by Ruth Rendell
Christopher Font put his car on the Pembers’ driveway and Kathy came out to say how sorry she was about Stuart and what a tragedy it was. She and her husband and Duncan Yeardon were inside having a coffee and if he and his wife would care to join them they would be very welcome. Christopher thanked her but said not just now, thank you.
If they had accepted the invitation, Duncan and the Pembers could hardly have continued with their conversation. Its subject, like most conversations in the neighbourhood, was Wally Scurlock. All that varied between what Duncan and his companions said and what Amanda Copeland and Rose Preston-Jones were saying, between what the Constantines and Molly and Sophie were saying, was the tone, the epithets and the level of revulsion. The shocked horror and the anger was much the same. What was remarkable was that the murder of Stuart Font was far less popular as a topic of discussion than Wally Scurlock’s not yet proven offence.
Marius commented on this when, at 1 p.m., he dropped in to the Bel Esprit Centre to take Rose to the cafeteria for lunch.
‘So does that mean that we think looking at indecent pictures of children is a more heinous crime than killing someone?’
‘I’m afraid we just think it’s more interesting, darling.’
‘You’re right, of course. You always are,’ said Marius.
Like the other residents of Lichfield House, Rose and Marius thought the least they could do was support Stuart’s parents; and this even though, with the exception of Molly Flint, they hadn’t much cared for Stuart. Molly was already in the church, dressed in deepest black, a style which rather suited her now she had lost weight, and sitting between her and Sophie Longwich was Carl. Sophie edged away as far as she could from proximity to Carl’s long greasy hair and leather jacket. Maybe the jacket wasn’t dirty but it looked it. A white hairy knee protruded from the hole in his jeans. Richenda glared but Annabel and Christopher Font gave him vague smiles, glad to see anyone there who might have been a friend of their son’s.
Duncan sat in the second row from the front. Unaware of Molly’s association with Stuart, he had set himself up as the dead man’s closest friend, noting those who attended and those conspicuous by their absence. Michael and Katie Constantine came in this latter category, for which Duncan awarded them black marks along with the occupants of Springmead. It was all very well Mr Deng saying he and his nieces and son kept themselves to themselves but there was such a thing as neighbourliness and, considering what an interest poor Stuart had shown in Tigerlily, turning up at his funeral was the least they could do. It was only a matter of a short drive. The Pembers were both at work but Moira and Ken had come. In fact, they had very thoughtfully come to fetch him and brought him with them.
Duncan and Molly accompanied the Fonts to the crematorium. Carl, telling everyone he was Molly’s fiancé, wanted to go too but Molly stopped him. ‘You’d never even spoken to him,’ she said, wiping away her tears.
It was a very warm day and all the funeral flowers, swathed in gleaming plastic, began to wilt in the sunshine before the coffin had disappeared. Arrangements to entertain the guests with wine and canapés (Annabel), coffee and biscuits (Duncan) or hot chocolate because Stuart loved it (Molly) came eventually to nothing, and Annabel and Christopher went back to Flat 1 alone with Molly.
Apart from Stuart’s clothes which Annabel had packed up, ready to dispose of at some Scope or Oxfam outlet, the contents of the flat were as Stuart had left them. Molly confirmed that. All that had gone, she told Annabel, was a toothbrush, a razor, a change of underwear, a shirt and the clothes he was wearing.
‘He had a small suitcase,’ Annabel said to Christopher. ‘Don’t you remember, when he came to us after he’d broken his arm he brought his things in a small suitcase? It was beautiful – very soft blue leather. Well, where is it?’ And she began to cry again.
Molly remembered and remembering also reduced her to tears. ‘It was blue calfskin. He loved blue. He had it with him when he went out. I’d forgotten.’
