by Ruth Rendell
They questioned him at home and at the police station. The interrogation went on for hours. He denied everything. The club was doing well at that time, the travel agency was well past the planning stage, the original-oil-paintings business had started bringing in the money. They could see where the money came from.
His two new rifles came to light, each in its case. He had his gun license, as member of an accredited rifle club. He said he had never heard of Cornelius Mulvanney, the man had never come to his house. One thing he would like to tell them, he said, was that while he was at a party in a pub in Balham at the weekend, someone had come up to him and asked if he had any hashish. In those words? Well, no, not in those words, he didn’t want to repeat the words, but if they insisted, what he had asked had been, “Have you got any shit?” How did he know what that meant? He had been curious, he had asked a man in the pub, who had told him.
Describe the man. Which man? The one who asked him for the hashish. Guy had said he couldn’t, he couldn’t remember. Eventually he came up with a vague outline of a thin man, pale, with longish, fairish hair. The name of the pub? The time? Whose party was it? What time did he leave? On and on it went. At midnight they let him go home. He never heard from them again.
Poppy Vasari, however, returned a few days later. She said she wouldn’t come in, thanks. (He hadn’t asked her.) She’d stay on the doorstep because he might do her a mischief if she was alone with him in there. That made him laugh. As if he would even touch someone so repulsive! The smell was still there, ingrained in her clothes probably. He stood holding the door and laughing at her, it was all so ridiculous.
“You murdered Con,” she said, “so why not me? It wouldn’t make any difference to you. You’re evil.”
He was forcing himself to keep on laughing, it didn’t come naturally. If he shut the door she would only keep banging on it until he opened it again.
“You’re safe from the law,” she said, “but you’re not safe from your peers.”
“What d’you mean, peers?” he’d said, getting a sort of picture of the House of Lords.
“I’m telling everyone I know about you, everyone. And I’m telling everyone Con knew. I’m telling them the truth, that Con may have died from bee-stings but he only got stung because of the drug you gave him. You murdered him by giving him a lethal drug and that’s what I’m determined everyone’s going to know. I’ve started at home. Now I’m going to start here. I’m going to find your friends and tell them. I’m going to knock on every door in this street and tell people what you did.”
The trouble with doing that sort of thing, at least in Britain, is that the recipients of statements of this kind, delivered like that, think the messenger is mad. He or she is a “poor soul” who ought to be put away, ought never to have been let out, needs looking after, is best ignored, forgotten, and, as for the information thus relayed, no one gives it credence. No doubt the neighbours in Scarsdale Mews did think Poppy Vasari mad if she carried out her threat—Guy didn’t look to see—and perhaps she was temporarily a little mad. I mean (thought Guy), imagine it, the TV chat-show chap coming to his door and getting an earful of “I think you ought to know that the man who lives at number seven killed my friend with drugs.”
It didn’t even worry him much. If she thought these people were his friends, she was making a big mistake. He had never been matey with the neighbours. An invitation from one set of them to drop in for a Christmas drink he had refused. In the ensuing days he was a bit wary with them, but everyone went on just as they had been before, either saying “Good morning” or “Hi” or not saying anything. As he thought, they hadn’t listened. But that was a far cry from Poppy Vasari telling someone she knew personally, someone she worked with, especially when she had calmed down a bit. It was a far cry from her telling someone who knew him, who recognized his name.
Rachel Lingard.
It was within a fortnight of the Con Mulvanney inquest that he and Leonora were going away on holiday together. Nothing of importance came out at the inquest. His name, thank God, wasn’t mentioned. Poppy Vasari got a reprimand from the coroner for sitting by and doing nothing while Con Mulvanney took a prohibited substance, a dangerous hallucinogen. She was specially to blame in the light of her training and the job she had been doing, from which, the coroner was pleased to inform the court, she had resigned. The verdict was accidental death. But Rachel must have been busy because in the middle of the following week, when he and Leonora met in Cambridge Circus—he was taking her to the theatre to Les Miserables—she told him she wasn’t coming to Greece.
