Tree of Hands

by Ruth Rendell

  They had found Jason’s body. They told him that as if it were true, positive, beyond a doubt. But all the same they wanted him to identify the thing that had been dug up in a garden in Finchley.

  First he was taken to the police station. Chief Superintendent Treddick was there, talking in knowing tones as if to say Barry was being very clever and he understood all about that and even rather admired it, only Barry must realize the police were cleverer still. He talked as if Barry were a murderer beyond a doubt and insinuated that if he would only admit everything – take his time and admit every single thing – the police would be very kind and lenient with him. Leatham was more brusque and offhand. His beefy red face and hooked nose and corrugated yellow hair brought to Barry’s mind what he had been thinking of earlier. Leatham was the Jason’s father type, though not handsome enough.

  The Finchley householder had been digging a hole to plant a tree. Two to three feet down he had unearthed a rotting bundle. He had been living in the house just a week, which before that had been empty for six months. The house and garden were about a hundred yards – a stone’s throw, Treddick said – from where Barry and Ken Thompson were panelling the office.

  ‘We’ve only been working there a week,’ Barry said.

  ‘It was six weeks ago you went over there to have a look at the place for an estimate,’ said Treddick.

  But Barry hadn’t been there. It was always Ken who did the estimates. He tried to explain this but it seemed to have no effect on them. The fact that he had some little hearsay knowledge of the area was enough for them.

  ‘I’d never been there,’ he protested. ‘I never talked about it with Ken. You might as well say because I’ve got a street plan I might have looked it up.’

  ‘Maybe you did,’ said Leatham.

  They were illogical, they didn’t reason things out. This made him much more uneasy than any evidence they might fancy they had against him. They asked him about the street in which the dead child had been found, about where he and Ken went for their lunches, about how he got to Finchley, by what method of transport, and then they took him to the mortuary.

  Until then he hadn’t known this building was the mortuary. He had known it all his life as a red brick wall with windows high up through which you could see white tiles. They took him in through a door that had a very highly polished brass handle. The image of that shiny brass sphere remained in Barry’s mind, making him flinch whenever he saw well-polished brass. There was a very powerful smell – not of death or decay but of disinfectant, yet ever afterwards when Barry smelt it or had a whiff of something like it, he associated it at once with death.

  In the mortuary he behaved, he thought, as he might have done if he had really murdered Jason. They uncovered the face. Barry’s throat rose up, closed, strangled him. He covered his face and staggered back. Someone must have caught him. He didn’t remember any more till he was sitting in a chair with his head down on his knees.

  If they had tried to get Carol there to identify the awful thing under the cover, he thought he would have fought them all, killed them all. That would have made a murderer of him. But they didn’t attempt that. They got Maureen. He saw her brought in, blank-faced, head tied up in a scarf, and come out again, no less steady and calm. They drove him back to Summerskill Road where two reporters were with Carol who had been fetched from the wine bar. But before that, they put him through the gruelling process again. How well did he know that part of Finchley? How many times had he been there? For several months an estate agent’s board had stood in the front garden of the house where the child’s body had been found. The side gate had been off its hinges and had stood propped against a fence. On the day of Jason’s disappearance Barry had been working in Wood Green, hadn’t he? It was easy to get by bus from Wood Green to Finchley. He could have picked up Jason in Rudyard Gardens, taken him to Finchley, killed him and buried his body and still been in Highgate by five . . .

  He and Carol slept that night because they were both drunk. They didn’t bother with wine. They had a bottle of gin between them. He woke up with a cracking headache and a mouth that felt as if it were filled with dry fur. Carol’s face on the pillow was young, china pink and white, beaded with sweat. He left her sleeping and went off to buy the Sunday papers. He wanted to see what they said about him and if they had yet established who the dead child was.

