The Fallen Curtain

by Ruth Rendell

  Acclaim for

  Ruth Rendell

  “If there were a craft guild for writers, I’d apprentice myself to Ruth Rendell.”

  —Sue Grafton

  “The best mystery writer anywhere in the English-speaking world.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Ruth Rendell is, unequivocally, the most brilliant mystery novelist of our time. Her stories are a lesson in a human nature as capable of the most exotic love as it is of the cruelest murder. She does not avert her gaze and magnificently triumphs in a style that is uniquely hers and mesmerizing.”

  —Patricia Cornwell

  “Rendell may favor the darker side of life, but she is a virtuoso of composition…. Her prose is tantalizing.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “It’s no use trying to read Ruth Rendell’s mind. You can follow her logic, analyze her insights and puzzle out her plots. But she’ll always astonish you … with the emotional depth of her psychological mysteries.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Ruth Rendell is a master of the form.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Ruth Rendell is surely one of the greatest novelists presently at work in our language. She is a writer whose work should be read by anyone who enjoys either brilliant mystery—or distinguished literature.”

  —Scott Turow

  “No one writes with more devastating accuracy about the world we live in and commit sin in today.”

  —John Mortimer

  “Rendell’s clear, shapely prose casts the mesmerizing spell of the confessional.”

  —The New Yorker

  “[Rendell] is a master at making the small English village into a metaphor for the world, understanding [its] workings … and how it relates to the violence surrounding us.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “No one can take you so totally into the recesses of the human mind as does Ruth Rendell.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Rendell’s prose, the psychological verity of her dialogue and her attention to telling details carry us through a whirlwind of adventure in a pretty unpleasant society that just may be microcosm of our own.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  Ruth Rendell

  The Fallen Curtain

  Ruth Rendell is the recipient of three Edgar Awards, four Gold Daggers, the Commander of the British Empire Award, and the most prestigious Edgar of them all, the Grand Master Award. She lives in London.

  ALSO BY RUTH RENDELL

  AVAILABLE FROM VINTAGE CRIME / BLACK LIZARD

  A Demon in My View

  Harm Done

  A Judgement in Stone

  The Lake of Darkness

  Murder Being Once Done

  No More Dying Then

  One Across, Two Down

  Shake Hands Forever

  A Sleeping Life

  Some Lie and Some Die

  Contents

  The Fallen Curtain

  People Don’t Do Such Things

  A Bad Heart

  You Can’t Be Too Careful

  The Double

  Venus’ Fly-trap

  His Worst Enemy

  The Vinegar Mother

  The Fall of a Coin

  Almost Human

  Divided We Stand

  The Fallen Curtain

  The incident happened in the spring after his sixth birthday. His mother always referred to it as “that dreadful evening,” and always is no exaggeration. She talked about it a lot, especially when he did well at anything, which was often, as he was good at school and at passing exams.

  Showing her friends his swimming certificate or the prize he won for being top at geography: “When I think we might have lost Richard that dreadful evening! You have to believe there’s Someone watching over us, don’t you?” Clasping him in her arms: “He might have been killed—or worse.” (A remarkable statement, this one.) “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  Apparently it bore talking about. “If I’d told him once, I’d told him fifty times never to talk to strangers or get into cars. But boys will be boys, and he forgot all that when the time came. He was given sweets, of course, and lured into this car.” Whispers at this point, meaning glances in his direction. “Threats and suggestions—persuaded into goodness knows what—I’ll never know how we got him back alive.”

  What Richard couldn’t understand was how his mother knew so much about it. She hadn’t been there. Only he and the Man had been there, and he couldn’t remember a thing about it. A curtain had fallen over that bit of his memory that held the details of that dreadful evening. He remembered only what had come immediately before it and immediately after.

  They were living then in the South London suburb of Upfield, in a little terraced house in Petunia Street, he and his mother and his father. His mother had been over forty when he was born and he had no brothers or sisters. (“That’s why we love you so much, Richard.”) He wasn’t allowed to play in the street with the other kids. (“You want to keep yourself to yourself, dear.”) Round the corner in Lupin Street lived his gran, his father’s mother. Gran never came to their house, though he thought his father would have liked it if she had.

  “I wish you’d have my mother to tea on Sunday,” he once heard his father say.

  “If that woman sets foot in this house, Stan, I go out of it.”

  So gran never came to tea.

  “I hope I know what’s right, Stan, and I know better than to keep the boy away from his grandmother. You can have him round there once a week with you, so long as I don’t have to come in contact with her.”

  That made three houses Richard was allowed into—his own, his gran’s, and the house next door in Petunia Street where the Wilsons lived with their Brenda and their John. Sometimes he played in their garden with John, though it wasn’t much fun, as Brenda, who was much older, nearly sixteen, was always bullying them and stopping them getting dirty. He and John were in the same class at school, but his mother wouldn’t let him go to school alone with John, although it was only three streets away. She was very careful and nervous about him, was his mother, waiting outside the gates before school ended to walk him home with his hand tightly clasped in hers.

