The Girl Next Door: A Novel

by Ruth Rendell

  This, then, was the conclusion anyone would jump to. “Never mind what it was. I didn’t do it.” Rosemary got up, pulling down and smoothing her crumpled dress. “Do you know where my handbag is?”

  Freya came in with it. Rosemary retrieved the half-empty bottle, made her way into the bathroom, and poured the contents into the basin. “They call it a sink now,” she said to Judith, who had followed her. “In my day a sink was something you only had in the kitchen.” Then, returning to the bed, she handed the empty bottle to Freya. “Would you put that into your bin, dear? And, Freya, could I stay here? I need to sleep. I need a long sleep. I don’t think I can go home, so would you let me stay here?”

  Freya, who didn’t want her, who had a lot to do before the birth of her baby and was herself feeling tired, said, “Of course, Gran. You must stay as long as you like.”

  “Shall I find a doctor for her?” Judith whispered.

  “I don’t know.”

  Rosemary went back to bed, fully clothed, and fell immediately asleep. When she had been asleep for five hours, Fenella had had two parking tickets, and Judith wanted to go home, she phoned her father.

  She got his voicemail: “We are on our way to Italy. Possibly back on the fifteenth.”

  ALSO TRYING TO get in touch with Alan was Michael Winwood, and he too got the Italy message. Rosemary simply wasn’t at home, he concluded, but it was hard to tell as she apparently had no mobile phone and no email address. Stanley Batchelor was another possibility. But the voice that answered his call he would never have recognised, it was so feeble and high-pitched.

  “Not at my best, Mike,” Stanley whispered. “Had a bad turn. Still in bed actually, though I’ll get up later. I’ve got Spot with me and he’s a great comfort, I can tell you.”

  That kind of voice made you want to clear your throat because the speaker needed to do so. Poor Stanley was ill. He couldn’t remember Lewis Newman’s number. He couldn’t even remember where he had written it down. Helen was fetched and she quickly found it in Stanley’s directory, the proper place. But now Michael had it, he wondered if he even needed to call Lewis on this rather delicate matter. Going directly to Colin Quell might be best.

  But when he tried it, a young woman who said she was Quell’s PA answered. It was a revelation to Michael that police officers, even senior police officers, had PAs. Calling him Michael, she told him that Detective Inspector Quell was no longer on the case. Would he like the extension number for Inspector Inshaw? Noticing that she didn’t use this Inshaw’s given name, he said he would like to speak to Mr. Inshaw and was told, in rather an admonitory tone, that it was Ms. Inshaw. At the extension was a pleasant-sounding, friendly woman. Yes, the “hands in the buried box” case was now in her hands. The pun wasn’t remarked on, and Michael’s wincing was invisible.

  Would he come to her or would he like her to come to him? He chose the second option. Caroline Inshaw, as she introduced herself, was quite unlike how he had pictured her. Not that he had pictured her much, it wasn’t something he did, but he had expected a tall, thickset woman with cropped hair, in her late thirties and dressed in a dark suit. Instead, she was tiny, slender, and though her hair was black, very long. If anyone had told him she was a ballerina, he would have had no difficulty in accepting it. She arrived at six in the evening, and sure she would say she didn’t drink on duty, he nevertheless asked if she would like a glass of wine. Somehow her saying yes endeared her to him.

  With their glasses of Chablis on the table before them, he told her about Clara Moss and what she had said to him about a man called “Raiment,” and because she was old with a Sunday-school childhood and was probably a churchgoer, aligned the word with “clothing.” Caroline Inshaw—she had asked him to call her Caroline—had never heard the term before. She frankly told him so.

  He talked about his parents. “It wasn’t a happy marriage. I never heard them speak a fond word to each other or even a polite word, come to that. At a later date they would have separated or got divorced, but not then, not in the 1940s. My mother had a lot of friends—I mean men friends.” He was hesitating now. Perhaps she could see how much it cost him to talk like this about his mother. She hadn’t wanted him; if she had never been cruel to him, she had been indifferent. But she was his mother. To speak of her sexual life, of her possible adultery, seized hold of his chest and bowed him over. He made himself straighten up. “There were several men she saw and went out with. I don’t know if my father cared, perhaps he did. According to Clara Moss—she cleaned for us, was often in the house—one of them was James Rayment. He was the uncle of a man—well, a boy then, of course—called Lewis Newman. You do know about the tunnels?”

