The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  • • •

  The man, whoever he was, the con man, the man who had deceived her, would come to the house as he always came when he had been away for the night. Already the heat was closing in as if a giant lid were held over the steam from a pan. From the comparative cool of Charlotte Cottage, Mary came out into a heat that enveloped her like a blanket. She left Gushi behind. It was too hot for him to walk and he must be content with escape into the garden twice a day. She was leaving the house to avoid the man who had been her lover but whom she dared not think of in those terms in case she was sick again.

  It was a matter for regret now that she had asked Dorothea for the day off. The museum would at least have sheltered her, given her a place to be where he wouldn’t find her. There seemed nowhere to go but the park, but even as she entered it, going in by the Chester Gate—farther north, nearer the zoo, she might meet him—she told herself this running away couldn’t be prolonged. They would meet, they were bound to, he couldn’t know Alistair had exposed him and she had found him out. Probably today, sometime today, they must encounter each other. She began to shake again. She felt weak, enfeebled, the sleeping capsules still taking effect, and she sat down on a seat under the trees in the Broad Walk.

  The day after tomorrow was to have been her wedding day. He would have married her, of course he would, that had been the purpose of the project, to marry her for her money and that vast barrack of a house up in Belsize Park. Tears came into her eyes and ran down her cheeks. He had been so plausible, so nice, so gentle, a wonderful actor. But who was he that he could show the registrar Leo Nash’s birth certificate and have Carl Nash for a brother and receive her bone marrow and die, yet be alive?

  The man she had once named Nikolai had come to sit on the other end of the bench. She hadn’t heard his arrival; he might have been there for five minutes, ten. Her tears, her thoughts, had cut her off from the external world.

  “Don’t cry,” he said, and then, “What is it?”

  She lifted her head, turned her eyes. Her sight was blurred by tears, but still she was sure he looked different. The change was subtle, not definable, for he still had his beard, he still wore his jeans, his denim jacket, the threadbare T-shirt, the battered trainers. But he was a man now, not a dosser. Whatever it was must be in those blue eyes or in the more confident set of his shoulders.

  The classic response, but what else could she say to a stranger? “It’s nothing.”

  “You’re very unhappy,” he said. “Shall I go away? I expect you’d like me to go away.”

  Her newfound rudeness had its limits. “No. No, of course not.” She turned her face away. “I am unhappy. No one can do anything about that.”

  He was very hesitant. “Do you want to tell me? I mean, just to tell someone?” It came to him then how he had told no one about his wife and children. He had talked of them only to that other self inside his head. If the other street people knew it was only that a tragedy figured in his life just as tragedies figured in all their separate lives. “The cliché is true,” he said. “Sometimes it’s best to talk to a stranger.”

  She shook her head. She got up and when he protested, he would go, the last thing he meant was to drive her away, shook her head again, made a gesture with her right hand indicating he should stay where he was.

  “I can’t talk,” she said. “It’s not just—well, inhibition. I wouldn’t know what to say. I don’t know, you see, I don’t know.”

  He looked at her neutrally, trying not to encourage or discourage.

  “I don’t know what’s been done to me, only that it’s bad and cruel, I think.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “it helps to get angry. You could try anger.”

  She nodded abstractedly. He watched her walk away. He was convinced that something terrible had happened to her and with that thought came a sense of failure. By his presence, near her, he had absurdly thought he could save her from suffering, protect her from life. Who did he think he was? He hadn’t been able to save himself, so how could he hope to save another?

  But now, while she was out of doors, he would never let her out of his sight.

  28

  Walking down from St. Barbara’s House in Camden High Street, the women’s hostel where she sometimes slept, Effie turned her eyes to the window of the Oxfam shop. She looked at it as another woman might look at the windows of Selfridges or D. H. Evans. Oxfam prices were usually beyond Effie but they were a possibility, they weren’t ludicrous, they weren’t that other woman’s Harrod’s. She needed a T-shirt, it was so bloody hot. The only one in the window had elephants on it, a married couple of elephants they were supposed to be with a couple of babies. Vanity had gone out of Effie’s life ages ago—but her with a family of elephants on her front?