‘We should tell the police,’ said Christopher.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Keeping an eye on Tigerlily was something Duncan thought he owed to Stuart’s memory. He hadn’t seen her since some days before Stuart’s death. The boy and the other girl were often to be seen going into the summer house but Tigerlily was never with them. Duncan had very little to do these days. His home was immaculately tidy, his decorating was done and the two men he had thought of as his friends, Stuart and Wally, had gone. A house that was three storeys high was more than he needed and often he wandered through the rooms, wondering if he could make one of them a study and another an exercise room. But he never studied and apart from walking up to Tesco he never exercised. How did others occupy their time? Those who were retired like him, who never read a book, didn’t care for music, didn’t possess a computer and found most of television not to their taste? He missed his car, gone for over a year now. His old hobby of people-watching seemed all that was left to him but some of his prime targets had disappeared. Even the alcoholic woman hadn’t been seen for weeks. Stuart’s parents had left, Richenda the ‘busy lady’ had apparently moved and no new caretaker had yet arrived. And where was Tigerlily?
The weather had grown very warm, unnaturally warm for early June, Duncan thought. He had always been a person who felt the cold and thought the temperature could never be too high for him, but though he felt comfortable outside in the garden or when walking, the heat indoors was almost too much for him. He had been back to the electrics shop at Brent Cross to try and buy a fan but they had run out, just as, back in the snowy winter when he’d bought his toaster, they had run out of room heaters. He kept all the upstairs windows open night and day but was afraid to leave a downstairs window open overnight. When he came down in the morning the heat was intolerable.
Did they have the same problem at Springmead? He put his head over the fence and called to the boy when he came out of the house, heading for the summer house. But the boy only shook his head and waved his hands about in a gesture Duncan took to mean he didn’t understand. Meanwhile, the heat increased. Duncan bought himself a thermometer, just out of curiosity, as he put it to himself. The temperature in his living room one morning at seven was twenty-eight degrees Celsius. One comfort, though, was that just as he was beginning to worry about her, he spotted Tigerlily lying face downwards on the Springmead lawn under the shade of the big ash tree. Her arms and legs were bare and the skin very white apart from what looked like bluish-black stains. Bruises was Duncan’s first thought but that must be his imagination running wild again.
The lawyer Freddy summoned to be present while the police questioned him was his own partner, Lucas Crabtree. Lucas constantly had to suppress a desire to laugh while Freddy teased the police with impossible answers to their questions, coolly offering to show them his knife collection and somehow contriving to leave a bloodstained T-shirt among the soiled linen at Aurelia Grove. The blood turned out to be from a joint of beef and Freddy was told that any more of this and he would be charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice. Freddy hadn’t much of an alibi for the evening of 20 May but nor had any knife been found to correspond to poor Stuart’s fatal wound. No one had seen anyone resembling him in the neighbourhood of Kenilworth Green that evening, whereas someone had seen through the front window of the Aurelia Grove house the head and shoulders of a man who might have been Freddy.
Apart from the joking, Lucas Crabtree was sure that Freddy told DS Blakelock nothing but the truth. He gave meticulous accounts of his visits to Stuart’s flat, the attacks he had made and received, and described in detail the small electronic devices by the means of which he had discovered his wife’s affair and the identity of her lover. When they asked him to repeat what he had said he did so with absolute accuracy. After hours of this, Lucas constantly interjecting that it was time they let his client go, they released Freddy in exasperation, assuring him that this wasn’t the end of it as they would certainly want to talk to
him again. Laughing a lot once they were outside the interview room, Freddy and Lucas went off to a club they knew and got drunk.
The four weeks she had spent in the private clinic paid for by her stepchildren was probably the longest time in her entire life Olwen had been without a drink. Hallucinations no longer came to her, but the doctor who ran the clinic told Margaret that the test they had done for end-stage liver disease measured the severity of the cirrhosis on the very high score of six. This figure forecast no more than a ninety-day survival. A nutritious diet was prescribed, plus diuretics, oral antibiotics and beta blockers.
