The Lake of Darkness

by Ruth Rendell

  “It’s some relative told the paper,” whispered Mrs. Urban. “Look, it says the money was raised by a customer of the shop who wants to remain anonymous.”

  Martin saw that the by-line was Tim’s. It was a month now since he had seen Tim. Ought he to give him a ring and arrange to see him at Christmas?

  He would be going for a drink with Norman Tremlett on Christmas Eve and to supper with Gordon and Alice Tytherton on Christmas Night. Christmas was a time when you made a point of seeing your close friends, and Tim had seemed a closer friend than either Norman or the Tythertons. Had seemed. Martin couldn’t remember that there had ever, since that encounter in the wood in May, been such a long time go by without their seeing each other. He had read somewhere that we dislike those whom we have injured, but that seemed absurd to him. Surely we should dislike those who injure us? Perhaps both were true. Anyway, you couldn’t say he had injured Tim by not going to his dinner party. No, it was he who had taken rightful offence at Tim’s sarcasm and reproaches. So what if they had made him come to dislike Tim? Tim was a dangerous companion, anyway, and not likely to get on with Francesca.

  Mr. Cochrane didn’t come on the Friday before Christmas. He phoned, waking Martin up, at five minutes to six in the morning to say his sister-in-law was about to be taken away to what he called a nursing home. He intended to go with her in the ambulance. Martin wondered if this accounted for Mrs. Cochrane’s failure to reply to his letter. Perhaps. It couldn’t, however, explain why Miss Watson hadn’t written again or phoned or why he had had no acknowledgement of his cheque from Mr. Deepdene.

  IX

  The police came and talked to Finn. He was one of the last people to have seen Anne Blake alive. Her friends in Nas-sington Road had told them that. Finn said he had left the house in Modena Road at half-past four, soon after she had come in, and had driven straight home. They seemed satisfied. They seemed to believe him. Finn thought how different things might have been if one of the officers, that middle-aged detective sergeant for instance, had happened to have been involved in the investigation into Queenie’s death eleven years before. But no one connected the carpenter and electrician of Lord Arthur Road with the fifteen-year-old white-headed boy who had been in the house in Hornsey when another woman was beaten to death. Finn wasn’t frightened of the police, anyway. His fear was for his mother.

  Lena’s reading glasses were ready for her within a week. By that time the Parliament Hill Fields murder had retreated to the inside pages, but Finn was afraid of some old copy of a newspaper falling into her hands. Such a one might be stuffed into the toes of a bargain pair of shoes or used to wrap a scented candle. When Lena set off for the shops, made stout by layers of coats and a lagging of stoles, a Korean straw basket in one hand and a greengrocer’s net in the other, he watched her with a pang. He couldn’t understand the impulse that had made him slaughter Anne Blake out there in the open, when he might so easily have waited till the next day and achieved an accident.

  How was he going to master others and control destinies when he couldn’t yet master himself?

  He had waited in daily expectation for the balance of the payment to come, for one of those olive-faced children to appear with a parcel. It was Christmas before that happened. The eldest boy brought the money wrapped in red paper with holly leaves on it and secured with silver Sello-tape. Finn’s pale glazed eyes and skeletal frame in a dirty white robe frightened him, he muttered something about Dad having had flu and now pneumonia, and fled.

  Finn peeled off the red paper, not much amused by Kaiafas’ idea of a joke. Underneath, before he reached the Mr. Kipling jam tart box in which the money was packed, was an inner wrapping of newspaper, the Daily Mirror, November 28, with a picture of the path and the grove of trees where Anne Blake had died. Finn tore it to pieces and burnt it as he had burnt Anne Blake’s money and chequebook and credit cards.

  The money was correct, two hundred and fifty ten-pound notes. No one would come robbing him, he was the last person. They were wary of him in the neighbourhood since he had roughed up those squatters for Kaiafas. Kneeling on the floor, tucking the money into a plastic carrier under his mattress, he heard Lena pass his door. She was chattering away; there was someone with her. Mrs. Gogarty maybe or old Bradley whose daughter-in-law locked him out of the house while she was at work so that he had to take refuge in the library or with Lena. Finn listened, slightly smiling. She had a host of friends. She wasn’t like him, she could love people. She had even loved Queenie …

  Lena had been over forty when Finn was born. She had never supposed she would have a child and her husband was dying of Addison’s disease. The baby she named Theodore after the dead man, which he was destined never to be called except by schoolteachers. For Lena he needed no name, speaking to him summoned a special note into her voice, and to Queenie he was always “dear.” They went to live with Queenie when Finn was six months old.

