by Ruth Rendell
Heather said, “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. You said I know the rest. I don’t really. What did you think you were going to do?”
“After I’d drowned him? He fought and struggled but he was weak, Issy. Under the water he was so white, sort of parchment color. I could see him very clearly because all the foam had gone. Funny thing, wasn’t it? All the foam had gone. My dress was wet and my legs were wet. I dried them on a towel but not my shoes. I didn’t think of my shoes. You asked me what I thought I was going to do. I thought I’d run away. It was the only thing I could do, though I didn’t know where I’d go or anything.
“That’s why I came downstairs. I hadn’t heard you and Mum come in. I hadn’t any money or any clothes with me, but I came down because I thought I’d go out of the front door and run away. You were there, looking up at me, and I couldn’t speak. Mum spoke to me. She said, ‘Why are you so wet, Heather? Where have you been?’ and then I spoke. I said, ‘In the bathroom. You’d better come.’”
“And we did and found Guy drowned. Someone must have phoned the police, but I don’t remember who. Not me.”
“It was Pam. Mum phoned Pam. She came straight over. The police came later. And a doctor, though anyone could have seen he was dead. All the time I was thinking I couldn’t run away now. We didn’t talk to each other at all, you and I and Mum. Mum wasn’t in the sort of state I’d have expected. She was calm. I was terribly frightened, Issy. When the police came, the inspector and the other one, I thought they’d take me away, and then Mum told them we’d all been out together, buying school uniform, but I hadn’t gone into the shop, I’d waited outside. I suppose even then I knew she’d said that so that if they questioned the shop man he’d say I didn’t try on any clothes. And I said that was right. And you said the same.” She paused. “You say I don’t tell lies—well, I did then, about as big a lie as anyone could.”
“The inspector is the man Marion Melville married.”
“Really? I suppose we lived in his jurisdiction or whatever you call it. I wonder if he remembers. After he’d gone and the other one had, I expected you and Mum to ask me what really happened and I couldn’t understand why you didn’t. I thought Pam might, but she had other things on her mind. That was when Michael left her. Why didn’t you ask?”
“I don’t know. I suppose if we didn’t ask we could go on accepting Guy had done it himself. That it was an accident, I mean. One thing we did do. We tried it out to see if you could have done it. Mum got into the bath and I lifted her feet up and her head went under and she couldn’t have pulled herself up till I let go. So we knew you could have done it.”
“If it wasn’t all so ghastly,” said Heather, “I could laugh. At the idea of you and Mum doing that, you know. Was it knowing all that which drove Mum crazy?”
“I don’t know. No one knows. It was easier for me. After all, presumably she’d loved Guy. She had that loss to bear. And she couldn’t have known why you’d done it. I did.”
Heather looked at her curiously. “Why did I do it, Issy?”
“For me,” Ismay said. “To save me from Guy. Even if I didn’t want to be saved, you thought I ought to be, didn’t you? Nothing had happened, though I’d wished it would. I knew you’d done it for me and I think that’s the reason I never told anyone.”
“I didn’t do it for you, Issy. I did it for me.”
It was as if she were trying to speak a language in which she’d only had a few lessons, a strange tongue whose grammar she hadn’t even begun to master. “What do you mean? I don’t understand what you mean.”
Heather nodded. “That night we stayed at Pam’s—do you remember that?—and we both came downstairs because there was a wasp in our room. Do you remember?”
“Of course I do. That was when Guy first saw me.”
“He saw two girls, Issy, not one. He saw me as well. I think we both attracted him, but you—you have to forgive me for this—showed pretty plainly what you felt. And you were older. That was part of the trouble. Did you never wonder why you got all that kissing and fondling but nothing more? Why he never did what you wanted and came to your bedroom?”
“I suppose I thought there wasn’t the opportunity. Or maybe he was scared of going that far.”
“He wasn’t scared,” Heather said. “He came to mine.”
This time Ismay was silent, looking down at the empty wine-glass in her hands, not daring to meet her sister’s eyes. Outside, halfway up in the sky, that single light flashed on and off, on and off. She was as Heather had been when she had come down those stairs, speechless.
Heather went on, “I don’t want to hurt you, but since I’m telling you all of it, I have to tell you this. Guy wanted you at first, but he stopped wanting you because you so plainly wanted him. Does that make sense? I said he was a pedophile. He kissed you and had you sitting on his knee to distract attention from me. But I was the one he wanted because I didn’t want him. That’s the kind of man he was. He told me so. He said, I need a girl who looks like a woman but who’s innocent like you are. You don’t want it now, he said, but I’ll make you like it. You’ll see. That was when he came to my room and—well, did it to me. There was only the once. He got ill after that. What could I do? I couldn’t tell Mum. It’s the old story. That’s how men like Guy operate. She won’t tell and if she does they won’t believe her.”
It was surely the longest speech Heather had ever made.
“He actually had sex with you? He raped you?”
