The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  The old farmland trees must have gone sometime in the nineteenth century. It was all planes now and a few hornbeams, ornamental trees that looked incongruous to him with lush tall grass growing close to their trunks. He took the paths along the eastern side, recalling the account of a murder from that same book. Sir Edmund Godfrey’s body had been found in a ditch on the south side of Primrose Hill one day at the end of the seventeenth century. Though his sword was thrust through his body, strangulation had caused his death. Nothing had been taken from him, his money was in his pocket, but he was all over bruises and his neck was broken. Medals were struck to commemorate his death, on one of which he was shown as walking with a broken neck and a sword running him through.

  Roman thought he remembered reading of several people being executed for the murder, and reading too of duels fought on the hill. He told himself he had come in there to find somewhere pleasant and peaceful to sit and read his Kipling, but he knew he had another reason. That accounted for his dwelling on the violent deaths of the past.

  There was no one on the summit today. It was windy, the planes’ thready branches blowing and the hornbeams ruffled. He walked along the northern perimeter and saw the blue and white crime tape on the railings far ahead of him. Long before reaching the place he went out into Primrose Hill Road. A row of cars were parked, obvious police cars and probable police cars. On the opposite side of the road a small crowd stood, waiting, watching, though there was nothing to watch.

  The tape cordoned off several yards of pavement but the railing itself was swathed in sheeting. A bunch of flowers, wrapped in cellophane, lay on the pavement outside the cordon. Someone, then, had cared for this derelict, and Roman wondered who. He looked about him and saw railings everywhere. There must be miles of it in the park’s vicinity, the spiked kind like this and the kind with blunted spikes. Here railings separated gardens from pavements and gardens from other gardens, skirted churches, made confining barriers along paths. Where in other places fences might be or hedges or walls, here were iron railings, straight, plain, usually painted black, crossed with two horizontal bars at foot and top, crowned with spikes.

  This murderer could have no difficulty in finding a site for a crime. Sites proliferated. If all he needed was a homeless man and a stretch of railings, his activities could be infinite. Roman stood with the crowd, watching faces. But these gave nothing away, they were blank, apathetic, patient. A policeman who had been doing something to the tape, adjusting it or shortening it or pulling it in some different direction, got into his car and drove away. The red and white van of Express Tikka and Pizza slowed a little as the driver passed the spot but quickly moved on. A woman in the crowd lit a cigarette.

  Roman turned back onto the hill and sat on a seat that was sunny and sheltered from the wind. He tried to read but his concentration was poor and his thoughts wandered back to Sir Edmund Godfrey, whose murder seemed as pointless as these, whose apparent killers had protested their innocence to the last and whose ghost was believed to haunt the hill. That reminded him of his son, brought Daniel before him, Daniel who half believed in the ghosts of the drowned rising through the broken ice.

  After a while he was on the move again, in quest as he had been on the previous day of a newspaper. It was not much after ten but the Standard was already on the streets. He bought a copy and, leaning against a long sweep of railings, read that the second victim of the man they were calling the Impaler had been identified.

  He was James Victor Clancy, age thirty-six, of no fixed address, known to some as the key man and to others as Pharaoh.

  16

  The American tourist asked for a list of items to be shipped to Cincinnati for himself and his wife: Irene Adler’s best tea service, the framed picture that looked like a Klimt, the photograph she had given to Holmes, two lace tablecloths, and a heap of wax fruit under a glass dome. Mary was making sure he understood they were all replicas, not antiques, all the kind of thing a woman such as Irene might have possessed in 1885, when Stacey came in to tell her a man had called for her.

  “To take you home,” Stacey said. “Well, it’s gone five.”

  “What’s his name? Didn’t he give his name?”

  “I never asked.”

  It must be Leo. He was taking two days off to settle into his new flat and, on a fine afternoon, might walk from Edis Street to Charles Lane without too much exertion. The color came up into her face and from the way the American smiled she thought he had noticed and drawn his own conclusions.

  “I’ll come as soon as I’ve finished here.” She wrote the things down in the order book. The man from Cincinnati gave her his card. Just as he was leaving—he had taken a few steps toward the shop door—he asked her where she thought the next murder would be located. Someone on their tour favored the zoo and they were laying bets.

  “I say in back of the theater, and my wife, she’s all for those big kinda gates by the rose garden.”

  Mary didn’t know what to say so she only smiled, or tried to. Dorothea had already gone. Mary turned the notice on the shop door to “closed” and hoped Stacey had done the same for the museum. She and Leo might go out to eat this evening and perhaps he would stay overnight with her. He had never yet done this, he had never made love to her, but it would come soon. This slow approach tantalized her, yet in some ways she wanted to prolong it, for the enhancement of a mounting sexual excitement. Three times now they had lain side by side in her bed at Charlotte Cottage and at last he had begun to caress her very softly and gently, with an interest that seemed more like pleasure than patience. She had whispered to him not to stop, that all would be well, he had nothing to fear.

  “Next time,” he had said.

