by Ruth Rendell
He was the dead woman’s husband. It was family members who were usually responsible for family murders. The police questioned him and treated him warily. Then he was cleared. Two men, one of them a stranger, came forward and said they had been in the train from Waterloo with him from six o’clock until twenty-five-past.
“I think you know Mr. Grainger,” the Detective Inspector said to him. “You saw him on the train and he has come forward and said he saw you.”
“I asked him how his wife was,” Richard said. “His wife had been ill.”
“Yes, he has told us that. Unprompted, I may add. He said hello to you and you asked after his wife. The other man is Mr. David Stanark. He knows you by sight.”
“I don’t know him.”
Detective Inspector Wallis ignored this. “He came forward of his own volition to say he was on the train and that he saw you on the train.”
Years later, because she asked, Richard told Francine all this. He told Julia what David Stanark had done for him. “He saved my life.”
“Not your life, darling,” said Julia.
“Well, my liberty then.”
“The reality is that he just saved you from a few days’ serious awkwardness, isn’t it?”
Julia was always saying what the reality was.
After Richard’s life and liberty were saved there came a limbo time. It was a time of silence and stillness. Francine no longer went to school and Richard didn’t go to work. They were together all the time, day and night. He moved her bed into his bedroom, he read to her, he never left her. What else could he do for her? He would do anything. For a while, compensating her was his whole life. He bought her a kitten, a white Persian, and for a while that helped her, cuddling the kitten and watching it play so that she was even seen to smile a little. But one day the kitten caught a bird and brought it to her as a gift, laying it at her feet. The dead bird had dark feathers and blood dripped from it, so that she shivered and stared, clenching and unclenching her hands. A good home was found for the kitten, it was the only way.
No one wanted to buy the house, though it was a beautiful place, a “gentleman’s” cottage, nearly three centuries old. Potential buyers hardly seemed to notice the lattice windows or the pretty garden, the green and gold and red Virginia creeper which half veiled its gables or that the house was in the country yet only thirty miles from London. They knew what had happened there and they came to gaze ghoulishly or to ask themselves if they could live with that knowledge. One woman stared at the hall floor as if looking for a bloodstain.
In the end the house was sold for a much lower price than its market value.
Because she couldn’t speak, and her reading and writing skills were very limited, Francine could barely communicate with anyone. She couldn’t tell her father about the videocassette or write down that she had found it. She could have handed it over to him, but for some reason she didn’t do that. Even then, young as she was and mute as she was, she sensed that there was something wrong about that cassette and it would make him unhappy. Perhaps it was because it had been so carefully hidden.
She had been sure the hiding place was her discovery and hers alone, her father didn’t know about it and maybe her mother hadn’t known either. There was an old cupboard in the wall of the chimney which was called a wig cupboard because in olden times, before he went up to bed, the man of the house took off his wig and put it inside there for the night. Her mother had kept her sewing box in there and a pair of scissors. The floor of the wig cupboard was of wooden boards which looked as if they fitted tightly together, but if you pressed one of them in a certain way it lifted a little, you could get hold of it in your fingers and prize it out. Underneath was a small hollow space.
When first she found it there was nothing inside. She wanted to use the scissors and in reaching for them rested her hand on the secret board and tilted it up.
Her mother had seen her with the scissors and, although she wasn’t cross, she hadn’t sounded very pleased. “You are not to use my scissors without asking first, Francine. You aren’t old enough to use scissors on your own.”
So was that what she had done and for which she had been sent to her room? Used the scissors without asking?
Perhaps. But she had never in fact used the hollow space for hiding things. She had never raised the board again until the day they moved away. On moving day, collecting up her things, she looked in the wig cupboard, but her mother’s sewing box and the scissors were gone. Richard Hill was outside in the front garden with the removal men and there was no one to see her. Francine put her hand into the hollow and found inside a videocassette. Or, rather, the rectangular plastic container of a videocassette.
On the outside were a picture and some large printed letters. She could read the word “to” but that was all. She put the cassette into the bag that she would be carrying with her with all her special things in it, the things that would not be going in the removal van but coming with her and her father in the car.
They were moving to a house as different as could be from the old one. About two hundred years younger, for one thing. It was a big suburban semidetached on a wide road in Ealing. Buses ran along the road and cars were always passing. Neighbors were on the left side, neighbors were joined to the house on the right side and more neighbors were all along the street. Their house was number 215. It wasn’t the sort of place where a man could come to the door and be let in and kill someone’s mother with a gun.
A few days after they had moved into the new house she talked again.
It was about nine months after the murder. She had long unpacked the bag she brought with her and, without looking inside the case, had put the videocassette on to a shelf with some of her books. She and her father were still unpacking things out of the boxes and there, among combs and brushes and hair slides in a tin that had once contained chocolate biscuits, she found the broken pieces of a record, a single of Come Hither’s “Mending Love.”
Richard wept when he saw it. The tears rolled down his face. “It was her favorite,” he said. “She loved that tune. We once danced to it.”
