by Ruth Rendell
The paintbox houses looked just the same in the morning. But of course they would. The arrest of Mr Arnold would hardly affect their appearance. The phone rang at 9.30 and Mrs Upton took the call. She came into the morning room where Mrs Julian was finishing her breakfast.
‘The police want to come round and see you again. I said I’d ask. I said you mightn’t be up to it, not being so young as you used to be.’
‘Neither are you or they,’ said Mrs Julian and then she spoke to the police herself and told them to come whenever it suited them.
During the next half hour some not disagreeable fantasies went round in Mrs Julian’s head. Such is often the outcome of identifying with characters in fiction. She imagined herself congratulated on her acumen and even, on a future occasion when some other baffling crime had taken place, consulted by policemen of high rank. Mrs Upton had served her well on the whole, as well as could be expected in these trying times. Perhaps one day, when it came to the question of Stewart’s promotion, a word from her in the right place . . .
The doorbell rang. It was the same detective sergeant and detective constable. Mrs Julian was a little disappointed, she thought she rated an inspector now. They greeted her with jovial smiles and invited her into her own kitchen where they said they had something to show her. Between them they were lugging a large canvas bag.
The sergeant asked Mrs Upton if she could find them a sheet of newspaper, and before Mrs Julian could say that they had burnt all the newspapers, Saturday’s Daily Telegraph was produced from where it had been secreted. Then, to Mrs Julian’s amazement, he pulled out of the canvas bag the black plastic rubbish sack, punctured on one side and secured at the top with blue string, which she had seen Mr Arnold deposit on the tip on Sunday evening.
‘I hope you won’t find it too distasteful, madam,’ he said, ‘just to cast your eyes over some of the contents of this bag.’
Mrs Julian was astounded that he should ask such a thing of someone of her age. But she indicated with a faint nod and wave of her hand that she would comply, while inwardly she braced herself for the sight of some hideous bludgeon, perhaps encrusted with blood and hair, and for the emergence from the depths of the sack of a bloodstained jacket and pair of trousers. She would not faint or cry out, she was determined on that, whatever she might see.
It was the constable who untied the string and spread open the neck of the sack. With care, the sergeant began to remove its contents and to drop them on the newspaper Mrs Upton had laid on the floor. He dropped them, in so far as he could, in small separate heaps: a quantity of orange peel, a few lengths of dark blue two-ply knitting wool, innumerable Earl Grey tea bags, potato peelings, cabbage leaves, a lamb chop bone, the sherry bottle whose neck had pierced the side of the sack, and seven copies of the Daily Telegraph with one of the Observer, all with ‘Julian, 1 Abelard Avenue’ scrawled above the masthead . . .
Mrs Julian surveyed her kitchen floor. She looked at the sergeant and the constable and at the yard or so of dark blue two-ply knitting wool which he still held in his hand and which he had unwound from the neck of the sack.
‘I fail to understand,’ she said.
‘I’m afraid this sack would appear to contain waste from your own household, Mrs Julian,’ said the sergeant. ‘In other words to have been yours and been disposed of from your premises.’
Mrs Julian sat down. She sat down rather heavily on one of the bentwood chairs and fixed her eyes on the opposite wall and felt a strange tingling hot sensation in her face that she hadn’t experienced for some sixty years. She was blushing.
‘I see,’ she said.
The constable began stuffing the garbage back into the sack. Mrs Upton watched him, giggling.
‘If you haven’t consumed all our stock of sherry, Mrs Upton,’ said Mrs Julian, ‘perhaps we might offer these two gentlemen a glass.’
The policemen, though on duty – which Mrs Julian had formerly supposed put the consumption of alcohol out of the question – took two glasses apiece. They were not at a loss for words and chatted away with Mrs Upton, possibly on the subject of the past and future exploits of Stewart. Mrs Julian scarcely listened and said nothing. She understood perfectly what had happened, Mr Arnold changing his clothes because they were wet, deciding to empty his rubbish that night because he had forgotten or failed to do so on the Saturday morning, gathering up his own and very likely Mr Laindon’s too, At that point she had left the window to go to the telephone. In the few minutes during which she had been talking to her nephew, Mr Arnold had passed her gate with his barrow, lifted the lid of her dustbin and, finding a full sack within, taken it with him. It was this sack, her own, that she had seen him disposing of on the tip when she had next looked out.