  Next time was this time. She was a little aware of her seniority and more than a little of the gratitude he owed her, but she managed at least for the time to dismiss all that. She had looked in one of Irene Adler’s mirrors, gilt-framed with cherubs and curlicues, and thought that she looked better, younger, prettier, than at any time since she heard of her grandmother’s death. The sun had turned her hair from straw to gold. She came out into the hall to greet Leo with a smile and her hands outstretched.

  The man waiting was Alistair.

  The smile that was not for him encouraged him to throw his arms round her. He would have kissed her mouth if she hadn’t turned it quickly away and presented her cheek. Stacey watched avidly.

  “Surprise?” he said.

  “I didn’t expect you, Alistair.”

  “Until they catch this man I don’t want you walking to and fro on your own.”

  She shrugged, could think of nothing to say that hadn’t already been said.

  “I’m thinking of you. Of your safety. While you’re still coming here, if I can’t be here you get a taxi, is that understood?”

  Some women, presumably, were flattered by this sort of hectoring manner, by being told what to do and then asked if a simple command wasn’t beyond their comprehension. No one, not her grandfather, or from what she could remember, her father, had ever talked to her like this. And it was impossible to imagine Leo capable of the words or the tone without breaking down into helpless laughter.

  “Oddly enough, Alistair,” she said, trying to keep her voice light, “I can look after myself.”

  “I wonder how many foolhardy women have said that before coming to grief? Now why wouldn’t you dine with me last week, Mary? I think I deserve an explanation.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t got one. I haven’t got an explanation.”

  She walked ahead of him out of the museum, thinking fast, making up her mind how to handle his presence and the plans he had no doubt made for the evening to come. Go out with him to eat somewhere she would not, nor take him back with her to Charlotte Cottage. Somehow she must shake him off.

  He was hastening to the corner of St. John’s Wood Terrace, his right arm already upraised for a taxi.

  He said over his shoulder, “We have to t
alk about this, but of course you’ll give up the—” he was seeking a polite word “—the shop, museum, whatever you call it. You won’t need to work.”

  “Alistair,” she said.

  There must have been something in her tone he had never heard before. She was aiming at that and it looked as if she had succeeded. He said, “Yes, what?”

  “I’m not going in a taxi with you. I’m not going back to Park Village. I’m on my way to see a friend.”

  “What friend?” He spoke abstractedly, watching the departing taxi with disappointment.

  She took a deep breath. “The man who had my transplant.” She tried again, not looking at him. “The man who received my bone marrow donation.”

  “You are not serious.” His voice was cold and smooth as water. It was a strange voice to emerge from those thick lips, that flushed hot face.

  He can’t shake me out here, she thought. He can’t hit me in the street. “I am perfectly serious. I have met him and I—I like him and we are—” How to say it? What words to choose? “—seeing each other.”

  He came close up to her. She saw his hands move to take hold of her and fall again as his sense of the conventions inhibited him. He trembled with impotence.

  “You’re not fit to be left alone if that’s what happens when you’re alone.”

  “And you’re not my judge, Alistair.” She spoke bravely but her voice was small. “I don’t want you to—to pronounce on what I do, who I see.”

  He was shrill with indignation. “Someone must. You’re not fit to do it yourself.”

  She shook her head, trying to be dismissive. “I don’t want to see you again, Alistair.”

  “I am not hearing this,” he said.

  “We said our good-byes before I left. We went through everything. We decided—we both decided—it was best. It was all over. Don’t you remember? You were happy to see me go, you said. And then you came back. It wasn’t my wish and it isn’t now. I hope we can be friends one day, but it can’t be yet. I don’t want to see you—can’t you understand that?”

  “I think it’s generally true of you, Mary, that you don’t know what you want.”

  “We shouldn’t be having this—this discussion out here, in public.”

  “Then why are we? You began it.”

  She hesitated. “I would be afraid to have it indoors, that’s why. Do you understand? I’d be afraid of you.”

  He made an impatient gesture. “Where does he live?”

  Again she shook her head.

  “You said you were going to him, so I ask you, where does he live?”

  Had his manner always been so hectoring? Not when he got his own way. Of course not then. And he had nearly always, then always, got his way when they were together. If he had never raised his hand to her she would be meekly married to him by now.

  She felt a dread of being captured by him, forced into a cab, taken home, browbeaten there, perhaps struck. Turning away, she began to walk, rather aimlessly, down Charlbert Street toward the park. Alistair came after her, taking bold purposeful strides. He grabbed hold of her arm with a hard hand and started to march her along. It was the way she had sometimes seen, and deeply disliked seeing, a parent manhandle a child of perhaps eight years old that was misbehaving in a shopping center. Like that parent, Alistair jerked her arm while keeping it pressed by his own hand close against her side. His voice had become abrupt, clipped.

  “Tell me where he lives, this con man of yours.”

  “Why do you call him that?”

  “Please. Be your age. How long have you been here? Six weeks? Seven? And in that time Oliver hasn’t just made himself known to you, he’s got to the point of—what’s your phrase?—‘seeing you.’ Does that mean sleeping with? I sincerely hope not, Mary, I sincerely do, for your sake and his. In that time your grandmother died and made you a rich woman. Doesn’t that tell you what he’s after?”

