by Ruth Rendell
What he had to do was see her, be with her again. He had to get her to retract what she had said, to admit she had said it in the heat of the moment, that it was false, false as hell. A snowball slapped against the window and he jumped up, sure it must have been vindictively thrown. But it was only little kids out there, Isadoros and Kupars and O’Haras, and their snowballs were simply handfuls of snow that contained no stones or pieces of glass.
The sun had come out and a thaw already begun, drip-drip-drip off the gutterings. She would come back if he waited long enough, she would have to, but he couldn’t bear the inactivity. He was putting on his jacket and slipping the gun inside it when the phone began to ring.
Barry answered it. He thought it might be Carol and he held his breath. A man’s voice asked cautiously if Carol was there.
‘No, she’s not.’
‘Will she be at Bacchus?’
It was so long since Barry had heard it called this that he had almost forgotten the wine bar’s proper name. ‘Is your name Wand?’ he said.
There was a silence, whispered into by the sound of indrawn breath. Then the receiver was replaced.
Carol would of course be at the wine bar on a Monday at lunchtime, Barry thought. She would be there until three.
The Channel had been icily calm. Benet wondered if Jay had ever seen the sea before. He stared at the sea with a long concentrated gaze, then turned his face to hers and laughed. It was only during those few early years, she thought, that we laugh with delight at what pleases us. After that, laughter is strictly for amusement only.
They were coming into the harbour at Calais, in a chill grey mist, when she understood where it was she was going. Down to the tip of Spain to Mopsa and her father. She was their daughter and she had a son. Their neighbours, their circle, would know that now. What could be more natural and acceptable than if she and their grandson came to stay with them?
Britain had no extradition treaty with Spain. Or from there she could easily go on to North Africa. She saw herself fleeing with Jay to infinite distances. He was too small for a piggy-back, he sat astride her shoulders, shouting, ‘I like the sea, I like the sea!’
When she got to Paris, she would phone her parents and tell them she was coming. Or perhaps, when she got to Paris, she would abandon the car and take a flight to Malaga.
The house was in darkness. Coming in under the arch, Barry could have sworn he had seen a light in one of the narrow slit windows on the left-hand side but now he thought that what he had seen had probably been no more than the reflected image of one of the streetlamps.
He was going to ring boldly at Terence Wand’s door. If she was there with him and they tried to beat him up between them, he didn’t care. He had to find her and see her and have his confrontation. If need be, he would use the gun to threaten. For Terence Wand he no longer had any feelings. The man might be Jason’s father and he might not. Barry wondered why he had ever cared who Jason’s father was. He rang the doorbell, once, twice, then insistently. It might only be his imagination that there was someone in there lying low, refusing to answer. How could you tell? There was no sound, the silence was total. Trying to see into one of the windows showed him nothing but the filtered light from a lamp in the close striking silky dark carpet and the bronze limbs of a statue. He went round to the back and looked through the window of the garage. The car was there. He tried the garage doors but they were locked.
Piles of snow, yellowish or rimmed with grit, were stacked against fences. It had become very cold. Ice glittered where before there had been black wetness. Barry went down to the station. He would try Maureen, he thought, and, if he had to, Iris.
As he came off the Chinese bridge on to the crusty remains of snow that lay in islands on the sea of grass, he saw lights on in Carol’s house. His heart jumped as it always did but heavily this time, with pain. Although he knew it was her house he counted from the end to make sure: two, four, six, eight . . .
He had the gun so he wasn’t even apprehensive about going through the passage in the dark. Before he entered the black tunnel, slippery underfoot tonight and the fences on either side of it silvered, he got out the gun and held it clutched in both hands the way Paddy Jones had shown him. But he met no one and no one followed him in. He came out into the street at the other end and from there he could see the light from her living-room window shining on to the little bit of front garden. Then the light went out. He couldn’t be sure if all the lights in the house went out, he couldn’t see from there.
