The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  His newfound power led him to ask James Barker-Pryce not to light another cigar while talking to him. It was bringing on the asthma he thought he had left behind him twenty years ago. They had gone into a small office or study with a view from its long window of the Royal College of Physicians. On the desk was a stack of writing paper with House of Commons printed on it in green and a picture of a gridiron thing that Bean thought meant it was the property of the government. The cigar was left behind, smoldering in an ashtray in the hall.

  He opened the cardboard folder and displayed two photographs of Charlie and then the enlargement. Barker-Pryce snatched it up. “I have others, sir,” Bean said.

  Barker-Pryce didn’t even look at the shots of Charlie. Some of these people weren’t fit to keep a dog. He picked up his dark green Mont Blanc fountain pen in khaki-stained fingers and wrote a reference on that same crested writing paper. His handwriting was not what Bean would have expected, being small and clear and perfectly legible. Over his shoulder, Bean could read desirable words: “reliable,” “a true animal-lover,” “unfailingly punctual.”

  “I’ve made other arrangements for Charlie,” Barker-Pryce said in almost the tone he would have used to a neighbor or an honorable friend in the Commons. “I can’t see my way to revoking those, if you understand me. But I’d like these pictures of my retriever.”

  The money was there, all ready and prepared. It was placed in his hand, the notes lined up against the edges of the envelope with the reference in it. Bean didn’t count them, he could tell it was a hundred pounds. With an awful attempt at a conspiratorial grin, a squeezing shut of the eyes, a lifting of that thick hairy upper lip to expose teeth of the same shade and shape as the mahogany beading on the desk, Barker-Pryce said, “Buy yourself a few videos instead of the newspaper, eh?”

  Bean did speak then. “I’ll call again in a week’s time.” He’d dropped the “sir.” He left the pictures where they were, the one of Charlie and the goose uppermost. The expression on Barker-Pryce’s face was frightening, so he stopped looking at it. What those girls went through! No wonder they’d never let a john kiss them.

  Charlie burst out of one of the rooms at the back and came boisterously up to him in the hall. Poor innocent creature, thought Bean. He touched the retriever perfunctorily on the head the way Queen Victoria’s dad might have patted one of the dogs at Sidmouth. Barker-Pryce didn’t say another word but stood in the study doorway, looking at him. Bean pulled the front door closed.

  Mrs. Sellers and her dalmatian lived in Park Square, which would be convenient, being more or less on the way from the Cornells’ to Lisl Pring’s. The dalmatian (called Spots, “not Spot, please,” said Mrs. Sellers) was obedient and docile and she took a fancy to Bean from the moment he entered the flat. The interview went well and it looked as if Bean would soon add another dog to his charges. The reference on House of Commons paper made an awesome impression on her but didn’t stop her asking for a second one.

  Miss Jago at Charlotte Cottage was the sort who when she said she’d do a thing, did it. Except that she hadn’t. And he’d already twice reminded her of her promise. He noticed most things about his clients and it didn’t escape him that Miss Jago had an engagement ring on her left hand. Not much of a ring, Victorian rubbish of nine-carat gold and tourmalines you could pick up for forty quid at Camden Lock. One of the numerous men she entertained was presumably going to make an honest woman of her. He wondered—for he was always on the lookout for a means of money-making—if Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris knew, if they would mind, if she had told them. Would she be marrying soon? Would she bring hubby to live here? Was there anything in it for him?

  More pressing was the matter of his reference. Having hesitated as to whether or not he wanted another dog and a big dog at that, he now desperately wanted Spots. He told himself he needed the increase to his income walking Spots would bring. Besides, it irked him, Mrs. Sellers doubtless believing by this time that no one else was willing to vouch for him.

  Twenty-three days had elapsed between the first murder and the second and now it was just twenty-three days since the second murder. Bean expected a third at any minute. He believed in psychopaths ruled by the phases of the moon, cycles of madness, blood lust regulated by multiples of seven, give or take a little. So there should be another one at any time.

