by Ruth Rendell
No one died from being down an eight-foot-deep pit in the middle of London. Then he remembered he had bolted the gate on the inside after he came back from the mews. Probably it didn’t matter, probably it wasn’t important, but he couldn’t help thinking things would be easier for him if that gate were unlocked.
He knelt down on the floor in front of the door into the cellar and tried to raise the hatch from the inside. To his surprise it was an easy task. The smell that came from the cellar was horrible and he recoiled from it, sitting back on his haunches. Would you ever get used to that smell? Would there ever come a time when you got accustomed to it? He remembered how he had wondered what dead bodies smelled like. He knew now. You could plug up your ears, cover your eyes, but no way existed to blocking your nose if you wanted to be able to breathe. No one died from a bad smell, though. He must hold on to that.
His arm went in around the framework of the hatch and he felt about for the bolt. He had been pretty sure he could reach it and he could. The door swung open and he stepped into the burial chamber. Once there, he couldn’t help remembering those thoughts he had had about Egyptian pharaohs and rooms in the earth no human eye saw for thousands of years. This human eye was seeing it, he thought grimly, or rather feeling it, for removed from the dim light that came through the manhole opening, in here it was nearly pitch dark.
He dreaded touching or even brushing against the bodies on the floor, so he made his way to the stairs by feeling his way along the wall. Even so, he tripped over something on the floor. It was the pole with a hook on one end that Harriet had been carrying. At the stairs he crouched down and went up on all fours. The space in front of the new wall seemed very narrow, no more than a foot or so in depth. He felt the rough brickwork with his fingertips, pulled himself up so that he was pressed close to the wall.
For the first time in his life he was regretting being so thorough, such a perfectionist, always doing everything as beautifully as he could. If he had skimped on the mortar, left gaps in the brickwork, made the plaster thinner.… But he tried just the same. In the dark he pushed and kicked at that wall, pounded on it with his fists and beat on it with the pole. It was as solid as if it had been built as part of the original house. There was no sense of yielding at all. He doubted if the Alpheton painting on the other side even trembled.
But increasing panic, a very real fear that things might be worse than he had at first thought, worse than he could imagine, made him keep on pounding, made him stamp against the wall with the sole of his right foot. And it was this, for he had nothing to hold on to, which made him lose his footing and tumble backward down the stairs.
Like Harriet, he landed on the cellar floor and, like her, he lost consciousness.
38
The police knew Francine’s history and made no attempt to harass her. In the morning, of her own volition, she wrote down where she had been since Sunday, what she had done and when she had returned to the house. Staying with friends, she wrote, giving Holly’s address. Why involve Teddy? Especially as he might get into trouble over Orcadia Cottage. Julia had been asleep when she left the house on Sunday, she was sure of that, but she went into no details. She didn’t want them to know that her stepmother had locked her up. To go into all that would have seemed like speaking ill of the dead.
She tried to remember how it had been before, the first time she had lost her voice. But she couldn’t, only that it had been like it was now, the words there and the desire to speak, but the inability to enunciate. It was the ultimate frustration for her and she thought of Teddy, who had been unable to function as a virile man. I will tell them nothing about him, she thought, for he has done nothing, only been here and been with me and tried to love me.
They got more help from Richard. Or so it seemed at first. “There’s a man called Jonathan Nicholson. He’s been harassing my daughter. Stalking her.”
Of course they wanted to know why Richard and Julia had never reported this, and Richard could only say he meant to, he intended to, when he got home. By that time, their faces told him, it was too late. A new guilt replaced the old one in Richard’s mind. If he had gone to the police about Jonathan Nicholson, if he had only phoned them from Germany, would Julia be alive now? Would his dear girl, his sweet daughter, have the power of speech?
She sat silent and strangely tranquil, though once or twice tears slid out of her eyes and fell down her cheeks. He was reminded of that other time, after Jennifer died. She was too old now for him to read to her and buying her a kitten wasn’t the answer. Instead, he bought her books. She wrote out a list for him and he bought them all.
The police were interested in Jonathan Nicholson and instituted a search for him. From Richard they knew that he was young, dark-haired, had a red sports car and lived in Fulham. It wouldn’t take them long to find him.
For a moment, when he regained consciousness, Teddy didn’t know where he was. Then, as he awoke and his sight came back and his sense of smell, he experienced a long spasm of pure terror. He was more afraid than he had ever been in all his life. He wanted to scream and cry, and beat with his hands on these rough stone walls.
Instead, he held both hands hard across his mouth until the need began to pass. Slowly he knelt up, but his head hurt and throbbed. There seemed no point in struggling to stand. He sat down, facing the wall, with his back against the thick folds of plastic. It was as if a pulse beat in his head where no pulse had been before.
It was lighter inside the cellar and he saw why. Very little time had passed, a matter only of minutes, but a misty yellow moon had swum across the red-lit rectangle that was the manhole opening. The light it shed illuminated the cobwebbed sides of the hole, the glimmering plastic, and worse things. It was to avoid seeing them that he sat with his face to the wall. Later on, he thought, when the drumming in his head stopped and also perhaps when the moonlight had passed, he would make an attempt to lever himself up out of the hole.
