late, and bought himself some pot noodles, a jar of minced sun-dried tomatoes, button mushrooms in brine, a blueberry and almond practically fat-free yogurt, and a can of Sprite. The only other person of his acquaintance he met on the way home was the Cornells’ housekeeper out with a man friend. They looked as if on their way to the Screen on Baker Street for the eight-fifteen showing. Remembering how she had sent him up and down those area stairs some four hours earlier and again some three hours earlier, Bean said loudly, “Good evening, Valerie. Lovely evening.”

  From the pavement newsstand in the Marylebone Road opposite the station he bought an Evening Standard. He wasn’t a newspaper reader, or indeed much of a reader at all, but stuff whizzed past so quickly on the telly that sometimes you couldn’t take in the details. The story about the impalement on the churchyard railings had by now been relegated to an inside page. An inquest had found that John Dominic Cahill, known as Decker, had died of stab wounds, principally of a stab wound that pierced the left ventricle of the heart. The body’s being stuck on the railing spikes was merely an artistic touch, what the coroner described as evidence of the perpetrator’s “evil and degraded sense of humor.”

  Bean read all about it while the microwave was heating up his pot noodle, dried tomatoes, and button mushroom mixture. The verdict was of murder. No nonsense, Bean observed, about “unlawful killing” or manslaughter. He was a hundred percent in favor of the death penalty himself. If he had his way executions would be in public, not to mention putting lesser offenders in the stocks.

  Drinking his Sprite, which had had five minutes in the freezer for a quick chill, he read an interview with Cahill’s sister, a Bernadette Casey from County Offaly, who though admitting she hadn’t set eyes on her brother or spoken to him for twenty-eight years, described him as a “lovely person” whose death had devastated her and all his other eight brothers and sisters. It was incredible to her that Johnny should have been living rough on the streets of London and she still hoped and prayed there was some mistake.

  The police hadn’t got very far with finding who had done it. You could read that between the lines. Of course, it was probable that, like him and any other law-abiding citizen, they didn’t care who had done it. Wasn’t this just another bit of human detritus swept up off the streets and thrown away like litter?

  Bean switched on the television. It was news time, but the murder no longer merited space on the national news. He leaned back in his chair and gave himself up to dreams: the dog of his own he wanted and would one day have when he had decided on the breed and could afford a pedigree animal, sired by a Crufts champion; ways of augmenting his income; could he manage a third daily round of dog-walking?

  At this point Bean’s thoughts turned to his clientele, to the Barker-Pryces, the Blackburn-Norrises, Mrs. Goldsworthy, Lisl Pring, and the rest of them. He had hoped to discover, when he first began walking these people’s dogs, secrets of their pasts, incidents they would not want known and might pay to keep secret. But they barely admitted him to their houses, they never confided in him, they presented to him only blank and blameless facades. He sometimes thought that living for eight years with Maurice Clitheroe had given him an exaggerated idea of what the average West End dweller’s homelife was like. Perhaps they really were all innocent, happily married (or happily celibate), chaste, incorruptible, exemplary citizens.

  As to the secrets he did know, if they were secrets, there was no use threatening with exposure the girl who had approached him in Baker Street, for she would very likely regard this as welcome publicity and in any case she had no money. He cheered up a bit when the notion came to him that Lisl Pring might well be bulimic. Now she was starring in a successful sitcom, she might not be thrilled to see The Sun running a story about how she binged and then stuffed her fingers down her throat.

  Bean went out to the kitchen to fetch his yogurt. Next time he went to fetch Marietta he’d give the place a good sniff, checking for vomit.

  • • •

  The hamburger stall outside Madame Tussaud’s smelled the same as human sweat. Very strong human sweat. Bean knew all about it. He had smelled plenty of it in Maurice Clitheroe days, especially when one of the young men came round. The hamburger stall was doubly offensive to him, for that reason, and because it emanated from meat. He wondered what had possessed him to come this way round instead of taking York Gate or Park Square, and as he passed the stall, pushing his way through the milling throng of adolescents from all over Europe, he held a tissue ostentatiously over his nose or mouth. Nobody noticed, or if they did they thought he was protecting himself from traffic emissions in the Marylebone Road.