  Mr Mahmud at the paper shop was always a bit distant and his daughter off somewhere in a world of her own, so Barry hardly noticed that he didn’t get a thank-you for producing the right money for the Sunday Mirror and the Express. This Pakistani family were known for conducting a lot of their business in silence. But as he came out of the shop and into Bevan Square, he encountered two girls who hadn’t that reputation at all. Stephanie Isadoro and a girl Barry thought was called Diane Fowler, Blue Hair’s sister, were coming across the square, mackintoshed, wearing high-heeled sandals, arm-in-arm. He had been reading headlines, so relieved that there was nothing new that he could even distract his mind enough to admire the big beautiful photograph of Carol on the Mirror’s front page, but now he looked up to say hallo to them.

  These girls were usually giggling, usually pleased with themselves. Karen had once told him that Stephanie fancied him. If it had ever been true, she had got over it now, for she pointedly turned her head the other way and so did Diana. It was a funny thing, he’d often thought most of this lot couldn’t read but they had read the papers all right, they had read the bits about him helping the police with their inquiries.

  Carol didn’t get up till lunchtime. The phone rang a couple of times before that but they must have been wrong numbers, for each time Barry picked up the receiver, he got silence and then the dialling tone. Unless, he thought, it was someone trying to get Carol who didn’t want to speak to him, who didn’t even want him to know they wanted to speak to Carol – ‘they’ being a man of course. He cleared up in the kitchen, washed their glasses from the night before and the cups and saucers the reporters had used when Iris had made tea for them, and carried the rubbish bag out from the waste bin to the dustbin that stood by the back door.

  It was cold today but dry, colder than it had been when he went out for the papers. He noticed how green Winterside Down was, all the little rectangles of garden, all the lawns and banks and slopes, a brilliant, hard, acid, treeless green. It was a green to hurt the eyes. Mrs Spicer was putting bowls of some sort of steaming mash stuff into her rabbits’ hutches. She turned round and smiled at Barry and said good morning to him and it was better today, wasn’t it, at least it was dry. He felt unreasoningly grateful to her for speaking to him, for greeting him with warmth. He could have kissed her.

  Carol said she couldn’t stand another evening on their own, she’d go off her rocker. She had a long leisurely bath with avocado and peachnut essence in the water and a herbal pack on her face. In the black and white dress with, over it, Mrs Fylemon’s cast-off, beauty-without-cruelty synthetic fox coat, she was the old Carol again, his love, his child-mother of three children. They hadn’t seen Tanya and Ryan since before Jason went. Barry didn’t want to think about that, he pushed it away, he had enough without that. He and Carol were going to meet Iris and Jerry in the Bulldog, but just as they were leaving, the phone rang again. Carol answered it this time. Barry was already in the hall, waiting for her by the front door. She had gone back into the living room to answer the phone, and when she’d said, ‘Hallo,’ and a less impersonal ‘Oh, hi,’ he saw the door pulled shut. She had shut herself in with the phone, leaving him alone in the hall. He felt the sudden swift descent of the worst loneliness he had ever known in his life. It made him cold. He shivered with the cold. She was only on the phone a few minutes, three at most. She came out and took his arm and said it had been Alkmini.

  Iris and Jerry were sitting at a corner table with a couple Iris said lived down the road from them. Barry immediately thought of Terence Wand’s mother. Could this possibly be her? Iris never introduced anyone t
o anyone. You were supposed to know who people were without being told. Carol knew all right. She called the woman Dorothy. Barry found himself studying the sixty-year-old, raddled, sagging face, the bravely painted mouth, the henna’ed grey hair, looking for a likeness to Jason. In the nose perhaps, in the eyes which were faded now but once might have been as blue as cornflowers. He was working out ways of finding out what he wanted to know when the Dorothy woman and her husband or boyfriend or whatever he was got up quite abruptly and said they must be going. Barry was rather disappointed. It was only afterwards that he realized that, just before they left, just before a glance passed between them and they got up, Iris had spoken to him and had called him for the first time that evening by his Christian name.

  Carol looked rovingly round the saloon bar, twining a curl round one of her fingers. A great cavernous place it was, of Edwardian etched glass and red plush and a ceiling whose scrollwork was chestnut-brown with nicotine. Jerry sat silent, dumb with gin, his face a dull blue. Her claw of a hand on Barry’s arm, Iris cocked her head in the direction of the departing neighbours.