A woman came out of Carol’s house. For a moment he thought it was Iris, the way she clutched her coat round her, the quick, almost scuttling walk. The light from a street lamp showed him her hair, the pale gleaming natural curls. It was Carol herself. She was wearing Mrs Fylemon’s fake fur and sandals with very high heels. Sometimes, he remembered, she would come home with her feet blue with cold.
She darted quick glances about her as if she were afraid of something or someone, afraid perhaps that someone might be following her. He didn’t flatter himself that she might ever be afraid of him, but he followed her. There seemed nothing else in the world to do, no other occupation for him. Looking about her but never directly behind her, she came into Bevan Square. Black Beauty and Blue Hair were up at the top end of the square, on the corner of the row of shops, draped negligently over their bikes as if the saddles were bar stools.
Barry had replaced the gun inside his jacket. He held on to the butt of it but he didn’t get it out. One of them said something, a muttered, indistinct, probably obscene word he didn’t catch. Carol thought it was directed at her. She turned, quick as a flash, and shouted at them to piss off. He admired her nerve. The two of them sniggered. Carol was heading for Lordship Avenue.
He slackened his pace, uncertain what to do. It occurred to him that she might merely be going to Iris’s. But she too was walking less quickly, and at the corner where the entrance road ran in between the two blocks of flats, she stopped and waited. Or, rather, she paced on one spot, turning round and round on those nearly bare feet, her arms folded and wrapped round her. A little snow, fine as dust, stingingly cold, needled on to his face and the backs of his hands. He pushed his hands inside his jacket. The cold was biting yet the sky was the colour of smoke from a burning rubbish heap.
The car turned in from Lordship Avenue. It turned in, looped round and stopped at the left-hand kerb. Barry couldn’t see the driver but he thought the car was the one he had seen an hour before in Terence Wand’s garage.
Carol darted across the road as the passenger door swung open. She jumped in – she almost dived in to escape from the intense cold – and the door slammed. The car slid out into Lordship Avenue once more and moved off down the hill.
It had disappeared by the time Barry came out into the main road but he thought he knew where it had gone. There were people standing round something by the kerb, looking at something that lay there. A woman stepped back and began to walk away, leaving a gap in the crowd. Barry saw that a van had run over an animal and its driver was arguing with one of those bystanders who mysteriously spring out of the ground when an accident happens. The thing in the road, black, lean, sleek, apparently unmarked, dead, was the greengrocer’s Dobermann. The sight of it made him feel slightly sick.
He meant to walk but a bus came as he reached the stop outside the pub. The gun was sticking out, pushing out the front of his jacket as if he had a deformed breastbone. The woman in the seat opposite stared. He pushed the gun down and held on to it.
They weren’t in the bar. He could see that, he didn’t have to ask. Alkmini was serving. Kostas sat at a table with a group of middle-aged Greeks like himself. Dennis Gordon, three parts drunk, his face dark and swollen, hung slouched against the black curvy counter. He looked at Barry and their eyes met but neither of them said a word. Then Barry saw the other man’s eyes move. Glazed and bloodshot, they strayed back to where they had previously been fixed – on Kostas’s black glass clock who
se hands pointed to five minutes to nine.
Barry had the bare price of a drink on him but he didn’t spend it. He went back outside. In Java Mews, Dennis Gordon’s silver-blue Rolls was parked as it had been the other night. Barry heard the side door of the wine bar swing open and shut with a slam but he didn’t look behind him. His instinct had been wrong and she wasn’t there and he wondered where to look for her.
Probably, instead of coming here, they had gone down to the West End. Go home, the sensible voice inside him said, go back to where you were before you met her. Sooner or later you’ll have to, so why not now? A solitary bus appeared over the crest of the hill, rounded the curve in the road with its lumbering galleon-like motion, a red double-decker bus going up to Hornsey that passed the end of his parents’ street.