Inside there, eight feet down in the earth, it had grown very cold. His hands were icy and goose-flesh stood on his arms under the thin jacket. The moonlight made it possible for him to see the hands on his watch. It was only just after eleven. Maybe Francine would still come. Would he hear a taxi down here? He re-created in his mind the throb of a diesel engine, but the longed-for sound didn’t come. He shut his eyes and tried to think.
If worse came to worst, if the unthinkable happened and he was here all night, Westminster Council’s contractors would be here in the morning to clear away the leaves. Mildred’s friend or whatever he was had said so. Not in here, of course. But if when he heard them come he shouted and called for help, would they get him out with no questions asked? Would they just respond by coming in here and throwing down a rope or a pair of steps? He fancied those people always had ropes and pairs of steps on board their lorry. But he had bolted the gate on the inside.
Another idea he had was almost too terrible to contemplate. He could drag those bodies into the hole, pile one on top of the other and, standing on them, reach the opening. Perhaps. Just about. His heart quailed, he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t touch them. But he had to contemplate it, he had to think of everything. If he forced his feet into Harriet’s high-heeled shoes and then those into Keith’s it would raise him maybe four inches. Then standing on the bodies, he would be able to grip the edges of the hole that much more easily. He might even be able to scrape away with his fingers the sticky crust of leaves on the flagstones, on the rim of the hole.
He waited a while before beginning. He couldn’t help himself. The shivering that galvanized him had to be got under control. When the moon disappeared and semidarkness returned it became easier. Even so, he closed his eyes before reaching for Harriet’s feet. He expected stiffness, but they were limp and slack. The shoes she was wearing had higher heels than he remembered, these must be four inches high, and he felt something unexpected, a small surge of excitement, as he held them in his hands. These shoes would save him, they would lift him
up and get him out, without the need of anyone else’s intervention.
They wouldn’t go on. He pushed and thrust and squeezed his feet into the pointed toes, took off his socks even though he was freezing. His heels wouldn’t go in. The shoes were five sizes too small, at least. Still, he must try without them. He stepped on to the two bodies, trod on them sickeningly, pretended he was somewhere else, pushed away reality and reached up for the mouth of the opening. His hands were very sore from the wire and from scraping on the stone, and it was no less slippery out there. Something had happened to him too when he fell, concussion perhaps, he didn’t know, but it had been enough to weaken him and take the strength from his shoulders and his arm muscles. He felt his fingers slide helplessly back across the greasy surface. He scrabbled with his nails, prayed for a grip, a purchase, but his sticky, weak fingers slithered and slid, and the point came where they lost their hold and he slipped back, half dropping, half falling, to the bottom of the shaft.
This time he didn’t hurt himself much. The worst part was falling on the bodies of Keith and Harriet. There was something terrible about it, as if they, the dead, were pulling him down into their awful ugliness and decay, he was drowning in their putrefaction. He shrank away from them and huddled up against the wall. For some minutes he remained pressed against the cold brickwork as if, by pushing hard enough, it would yield and absorb him. But he knew what he must do if he were to survive the night: drag them back into the cellar and keep the coal hole to himself, pass the night there as best he could, alone, isolated, committed to thoughts of how to get out. Cold too. He was suddenly aware of how terribly cold it was in the hole.
In this respect, too, he knew what he had to do. But it took him a long time to prepare himself. He had expected never to see the occupants of the cellar again, still less to have to touch them. Growing stiff with cold, his teeth chattering and the goose-flesh on his arms like a rash, he told himself in a low mutter that he must, he had to do it. Otherwise he might die of hypothermia. “Just do it,” he said, fully out loud this time, “just do it.”
Turning away his face, he reached for the blanket in which Harriet’s body was rolled up, got hold of one side of it and tugged. It came away easily enough, but the sliding and bumping of what it had contained as it slumped on to the floor made his throat close up and rise. The blanket smelled, but not badly. Strangely, rather, of exotic perfume and luxury, and something sweet-sour and fierce and indefinable, which he felt would swiftly become, maybe tomorrow, appalling.
It took him as long again to put the blanket to the use for which he intended it. One thing to touch the edges of it with his hands, quite another to wrap himself in it. Yet it was a beautiful object. He remembered that from when he had fetched it out of the cupboard, soft, thick, baby-blue, with satin binding. In the dim light from above he could see that it was smeared all over with coal dust and this troubled him. He felt ashamed of himself for dirtying this lovely, clean, expensive wool, for doing something so alien to his nature. Gently, for a while, he stroked it with his fingertips. Then, familiar with it by now, easing himself away from the use to which it had been put, he wrapped himself in it and curled up on the floor.
Tears ran down his face, hot as water from a tap. He stroked them away with his fingers. Inside the blanket’s pastel-blue fluffy folds it was warm, and more than that. It was like being a child again, though not the kind of child he had ever been.
But he couldn’t sleep. He covered up his face with the blanket, huddled more and more deeply inside it, pulling a fold of it over his head so that he was cocooned. Back inside Eileen’s womb, warm and dark, he tried to sleep and failed. Who knows if a fetus sleeps?