  Caroline Inshaw said she didn’t, which made Michael wonder how much of the case Quell had been interested in, let alone cared about, and how much he had passed on to her. Michael described the tunnels as briefly as he could and told her about the children who had been there. She showed more interest than Quell ever had. “I must tell you that even after so long I find it pretty hard—worse than that really—to talk about my mother like that.” Michael bit his lip, stared down at the hands in his lap—the hands!—and made himself go on. “She was very lovely to look at, my mother. I expect the temptations were great—all those men in uniform, you see.” He saw as he finished speaking the lady with the little dog who hadn’t been lovely to look at except to a lonely child. She was talking to him again in the railway carriage and he was stroking the dog. Again he pulled himself away from the familiar dream. “It’s not for me to tell you how to do your job. I don’t mean to do that, but if you were to do a DNA test on me and on Lewis Newman, wouldn’t that show if the hands belonged to James Rayment and . . . and . . .” It astounded him that he couldn’t go on, that the two words that in the past, on the rare occasions when he’d uttered them, had left him unaffected now refused to be spoken.

  “And your mother?” Caroline Inshaw spoke so gently and kindly that he was touched by an enormous gratitude.

  He nodded, silent because all his effort at control was going into preventing the tears from coming.

  “I think we could do that. You and I could go together to speak to Mr. Newman and do a test on him. I can do one on you today. It’s only a matter of testing saliva.”

  “It’s Dr. Newman. I don’t mean to correct you. It’s just that he’ll know more about this sort of stuff than I do.”

  She produced a tablet in a green leather cover. “I’ve a note here that your father is still alive. Is that so? Sorry to put it like that, but when one is a hundred, or nearly that, it’s a reasonable enquiry to make.”

  “He’s still alive.” Michael felt that these were ominous and in some ways terrible words. He said nothing about the cyanide.

  IF LEWIS NEWMAN hadn’t entirely forgotten about the hands in the box, the subject had drifted to the back of his mind. It was all so long ago. It wasn’t as long as it would appear to a young or middle-aged person, but still the box of skeletal hands had half hidden itself in that mental compartment where unexplained but not very interesting mysteries of one’s early life lived. Such as what had happened to Uncle James, and what a strange thing it was that Lewis’s mother, who had been what in those days they called an infants’ teacher, was the daughter-in-law of a man who couldn’t read or write. Uncle James was still present in Lewis’s memory and quite active there. He thought how different James’s disappearance would have been today, essentially because he would hardly have been allowed to disappear. James would have had a mobile phone, very possibly an email address, credit cards, be registered with a doctor like one of Lewis’s own patients. Probably the police would no more have searched for him today than they would have then. Lewis recalled walking across the fields with his young uncle and, though there was a war on, the peace and silence of those fields. At home, although there was radio, there was no television, no music you could choose to accompany you wherever
you went, no Internet, no antibiotics in general use though they had been discovered, no DNA.

  He was thinking about the discovery of DNA, about the double helix, while he went about his daily chores, washing dishes—he saved them up until he ran out—putting clothes in a plastic bag to take to the launderette, a little basic dusting, thinking about DNA’s use in medicine and police work, when the phone rang. Such an amazing coincidence, almost uncanny, as if this detective inspector woman were reading his thoughts, that for a moment he could hardly speak. DNA? Yes, of course, though he couldn’t imagine why. She told him.

  MICHAEL HAD ALSO received an unexpected phone call. That was the reason for his sitting beside Clara Moss’s bed, holding her hand. The call had come from “her next-door,” whose name he learned at last. “It’s Mrs. Beecham as lived next to Mrs. Moss, sir.”