  ‘Don’t take no notice, Barry. There’s some get very funny about folks what have contact with the police.’

  Her habitual placid half-smile lay on her mouth. It was a fat woman’s smile on a thin woman’s face. Iris pushed two cigarettes into the smile, lit them and handed one to Carol.

  On the way home with Carol, taking her arm and putting it into his, he asked her if Dorothy’s surname was Wand. She was preoccupied. He didn’t wonder at that. He asked her again, looking into her face this time, though he never much liked doing that after dark in Winterside Down. The khaki, colour-draining light was unkind to even the prettiest face. It made skulls out of faces and gave them empty eye sockets.

  ‘You what?’ she said.

  ‘I thought she might be a Mrs Wand.’

  ‘Well, she’s not, she’s a Mrs Bailey. What’s made you so nosy all of a sudden?’

  The tall single tower block dominated the estate, lights on all over it. It was like a chimney full of holes which the fire inside showed through. They went across Bevan Square where Hoopoe and Black Beauty and Nose Ring and a couple of girls with black lips and fingernails – or lips and fingernails that looked black in this light – stood outside the Turkish takeaway, eating chips. Hoopoe said something as they passed but he didn’t say it loudly and all Barry caught was the word ‘woman’.

  ‘They’re just ignorant,’ said Carol loud enough for them to hear. ‘That’s what you have to put up with living round here, ignorant scum and scrubbers like those two.’ Her body trembled against his side and he was filled with a fierce pride that she should be angry for him. Then she said, speaking softly, to him alone, ‘I’d do anything to get away from here. I hate this dump. Sometimes I think I’ll be in this dump till I’m old, till I die.’

  ‘Carol,’ he said. ‘Carol – a year or two, just give me a year or two. I’ll make money. I’ll get the down payment on a house for us.’

  She looked away from him. Her words were rough but she didn’t speak them unkindly. ‘It’ll just be piddling little bits of money, won’t it? I want real money, I’m sick of struggling. I had a chance of that with my husband and he had to go and die.’

  ‘I’m young. I can make as much as Dave ever could. Let’s get married, Carol. I want it to be me you mean when you say “my husband”.’

  ‘How can I get married?’ she said. ‘I can’t get married when we don’t know if Jason’s alive or dead.’

  Her voice sounded sincere yet he had a feeling it was something entirely different she was saying, some far more genuine excuse she was really making.

  The police came in the morning and told Carol they had established beyond a doubt that the dead child wasn’t Jason. Carol didn’t say anything; she lifted her shoulders in an indifferent little shrug. They had caught her as she was leaving for Mrs Fylemon’s, her first day back since Mrs Fylemon’s return from Tunisia. The detective sergeant told her that the boy whose body they found had been nearer three than two and, from the shape of his skull, was shown not to have been Caucasian. In any case he had been dead for at least six seeks, a fact which didn’t surprise Barry, remembering that face.

  He had an unreasonable urge – unreasonable only because he knew they wouldn’t dream of doing it – to ask the police to put posters and banners up all over Winterside Down saying, Barry Mahon Is Innocent, or something like that. Maybe have a car going round and a man with a loudspeaker like they did before elections, shouting that he hadn’t done it, that he was in the clear. His imagination was running wild, he knew that. He watched the sergeant go, having said not a word.

  What did it matter anyway? Sticks and stones may break my bones but hard words cannot hurt me. His mother had taught him that when he was a little kid and had been subjected to verbal bullying in the school playground. He had always remembered. It wasn’t important that an old bag with dyed hair didn’t want to sit in a pub with him or that Hoopoe called after him that some folks wouldn’t dare show their faces outside – for he was certain now that this was what had been said – without a woman to protect them.

  But it was in the forefront of his mind as he and Carol walked together to the bus stop. Not that there was anyone for her to ‘protect’ him from this morning. Going along the path to the Chinese bridge, they met no one but the old boy in the Sherlock Holmes hat who sat there fishing in the canal most wet mornings under a green umbrella. Barry’s bus came first. He didn’t want to go to Finchley, he never wanted to go there again. He was hours late anyway.