No wonder the boiler had hardly ever been alight, no wonder the compost heap had scarcely grown. Once the snow and frost began and she knew her employer meant to remain indoors, Mrs Upton had abandoned the hygiene regimen and reverted to sack and dustbin. And this was what it had led to.
The two policemen left, obligingly discarding the sack on to the tip as they passed it. Mrs Upton looked at Mrs Julian and Mrs Julian looked at Mrs Upton and Mrs Upton said very brightly: ‘Well, I wonder what all that was about then?’
Mrs Julian longed and longed for the old days when she would have given her notice on the spot, but that was impossible now. Where would she find a replacement? So all she said was, knowing it to be incomprehensible: ‘A faux pas, Mrs Upton, that’s what it was,’ and walked slowly off and into the living room where she picked up her knitting from the chair by the window and carried it into the furthest corner of the room.
As a detective she was a failure. Yet, ironically, it was directly due to her efforts that Mrs Arnold’s murderer was brought to justice. Mrs Julian could not long keep away from her window and when she returned to it the next day it was to see the council men dismantling the tip and removing the sacks to some distant disposal unit or incinerator. As her newspaper had told her, the strike was over. But the hunt for the murder weapon was not. There was more room to manoeuvre and investigate now the rubbish was gone. By nightfall the weapon had been found and twenty-four hours later the young out-of-work mechanic who had struck Mrs Arnold down for the contents of her handbag had been arrested and charged.
They traced him through the spanner with which he had killed her and which, passing Mrs Julian’s garden fence, he had thrust into the depths of her compost heap.
The Wrong Category
There hadn’t been a killing now for a week. The evening paper’s front page was devoted instead to the economic situation and an earthquake in Turkey. But page three kept up the interest in this series of murders. On it were photographs of the six victims all recognizably belonging to the same type. There, in every case although details of feature naturally varied, were the same large liquid eyes, full soft mouth, and long dark hair.
Barry’s mother looked up from the paper. ‘I don’t like you going out at night.’
‘What, me?’ said Barry.
‘Yes, you. All these murders happened round here. I don’t like you going out after dark. It’s not as if you had to, it’s not as if it was for work.’ She got up and began to clear the table but continued to speak in a low whining tone. ‘I wouldn’t say a word if you were a big chap. If you were the size of your cousin Ronnie I wouldn’t say a word. A fellow your size doesn’t stand a chance against that maniac.’
‘I see,’ said Barry. ‘And whose fault is it I’m only five feet two? I might just point out that a woman of five feet that marries a bloke only two inches more can’t expect to have giants for kids. Right?’
‘I sometimes think you only go roving about at night, doing what you want, to prove you’re as big a man as your cousin Ronnie.’
Barry thrust his face close up to hers. ‘Look, leave off, will you?’ He waved the paper at her. ‘I may not have the height but I’m not in the right category. Has that occurred to you? Has it?’
�
�All right, all right. I wish you wouldn’t be always shouting.’
In his bedroom Barry put on his new velvet jacket and dabbed cologne on his wrists and neck. He looked spruce and dapper. His mother gave him an apprehensive glance as he passed her on his way to the back door, and returned to her contemplation of the pictures in the newspaper. Six of them in two months. The girlish faces, doe-eyed, diffident, looked back at her or looked aside or stared at distant unknown objects. After a while she folded the paper and switched on the television. Barry, after all, was not in the right category, and that must be her comfort.
He liked to go and look at the places where the bodies of the victims had been found. It brought him a thrill of danger and a sense of satisfaction. The first of them had been strangled very near his home on a path which first passed between draggled allotments, then became an alley plunging between the high brown wall of a convent and the lower red brick wall of a school.