And Francine, who hadn’t uttered a word for nine months, said quite clearly and with a kind of wonderment, “I broke it. That’s what I did.”
His grief temporarily forgotten, Richard cried out and seized hold of her, put his arms around her, holding her tightly against him. Unwise, probably, frightening to a child, but he couldn’t help himself and in the event it didn’t stop her speaking again.
“It was on the record player,” she said. “Mummy said to be careful if I wanted to take it off, but I wasn’t careful enough and I dropped it and it broke, and Mummy sent me upstairs. I remember now.”
“Oh, my darling,” said her father, “my sweetheart, you’re talking, you can speak.”
The psychologists came back again with their dolls. The kind, gentle police ladies came back. They showed her hundreds of pictures of cars and played her dozens of tapes of men’s voices. In her mind’s eye she saw the car parked on the verge, under the overhanging branches, but she saw it like a black-and-white photograph. The car might have been green or red or blue. It looked pale gray to her, as the grass did and the sky. She saw the top of the man’s head, brown like rabbit fur, and his brown shiny shoes.
She had the big room at the back of the house where her window gave on to their garden with its summerhouse and swing and apple trees, and on to all the gardens next door and behind. She had her own bathroom, called en suite, and completely new bedroom furniture. But for a time, while her bedroom was being decorated, she had the small room at the front and several times she had looked down from her window and seen a man standing on the doorstep, seen his shoes and the top of his head, and she had screamed out, “It’s him! It’s him!”
Once it was the postman and the other times David Stanark and Peter Norris, who lived next door. Her father grew very upset when that happened and later on she found out that he had told the police and the
psychologists that they must stop questioning her. They must give it up. Julia agreed with him. It was bad for her, it would traumatize her. They must close the case.
But they wouldn’t do that. Not, at any rate, for years. They would find him, the Detective Inspector said, if it was the last thing they did. They had a theory. The reason for the murder that they had decided on, the man’s motive, horrified Richard Hill. It brought him so much shame and guilt that he wished many times that they had never told him.
5
A week after the murder David Stanark had come around unasked to see Richard. He presented himself on the doorstep, a good-looking man of about Richard’s own age with an anxious expression. He held out his hand and said who he was. “I was the man on the train, the one you didn’t know.”
Usually mild and self-effacing, Richard in his grief and confusion shouted at him, “I suppose you’ve come to be thanked? Is that it? You want gratitude?”
David Stanark said, “May I come in?”
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Richard said, “no one does. No one who hasn’t been through it knows what it’s like to be suspected of murdering the person you—” his voice fell and he turned away before muttering “—love best in the world.”
“I think I can imagine.”
After that David came in and the two men talked. Or, rather, Richard talked and David listened, and when that had gone on for two hours David told Richard that he too had once lost the woman he loved, that she had died violently. But it was to be some months and the friendship firmly established before Richard told him of the load of guilt that weighed on him and the shame that went with it.
Flora Barker, who had been a nurse, came to look after Francine while her father was at work and away on business trips.
Francine went back to school. Or, rather, she went to a new school in the new place and made new friends. She was behind in her schoolwork, but she soon caught up because she was bright. And she liked Flora. In finding her to care for his daughter and as a mother substitute, Richard had chosen wisely. It was one of the few wise decisions he ever made.
Flora was among those women who are an instant hit with children because, as well as being kind and patient and loving, they like children and enjoy their company and talking to them. Such people never talk down to children, they are too simple and too aware of their simplicity, to talk down to anyone, even supposing they knew how to condescend. They never patronize or exercise power or pull their rank.
Flora would say, “I like these new biscuits, don’t you? And they’re no dearer than the other lot. Go on, have another one, I’m going to.” Or, “Let’s have the telly on. I tell you what, if you’ll watch EastEnders with me I’ll watch your lion program with you.”
She was a great one for deals. “If you’ll teach me to do jigsaws I’ll teach you to knit. Jigsaws are something I’ve never got the hang of.”
“But they’re easy!”
“So’s knitting when you know how. I tell you what, if you’ll sing me a song, one of your school songs, I’ll make pancakes for our tea.”
Julia Gregson was a very different kettle of fish. It was Flora who referred to her as a kettle of fish, a term Richard disliked. He said it was impertinent. But Julia looked like a fish, Francine said. Not a dead, slimy mackerel or cod of the kind you see on the supermarket counter, but a bright, healthy, swimming fish, a beautiful fish, a Shubunkin perhaps, or a Koi carp. Julia had a high-browed face and a rather long nose, and she was all gold and white and red. Her skin was gleaming white and her hair gleaming yellow, her wide curved mouth painted scarlet and her nails varnished to match.
It was David Stanark who recommended her. She was a child psychotherapist, or as she put it, a pedopsychiatrician. David suggested Francine see her because Richard sometimes confessed to his friends that his daughter was too quiet, too preoccupied, and that she needed to come out of herself. At first Richard was doubtful. A firm advocate of formal education and plenty of it, he wondered what mind-mending skills a woman could possibly have whose qualifications were a teacher-training certificate and a diploma from a counseling crash course. He had always been deeply disapproving of the legal loophole that allows anyone who wishes to call herself a psychotherapist and set up in practice to do so, without benefit of a medical degree or training in psychiatry. But all that changed when he met Julia.