  Lena couldn’t live alone with a baby. She wasn’t strong or self-reliant. Queenie was her first cousin and also a widow, a State Registered nurse who owned her own house and was fat and practical and seemingly kind.

  Queenie’s house was in Middle Grove, Hornsey, one of a row of neat, narrow houses on three floors under a slate roof. Finn would have liked to sleep in Lena’s room, but Queenie said that was silly and wrong when there were four bedrooms. Lena had a small pension from Theodore Finn’s employers, but it wasn’t enough to live on and keep Finn on, so later she went out cleaning for Mrs. Urban in Copley Avenue, leaving the child at home with Queenie. It was Queenie’s aim and desire, though without intentional cruelty, without really knowing what she was doing, to win Finn’s love and make him prefer her over his mother. She knew she would be a better influence on him. She read to him out of Thomas the Tank Engine and gave him banana sandwiches for tea and wheeled him round the shops, and when people said “your little boy” she didn’t contradict them.

  Lena observed it all with speechless anguish. There was no fight in her; she could only contemplate the theft of her son in passivity and pain. But there was nothing to contemplate, for Finn was not to be won. He wavered for a while, half-seduced by the reading and the sandwiches, and then he returned Quietly to his mother, creeping into her bedroom at night, finding his way in the dark.

  When he was thirteen the poltergeists started. Lena, who was psychic, believed that they were spirits, but Finn knew better. Sometimes he could feel the energy coursing through his veins like electricity along wires, charging his muscles and raying out through his finger ends. Lena saw his aura for the first time. It was golden-orange like the rising sun. He was aware of his brain waves, of a surplus of power.

  One day all the plates in Queenie’s china cupboard rattled down off the shelves and a lot of them smashed. Another time a brick came flying through the kitchen window, and in the same hour the framed photograph of Queenie in her staff nurse’s uniform, wearing her SRN badge, fell down off the wall and the glass cracked.

  Queenie said Finn was responsible, he was doing it himself, though even she couldn’t explain how he had brought into the house a rockery stone no one could lift an inch off the ground. The poltergeists went away soon after he started smoking the hashish, and when they were gone he regretted their loss bitterly, praying for their return to any god or spirit or seer he came across in his reading. But they had deserted him. He decided to kill Queenie.

  There were a number of reasons for this. He was afraid of her mockery and alarmed at her distaste for his pursuits. She had burned a book of his about the Rosicrucians. He also wanted to know how it would feel to have killed, and he saw killing as a fire baptism into the kind of life he wanted to lead and the kind of person he wanted to be. Queenie was the obvious choice for victim, ugly, stupid, unsympathetic, one who had never begun to see the light, a young soul. And she had a house which she had said over and over again she would leave to Lena. Brenda, her daughter, who lived in Newcastle, she never saw and got nothing from but a card at Chr
istmas. Finn couldn’t understand why his mother wanted a house of her own, but she did want one, and Finn thought she had a better right to one than Queenie.

  He carried the dream of killing her about with him for two years, but when he actually did the deed it happened spontaneously, almost by chance. One night Queenie awakened him and Lena, saying she had heard someone in the house downstairs. It was springtime, three in the morning. Finn went down with Queenie. There was no one there, though a window was open and some money, about seven pounds in notes and change, had been taken out of a tin in one of the kitchen cupboards. Queenie was carrying the poker they used for riddling out the slow-burning stove in the living room.

  “Give me that,” Finn said.

  “What d’you want it for?”

  “Just to try something out.”