  Do me a favor. Anyway, it was about sixteen sizes too small.

  A baseball cap she could live without. A pimple on an egg that would be on her Humpty-Dumpty face. Maybe she’d try the Sue Ryder place for her T-shirt if she could remember where it was. She wandered on, shifting the heavier bundles she carried from her left to her right hand, heading for the Gloucester Gate.

  Dill went up there later to cash his giro, but he didn’t look in the Oxfam window because he never bought clothes. The nuns who had a soup and bun stall in Eversholt Street five nights a week handed out cast-off clothing for free. He was more interested in food for the beagle, which he’d run out of, so he tied the dog up to a parking meter and went into the Indian mini-market where he bought five cans of Cesar, gourmet stuff but light to carry in those little foil cans. The beagle would wolf it down.

  Roman passed that by on his way from the Hawley Hotel to Lisson Grove where the Benefit Office and Job Center is, a long walk but nothing much to one who had walked miles every day for the best part of two years. A slight embarrassment stopped him looking at the Oxfam shop as he passed it. He consciously kept his eyes averted. The previous day he had handed over to them all the clothes—those that had survived and were in a reasonably decent condition—he had worn while on the street, having washed them first and worked on them with the hotel’s ancient iron. They would very likely be in the window. He had taken no money for them, but it troubled him vaguely that there were people out there prepared to pay for and wear his castoffs. So he didn’t look.

  Nor did Nello, also on his way to cash his giro and spend half of it in the Red Lion. The school-leaver who had inherited most of Bean’s dogs dragged all his charges past the window, heading for the pharmacy where his mother’s repeat prescription for barbs was regularly dispensed. As often as not, the dogs never saw the grass of the park these days; the school-leaver was too busy shopping or playing the fruit machines.

  It had taken him only two days to time the early walk for two hours later. Outside the pharmacy he tied the dogs up so tightly that Ruby couldn’t get her leg over or Spots catch a sniff of Charlie’s chuff. Another hundred chlorme-something or others, please, and this prescription for his baby brother who never gave any of them a wink of sleep. It was for pediatric Valium in syrup form. The school-leaver was going to divide it up and sell it in forty-milliliter phials, there was a good market among the buffs for coming down from a speed hangup. Cough mixture would go into the Vallergon bottle and his brother no doubt would keep on screaming half the night.

  It had to be one of Bean’s regulars who spotted the T-shirt and the baseball cap, but few of them ever looked in charity shop windows, let alone went inside. In any case, Camden High Street was too down-market or just bohemian for the Barker-Pryces, Erna Morosini, Mrs. Sellers, and Edwina Goldsworthy, and not sufficiently recherché for Lisl Pring. Just as well for the school-leaver or they might have seen their dogs lashed to lampposts outside the pinball arcade. The one who looked but saw no need to go inside was Valerie Conway.

  She was living with her boyfriend just off Camden High Street and was walking down to her new job as receptionist in the Peugeot showrooms. The neighbors in Jamestown Road had been all agog
when they found out she’d known Bean quite well, seen him every day and talked to him. It was a wonder it wasn’t she the police had hauled in to identify his body.

  “I was like Bo-Peep’s sheep,” Valerie said. “They didn’t know where to find me.”

  But she wasn’t without public spirit. And she wasn’t too posh for Oxfam shops. Her sister had bought a really nice boob tube from one of them and worn it on her honeymoon in Bodrum. Valerie was on the lookout for a halter top. A red one was in the very center of the window and the idea apparently was that you wore it with the red baseball cap they’d stuck on the plaster model’s head. Valerie went inside, her heart thudding uncomfortably.

  “D’you know where you got that from?”

  “If you mean who brought it in,” said the sour-faced middle-aged volunteer, “I do remember the the man, but we’re not in the habit of divulging the names of donors.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Valerie. “I’ll have the red halter. I just wanted to know about the baseball cap because the last time I saw it it was on the head of one of those blokes that got themselves impaled on railings.”