Barry took this route to the livelier part of the town, walking rapidly but without fear and pausing at the point – a puddle of darkness between lamps – where the one they called Pat Leston had died. It seemed to him, as he stood there, that the very atmosphere, damp, dismal, and silent, breathed evil and the horror of the act. He appreciated it, inhaled it, and then passed on to seek, on the waste ground, the common, in a deserted back street of condemned houses, those other murder scenes. After the last killing they had closed the underpass, and Barry found to his disappointment that it was still closed.
He had walked a couple of miles and had hardly seen a soul. People stayed at home. There was even some kind of panic, he had noticed, when it got to six and the light was fading and the buses and tube trains were emptying themselves of the last commuters. In pairs they scurried. They left the town as depopulated as if a plague had scoured it.
Entering the high street, walking its length, Barry saw no one, apart from those protected by the metal and glass of motor vehicles, but an old woman hunched on a step. Bundled in dirty clothes, a scarf over her head and a bottle in her hand, she was as safe as he – as far, or farther, from the right category.
But he was still on the watch. Next to viewing the spots where the six had died, he best enjoyed singling out the next victim. No one, for all the boasts of the newspapers and the policemen, knew the type as well as he did. Slight and small-boned, long-legged, sway-backed, with huge eyes, pointed features, and long dark hair. He was almost sure he had selected the Italian one as a potential victim some two weeks before the event, though he could never be certain.
So far today he had seen no one likely, in spite of watching with fascination the exit from the tube on his own way home. But now, as he entered the Red Lion and approached the bar, his eye fell on a candidate who corresponded to the type more completely than anyone he had yet singled out. Excitement stirred in him. But it was unwise, with everyone so alert and nervous, to be caught staring. The barman’s eyes were on him. He asked for a half of lager, paid for it, tasted it, and, as the barman returned to rinsing glasses, turned slowly to appreciate to the full that slenderness, that soulful timid look, those big expressive eyes, and that mane of black hair.
But things had changed during the few seconds his back had been turned. Previously he hadn’t noticed that there were two people in the room, another as well as the candidate, and now they were sitting together. From intuition, at which Barry fancied himself as adept, he was sure the girl had picked the man up. There was something in the way she spoke as she lifted her full glass which convinced him, something in her look, shy yet provocative.
He heard her say, ‘Well, thank you, but I didn’t mean to . . .’ and her voice trailed away, drowned by the other’s brashness.
‘Catch my eye? Think nothing of it, love. My pleasure. Your fella one of the unpunctual sort, is he?’
She made no reply. Barry was fascinated, compelled to stare, by the resemblance to Pat Leston, by more than that, by seeing in this face what seemed a quintessence, a gathering together and a concentrating here of every quality variously apparent in each of the six. And what gave it a particular piquancy was to see it side by side with such brutal ugliness. He wondered at the girl’s nerve, her daring to make overtures. And now she was making them afresh, actually laying a hand on his sleeve.
‘I suppose you’ve got a date yourself?’ she said.
The man laughed. ‘Afraid I have, love. I was just whiling away ten minutes.’ He started to get up.
‘Let me buy you a drink.’
His answer was only another harsh laugh. Without looking at the girl again, he walked away and through the swing doors out into the street. That people could expose themselves to such danger in the present climate of feeling intrigued Barry, his eyes now on the girl who was also leaving the pub. In a few seconds it was deserted, the only clients likely to visit it during that evening all gone.
A strange idea, with all its amazing possibilities, crossed his mind and he stood on the pavement, gazing the length of the High Street. But the girl had crossed the road and was waiting at the bus stop, while the man was only just visible in the distance, turning into the entrance of the underground car park.
Barry banished his idea, ridiculous perhaps and, to him, rather upsetting, and he crossed the road behind the oncoming bus, wondering how to pass the rest of the evening. Review once more those murder scenes, was all that suggested itself to him and then go home.
It must have been the wrong bus for her. She was still waiting. And as Barry approached, she spoke to him, ‘I saw you in the pub.’