Olwen could go home but not to her own home. Margaret didn’t want her and Richard, her brother, refused to have her. He had just remarried and his new wife was expecting their first child. An invalid in the house was out of the question. Margaret clung on to the prediction of Olwen’s life extending no more than ninety days, twenty of which had already expired. She could put up with Olwen for seventy days, couldn’t she? She and her husband and their teenage children would have to submit.
The prospect of living with Margaret brought her despair and then anger. It was explained to her that she really had no choice. They gave her a room on the ground floor of their small house. It had been a dining room but no one had ever eaten there, so Margaret took away the table and chairs, installed a single bed and a television that was too outdated for the children’s taste. For the first two days Olwen stayed in bed. She washed and went to the lavatory in the cubicle known as a cloakroom, though no one had ever hung cloaks in it. After that she dressed herself and sat in the living room with Margaret and her husband. The children she hardly saw. If they weren’t at school or out somewhere else, they were in their rooms ostensibly doing homework. Olwen, who understood duplicity, supposed that they were really playing video games.
Her own subterfuge she was planning. She never asked for drink and never talked about it or the lack of it. Margaret and her husband, who probably drank wine and even gin and tonic when alone, behaved abstemiously in her presence. ‘Out of consideration for you,’ Margaret explained.
‘Olwen appreciates that,’ said her husband, ‘don’t you, Olwen?’
‘Not really,’ said Olwen, and added, ‘I don’t care.’
She wanted to go home but knew she never would. They had told her to take daily exercise, take her prescribed medication and a healthy diet, and she wondered what the point was when she was going to die anyway. If she was going to die she wanted it to be soon. She often thought of her intention to drink herself to death and how she had done her best but her strong heart had betrayed her. After she had been a week in that house she started going out for walks. The first time Margaret insisted on coming with her but she could tell Olwen was walking quite well, provided she used a stick. Olwen walked round the block, reflecting that she had probably never in her life before done this without a purpose, shopping or visiting someone.
At home (which was a way of putting it, that was all) she behaved so well, was so quiet and apparently content that Margaret went out on her own. Her best friend lived next door and she liked calling on her. Olwen suspected they had a bottle of wine between them when there was no risk of her seeing. She could smell it on Margaret’s breath. While she was out Olwen searched the house for drink but she hadn’t far to look. In a cupboard in the living room which didn’t look like a drinks cupboard she found several bottles of wine, an almost full bottle of gin and an untouched one of brandy. No doubt they had all been in the cabinet in the room which was now her bedroom but they had been prudently removed. Resisting those spirits was probably the hardest thing she had ever done.
But resist she did. She would not always do so.
June isn’t usually a hot month in the British Isles but this one looked as if it would be. The temperature in Duncan’s house mounted. He left a ground-floor front window open overnight because he couldn’t face coming down into that furnace in the morning. A silent intruder came in and stole his DVD player, his mobile phone which he had left on the kitchen counter, his food mixer and the two notes and a hundred or so coins amounting to £62 that had been stashed away in an instant-coffee jar.
After that he had no choice but to shut and lock the windows, leaving only those in his bedroom open. The heat, he decided, must be due to something more than the high outside temperature and the excellent insulation. That which had been a source of comfort to him and of pride in his domestic arrangements had now become a curse. And there was no reason to hope that July and August would be cooler. Even when it rained, lowering the outside temperature, indoors it remained the same, thirty degrees Celsius when he had come downstairs that morning after a night of tossing and turning in the heat, sweat pouring off him.
It must be coming from next door. The tropical plants they grew for the royal family must demand the kind of heat experienced in South-East Asia and some of it infiltrated here. That must be why the paper had peeled off his walls. Duncan hated the prospect of complaining to the neighbours. He had once or twice done so in previous homes but mostly it was Eva who handled this, aggressive little firebrand as she could be. It was Eva who rang up about the noise the night before or banged on a front door to complain about footballs coming over the fence and breaking down their flowers. Eva, he thought, would have been into Springmead long before this, demanding they turn down their heating.