  He was sure the police believed in it too. That was why they were so jumpy and so polite. He had stopped reading the papers, but the television had a program about fixated killers, killers with a mission or an obsession, and there was a psychiatrist on it—probably the one who analyzed Pharaoh’s madness—talking about murderers who killed prostitutes or nuns or almost anyone so long as they could be put into a category.

  The twenty-third day went by and the twenty-fourth and none of the homeless or the jacks men or the beggars got killed. Whoever it was doing it had probably gone off somewhere else, Bean thought, gone up north, they always went up north for some reason. He often speculated about The Beater and wondered if he ought to say something to the police next time they paid him a visit. They had been back twice since asking him about the mugger in the tunnel and he had begun seriously thinking of himself as their adviser, as genuinely helping them with their inquiries. But what could he say? That The Beater could act anything, pretend to be anything he wanted? A sadist or, doubtless, a respectable citizen?

  Instead of leaving wet weather in its wake, the storm had just made things hot. Summer had come at last. All the rain had made the grass in the park very green and fed the roses so that dicy grew lush with dark shiny foliage. The sun shone on velvet lawns and sparkling dewdrops. By noon the temperature had climbed to eighty degrees, and in the evenings people watched performances at the Open Air Theatre in sleeveless dresses and T-shirts.

  Calling for Gushi on the first really hot morning, the sky cloudless, the air clear, he asked Miss Jago for the third time about that reference. She looked genuinely aghast, he had to give her that.

  “I am sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll have it done for you by this afternoon.”

  “I don’t see you in the afternoons, Miss,” Bean said in his most respectful tone.

  “I’ll try to be home by the time you bring the dogs back. Or else you can be sure it will be here when you come in the morning.”

  The woman who walked ten dogs was out with her troop. It was all right for her, she wasn’t a day over thirty-five. She had given up waving at Bean since the day he returned her greeting with one of his looks. But nothing could stop their dogs fraternizing. Ruby made the Cavalier King Charles spaniel her prey. It was a lot smaller than she was and those dogs always had poor sight. Bean had to rescue it from gang rape, for McBride and Boris had followed Ruby’s lead.

  The woman watched his efforts without offering to help. Then McBride found a heap of horse dung—How did a horse get in here? Under a mounted policeman?—and rolled his fat wet body in it, shaking smelly brown liquid all over Bean’s trousers. It was no way to make a living, he told himself, he’d be seventy-one in September. But he had to have an income, he couldn’t live on the pension, especially in a luxury maisonette designed for a fifty-thousand-a-year man.

  Valerie Conway was waiting in the area doorway, well out of the rain of course. Boris would never go down the stairs alone, Bean had to take him, otherwise the borzoi would lie down on the top step and refuse to budge.

  “You got the dalmatian on your books yet?” Valerie said as he descended.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just being friendly. As a matter of fact I’d like to think business was good because Mr. Cornell has given me a message for you.”

  “What message?”

  “He’s giving you two weeks’ notice. Your services won’t be required after the twenty-eighth.”

  Bean stared at her. He took his hand slowly from Boris’s collar and the dog slunk through the doorway, drawing its body to one side so as not to touch Valerie as it passed her.

 
; “What’s brought this on?”

  Valerie could hardly contain her pleasure and triumph, he could tell that. “They’re going to live permanently at their place in the country. And I’m moving in with my boyfriend.”

  “Well, thanks very much. Thanks very much for the courtesy of two weeks’ notice.”

  “I consider I’ve done very well by you, Leslie Bean or whatever your name is. Why d’you think I found you a new customer? You ought to be down on your bended knees thanking me.”

  He looked hard at her. He would have liked to say she could keep her two weeks’ notice and she needn’t think he’d ever have another thing to do with that foul-tempered dog, that cold-hearted, evil Russian, the animal that hadn’t even attempted to defend him when he’d been mugged. But he couldn’t, he needed the money.

  “Thank you, Valerie,” he said, and was about to add that he’d see her later, but she had slammed the door.