‘Yes,’ he said. He never knew how to talk to girls. They intimidated and irritated him, especially when they were taller than he, and most of them were. The little thin ones he despised.
‘I thought,’ she said hesitantly, ‘I thought I was going to have someone to see me home.’
Barry made no reply. She came out of the bus shelter, quite close to him, and he saw that she was much bigger and taller than he had thought at first.
‘I must have just missed my bus. There won’t be another for ten minutes.’ She looked, and then he looked, at the shiny desert of this shopping centre, lighted and glittering and empty, pitted with the dark holes of doorways and passages. ‘If you’re going my way,’ she said, ‘I thought maybe . . .’
‘I’m going through the path,’ he said. Round there that was what everyone called it, the path.
‘That’ll do me.’ She sounded eager and pleading. ‘It’s a short cut to my place. Is it all right if I walk along with you?’
‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘One of them got killed down there. Doesn’t that bother you?’
She only shrugged. They began to walk along together up the yellow and white glazed street, not talking, at least a yard apart. It was a chilly damp night, and a gust of wind caught them as, past the shops, they entered the path. The wind blew out the long red silk scarf she wore and she tucked it back inside her coat. Barry never wore a scarf, though most people did at this time of the year. It amused him to notice just how many did, as if they had never taken in the fact that all those six had been strangled with their own scarves.
There were lamps in this part of the path, attached by iron brackets to the red wall and the brown. Her sharp-featured face looked greenish in the light, and gaunt and scared. Suddenly he wasn’t intimidated by her any more or afraid to talk to her.
‘Most people,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t walk down here at night for a million pounds.’
‘You do,’ she said. ‘You were coming down here alone.’
‘And no one gave me a million,’ he said cockily. ‘Look, that’s where the first one died, just round this corner.’
She glanced at the spot expressionlessly and walked on ahead of Barry. He caught up with her. If she hadn’t been wearing high heels she wouldn’t have been that much taller than he. He pulled himself up to his full height, stretching his spine, as if effort and desire could make him as tall as his cousin Ronnie.
‘I’m s
tronger than I look,’ he said. ‘A man’s always stronger than a woman. It’s the muscles.’
He might not have spoken for all the notice she took. The walls ended and gave place to low railings behind which the allotments, scrubby plots of cabbage stumps and waterlogged weeds, stretched away. Beyond them, but a long way off, rose the backs of tall houses hung with wooden balconies and iron staircases. A pale moon had come out and cast over this dismal prospect a thin cold radiance.
‘There’ll be someone killed here next,’ he said. ‘It’s just the place. No one to see. The killer could get away over the allotments.’
She stopped and faced him. ‘Don’t you ever think about anything but those murders?’
‘Crime interests me. I’d like to know why he does it.’ He spoke insinuatingly, his resentment of her driven away by the attention she was at last giving him. ‘Why d’you think he does it? It’s not for money or sex. What’s he got against them?’
‘Maybe he hates them.’ Her own words seemed to frighten her and, strangely, she pulled off the scarf which the wind had again been flapping, and thrust it into her coat pocket. ‘I can understand that.’ She looked at him with a mixture of dislike and fear. ‘I hate men, so I can understand it,’ she said, her voice trembling and shrill. ‘Come on, let’s walk.’
‘No.’ Barry put out his hand and touched her arm. His fingers clutched her coat sleeve. ‘No, you can’t just leave it there. If he hates them, why does he?’
‘Perhaps he’s been turned down too often,’ she said, backing away from him. ‘Perhaps a long time ago one of them hurt him. He doesn’t want to kill them but he can’t help himself.’ As she flung his hand off her arm the words came spitting out. ‘Or he’s just ugly. Or little, like you.’
Barry stood on tip-toe to bring himself to her height. He took a step towards her, his fists up. She backed against the railings and a long shudder went through her. Then she wheeled away and began to run, stumbling because her heels were high. It was those heels or the roughness of the ground or the new darkness as clouds dimmed the moon that brought her down.