  She handed it to him and turned her back to look for her rings, the wedding band and the engagement ring, which each night she took off and dropped into a glass dish on the mantelpiece. Finn raised the poker and struck her on the back of the head. She made a terrible sound, an unnerving, groaning wail. He struck her again and again until she was silent and lying in a big, huddled, bloody heap. He let the poker fall and turned round slowly and saw Lena standing in the doorway.

  Lena was trembling at the sight of the blood. Her teeth were chattering and she kept making little whimpering whistling sounds. But she took hold of him with her shaking hands and made him wash himself, and she took away his pyjama trousers and his vest, which were all he had been wearing, and stuffed them into the stove among the glowing nuggets of coke. She washed the poker herself. She made Finn put on clean pyjamas and get into bed and feign sleep and then she went out and got the people next door to phone the police. When they came Finn was really asleep. He was never even suspected.

  It pushed Lena over the edge of sanity. She had been teetering there for long enough. “Spontaneous schizophrenia” was what Finn heard a doctor say. That was in the hospital where they had taken her after she had been found going into butchers’ shops and crying out that they sold human flesh. She went into the shops and then she walked into the Archway Road and lay down in the middle of the road and cried out to the motorists to kill her.

  And they hadn’t got the house after all. There was no will, so it went to Brenda who let them go on living there for just six months. Finn never went back to school after Queenie died, and in the depths of the winter after his sixteenth birthday they moved into Lord Arthur Road, she into her top floor warren, he into this room.

  He stood inside the door, listening to the ascending steps and to Mr. Bradley’s thin broken voice croaking over and over, “God bless your kind heart, my darling, God bless your kind heart.” After a while Finn went down to the street where he phoned Kaiafas at home from the call box on the corner of Somerset Grove. He needed employment, he hadn’t done a job of work since patching up the Frazers’ bay.

  Kaiafas suggested a meeting at Jack Straw’s Castle. That was half-way between their homes, he said, and he coughed piteously into the phone. The meeting was for a long way ahead, two days after Christmas, but Finn couldn’t argue, for Kaiafas claimed still to be bed-bound.

  The air was charged with frost and the melted snow had frozen again when he went off to Hampstead to keep his date with Kaiafas. Lena wasn’t yet back from some trip she had gone on with Mrs. Gogarty. There was a waxing moon that hung up over Highbury, greenish-white in a fuzz of mist, and a fine snow was falling, tiny hard pellets of snow that burned when they touched the skin. Up on the Heath, the highest you could get above London and still be in it, an east wind was blowing and the broken and refrozen ice on the Whitestone Pond made it look like a shallow quarry of granite.

  The saloon bar in Jack Straw’s was half empty. Finn sat down to wait for Kaiafas. He wasn’t going to buy himself a drink, wasting money for form’s sake. There was only one person in there that he knew and then only by sight. This was the Post reporter, a dark man as thin as himself with black hair and a red mouth, whom Finn had often seen when he had been conducting a one-man investigation into stories of maltreatment and terrorisation of tenants in Lord Arthur Road. The reporter hadn’t got very far. The people he interviewed didn’t think it worth their while to talk to the police, let alone a newspaper.

  Finn watched him. He was talking to a pompous-looking fat man, writing something in a notebook, stubbing out a cigarette. Finn concentrated on him and tried by the power of thought to make him light another cigarette. What hadn’t worked on the woman with the iron worked immediately on the reporter. Finn felt pleased with himself. Then Kaiafas came in. Kaiafas had a wrinkled, seamed face like an old leather bag and eyes like muscatels. When out for the evening he always wore pale-coloured suits of some smooth cloth with a glistening sheen to it. Tonight the suit was silvery-blue, but Kaiafas had a black sheepskin coat over it with a black fur collar into which he huddled his paler-than-usual face.

  “What will you drink, Feen?”

  “Pineapple juice,” said Finn. “The Britvic.”

  Kaiafas began to talk of Anne Blake as if Finn had had nothing to do with her death, as if indeed he might not know of her death, but he did so with numerous nudges and winks.

  “The rent she pay me, Feen, she could afford have a car, but no, she must go walking in these lonesome places, in the dark. So here we have the result.” Kaiafas had a way of wagging a finger at whomsoever might be his companion. “She have some good furniture. Antiques. Her sister come and take them all away.” He sounded regretful.