  He was taken aback by that “sir.” Perhaps she had discovered from Clara that he was a lawyer. He would have liked to tell Mrs. Beecham not to “sir” him, but he didn’t know how. She might be offended or, worse, upset.

  “The social come in,” she said. “They’ve poked their noses in a lot since you was last here, sir.” There it was again! “They want her in one of them hospices, she’s got the Big C, you see, and she’s not got long. Clara wouldn’t budge from here and she’s asking for you. I told the social, sir, that if she stayed here, I’d take care of her, me and Sam, we’ll look after her.”

  “I’ll come now,” said Michael, thinking, How good these people are, how endlessly kind. “Tell her I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

  “Thank you, sir, that’s very good of you,” she said, echoing his accolade of herself.

  Now his tears fell, those ever-present tears that flowed not so much from grief as from admiration of the goodness of others. Was it because he had seen so little goodness in his early years and because he’d first encountered it with a woman and a dog in a train? He went up to Vivien’s room, lay down beside where she had lain, and cried all the tears he had.

  So now in the afternoon he was with Clara Moss. The first thing he did was give her the wedding ring, wondering if she would recognise it after all these years. But she knew it at once. She smiled and nodded. He needed no medical knowledge to tell she was dying. The doctor, Sam said, came in and gave her morphine, that was the only thing to keep the pain away. Proudly, Sam said the doctor trusted her and left liquid morphine with her to give Clara the prescribed dose. Clara gave Michael a small smile and squeezed his hand. He would come back again tomorrow, he said, and he wondered what was wrong with him that he had made such a fuss about visiting her at Maureen Batchelor’s request. It was easy, almost a pleasure. Not too long on the tube and then a short walk. The following day he found a bed-and-breakfast in Lower Park Road and stayed the night, returning to Clara in the morning.

  23

  THE HANDS IN the box had from the first been a plague to Colin Quell. “A pain in the neck,” he referred to it. To use his detective skills on investigating the possible provenance of ancient body parts that may have lain where they were found for six or seven decades was beneath his dignity. Such an investigation had no urgency. The hands had been there for sixty years or more and wouldn’t go away. Moreover, the owners, if that was the word, might not even have been dead, still less murdered, the hands removed from living bodies. True, no half-hearted enquiries on his part had uncovered any evidence that local hospitals were missing amputated hands at the relevant time. His own solution to the mystery was that the hands had been taken from bodies found on bomb sites in the East End of London. Taken by perverts, of which there was no shortage in his experience. Whoever they might be they were long dead by now.

  Because the police boast that they never give up on an investigation and Detective Inspector Quell feared this one would be with him for life, he was overjoyed when his chief superintendent told him the case would be handed over to Caroline Inshaw.

  “I’ve no objection,” Lewis said. “You can have my DNA if you want. But why?”

  “I believe you had an uncle who went missing in 1944 and was never found. A Mr. James Rayment?”

  “That’s so. But a lot of people went missing in 1944. The war was on.”

  “You never found what happened to your uncle?”

  “I was a child. Children aren’t much concerned about things like that. The ways of adults are strange to them, why they behave the way they do, why they care. My parents were worried, I remember that. They made enquiries, I believe, but the police wouldn’t look for a missing young man.”

  “No, perhaps not. Do you know if your uncle knew Mrs. Winwood? Anita Winwood?”

  “Michael’s mother? I don’t know. Possibly. Uncle James stayed with us, you know. He stayed with us on and off during that summer and he used to go out in the evenings till very late. My mother gave up the search in the end. She decided he’d been called up and joined the forces, though the army had never heard of him.”

  “And you? You didn’t think about it?”

  “I told you. I was a child. Maybe I wondered why he’d never said good-bye to me, told me he was going away. But that’s all.”