  The sun grew almost unpleasantly hot by three-thirty. Bean never thought he’d be complaining about the heat, but he would gladly have missed out on the afternoon walk. Marietta, always the least controllable of the dogs, the liveliest, the bounciest, went too near a family of cygnets and got a peck on the chest from the swan. She screamed as if she’d been stabbed with a knife, but Bean couldn’t see a mark. Little Gushi was too hot under his thick shaggy coat, puffing and whimpering until at last Bean picked him up and carried him. The dog was heavy for his size and he panted, his tongue hanging out.

  All this made Bean late getting back to Charlotte Cottage. He rang the bell, hoping Miss Jago was home as she had said she would be. But there was no answer, so he let himself and Gushi in with his key. She kept it very clean, he always noticed. What he would really have liked was to have taken Marietta in there and left her to run about shaking and splashing the pale walls and silk chair covers with muddy water. But, thinking of his reference, he left the other dogs at the gate, carried Gushi into the kitchen, and refilled his water bowl.

  Taken all in all, it had not been a pleasant day. Bean had still not been back to the Globe. It was not that he was any longer afraid to go there, or that he believed the police would watch him go there, but he saw himself as punishing the place by ostracizing it. All the trouble he had been in was due to the Globe and the Globe’s clientele telling tales. Bean had an obscure feeling that a well-run pub wouldn’t have those sorts of customers.

  So, for the past three Fridays, he had been going to the Queen’s Head and Artichoke. He knew no one there but that bothered him very little. He went there to drink and this evening he felt particularly in need.

  Someone in the pub the previous week had buttonholed him and started giving him a history of the place, how the original house that had stood here had been built by one of Elizabeth I’s gardeners, hence its name. Bean wasn’t interested and he looked cautiously about him now so that he could give the historian a wide berth, but the man wasn’t there this evening. He asked for a double whiskey, Bell’s, and ginger ale, and took it to a table in the corner.

  Without the whiskey he would probably never have thought of going up to Park Village. A second double emboldened him. After all, he was already in Albany Street, and it was a beautiful evening. At just after nine-thirty, the sky was clear and cloudless, violet-colored and still stained red in the west. So near the park, the air smelled of the scents distilled by the sun from grass and leaves and roses.

  Twenty to ten, which was the time he would get there, was not too late to pay an evening call. He remembered Anthony Maddox’s rules about that—he was talking of the phone but it came to the same thing—“nothing before nine A.M. or after ten P.M.” Besides, she couldn’t complain, she had promised him that reference over and over again. On the spot, he could stand over her till it was done. Well, stand there and perhaps be offered a drink while she wrote it.

  • • •

  When she said she was going to be married, Dorothea assumed it was Alistair.

  “It’s Leo I’m marrying.”

  Dorothea had to think who that was. “How awfully romantic,” she said.

  “It is, isn’t it? But I’m so glad you think so, I’d thought you’d disapprove. We haven’t known each other very long.”

  “Knowing the person very long isn’t necessarily important. You can have an instinct about someone being right for you.”

  “That’s exactly it. I have an instinct about it. But I do wish my grandmother were alive to see us, to see him.”

  “You thought I wouldn’t approve but she would?”

  “Oh, maybe it’s that her generation expected marriage, they thought in the terms of marriage, whereas ours doesn’t. I suppose I’m getting married to make, as they say, a public commitment.” And, she thought, but didn’t say, because he may not live long. “I’m older than he is. Why should I wait?”

  “Do you know what I’d really like, Mary? I’d love you to wear one of Irene’s dresses. Why not the wedding dress?”

  They looked at it in its glass case. Irene Adler had never existed, nor had Godfrey Norton; she had never been married to him, so never had had a wedding dress. This one had been worn by some Edwardian bride, long dead. It was white lace with a high boned collar and long embroidered train. Mary laughed.