  “It tells me what you are, Alistair,” she said quietly. “Perhaps what you’ve always been after. Oliver—I don’t want to tell you his name—would prefer me poor, only I’m not and he has to put up with me as I am. Now will you please let go of my arm?”

  For a moment she stood frozen; then she pulled herself away from him and began to run. The gesture was so sudden that he was startled and briefly he remained, stunned by her unaccustomed decisiveness and rejection of him. She ran across the road and he was unable to follow her for the traffic from the park end, three cars coming along almost nose to tail. One of them started to double-park, holding the rest up.

  Mary ran without aim westward along Allitsen Road. When she had told Alistair she was going to Leo, this had been no more than an escape ploy and, as she now saw, an unwise one. There had been no real intention of visiting Leo’s new flat and there was none now. She wanted only to elude Alistair and somehow hide herself from him until he grew tired and went home. But as she ran across Avenue Road—he was pursuing her but once again had been held up and frustrated by traffic, this time a stream of rush-hour cars pouring toward the park and the Macclesfield Bridge—she asked herself why not go to Leo, why not shake off Alistair and go to Leo?

  It was a long time since she and her grandmother had been to call for that friend in Primrose Hill and she had no clear idea how to find her way to Edis Street, only a notion that it might be a turning off Gloucester Avenue. Since the second murder the thought of the open greens of Primrose Hill frightened her, but it was light, the broadest daylight, and bright and sunny too. If she had ever been in there before, perhaps twenty years ago, she had forgotten the place.

  The man with the beard that she had come upon reading Dead Souls was crossing the green toward the Ormonde Terrace Gate. He smiled at her, she said a breathless “Hello,” wanted to tell him, if he saw Alistair, to send him off in the opposite direction. But of course she couldn’t do that. There was no time to pause and read the map at the gate. She looked back once, then rushed into Primrose Hill and hid herself behind the plane trees in the long grass.

  It was quite unlike Regent’s Park, wilder, nearer to Hampstead Heath. The hill rose up, a pronounced green peak, out of green slopes and plains, and all around its borders were tall trees and grass and cow parsley gone to seed. The grass where she squatted smelled like the country. She could see a cricket on a dandelion leaf.

  If Alistair had come onto the hill it wasn’t through that gate. She gave him ten minutes and, when he still hadn’t appeared, began to walk along the path that runs parallel to Albert Road. Her pale cream shoes were streaked with green smears and threads on the hem of her skirt had been pulled by brambles. It didn’t seem important.

  There must be no chance of meeting Alistair head-on, so Regent’s Park Road should be avoided. She began to run again, lightly, not too fast, because running made her feel free. It came to her that she had actually told Alistair she didn’t want to see him again, she had told him things were over between them and told him why, and this pleased her, she felt it had been brave of her. Lately she had been thinking a lot about her own passive gentle temperament, her inability to say no, her politeness and her acquiescence, and she had wondered if she was one of those said to be born to be victims. Those people were attracted to the strong and aggressive and they to the victims. But perhaps, to coincide with her meeting Leo, she was changing, asserting herself, leaving victimhood behind. It was frightening to think of oneself as doomed to be used and maltreated by others, not a free agent and master of one’s fate.

  Avoiding Regents Park Road was impossible, but she crossed it quickly, into Fitzroy Road. Wherever Alistair might be, he wouldn’t come into these streets; she was sure he was even more ignorant of the place than she. Slackening her pace, she slowed to a walk until she came to Chalcot Road, which forms the spine of Primrose Hill. She had read somewhere that there was once an old manor house of Chalcot here and that Chalk Farm itself was a corruption of the name. Alistair would be lost here, he would have turned back by now.

  As Mary walk
ed along the pretty, shabby, dusty street the thought came to her that perhaps it was unwise to visit Leo out of the blue. She did not know him well enough yet to drop in on him. The unkind and prejudiced things Alistair had said had given rise to these misgivings. Surely she should discard them, forget them. Those allegations sprang from his jealousy and unaccountable hatred of “Oliver” that started long before she met him. But even so might she not be doing a risky thing?

  She imagined Leo not alone. Not necessarily with another girl, not that, but with the brother he was so close to or even their mother or some friend to whom he would be reluctant to introduce her, or just—since he had only yesterday moved in—surrounded by disorder and chaos, in a panic of failure to cope.

  The prospect of turning back, going back to Charlotte Cottage and spending a lonely evening with Gushi, kept her walking on. Suddenly she was at Edis Street. There it was, a left-hand turning of mid-Victorian terraced villas, more stucco, plaster scrollwork, untidy flowery front gardens, bicycles chained to fences. Three steps led up to a dark green front door. But first, dividing the small front garden from the pavement, black-painted, spiked, iron railings. She shivered inwardly. Did everybody in North-west One see railings where they had never noticed them before?

  There was still time to turn back. In spite of herself, she imagined walking into his room and seeing a woman her own age sitting there, her shoes kicked off, a glass of wine in her hand. A dark woman, she thought, quite unlike herself, with a tangled bush of hair and a bright sparkling face. The idea of it brought her a wash of real anguish. But she pressed the bell marked with a newly printed card: L. Nash.