  One bus to Wood Green and then change on to another. What curious trick of chance brought that double decker bus with an L plate rather slowly and steadily past the stop? No buses to Hampstead or through Hampstead came this way but this bus, out on a practice run, had Hampstead on its front. The address on the paper that had fallen from Carol’s coat came back to him. 5 Spring Close, Hampstead. Terence Wand. It had said Terry on the paper but Barry didn’t want to think of him like that, it sounded too close to his own name, it put it in the same class of name. Terence. Terence Wand, who lived in Hampstead at a classy address that was a far cry from what Carol called ‘this dump’, from Winterside Down.

  Getting on the next bus that came, climbing up to the top deck, Barry found himself looking at all the men about, looking for the kind of man he sought. He sat in the front, looking at the men in the street. It seemed to him that there were more of them about at this time of day than there had used to be a few years back. That was all the unemployment, of course. Barry didn’t want to think about unemployment, it made him go cold down his back.

  A lot of the men were black or Indians or men he instinctively knew to be of Irish descent like himself, dark and wild of face with a light in their eyes. Some were fair and sharp-nosed but none he could see really looked like Jason grown-up. The idea formed and grew solid in Barry’s mind that for his own peace of mind – or if not for peace, for the easing of his mind – he would have to go up to Hampstead and find Spring Close and take a look at Terence Wand.

  15

  IT GAVE BENET a curious feeling when she read in the newspaper about the discovery of the child’s body in Finchley. If they decided it was Jason she wouldn’t have to give Jason back. There were two major faults in this hypothesis: one that the child’s body couldn’t be Jason’s since Jason himself was standing a yard or two from her feeding his rocking horse with sugar lumps, and secondly, that nothing could be more disastrous for her, nothing so militate against her work and her life as feeling herself obliged to hang on to Jason. Yet the discovery of the body had strangely pleased her. For that she castigated herself. It was dreadful and wrong to feel that way, for whoever this wretched little corpse might have been, it had once been a child, some child, murdered or killed by a violence that went too far, and buried in squalid suburban earth.

  Just as she had been almost pleased by the unearthing of the corpse so she was vaguely and i
rrationally disappointed when it was identified as that of Martin M’Boa, a Nigerian child who had been missing for more than three months. It brought her back to something she had shelved or suspended while there was doubt about the child’s identity, it brought her back to decision-making. She still had to fix on a way of returning Jason, though it was a week now since she had decided to return him clandestinely. Jason had taken to waking up in the night, waking just once and calling for her. The first time he called ‘Mummy’ she felt a sort of horror because, momentarily, as she woke to that cry, he had been James. She hadn’t wanted to go in to him, to see him instead of James, but she had gone. It wasn’t his fault, he was responsible for none of it, and he called her what he would have called any young woman who had the care of him. After she had quietened him, she lay awake for a long time wondering at herself and what had happened to her. Mopsa, of course, was mad. But hadn’t she too been a little mad from shock and grief in that she had kept Jason so long after she knew who he was? She wasn’t mad now. She was sane and level-headed – she was even writing again, working well in the study room after Jason had been put to bed – but it was too late now. A rational mind had been recovered too late. That mind looked askance at Mopsa-type ideas for taking Jason back, restoring him to the wall where he had been when Mopsa found him, taking him into a store crowded with Christmas shoppers and giving him into the care of the management as a lost child, placing him in the arms of a policeman in the street and then running like a hare. Mopsa ideas all of them, if Mopsa could ever have been persuaded Jason must be returned home.

  She hadn’t spoken to Benet since her return to Marbella. It was Benet’s father who had phoned to say her mother had arrived safely, had a good journey, been in good spirits and talking constantly of her visit. It made Benet wonder what story she had told to account for Jason’s presence. If she had told any. She must have said something for John Archdale asked just before he rang off, ‘How’s the boy?’