  “I’m getting married at Camden Register Office. Can you imagine this? I shan’t even have anything new for it. We don’t care about things like that, he doesn’t any more than I do. And we shan’t have a honeymoon. We can’t, I have to stay at Charlotte Cottage for another five weeks. He’ll go back to his place and I to mine, I expect—and then, I don’t know. But I think we’ll be happy, Dorrie.”

  “And what about Alistair?” said Dorothea.

  Since she had run away from him and hidden herself among the trees on Primrose Hill she had seen and heard nothing of him, apart from the letter. She had not yet been able to face replying to it.

  “He wants me to let him invest my grandmother’s money. He says I’ll never find anyone more competent and more cautious. But I haven’t got the money yet and shan’t have it for ages.”

  “You sound as if you don’t much want it.”

  “That would be silly, wouldn’t it? We all want money. Now that I’m going to marry Leo I want somewhere nice to live.”

  She said good-bye to Dorothea and took the path straight across the park, but their talk had delayed her and it was only when she reached the gate of Charlotte Cottage that she remembered telling Bean she would be home early, that she would be home before he came back and would give him his reference. He couldn’t have been gone long. Gushi, with fresh water brimming his bowl, was lying exhausted on the kitchen floor.

  Mary sat down to write Bean’s reference, the little dog on her lap. It took her a long time because she had never done it before and had no idea what was requisite to say. And to whom did you address it? She had written To whom it may concern and “Mr. Bean”—should she try to find out his first name?—when Leo arrived. He looked white and tired and said he had had a hard day, he would have to lie down for a while.

  The reference finished, she decided to write to Alistair. She would tell him she was getting married in three weeks’ time to Leo, and she had begun, had rejected “My dear Alistair” for plain “Dear Alistair,” when Leo called her from upstairs. She came into the bedroom and he started to say rather peevishly that she had promised to look after him, to care for him, but although she knew he was exhausted she had virtually ignored him since he got home.… And then, suddenly, he was laughing at himself, apologizing, saying how absurd he was, he was only making excuses for wanting her.

  So she went into his arms and after a while he began his gentle delicate lovemaking, his fingers with the soft gossamer touch of a moth’s wing, his lips as cool as petals, so that it was like being in bed with a phantom. She closed her eyes and thought, when I open them there will be no one there but a shadow. And then his movements strengthened and his body grew real and seemed infused with a sudden great heat. The sou
nd wrenched out of him was like a groan of pain.

  They slept and woke to see a red sunset behind the trees of the village and the double spires of St. Katharine’s. The red dimmed and the sky was blue covered with tiny pink feathers. Mary got up, had a shower, put on loose cotton trousers and a T-shirt, and began to make their supper. But Leo came down while she was tearing lettuce for a salad and gently shepherded her away: He would do it, he was fine now, he wasn’t ill.

  He laid the table, opened the bottle of wine he had brought. She finished her letter to Alistair. Everything she wanted to say had presented itself clearly, she had had no difficulties with it, and what had seemed an insurmountable problem resolved itself into a simple telling of the plain facts, kindly, precisely, without emotion.

  It was nine before they sat down to eat, his pasta dish with black olives having taken detailed preparation. She ate and was glad to see him eating so heartily, a second helping and another slice of ciabatta. Remembering Alistair’s suggestion, she asked him if they should start house-hunting this weekend. They would be bound to like the same things, they always did, so it should be a delightful exercise. If he agreed, she had quite decided to sell the house in Belsize Park.

  The idea seemed to appeal to him and he speculated about houses. Buying a house, buying any property, had never come in his way before, he confessed, it was something that the grown-ups did. And she laughed because she felt just the same. It was not for them, they were children to whom such businesslike adult stuff had never occurred, but now they must, they must be serious, they must realize that, give or take a little, they could have whatever they wanted. He had got up and come round the table, had put his arms round her, and was holding her close in a bear hug, when the front doorbell rang.

  Mary said, “It’s Alistair.”

  “Yes, I expect it is.” Leo hesitated only infinitesimally. “I’ll go. It’s time we met.”