She wasn’t abashed about it, she wasn’t awkward. There was no question of saying to him that she hated telling him, that she felt awful. She came straight out with it.
“I can’t come, I’m sorry.”
He was appalled, he protested. Was it the cost that was worrying her? Was it because he would have to pay for both of them?
The shock of it made him careless and he uttered the phrase she hated and he had promised himself not to use. “I won’t even notice an amount like that.”
It always made her wince. “It’s that, and other things. I can’t. Don’t ask me to explain, it would be painful to explain. Let’s just forget it—can we?”
Once he thought it was the money and perhaps—unpleasant notion—she might feel she’d have to sleep with him if he’d paid, so it was better not to go. Now he knew differently. Rachel had told her about Con Mulvanney.
She lived with Rachel, Rachel was always there, poisoning her mind, influencing her against him. He would like to kill Rachel.
CHAPTER TEN
The barbecue at Danilo’s was operated by cooks in striped aprons and high white hats and the food served by waitresses dressed like eighteenth-century dairymaids. The barmen and barmaids were dressed like Hawaiian dancers. Fortunately, it was a warm evening. The garden of Danilo’s neo-Georgian house in Weybridge was enormous, planted here and there with imported, nearly mature, palm trees, which were doing all right this summer but might be less happy by next spring. His latest novelty was the fountain, installed in an ornamental pool on the lawn below the terrace. The fountain was floodlit this evening, pink rose-trees in pink pots stood round the marble coping and pink dye had been put into the water. Danilo explained to people admiring the effect that the natural-looking rocks were real rose quartz.
About a hundred people had come. Guy knew some of them slightly. Bob Joseph was there with his girl-friend and Bob’s ex-wife was there with her new husband, Danilo’s wicked old father with his third wife and Danilo’s brother, who had taken over the turf accountant’s business and now had a chain of betting shops. There were a lot of friends of Tanya’s in the rag trade and a lot of girls who looked like models but probably weren’t. Danilo and Tanya, though always talking about getting married “one day,” had not yet done so, in spite of having four children.
These four, intolerably spoilt in Guy’s opinion, instead of being in bed or supervised in some distant suitable place by their two nannies, ran about among the guests screaming, throwing food about, and splashing anyone who came within the line of fire with pink water from the fountain. They were dressed up to the nines, the two boys in striped trousers and monkey jackets with bow-ties, the girls in white organza with layers of petticoats, as if their parents were Italian peasants made good instead of cockney parvenus. The elder boy, Charles, but always known as Carlo, had got himself a Bellini, which, because this was Tanya’s party, had brandy in it as well as champagne and peach juice, and, surrounded by shrieking girls in hip-high miniskirts, was swigging it down and smacking his lips.
Fairy lights were strung among the palm trees, along with ultraviolet mosquito-repellent rings. A tape was playing music of the down-below-the-Rio-Grande type, thus fostering the illusion Danilo and Tanya liked to create that they really were of Latin origin. The garden smelt of burning oil and charred steak in spite of the patchouli-scented candles. Guy understood that he could never hav
e brought Leonora here. She would call it vulgar, or worse, would laugh. Her idea of a party was fifteen people in a flat in Camden Town, drinking white wine and Perrier and talking about the environment. But giving up Danilo and Tanya for Leonora would be an endurable sacrifice.
The night sky was purple, starless, with a lemon-coloured sickle moon that must be real but looked as if Danilo had hung it up there when he dyed the fountain. A slight breeze moved the palm fronds. Guy had drunk one Bellini for form’s sake, then moved on to vodka. He could see Celeste enjoying herself dancing with Danilo’s next-door neighbour, a millionaire and former member of a highly successful sixties rock group. She had a bright red ankle-length skirt on and a black-and-gold tank top that left bare two inches of golden midriff. Her hair in those scores of gilt-tipped plaits was like the crest of some glorious tropic bird. The smallest of Danilo’s children, a little girl in bouncing white tutu, came running up to her and Celeste drew her into the dance, the three of them holding hands. Celeste loved children, he had seen signs before.