He let the bus go. They might be in a pub instead. They might be down there in the Java Head. Barry didn’t approach it from the mews but from around the block, walking round the square formed by Lordship Avenue and the three small streets, looking into parked cars.
It was dark with lamps only at the corners. He wasn’t in danger here, no one knew him here, but the two boys waiting under a corner lamp looked too much like Hoopoe, were too much in Hoopoe’s style, for comfort. He held the gun and felt a quickening, strengthening surge into his blood. The boys didn’t even look at him.
He was almost at the pub, he was entering the pool of light under the saloon bar window, when he heard the first shot. He was still grasping the gun through the lining of his jacket and for a wild moment he fancied it was he who had made the shot, fired the gun. Then there came a volley of shots and a scream that split the cold thick air. Barry began to run. The pub doors opened behind him and people poured out. He ran up the mews, not knowing whether he was running away from the shots or towards them.
There was one more shot. He saw Dennis Gordon on the pavement ahead of him, a blind, staggering, King Kong shape, a silhouette as black as a gorilla. The little gun half the size of Barry’s was in his paw of a hand and he flung it in an arc away from him.
Barry didn’t know where all the people had come from. The cold had kept them in and blood and screams and the heat of violence had brought them out as if melting their doors. The mews was full of people and their noise.
He saw the bullet hole in the wing of the car before it registered with him whose car it was. He pushed his way through, he elbowed the crowd out of his way. The passenger door he had seen opened for Carol stood open again, and thin threads of blood came out over the edge of the seat and in winding narrow rivulets over the rim of the door.
There was a lot of blood on the floor of the car, a lake of it forming. Barry had often wondered how he would feel, what he would do, if he saw Carol in another man’s arms, in, say, Terence Wand’s arms. He witnessed that sight now and knew the total negation of feeling shock brings. Impossible to say whether they had been embracing before they were shot or had fallen into each other’s arms in death. There was no blood on Carol’s golden baby curls. The shot that had killed her had made a round hole just below the lobe of her left ear where the clotting blood formed an earring like a cluster of dark jewels.
Barry turned away and elbowed through the people to the end of the mews. He walked up the hill like an automaton or a contestant in a walking race. Police cars with sirens blasting and a useless ambulance came past him through red traffic lights. The night was suddenly filled with the howls of sirens. Barry felt nothing, but all the time he could see Carol’s face with that red jewel just below her ear and he fancied he could smell limes as he had smelled them in the mortuary. Mechanically he walked, the gun moving rhythmically like a fifth limb.
At the top of the hill he leaned over the bridge and dropped the gun over the parapet into the canal. The water rings from the splash were still widening when he got on to the Hornsey bus.
24
THE TAXI SET him down in Golders Green. That was far enough, he could get a tube from there. He felt curiously carefree and light of heart. Light of body he was too. He had weighed himself before leaving and found he had lost eleven pounds since Christmas. All his troubles seemed left behind with his discarded past. He was so relaxed that he bought an evening paper in the station for something to read in the train.
Going down the steps to the platform, he glanced at the front-page lead. Glanced, then stopped and read. The shock gripped and twisted his insides. If he hadn’t phoned Carol yesterday afternoon to say he couldn’t make it, it might have been him with her in what the paper called the ‘death car’. So his nerves had come in useful and saved his life. If his nerves hadn’t told him that the only way he was going to get through his last night in Spring Close was alone and on a stupefying mixture of tranquillizers, alcohol and sedatives, it might have been him! He and she would certainly have spent part of their time together in the wine bar. One always did with Carol. He hardly took in the name of the murdered man, Edward Greenwood, whoever he might be. His hand was trembling so much that the one good clasp on the brown suitcase shook undone.
Rather late in the day, he spared a thought for Carol. Poor old Carol. Suppose he had taken her out last night as they had originally planned? Even if he hadn’t got shot, he would doubtless have been involved in some unpleasant way in all the fracas that went on between her and this jealous guy with whom she’d apparently been living on and off. The one he’d spoken to on the phone yesterday perhaps. The result would have been all the business of Freda’s house coming out and his getaway with the money prevented. Terence decided he must have a guardian angel after all.