  Waxworks. Bean couldn’t see the point. He had been in there once, into the Chamber of Horrors—where else?—with Maurice Clitheroe to look at someone hanging up on a hook and that French chap stabbed to death in his bath. Maurice Clitheroe liked that sort of thing and frequented Tussaud’s. Bean fancied it had been less busy seven or eight years ago. These days it was almost impossible to make one’s way along the pavement, but he refused to be driven into the road and used his elbows. A young woman with three rings in her left ear and two in her right tried to sell him a copy of the Big Issue but drew back at the glare she got and the bared teeth.

  The beggar with the dog—that was how Bean thought of him—was sitting in his usual place, halfway between Tussaud’s and York Gate. A plastic box that had once held a videocassette lay open on the pavement for the receipt of alms and the dog sat on the man’s knees, sleeping, snuggled up with its nose in a jacket pocket. The dog Bean’s expert eye identified as a beagle, lemon and white, a pedigree without a doubt.

  He bared his teeth at this man too. It was a grimace that was always effective, due perhaps to its shock value. People always recoiled. Armed as usual with his camera, he stepped back to the pavement edge and took a photograph. The beggar put his arms up over his face but by that time it was too late.

  Boris the borzoi was the first dog he picked up. As usual Valerie Conway made him walk all the way down the area steps. She had a message for him, she said, from Mr. and Mrs. Cornell, to keep his wits about him because there had been an epidemic of dog-stealing.

  “Those dossers pinch dogs, you know,” said Valerie. “They want them to keep them warm at night and then there’s the pathos factor.”

  “The what?” said Bean.

  “I mean, the British feel more sorry for a dog than a human, don’t they?”

  Bean stored up everything he learned on the chance it might come in useful and when he came to the flat in Devonshire Street to collect Ruby the beagle, he passed on this new information to Erna Morosini.

  “Beagles are particularly in demand,” he said. “For example, that down-and-out sits outside Tussaud’s, he’s got a beagle. You can see it’s registered at the Kennel Club.” His powers of invention came into play. “They drug them to k
eep them quiet all day. Valium’s the favorite but Largactil runs it a close second.”

  “I wish you hadn’t told me,” said Mrs. Morosini.

  “We all have to face facts, don’t we, madam? I’ll be taking some photos of Ruby in the coming week. If you’re interested they’ll be very reasonably priced.”

  The eyes of the Duke of Kent met his as he came back into Park Crescent, and Bean composed his features into a similar stern and haughty expression. He let himself into the gardens and he and the two dogs made their way down the sloping path to the Nursemaids’ Tunnel. On this mild afternoon of hazy sunshine it was deserted as usual and there was no sign of the key man. The gardens of Park Square were equally empty but for pigeons and sparrows on the sunlit grass and a squirrel that ran down the trunk of one tall green tree and up the trunk of another. It being Saturday, the park itself would be crowded.

  Bean told Mr. Barker-Pryce about the street people stealing dogs, in his version substituting golden retrievers for beagles. Barker-Pryce said nastily that since Charlie only went out twice a day and always with Bean, it was up to him to see that no such theft took place.

  Bean said, “You’re right, sir,” but with rage in his heart. He didn’t mention photographing Charlie and obviously the time wasn’t right to say anything to Lisl Pring about pictures of Marietta. He’d told her poodles were currently the beggars’ favorite prey and she’d reacted unexpectedly.

  “They can have her. She’s just shat all over my kilim.”

  “You don’t mean that, Miss Pring.”

  Bean was shocked, by the sentiment and the language. Waiting in the hall while she went to fetch Marietta, sniffing like a hound, he opened a door that looked as if a cloakroom would be on the other side, but it was only a cupboard. A long embroidered dress on a dummy and a suit of armor, standing up as if it had a man inside it, startled him and he closed the door quickly. Remembering what Lisl Pring had said, he was deterred from saying anything to Mrs. Goldsworthy about scotties as dogs coveted for their pathos factor or bed-warming value.