  PAYING A VISIT to Rosemary Norris was a way of passing the time and perhaps a duty. He was in Loughton and had woken early as people often do when in unfamiliar surroundings. The sun was shining, though the day had a cold look to it. Michael decided he would walk down to Traps Hill before he went to Clara’s. He could tell Rosemary about Clara and perhaps even enlist her help to visit her. He had never been to her flat but he knew the address. Was it too early for a call? Half past nine seemed all right. A man who was retired might have a lie-in but not a woman, he thought. Women always had household tasks that they liked to get through early. But though he rang the bell and clattered the letterbox, there was no answer. Away somewhere or ill? He tried again and then he left it, encountering on his way out a woman with a large, stripy cat in her arms.

  “Mrs. Norris is staying with her granddaughter. She phoned to tell me. Very considerate, I thought, but she always is thoughtful.” The woman paused, looked doubtfully at him. “Imagine that man leaving her. At his age. You can’t understand it, can you?”

  Michael said nothing but managed a wry smile. He walked down to Forest Road. Samantha was in Clara’s front garden, putting a rubbish bag into a bin.

  “Lilian’s with her.” That would be Mrs. Beecham from next door. “She’ll be glad to see you. She’s a bit brighter this morning.” The front door was pushed open for him. “Which is funny really considering they’re coming to take her to the hospice any minute.”

  “She wanted to stay at home,” Michael said.

  “Not allowed. Shame, isn’t it? It’s not as if she’d no carers.”

  Clara was in bed but fully dressed, her hair brushed, her shoes placed side by side on the floor next to the chair where Lilian sat. The wedding ring was on the thin third finger of her thin left hand. Michael went up to the bed and, meeting Clara’s eyes, evoking a small smile, bent over and kissed her.

  “I’ll lay down now, Lil. Take my pillows away, would you. Let me lay down. They’re taking me away, Michael.”

  “Sam told me. I believe it’s a nice place.” He had no knowledge of it, had only heard that hospices usually were nice.

  Her voice was faint now but at least there was a voice. “The pain’s all gone, Michael. Is it all right calling you Michael? I did when you was little.”

  “Of course it is, of course.”

  “You was just a kid, and they was at the kitchen table holding hands like you wasn’t there and like I wasn’t there, his hand holding hers across the table, and your dad walked in.” Clara sighed, closed her eyes, and her hands moved across the coverlet, plucking and picking, reversing the action and then repeating the movements. “Walked in,” she whispered, “and saw. He never said a word. I remember it like it was yesterday.”

&nbs
p; Michael felt sick. He would never hold anyone’s hand again. Never, never. He couldn’t bring himself to ask her if the man was James Rayment, though he knew it must have been. The room had become quiet. Clara breathed silently. Lilian Beecham said to him, “Get you a cup of tea, shall I?”

  He shrugged, moved his hands from side to side in a gesture that might have meant anything. The tea came, and to his surprise he was glad of it. A vehicle had drawn up outside with AMBULANCE printed on its side. He half rose and turned to check that this was what it was. The moving hands that wandered across the coverlet were still now. He had only ever seen death happen once, and that was when Vivien had slipped, silent and still, from life to insensibility to death.

  He knew it when he saw it. “Tell them they won’t be needed,” he said to Sam. “She’s gone.”

  ROSEMARY TOO LAY IN BED. She did nothing. Although Freya’s spare room had a small television, Rosemary didn’t watch it. Nor did she read or listen to radio programmes. Usually considerate, as her neighbour put it, she forgot all that and in the flat in St. John’s Wood Road behaved as if she were in a hotel. Freya or David, home on paternity leave, brought her breakfast, and Judith, who called in every day, told her it would do her good to get up and move around, maybe go out for a walk. Only Fenella, arriving with Sybilla, had the nerve to tell Rosemary she wasn’t ill and should pull herself together. Sybilla bounced up and down on the sofa until her great-grandmother shouted at her to stop and threatened her—the ultimate in child abuse—with a “good hard smack.”

  Rosemary sat at the dining table, silent and patient. “Like a dog,” said David, “waiting for its dinner.”

  “Well, she is waiting for her dinner or her lunch,” said poor Freya, back in the kitchen. “What are we going to do?”

  “She’ll go when the baby’s born. You’ll see.”