  But once a week he didn’t go straight home. He looked forward to Wednesdays because Wednesday evening was the one he spent at gran’s, and because the time between his mother’s leaving him and his arrival at gran’s house was the only time he was ever free and by himself.

  This was the way it was. His mother would meet him from school and they’d walk down Plumtree Grove to where Petunia Street started. Lupin Street turned off the Grove a bit further down, so his mother would see him across the road, waving and smiling encouragingly, till she’d seen him turn the corner into Lupin Street. Gran’s house was about a hundred yards down. That hundred yards was his free time, his alone time.

  “Mind you run all the way,” his mother called after him.

  But at the corner he always stopped running and began to dawdle, stopping to play with the cat that roamed about the bit of waste ground, or climbing on the pile of bricks the builders never came to build into anything. Sometimes, if she wasn’t too bad with her arthritis, gran would be waiting for him at her gate, and he didn’t mind having to forgo the cat and the climbing because it was so nice in gran’s house. Gran had a big T.V. set—unusually big for those days—and he’d watch it, eating chocolate, until his father knocked off at the factory and turned up for tea. Tea was lovely, fish and chips that gran didn’t fetch from the shop but cooked herself, cream meringues and chocolate eclairs, tinned peaches with evaporated milk, the lot washed down with fizzy lemonade. (“It’s a disgrace the way your mo
ther spoils that boy, Stan.”) They were supposed to be home by seven, but every week when it got round to seven, gran would remember there was a cowboy film coming up on T.V. and there’d be cocoa and biscuits and potato crisps to go with it. They’d be lucky to be home in Petunia Street before nine.

  “Don’t blame me,” said his mother, “if his school work suffers next day.”

  That dreadful evening his mother left him as usual at the corner and saw him across the road. He could remember that, and remember too how he’d looked to see if gran was at her gate. When he’d made sure she wasn’t, he’d wandered on to the building site to cajole the cat out of the nest she’d made for herself among the rubble. It was late March, a fine afternoon and still broad daylight at four. He was stroking the cat, thinking how thin and bony she was and how some of gran’s fish and chips would do her good, when—what? What next? At this point the curtain came down. Three hours later it lifted, and he was in Plumtree Grove, walking along quite calmly (“Running in terror with that Man after him”), when whom should he meet but Mrs Wilson’s Brenda out for the evening with her boy friend. Brenda had pointed at him, stared and shouted. She ran up to him and clutched him and squeezed him till he could hardly breathe. Was that what had frightened him into losing his memory? They said no. They said he’d been frightened before (“Terrified out of his life”) and that Brenda’s grabbing him and the dreadful shriek his mother gave when she saw him had nothing to do with it.

  Petunia Street was full of police cars and there was a crowd outside their house. Brenda hustled him him in, shouting, “I’ve found him, I’ve found him!” and there was his father all white in the face, talking to policemen, his mother half dead on the sofa being given brandy, and—wonder of wonders—his gran there too. That had been one of the strangest things of that whole strange evening, that his gran had set foot in their house and his mother hadn’t gone out of it.

  They all started asking him questions at once. Had he answered them? All that remained in his memory was his mother’s scream. That endured, that shattering sound, and the great open mouth from which it issued as she leapt upon him. Somehow, although he couldn’t have explained why, he connected that scream and her seizing him as if to swallow him up, with the descent of the curtain.

  He was never allowed to be alone after that, not even to play with John in the Wilsons’ garden, and he was never allowed to forget those events he couldn’t remember. There was no question of going to gran’s even under supervision, for gran’s arthritis had got so bad they’d put her in the old people’s ward at Upfield Hospital. The Man was never found. A couple of years later a little girl from Plumtree Grove got taken away and murdered. They never found that Man either, but his mother was sure they were one and the same.

  “And it might have been our Richard. It doesn’t bear thinking of, that Man roaming the streets like a wild beast.”

  “What did he do to me, mum?” asked Richard, trying.

  “If you don’t remember, so much the better. You want to forget all about it, put it right out of your life.”

  If only she’d let him. “What did he do, dad?”

  “I don’t know, Rich. None of us knows, me nor the police nor your mum, for all she says. Women like to set themselves up as knowing all about things, but it’s my belief you never told her no more than you told us.”

  She took him to school and fetched him home until he was twelve. The other kids teased him mercilessly. He wasn’t allowed to go to their houses or have any of them to his. (“You never know who they know or what sort of connections they’ve got.”) His mother only stopped going everywhere with him when he got taller than she was, and anyone could see he was too big for any Man to attack.

  Growing up brought no elucidation of that dreadful evening but it did bring, with adolescence, the knowledge of what might have happened. And as he came to understand that it wasn’t only threats and blows and stories of horror which the Man might have inflicted on him, he felt an alien in his own body or as if that body were covered with a slime which nothing could wash away. For there was no way of knowing now, nothing to do about it but wish his mother would leave the subject alone, avoid getting friendly with people, and work hard at school.