“Yes, you could call it that. I didn’t struggle, though. I was afraid he’d hurt me. Well, hurt me more.”
Ismay put her head in her hands. Just for a moment. “What did he say to you when he was in the bath and you went into the bathroom?” she asked. “You said he said something awful to you.”
“Yes. Maybe if he hadn’t said it I’d never have drowned him. He said, ‘How about coming into the bath with me, Heather? The water’s lovely.’”
“Oh, God, Het. He deserved what he got.”
“I don’t know how many times I’ve heard those words. ‘The water’s lovely.’ Every time I’ve been to the seaside. It always makes me wince.”
“Let’s finish the wine. Do you know, I can tell you now, I was so worried about it all when you met Ed that I thought I’d have to tell him, sort of not let him marry you without knowing this thing about you.” She poured the last of the wine into their glasses. “I never did tell him, of course.”
“Oh, Ed knows,” said Heather. “I told him.”
“You told him?”
“I had to. A few days ago, actually. I told him everything.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he loved me and we’d never talk about it again. He didn’t exactly say I was justified, but that’s what he meant. And we have talked about it again. He does love me and things are just the same—I think—but still…he never used to be sad, Issy, but he’s sad now.”
Was Heather justified? Ismay didn’t know. If she had fought off his advances and killed him in self-defense, well, yes. But in cold blood? A calculated move because he had disgusted her? “Do you think you were justified?”
“No,” said Heather. “Not really. Do you?”
“I can’t say. I don’t seem to know anything anymore.”
“What are you going to do? If you’re going to do anything, would you let us have our honeymoon first? For Ed’s sake?”
They heard his key in the lock. He came in, kissed Heather, kissed Ismay, and began talking about his mother. Ismay thought his eyes were unhappy, in a steady, accepting, resigned sort of way.
In the days that followed, Ismay spent as much time as she could with Heather, not as difficult as it might have been, for Andrew was occupied in house-hunting. And it was “house,” not “flat.” His father had promised him the deposit on a mortgage if he would consent to buy a mews house. Douglas Campbell-Sedge was prejudiced against flats. His children lived in stylish houses in
fashionable places. Ismay went with Heather to buy clothes to wear in a hot sunny climate at Christmastime, sundresses and swimming costumes. She told Andrew she had been looking at furniture and carpets for the new house.
Edmund and Heather left for their honeymoon in the middle of December. On the same day Andrew took Ismay to look at a little house he had found in a pretty mews in Chelsea, cobbled and with antique lampposts and troughs for flowers, looking, he said, as mewses should. She liked it, he told the estate agent they would have it, and that evening he got in touch with his solicitor. Ismay didn’t know he had a solicitor, but, on reflection, she saw that of course he would have one, inevitably.
Marion and Barry came back from India. He had been disappointed in the subcontinent. There was a great deal more dirt than he had expected, and the widespread poverty got him down. There were too many people about who reminded him of that poor wretch who had asked for change outside his house the evening before they were married. The food, too, failed to come up to expectations, the meat and fish being tasteless and tough compared with what he got at the Maharanee and the Pushkar. He wasn’t, however, disappointed in his wife, who was sweetness itself, something which went a long way to consoling him for the gas, electricity, and water bills that Fowler had forwarded and were waiting for him on his return. Although they were careful not to drink the water, they both came back with what Barry called “tummy bugs.”
Christmas chez Litton was a livelier affair than it had been the year before. Joyce and Duncan Crosbie came, and brought Avice Conroy with them. Her new Croatian au pair was rabbit-minding. The unexpected guests were Marion and Barry Fenix and their friend ex-Superintendent Alan Ambury, who had promised to come in “just for drinks” the day before. Marion had made her peace with Irene, humbling herself and apologizing profusely—she had done much the same with Avice—for, as she put it, she could afford to do so now. Much to her relief, Barry’s impressions of the subcontinent had put him off Indian dress and he came in a new charcoal worsted suit. Marion was in Alexander McQueen with Prada shoes. There was a lot of kissing and expressions of regret that Edmund and Heather weren’t there.
“They’ve gone to a place called Kanda in Sumatra,” Irene told everyone. “No one else knows, but Edmund naturally confided in me.”
Barry and his wife went home for Christmas dinner—curried turkey, for Barry’s disappointment in India didn’t extend to his own cooking—and they took ex-Superintendent Ambury with them, but not before he had asked for Irene’s phone number and given her his.
Andrew met Ismay’s mother at last. He seemed embarrassed by the experience, a condition Ismay had never seen him suffering before. He managed to be polite to Pamela and Michael but was visibly relieved to make his escape and take Ismay out to lunch at San Lorenzo. She thought about Heather and Heather’s confession more than she liked. Every day she thought about it and about Edmund knowing and what she should do. If anything. Kieron Thorpe had been committed for trial to a higher court. Andrew said it would be months, maybe even a year, before the trial took place. At least Heather had had nothing to do with that.