Anthea surprised herself. She never thought it would fall to her lot to urge Franklin to go home and speak to Harriet. Her hope would have been for Franklin simply to leave well, or ill, alone. But suddenly she wanted clarification, all things made smooth, everything brought out into the open. “Just go,” she said. “Explain. Promise nothing, but hint that all things are possible.”
Sometimes, though without empathy, Franklin had wondered how Harriet got on during his absences without him to bring her tea in the morning. Without him, come to that, to clean for, run a household for and to run back and forth to the cleaners with his clothes. Enjoyed herself, perhaps, or went to pieces. At any rate, now she had to get her own tea, but whether that got her up earlier or kept her in bed later he couldn’t tell. But he was pretty sure she would still be in the house and probably titivating herself after her morning shower at ten-past nine, which was the time he calculated getting to Orcadia Cottage.
The traffic was heavy and it made him a little later than that. He parked the car in the mews and waved to Mildred, who was out with her dog. She waved back, managed a half smile and it was probably his imagination that she looked embarrassed. As if she hadn’t expected to see him or he were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Imagination, no doubt. There was a chance the back gate might have been left unbolted, for Harriet was careless about such things, but she hadn’t been this time and he couldn’t get in that way.
He walked around the corner and opened the gate into the front garden. The Virginia creeper had shed half its leaves, they were so thick you couldn’t see the paving stones. Harriet never did a stroke of gardening, of course, but surely she could have swept up. He reminded himself that it need no longer matter to him what she did or failed to do, or even how the place looked, and he put his key into the front-door lock and entered the house.
To be fair to her, she had always kept it clean. And it was like that now, even, it seemed to Franklin’s keen eye, cleaner and tidier than usual. He called out, “Hello. It’s me.”
The answer should have been a shriek of astonishment. He had never before arrived home from a holiday at this sort of time. There was no answer. Franklin went upstairs. The bed was made and looking exquisite. It was apparent that no one had slept in it the night before, or used the room or the bathroom. The shower cabinet would have been wet, but it was dry and the ivory-colored towels on the rack were dry too.
He went back downstairs and had a look around. The place was so clean it looked as if a bevy of maids had been in, dusting and vacuuming and polishing. Harriet must have been spring-cleaning in autumn. The one incongruity, apart from the lights she’d left on, was the pile of cushions on the living-room floor. Every cushion from the chairs and the two sofas had found its way there, and draped across the top of the heap was Harriet’s scarlet feather boa.
Reserving his judgment, Franklin went into the kitchen. Everything was normal there, if gleaming glass and polished surfaces could be called normal. There was something different about the dining room, though it took him a moment or two to decide what. The mirror, it must be, the new mirror. Harriet, who never bought anything for the house, who spent all her money on clothes and beauty treatments, had in his absence bought this beautiful mirror. It was rather too modern for his own taste, but he recognized the exquisite craftsmanship, the delicate balance of colors.
But what, then, had become of the Alpheton still life? If she has sold it, thought Franklin, I will punish her till she squeals. But she hadn’t sold it, it was hanging on the wall at the end of the passage, a most unsuitable place for such a delightful and, incidentally, valuable painting. It was a funny thing to think of about one’s own house, but this was a part of it, an obscure corner, never much visited by him. He couldn’t remember when he had last turned this corner into the passage, which was surely why he remembered it differently, why he thought there had been another door here somewhere, or a window.
Where was she? Where and why had she gone? Once more he went upstairs. If she had gone away some of her clothes would be missing and a suitcase. He opened the wardrobe doors and saw that half her clothes were gone, the newest and showiest, he noted. The biggest of their suitcases was missing from the landing cupboard. But it was something else which aroused a hope that seemed almost too good to be true, that she h
adn’t simply gone away but had left him, and that was the absence of the best of her jewelry. He looked in the various boxes and drawstring bags in the drawer and in the two jewel cases, and found the pearls gone, the diamond-and-sapphire necklace gone, the two gold bracelets gone.
The trashy bits on the earring tree she hadn’t bothered with, nor the obvious costume stuff. If she had just taken herself off in advance of the arrangements made for her holiday, she wouldn’t have taken the pearls and the necklace and all those rings. No, it was clear that she had left for good. Franklin did one of his little dances around the bedroom, thought of phoning Anthea to tell her the glad news, decided to tell her in person, waltzed across the spare bedroom and looked out of the window.
Leaves were as thickly scattered out there as in the front and someone had left the manhole cover off. Downstairs again, he contemplated the pile of cushions decorated with that red boa. Now he had seen other evidence of Harriet’s departure he thought he could interpret this strange arrangement as some kind of sign from her of defiance or simple farewell. She had, he remembered, always disliked his habit of tossing cushions on to the floor when he sat down. As for the boa, he recalled laughing when first she bought it and saying she was some thirty-five years too old to wear it. A sign, then, where another woman would have left a note.
He unhooked the Alpheton from the wall he couldn’t remember being there and rested it against the hall wall. That was something he would take with him.