  He did very well there, for he was naturally intelligent and had no outside diversions. No one was surprised when he got to a good university, not Oxford or Cambridge but nearly as good (“Imagine, all that brainpower might have been wasted if that Man had had his way”), where he began to read for a science degree. He was the first member of his family ever to go to college, and the only cloud in the sky was that his gran, as his father pointed out, wasn’t there to see his glory.

  She had died in the hospital when he was fourteen and she’d left her house to his parents. They’d sold it and theirs and bought a much nicer, bigger one with a proper garden and a garage in a suburb some five miles further out from Upfield. The little bit of money she’d saved she left to Richard, to come to him when he was eighteen. It was just enough to buy a car, and when he came down from university for the Easter holidays, he bought a two-year-old Ford and took and passed his driving test.

  “That boy,” said his mother, “passes every exam that comes his way. It’s like as if he couldn’t fail if he tried. But he’s got a guardian angel watching over him, has had ever since he was six.” Her husband had admonished her for her too-excellent memory and now she referred only obliquely to that dreadful evening. “When you-know-what happened and he was spared.”

  She watched him drive expertly round the block, her only regret that he hadn’t got a nice girl beside him, a sensible, hard-working fiancée—not one of your tarty pieces—saving up for the deposit on a house and good furniture. Richard had never had a girl. There was one at college he liked and who, he thought, might like him. But he didn’t ask her out. He was never quite sure whether he was fit for any girl to know, let alone love.

  The day after he’d passed his test he thought he’d drive over to Upfield and look up John Wilson. There was more in this, he confessed to himself, than a wish to revive old friendship. John was the only friend he’d really ever had, but he’d always felt inferior to him, for John had been (and had had the chance to be) easy and sociable and had had a girl to go out with when he was only fourteen. He rather liked the idea of arriving outside the Wilsons’ house, fresh from his first two terms at university and in his own car.

  It was a Wednesday in early April, a fine, mild afternoon and still, of course, broad daylight at four. He chose a Wednesday because that was early closing day in Upfield and John wouldn’t be in the hardware shop where he’d worked ever since he left school three years before.

  But as he approached Petunia Street up Plumtree Grove from the southerly direction, it struck him that he’d quite like to take a look at his gran’s old house and see whether they’d ever built anything on that bit of waste ground. For years and years, half his lifetime, those bricks had lain there, though the thin old cat had disappeared or died long before Richard’s parents moved. And the bricks were still there, overgrown now by grass and nettles. He drove into Lupin Street, moving slowly along the pavement edge until he was within sight of his gran’s house. There was enough of his mother in him to stop him parking directly outside the house (“Keep yourself to yourself and don’t pry into what doesn’t concern you”), so he stopped the car some few yards this side of it.

  It had been painted a bright pink, the window woodwork picked out in sky-blue. Richard thought he liked it better the way it used to be, cream plaster and brown wood, but he didn’t move away. A strange feeling had come over him, stranger than any he could remember having experienced, which kept him where he was, staring at the wilderness of rubble and brick and weeds. Just nostalgia, he thought, just going back to those Wednesdays which had been the high spots of his weeks.

  It was funny the way he kept looking among the rubble for the old cat to appear. If she were alive, she’d be as old as he by now and not many cats live
that long. But he kept on looking just the same, and presently, as he was trying to pull himself out of this dreamy, dazed feeling and go off to John’s, a living creature did appear behind the shrub-high weeds. A boy, about eight. Richard didn’t intend to get out of the car. He found himself out of it, locking the door and then strolling over on to the building site.

  You couldn’t really see much from a car, not details. That must have been why he’d got out, to examine more closely this scene of his childhood pleasures. It seemed very small, not the wild expanse of brick hills and grassy gullies he remembered, but a scrubby little bit of land twenty feet wide and perhaps twice as long. Of course it had seemed bigger because he had been so much smaller, smaller even than this little boy who now sat on a brick mountain, eyeing him.

  He didn’t mean to speak to the boy, for he wasn’t a child any more but a Man. And if there is an explicit rule that a child mustn’t speak to strangers, there is an implicit, unstated one, that a Man doesn’t speak to children. If he had meant to speak, his words would have been very different, something about having played there himself once perhaps, or having lived nearby. The words he did use came to his lips as if they had been placed there by some external (or deeply internal) ruling authority.

  “You’re trespassing on private land. Did you know that?”

  The boy began to ease himself down. “All the kids play here, mister.”

  “Maybe, but that’s no excuse. Where do you live?”

  In Petunia Street, but I’m going to my gran’s…. No.

  “Upfield High Road.”

  “I think you’d better get in my car,” the Man said, “and I’ll take you home.”

  Doubtfully, the boy said, “There won’t be no one there. My mum works late Wednesdays and I haven’t got no dad. I’m to go straight home from school and have my tea and wait for when my mum comes at seven.”