She faced Andrew across the table and ate the delicious food and drank champagne. He had given her a gold bracelet for Christmas. She was wearing it. She thought, I must decide about Heather. Perhaps I have decided—to do nothing. In a minute Andrew would wonder why she was so quiet, he would ask her why. She looked up and saw that he had turned his head. His eyes were fixed on a girl who sat waiting, alone, at a table nearby, a fair-haired, pretty, waif-like girl in a translucent white dress. It’s nothing, she said to herself, it means nothing. He turned back to her and smiled.
The earthquake and hurricane and floods in Indonesia and Sri Lanka dominated news broadcasts from the day after Boxing Day onward. “Tsunami” was a new word to most viewers, but it was soon on everyone’s lips. Southern India, the Thai coastline, the islands that Irene still called the East Indies, though she wasn’t quite sure what the term comprised. She talked about it on the phone with her new friend Alan Ambury.
“Sumatra,” he said. “The Nicobar Islands, the Andamans.”
“Sumatra?”
“Places one has never heard of, like Banda Aceh.”
“My son is in Sumatra.”
“It’s a vast area, Irene. I shouldn’t worry.”
“You don’t want to worry about that,” Andrew said to Ismay, signing the contract for the purchase of their house in Chelsea. “I remember when some mate of my mama’s was in a hurricane in Guatemala or she thought she was. Of course I got on to my pal in the Foreign Office, but it was all a storm in a teacup if you’ll forgive the pun.”
Ismay said, “But the worst-hit place is Kanda in Aceh, and Ed’s mother called to tell me that that’s where they went.”
Andrew’s casting up of eyes showed plainly what he thought of any family connections of Edmund Litton’s.
She watched television, one news after another. The water wasn’t lovely. One huge wave and then another and another, the engulfing of land, the destruction and sweeping away of fragile structures. Four British citizens staying in a beach hotel in Kanda…
“Their names cannot be released until next-of-kin have been informed.”
Next-of-kin would be Heather’s mother and Edmund’s mother. Ismay lived, moved, wandered in a daze. She was afraid to show much to Andrew, but at last she couldn’t help herself and she threw herself into his arms, begging him to find out, to tell her the worst, anything to end this. He didn’t fail her.
“You’re wonderful,” she said. “What would I do without you?”
“You don’t have to do without me,” he said.
He gave her a drink and went into the bedroom to phone the pal in the Foreign Office in private. When he came back, after a long time, enmity forgotten, quarrels past, his face told her. He held her close, telling her she had no need of anyone else. Hadn’t he said he would love her forever?
About the Author
Since her first novel, From Doon with Death, published in 1964, Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for 1976’s best crime novel for A Demon in My View, and the Arts Council National Book Award, genre fiction, for The Lake of Darkness in 1980.
In 1985, Ruth Rendell received the Silver Dagger for The Tree of Hands, and in 1987, writing as Barbara Vine, won her third Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for A Dark-Adapted Eye.
She won the Gold Dagger for Live Flesh in 1986 and, as Barbara Vine, for A Fatal Inversion in 1987 and for King Solomon’s Carpet in 1991.
Ruth Rendell won the Sunday Times Literary Award in 1990, and in 1991 she was awarded the Crime Writers’ Assocation Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding contribution to the genre. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 was made a Life Peer.
Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages.
Ruth Rendell has a son and two grandsons, and lives in London.
Also by Ruth Rendell
CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS
From Doon with Death
Sins of the Father
Wolf to the Slaughter
The Best Man to Die
A Guilty Thing Surprised
No More Dying Then
Murder Being Once Done
Some Lie and Some Die
Shake Hands Forever
A Sleeping Life
Death Notes
The Speaker of Mandarin
An Unkindness of Ravens
The Veiled One
Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter
Simisola
Road Rage
Harm Done
The Babes in the Woods
End in Tears
NOVELS
To Fear a Painted Devil
Vanity Dies Hard
The Secret House of Death
One Across, Two Down
The Face of Trespass
A Demon in My View
A Judgement in Stone
Make Death Love Me
The Lake of Darkness
Master of the Moor
The Killing Doll
The Tree of Hands
Live Flesh
Talking to Strange Men
The Bridesmaid
Going Wrong
The Crocodile Bird
The Keys to the Street
A Sight for Sore Eyes
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
The Rottweiler
Thirteen Steps Down
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
The Fallen Curtain
Means of Evil
The Fever Tree
The New Girl Friend
The Copper Peacock
Blood Lines
Piranha to Scurfy
NOVELLA
Heartstones
NONFICTION
Ruth Rendell’s Suffolk
The Reason Why
BY RUTH RENDELL WRITING AS BARBARA VINE
A Dark-Adapted Eye
A Fatal Inversion
The House of Stairs
Gallowglass
King Solomon’s Carpet
Anna’s Book
No Night Is Too Long
The Brimstone Wedding
The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy
Grasshopper
The Blood Doctor
The Minotaur
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2008
Copyright © 2006 by Kingsmarkham Enterprises, Ltd.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2007.