  • • •

  The day came and went. The wedding day. He hadn’t come, so Mary understood that he must somehow know he was discovered. The scam was over. If he was close to the real Leo Nash, and he must have been, perhaps the Harvest Trust had let him know they had informed her. After all, she would have received that letter much sooner if Alistair hadn’t delayed sending it on.

  His failure to come was at the same time a relief and a disappointment. A relief because of her shame at the things she had said, her confidings in him, her confessions of love, the relative speed with which she had let him make love to her and later, her reveling in that lovemaking. The disappointment was because she was angry. Although she had appeared indifferent to it at the time, she had taken to heart Nikolai’s advice. You could try anger. She had tried, perhaps for the first time in her life.

  Anger had come and begun to grow and as it grew brought with it a kind of liberation. Why hadn’t she previously let herself be angry? With Alistair, for instance? But the anger she now nourished needed expression and it could only express itself to him. And he didn’t come, would never come.

  The police came instead.

  They wanted more identification, this time to tell them if a red baseball cap and T-shirt with elephants on it had belonged to Bean. Had she ever seen Bean wearing them?

  “Many times,” she said. “He wore the hat every day in hot weather. I only saw the T-shirt once, but it was his.”

  There must have been a new firmness about her, a decisiveness, which she fancied made Marnock give her one or two surprised glances. Had she ever seen Bean with anyone? Had he, for instance, ever been accompanied when he came to fetch or return Gushi? She answered no without hesitation to both questions and the policemen thanked her and left.

  Dorothea was coming round in the evening. Mary had phoned her the night before to tell her the wedding was off but giving no further explanation. She had phoned her cousin in Guildford. After all, if she didn’t understand herself, how could she explain? She found a bottle of wine, the Chardonnay Leo had been so fond of, and dialed Express Tikka and Pizza for chicken korma with pilau rice and Bombay potatoes for eight o’clock.

  One of the qualities for which she liked Dorothea was her willingness to accept a refusal to explain, her submission without protest to silence on a particular subject. She was discreet, could keep a secret, and understood about other people having private places they wanted to keep inviolate.

  “Don’t ask,” Mary said. “I say that because I don’t really know why myself. Perhaps I’ll have an explanation one day and then I’ll tell you. And then maybe you won’t want to know, you won’t care.”

  Dorothea had brought a basket of peaches and a carton of clotted cream. “Better put this in your fridge till it’s time to eat it.” In the same tone she said, “Are you very unhappy?”

  “I don’t know. That’s a peculiar answer, but I really don’t know. I’m angry. I’ve never been so angry with anyone and it feels so strange and new. But I can’t be angry with him because I don’t know where he is.”

  They sat on the terrace and drank Campari with ice and orange juice and lime slices. Gushi lay half under the lilac bush and half on the grass, snapping at any moth that came his way. The sky was very pale blue, as if long exposure to the fierce sun had faded it. There was a smell of smoke. Not illegal smoke from an illicit bonfire, Mary thought, but a fire somewhere, perhaps on the embankment of the railway line coming out of Euston. Fires kept breaking out from cigarette ends tossed onto tinder-dry grass. “I brought you a paper,” Dorothea said, “for distraction. Well, a rag, a tabloid. Have you ever heard of an MP called Barker-Pryce?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “That man Bean that was murdered used to take his dog out. The dog must have gone out with Gushi. A golden retriever called Charlie.”

  “I remember the dog.”

  Dorothea passed her the front page. There was not much text. It was mostly photographs and headline: THE MP AND HIS TOY, with beneath it, WHAT WAS THE LINK WITH MURDERED MAN? One photograph was of a choleric-looking elderly man with bristly whiskers and badly cut hair, sitting at a table in what looked like a drinking club but might have been in a private house, next to a young heavily made-up girl with waist-length hair. A cigar with a pendulous head of ash pulled down one corner of his mouth. Fingers fat as sausages could be seen gripping the girl’s shoulder from behind. Her head rested on his shoulder. The caption read, A Toy is only a toy but a good cigar is a smoke. James Barker-Pryce, Conservative Member for Somers Town and South Hampstead, parties with a friend. The other photograph, snapped on a beach somewhere, was of Bean.