So confident was her manner, so calming her words and so excellent her timing, that you could scarcely be with her for five minutes without trusting her utterly. Or so it seemed to Richard. Almost without reserve he put Francine into her hands.
Julia had Francine playing with dolls. There was no escaping those dolls, Francine sometimes thought. Here, though, in the pleasant sitting-room overlooking Battersea Park, she was not apparently expected to reveal by her play any hidden knowledge of the crime against her mother, only perhaps show by the dolls’ movements and interaction with each other the deep secrets of her childhood. Julia watched her and sometimes she wrote things down. She talked a lot to Francine, but not as Flora did, about the books she was reading and the television programs she watched, about going shopping and what to cook for dinner, and whether Francine liked this friend more than that friend, and about Flora’s own friends.
Julia asked questions. “Why do you like that, Francine?”
“I just do,” Francine would say.
“Why do you like ice cream?”
“I don’t know. I just like it.”
“What would you like to happen best in the world?”
Francine knew but she wouldn’t say.
“If you could have three wishes what would they be?”
Francine’s three wishes were for the man not to have come, for her mother not to have died and to live with her mother and her father in the cottage once more. And maybe have Flora living next door. She didn’t want to tell Julia that. Julia ought to know it without being told, everyone ought to know it, for it was obvious. But Francine could read now, she was a good reader, and before she came to Julia for this session she had been reading a book in which a character confessed to a fear of pursuit by pirates whose treasure he had unearthed. The story was vividly told and much of it remained in her memory. “I want to be safe,” she said, quoting directly. “I don’t want them to get me, I don’t want them to find me.”
Julia nodded, looked grave and said that was all for now as her father would be coming for her in a moment. Her father did come and he and Julia had a quiet talk in private, while Francine sat in the other room, watching a carefully selected children’s video. After a few minutes he took her home in the car. She had been asked enough questions for one day, but he started asking her more. Did she like Julia? Was Julia helping her to feel happier? Was she lonely when he was away?
“I’ve got Flora,” she said. “I do like Flora.”
Off he went on a trip to Glasgow, Francine went to school and Flora came to the school gates to meet her at home-going time.
“You’re not frightened of being outdoors, are you?” Flora said as they walked along.
“No. Why?”
“Daddy said you found being outside a bit scary,” said Flora.
At home and in her room Francine took a book out of her bookshelf. It was a collection of Roald Dahl stories which Flora had given her and which she had not yet read, but was now ready to attempt. Next to it was the videocassette container.
She hadn’t looked at that since she put it there over a year ago. Then she hadn’t been able to read much, but now she could read anything—anything printed, that is. The big print on the colored sheet inside the container, the bit that was like a book cover, of which, when she first found it, she had only been able to read “to,” she now saw said “A Passage to India.” There was a picture, too, of a man in a turban and an old woman outside a cave. Francine opened the container, but there was no videocassette inside.
The small plastic box was full of sheets of paper with writing on them. Not printing
but joined-up writing. Francine looked carefully at it, but she couldn’t read a word. Grownups could read writing, though she sometimes wondered how, and even they probably wouldn’t need to much longer. Flora said no one wrote anything anymore except shopping lists and notes to the milkman. Everything else was done on computers. But this person had written with a pen on the kind of paper that came in a pad from newsagents’ shops and someone at the cottage had put the paper in this box and hidden it. Not herself, and somehow she knew it wasn’t her father. So her mother must have taken the videocassette of A Passage to India out of its box, put those papers into it instead and placed the box in the hollow space under the floor of the wig cupboard.
Francine made no further attempts to read the writing. She put the box back on the shelf where it had been before.
There are people in this world with very good brains and astute minds who at the same time have no common sense whatever. Bad judges of character and situation, unable to take the long view, they are both very clever and very unwise. Richard Hill was one of them.
He had murdered his wife and child. Not with a gun, not with malice aforethought and evil intent, but as he saw it, by his own thoughtless vanity. His pride in his own achievement had brought about their deaths.
The Detective Chief Inspector in charge of the case had told him the man’s motive and with that telling destroyed what peace of mind Richard had managed to achieve for himself. The crime committed against his wife had been drug-related and, most probably, the result of mistaken identity and dreadful coincidence. He, Richard, was called Dr. Hill, though his doctorate was in philosophy and his home was in Orchard Lane. Another Dr. R. Hill, a doctor of medicine, of an Orchard Road some ten miles away, kept considerable sums of money in the house—black money, though the police didn’t say that—paid to him by certain private patients. The perpetrator, suspected of being a heroin addict, certainly under toxic influence at the time of the murders, confused the two men. He had probably, the Chief Inspector said almost apologetically, found Richard’s address in the phone book.