  “Well, well,” said Finn.

  Kaiafas nudged him. “An ill wind that blows nobody no good, eh?” He chortled a little which made him cough. Finn didn’t ask him how he was, it wasn’t the kind of question he ever asked of anyone. “Another one of those pineapples?” said Kaiafas.

  Finn nodded.

  “With a drop of vodka this time, no?”

  “No,” said Finn. “You know I don’t drink.”

  “So. Now how about you do a nice decorating job for me, Feen? Paint out the house, do the rewire, and put down a nice bit of carpet I got fall off the back of a lorry?”

  Finn said he would and drank his second pineapple juice. They talked about it for a while and then Finn left. In Lord Arthur Road he parked the van in the same troughs of frozen grey snow from which he had taken it out. As soon as he entered the house, he knew there was something wrong, he could smell it. He went upstairs in the manner of an animal that keeps climbing though it knows there may be a trap or a predator at the top.

  Half-way up the flight between his room and Lena’s Mrs. Gogarty was waiting for him. She was bending over the banisters so that he saw her white moon face searching for him, hovering over the deep stairwell, before he reached his own floor. He came on more quickly, and Mrs. Gogarty clutched him, holding fistfulls of his clothes. Her face worked, her voice was a croak, and she could hardly speak. Mrs. Gogarty was afraid of almost everything the natural world held, of enclosed places and open spaces, of spiders and mice and cats, of crowds, of loneliness, of sudden noise, of silence, but she was rather less afraid of insanity than most people are. She had seen so much of it. As they came to the door of Lena’s room he managed to get the story out of her.

  She and Lena had been to a sale and exchange clothes market in Hampstead, in Fleet Road, and coming away from it to catch a bus, had seen a notice attached to a lamppost which had frightened Lena. Finn wanted to know what sort of a notice and Mrs. Gogarty could only say over and over, “The murder, the murder,” but that was enough to make all clear to him. Lena had seen one of the police notices enquiring for information leading to the arrest of the Parliament Hill Fields murderer. No doubt they were posted up all over the area between Hampstead Heath and Gospel Oak stations.

  “What happened?” he whispered.

  “She shouted out you’d, done it. ‘Him?’ I said. ‘Your lovely boy?’ But words are wind. There weren’t so many people, thank God. A taxi came, I got a taxi, but I don’t
know how I got her in it. I had to hold on to her in the taxi. She’s little but she’s strong when she’s like that.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “In there,” said Mrs. Gogarty, trembling. “Crouched down like a tiger. She said you’d, done the murder and then she said not to send her away. I knew what that meant, I promised not that.”

  Finn said, “Wait a minute,” and went down and into his own room. From the back of the bookshelf, behind Beelzebub’s Tales he took a glass jar that contained his hypodermic and his ampoules of chlorpromazine. Give her a big dose, fifty milligrams-or seventy-five? Finn had no friends, but he had acquaintances who could get him anything. Mrs. Gogarty was still outside Lena’s door, her face quivering and tears now shining in the corners of her not quite symmetrical blue eyes.

  Finn opened the door and walked across the tiny kitchen. He stood in the doorway of the partition he had made. Lena was crouched in the armchair under the budgerigar’s cage, her legs flexed under her, her hands up to her head. When she saw Finn she sprang. She sprang at him and at his throat, holding on to his neck and pressing her thumbs in.

  Mrs. Gogarty gave a little cry and shut the door and subsided against it like a flung cushion. Finn staggered under his mother’s stranglehold. He got his hands under her fingers which had become like steel clasps and he forced her arms down and held her turned from him, one hand holding her wrists, the other arm hooked under her jaw. She was champing now, grinding her teeth, murmuring meaninglessly, “Take me home, I want to go home.” Finn didn’t dare let her go. He knew she would attack him again, for she no longer knew who she was or he was or where they were. He said to Mrs. Gogarty,

  “You do it.”

  She came fearfully to take the syringe, but she had seen it done often enough before, had had it done to herself. Finn could have used a strait jacket but he balked at anything of the sort. He held her until the drug made her limp, and then he lifted her up and laid her on the bed in the diminutive bedroom.