He was walking towards the bar for a vodka refill when a more than usually loud splash and shriek from the direction of the fountain made him look to his left. There, among a knot of guests brushing water-drops off their clothes—Carlo had been active at the fountain edge—was Robin Chisholm.
Guy fetched his drink, moved to a shadowy point of vantage where only scented candle-light penetrated. Robin was talking to Tanya, a man Guy didn’t know, and two string-thin bizarrely dressed women with hair like huge cumuli of candy-floss, lemon and strawberry, respectively. Tanya’s hair was not dissimilar, except that candy-floss does not come in ink flavour. Tanya was wearing a kind of camisole in gold lamé with black-and-gold-striped pleated trousers and high-heeled green shoes that she had probably put on by mistake and then forgotten to change. There was no sign of Maeve.
Robin looked as if he had stepped straight out of a musical set in Edwardian times. All that was lacking was the straw boater. He had taken to wearing his fair wavy hair parted in the middle. It looked very strange. His face was as youthful as ever, not simply youthful as that of a man of twenty-seven is, but like a boy’s ten years younger. His cheeks were rosy, his lips red as a girl’s. He had white flannels on and a striped blazer, seemed prosperous and immensely pleased with himself.
Guy said to Danilo, “I didn’t know you knew him.”
“I used to know him just like you did. Not so well, maybe, till lately. He swapped some pesetas for me. I sold my villa and it was a question of getting the funds out. I should have asked little Miss Leo, eh? Is that what’s going through your mind? Little Miss Leo and the fiance?”
“Not at all,” Guy said stiffly. “How did you run across him again?”
“I wonder why you ask. Still, my life is an open book between friends. It was a chance meeting. Tanya’s sister had a flat in the same block as him by Clapham Common. That’s her talking to him, the strawberry blond one.”
“In Clapham? He lives in Chelsea.”
“This was three or four years ago,” said Danilo. “Why are you so interested all of a sudden? Oh, I begin to see. You aren’t putting a contract out on him, I hope. He’s valuable to me. Where shall I find another swap jockey with a baby face and no scruples? Look at him, he looks about twelve.”
Guy fetched himself another drink. What he would have liked to do was walk up to Robin Chisholm and throw the drink in his face, see what happened. He had never thrown a drink in anyone’s face, but the idea of doing this was suddenly very attractive. It was as if this was something he had to do before he died. The evening was no longer very warm. For the first time in his life Guy thought that nights are never warm in this country—well, maybe one a year might be warm. Then he walked up to Robin, who was still with Danilo’s strawberry-blond sister-in-law, and, by now, an elderly man someone had said was a dress designer.
“Hallo, how are you?” He said it in that transatlantic manner that places all the stress on the “you” and runs the words together in a meaningless way. It was deliberate, unaccompanied by a smile.
Robin chose to answer this rhetorical question literally, which made the strawberry blond laugh. “Oh, I’m marvellous, never been better.” He gave Guy a purposely vacuous grin, looking like one of the “big boys” in Just William.
“Maeve not here?”
This occasioned an offensive pantomine search. Robin looked to either side of him, stretching out his neck and peering round the back of the dress designer. His eyebrows rose, he immediately became short-sighted, baffled, looked at the ground, pursed his lips in a silent whistle. “She doesn’t seem to be,” he said at last. “No, I’d say not.” He had assumed, for the evening only perhaps, for Guy only perhaps, a hearty, ingenuous manner. “I say, is that awfully pretty girl with you?”
It was a mistake to ask which one but Guy asked it.
“The coloured one with the Rastafarian hair.”
Guy threw his drink in Robin’s face.
Danilo’s sister-in-law screamed. The dress designer shouted, “For heaven’s sake!” Robin shook himself, spat, tossed back his hair, and leaped for Guy with arms extended, like a cat fighting. The whole party was silenced, was staring, movement suspended, adrenaline rising. Guy’s fist shot out and caught Robin not where it was meant to, on his jaw, but against his right collarbone. Almost immediately Robin’s flailing hands made contact with Guy’s face, the longish nails extended, tigerlike. Guy struck again as people began to intervene. Someone seized him from behind as someone else grabbed Robin by the shoulders, but not before he had slammed his fist into Robin’s left eye.