But he had to do it now. First he consulted Jock and Kathy Pember, inviting them round for drinks because you couldn’t give people coffee at six in the evening. But he got cold feet – how he wished he literally had! – and bought more garden furniture in a Brent Cross sale, two chairs and a table with an umbrella, on condition they came that day. You could make conditions in a recession. Jock and Kathy admired the white-painted ironwork and the pink roses and yellow daisies on the seat cushions and after they had each had two glasses of rosé, ventured into the house to test the temperature.
‘You can’t live in that.’ Jock wiped his forehead.
‘I am living in it.’
They all climbed the stairs in the tropical heat, looked out of the top-floor back-bedroom window and down on to the Springmead garden. Tigerlily was just coming out of the summer house.
‘Lovely-looking girl, isn’t she?’ Jock leaned out of the window.
‘If you like flat chests and slant eyes,’ said his wife.
‘Why don’t we go down,’ said Jock, ‘and talk to her over the fence? Tell her you want to speak to Mr Deng?’
Duncan really needed more time to consider it but he agreed. Jock wasn’t quite tall enough to get his chin over the fence so Duncan brought a box from the shed, Jock stood on it and called out to Tigerlily who was sitting on the grass. ‘Excuse me!’
Duncan thought he had never seen such a look of terror on someone’s face, not even when he was called to help a woman whose borrowed car had broken down because she had put diesel in the tank instead of petrol. Tigerlily’s pale skin had gone quite white and her eyes had grown huge. She stood up as if poised to flee.
‘Excuse me. Sorry to bother you, but can you –’
‘No,’ said Tigerlily, ‘no, no. No English. Sorry.’
She ran into the house.
‘You’ll have to pluck up your courage,’ said Kathy, who was quite aware of Duncan’s nervousness. ‘Go to the front door and keep ringing the bell till that man Deng answers it.’
They weren’t much help to him, Duncan thought unfairly. He sat out in the garden for a long time as the tree shadows lengthened on the lawn and a pair of bats appeared, swooping through the blue air after insects. The coffee he had made himself, two mugs of it, should hardly have been drunk so late in the evening. Now he wouldn’t sleep even if he could have endured the heat in the bedroom.
Upstairs he sat by the open window in the top-floor front bedroom, people-watching once more. Two couples turned into Lichfield House, the ones he called the lovebirds, the plump girl (Duncan used this kinder word) and her skinny boyfriend, holding
hands. Molly her name was and Duncan thought they must have quarrelled because she looked as if she would have liked to take her hand away but the boy held on to it tightly. Ah well, the course of true love never did run smooth, there would soon be wedding bells there. They were followed by the older couple. They walked side by side but not touching. A platonic relationship, Duncan thought, just good friends or maybe brother and sister. The lights came on in Flat 2 where Rose Preston-Jones lived soon after they went in. He noticed that Mr Deng’s black Audi was parked at the kerb outside Springmead and he wondered which of them would be going out at this hour. It was a quarter past eleven.
He looked down into the Springmead front garden and as he did so, Mr Deng came out of the front door with Tigerlily and the other girl and they got into the car. To Duncan’s surprise, the boy came running out, carrying a suitcase and closing the front door behind him. He would never have believed the whole family would go out together but that was what they were doing. The black Audi moved off.
Where could they be going? From Duncan’s viewpoint, going anywhere at eleven fifteen was something confined to the young, teenagers perhaps. And if those young people went out to a club, for instance, or a pub or bar they wouldn’t go under the supervision of a forty-five-year-old uncle. Some of those supermarkets stayed open all night. Maybe they had gone to one of those. But all of them? The two girls and the boy? It was pleasant by the window. A little breeze had got up and it was as quiet as it ever got. The traffic on the main road was beginning to slacken now. Had they ever gone out all together before? All four of them? And what was that boy doing with the suitcase? Surely it must mean that they had gone away somewhere for the night or even for longer.