He got out of the train at Euston and walked to the small hotel where he had booked a room for the night in order to have the use of it during this afternoon and evening. There he counted the money. Two thousand or so fifty-pound notes wouldn’t have taken up all that much room, but the bank manager hadn’t been able to let him have it all in fifties, and so at least half was in twenties and tens. In fact the case was hardly big enough to contain it. That was why the clasps kept coming undone.
He dared not leave the money in his room. He took the case with him and walked along Tottenham Court Road. There in a shop that sold leather goods and souvenirs, he bought a canvas strap to put round the suitcase and – as an afterthought when he was leaving the shop – a nylon fold-away bag.
Back at the hotel, he surprised himself by the amount of intense anxiety he seemed to find it necessary to devote to the packing of these bags and the disposal of the money. He had packed them both and re-packed them over and over and finally got all the money in the nylon bag and the few clothes he was taking and his toilet things in the other, when it occurred to him he might very likely be permitted only a single item of hand baggage. The nylon bag only, then. It was the kind on which the zip goes almost all the way round so that when empty the bag could be opened out flat, folded into its own pocket and reduced to handkerchief size. It weighed practically nothing and was more capacious than he had at first supposed.
He realized as he emptied both bags once more that his nerves were screwing up again. Carol, he thought, Carol, trying to feel sad and upset but succeeding only in thinking about 5 Spring Close and the Goldschmidts’ removal van arriving to find it full of furniture and Freda’s car in the garage. That would have happened by now. What would they do? Go to Steiner & Wildwood and get Mr Phipps’s forwarding address from Sawyer. That would be care of Wand in Brownswood Common Lane, Tottenham, and Terence knew for a fact his mother would be out all day visiting her sister in Palmers Green as she always was on a Tuesday.
But even if the Goldschmidts were at this moment trying to trace him to get his furniture moved out, that wouldn’t make them suspect him of never having owned the house in the first place. That and its implications would very likely not dawn on them for a week or more. Just the same, he was on tenterhooks as he re-packed the bag and watched the time creep very slowly towards seven-thirty, and it was an enormous relief to be in the tube at last with the nylon bag o
n his knee and a single ticket to Heathrow Central in his pocket.
Detective Inspector Tony Leatham had a rather smart overnight bag, not leather but as good as, a dark cream fake pigskin. He’d wangled it so that he’d be stopping two nights in Melbourne. Monty Driscoll had been there three months anyway so a couple more days wouldn’t do him any harm, while a brief twenty-four-hour stopover would have been cruel on the jet lag, Leatham thought. Not that he knew anything about jet lag. He had never been further abroad before than the Costa Del Sol.
He was going to enjoy himself. No tube for him. They let him have a car to take him right up to Terminal Three. Like all tyro travellers, Leatham was early and one of the first to check in on the Qantas flight that went out at 21.45. He had a cup of coffee and bought a paperback. Not The Marriage Knot you saw on display everywhere, he didn’t think that was quite his line, but a new collection of twelve horror stories. Then, because there seemed nothing left to do, he presented his passport, and went through the gate from which there was no returning this side of the air.
The girl was his type, with a little round face and blond curls, though hers were permed. She was surrounded by stacks of luggage. He didn’t know how on her own – for the little kid with her would have been more hindrance than help – she had managed to hump it into the train. She was wearing jeans and a brown fur jacket, coney probably, and at first he thought she must have an enormous bust, unnaturally huge on so small girl. It was only after he had been talking to her for a few minutes – or she had been talking to him, she had cottoned on to him fast the way they did – and told him her name was Jane that he realized it was a baby in a sling she was carrying strapped to her chest. She bent forward and he saw its round nearly bald head where he expected her cleavage to be.