They were both gasping, snorting really.
“Stop it, cut it out,” someone was saying.
“Are you crazy?”
“This is my party.”
“What in God’s name is going on here?”
“I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“Yes, he threw his drink at him, right in his face.”
“He’s a shit,” Guy said. “He’s the biggest shit in London.”
“And you’re a criminal psychopath and murderer,” said Robin, holding one hand over his eyes. “Why don’t you fuck off back to the slum you came from?”
Celeste drove them home. Guy sat beside her, nursing his bleeding face. He had been scratched on his right cheek, the right side of his upper lip, the left side of his chin, and on his neck.
“I shall probably get blood-poisoning. God knows what filthy bacteria a shit like that carries; listeria, hepatitis B, it could be anything.”
“Silly Guy,” said Celeste. “You’re so silly. You can go to the doctor tomorrow. He’ll never believe it was a fellow did it—you can say I did it, right?”
He didn’t love her but he loved the way she talked, that accent. Rastafarian, that shit would call it. Tomorrow was “tomorr-oh” and doctor “d’ctah.”
“Celeste, I want to tell you something.”
It was dark inside the Jaguar. Darkness helped. He lit a cigarette. He would rather have died than tell Leonora about Con Mulvanney, but he was going to tell Celeste and tell her without many qualms, with hardly any inhibition. Was that because he didn’t really care what she thought of him, whereas what Leonora thought of him was all-important? Was it because if she said as a result of what he told her that she no longer wanted to know him, he would be indifferent? Or something else altogether—that Celeste knew him for what he was and loved the man she knew, the real man; he had no need to pretend with her. Leonora, on the other hand, for all their long and close association, didn’t really know him and he didn’t want her to know him, he wanted her to keep her illusions about him.
“Go ahead, then,” said Celeste.
He told her, he didn’t conceal anything. It all came out—his doubt, his trepidation, his cowardice, his later awareness that someone had passed it on to Leonora. Rachel Lingard, he had thought it must be, but at the party he understood it wasn’t. It was Robin Chisholm. At the time Robin had been living in
Clapham, only half a mile away from Poppy Vasari.
“And that’s why you threw your drink at him?”
The real reason had been because of Robin’s racist remark directed at Celeste, but he wasn’t going to say this. It might hurt her, besides showing him in a ridiculous chivalrous light. “More or less, yes.”
“Guy, sweetheart, you are a bit crazy, do you know that? You are a bit obsessed with this thing about Leonora. Do you even know if someone told her? Have you asked her? No, because that would tell her the truth if she doesn’t know it already. Don’t you see this is all in your head, and your head is very strange these days, Guy, let me tell you.”
“She changed towards me. Within two weeks of what happened to Con Mulvanney, she changed. She wouldn’t go on holiday with me.”
“She didn’t want you to pay. She wouldn’t go because of the strings attached, right? That was the only way she changed. Okay, so I’m not like that. A man want to pay for me, he can, he’s welcome, I’m happy. If he want me to do things he want and I don’t want and he come on strong, then I throw him out the window. I have not been going to T’ai Chi classes for five years for nothing, I can tell you.”
Guy laughed in spite of himself. He glanced out of the car window but he knew where they were without looking. This was Balham Hill, and over there to the left was Clapham Common. Con Mulvanney country. He had a sensation as of it crossed with a million invisible wires, a network of transmission, each carrying whispers of his crimes and his culpability. Robin Chisholm’s voice spoke to him again: Psychopathic criminal and murderer. How could Leonora’s brother have known that those were the words to use unless he had been told the facts?
Celeste was driving them across the river by Battersea Bridge. “Sweet Guy,” she said, “I don’t want to hurt you.” He smiled to himself. That made two of them, each not wanting to hurt the other. “But, Guy, isn’t it most likely she changed because she was realizing you’d nothing to share any more? You’re not the same kind of people. Even I can tell and I’ve only seen her once. Okay, so I’m biased, I’m jealous; it’s true, I am. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the truth. She woke up, she got to understand.”