  It was hard for Mary to take much in. Distraction does not always distract. She seemed to have no concentration. The lines of print danced.

  “Here, you read it to me.”

  “All right. I like reading aloud. The missing link. The time has come for the public to be told. What was the connection between James Barker-Pryce MP and Leslie Arthur Bean, the murdered dog-walker?

  “It is several days since the police revealed that Bean was not The Impaler’s latest victim but that this was a copycat killing. Leslie Bean was well known to Mr. Barker-Pryce’s friend Miss Toy Townsende, 23, who has told police, ‘I knew Les when he was a butler. That was three or four years ago at my friend Mr. Maurice Clitheroe’s home. Les was employed by my friend James Barker-Pryce to walk his beautiful retriever dog Charlie, but I think there must have been some disagreement between them as the dog-walking ceased, though Les still paid visits to Mr. Barker-Pryce’s Regent’s Park home.…’

  “Can you imagine anyone actually talking like that?”

  “It sounds libelous to me. How do they hope to get away with it?”

  “Perhaps they don’t care. On the phone today Mr. Barker-Pryce, 68, said he had no memory of any photograph of himself and Miss Townsende. It was possible she was the young lady who made a suggestion to him while he was parking his Mercedes in Paddington Street, London W1, two months ago. Mrs. Julia Barker-Pryce, 62, Mr. Barker-Pryce’s wife of 33 years, was not available for comment. She and her husband are … Turn to page two.

  “Here’s a shot of the girl in a G-string. She can’t really be called Toy, can she? She and her husband are spending the weekend at their country retreat at Upper Slaughter, Gloucestershire … Upper Slaughter? I don’t believe it.”

  “There really is a place called that. Dorrie, did you hear the front doorbell?”

  “I don’t think so. Listen. It goes on, Mr. Barker-Pryce later told our reporter—I suppose they’re all barracking him outside his country house—‘There was no quarrel between me and Mr. Bean. That would be impossible. He was a working man and I believe former servant. I dismissed him for incompetence and there is no truth in rumors that he visited my house or that I continued to pay him a remuneration …’ Oh, tha
t must have been the bell!”

  The tikka man had come round the side of the house in search of them. He was wearing his red and white T-shirt with red jeans and carrying a tray laden with covered dishes, fastened to his torso with straps like a rucksack.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mary said. “We weren’t sure if we heard the bell.”

  “Shall I put it in the kitchen for you?”

  “Thank you.”

  He went indoors. When he came back, he gave Dorothea a doubtful look, then a smile and a, “I’m not mistaken, am I, madam?”

  “No, no. You used to drive the dry cleaner’s van, didn’t you? Oh, it must be five years back.”

  “That’s right. Spot on. And you live in Charles Lane up in St. John’s Wood.”

  They began reminiscing. Mary went indoors, turned the oven on low, and put the korma, rice, and vegetables inside. Leo’s engagement ring that he had bought her in a shop in Camden Passage was still on her finger. She took it off and wondered what would happen to it if she put it down the waste disposal unit and pressed the switch. It might break the unit. Better give it to some poor dosser to sell. She took it off and dropped it inside the cutlery drawer. Then she peeled two peaches, sliced them, and looked for a liqueur to pour over them. The Amaretto Leo had brought the previous week …

  Even in her mind she had better stop calling him that. Leo wasn’t his name. He wasn’t Oliver either, he couldn’t even be called by the pseudonym under which she had so long known the recipient of her donation, for he wasn’t that recipient, it wasn’t into his bones that her marrow had been induced, but an unknown dead man’s.

  She took the wine out of the refrigerator, found a corkscrew, and put it with two glasses on a tray. Dorothea was lying back in the lounging chair, gazing up at the pale sky, now covered with a network of vapor trails. Gushi had climbed onto her lap. The tikka man had gone.

  “That poor man,” Dorothea said, sitting up. “He went to prison for running someone over when he was driving a laundry van. Of course I didn’t mention any of that. But I remembered. I don’t think you ought to go to prison if you didn’t mean to kill someone, do you?”