The Lake of Darkness

by Ruth Rendell

  But Martin Urban, of course, hadn’t talked of transferring Lena to the country because he sincerely believed Finn should buy her a house with the money. His talk of prospective house-buying had been the precise equivalent of Kaiafas’ references to his homeland and Anne Blake’s expressed regret that he had ever left it. They couldn’t bring themselves, these squeamish people, to put their desires into plain words. Finn wondered at it. He thought he could simply have said, fixing his water-bright eyes on his listener, “Kill this woman, this man, for me,” always supposing he was ever in the unlikely situation of wanting anyone else to do anything for him.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he opened a large can of pineapple and ate it with some whole-meal bread and a piece of cheese. He was rather surprised that he hadn’t yet been told who his victim was to be. He had expected Martin Urban to bring the money himself and in a note or by circumlocutory word of mouth to give him a name and a description. In the middle of the floor, between the mattress and the pineapple can and other remains of his meal, lay the wrappings from the parcel. They lay in a puddle of sun-light cast by the only sunbeam that had managed to insert itself through the Chinese puzzle of brick walls and penetrate the room. Finn had told Martin Urban to wrap the money up in newspaper, and now his eye was caught by the picture on the front of the copy of the North London Post which had been around the notes and under the brown paper covering. He stretched out a long arm, picked up the newspaper and looked more closely at this picture.

  He seldom so much as glanced at a newspaper. He had never seen this copy before, but he recognised at once the scene of the photograph. It was the path between the railway bridge and the end of Nassington Road by Parliament Hill Fields. He recognised it because he had been there and because it was there that he had killed Anne Blake-and also because he had seen this photograph in another newspaper, that which Kaiafas had used to wrap his payment as a macabre joke.

  So Martin Urban knew. Indeed, it must be because Martin Urban knew that he had picked him to do this particular, as yet unspecified, job for him. How did he know? Finn felt a prickling of the skin on his forehead and his upper lip as a little sweat broke. There was no telling how Martin Urban knew, but know he must or why else would he have sent Finn that newspaper with that photograph in it?

  The unfamiliar sensation of fear subsided as Finn reflected that Martin Urban would hardly, considering what he was paying for and was about to have done for him, pass his information elsewhere. He shook the newspaper, expecting a note to fall out. He turned the pages slowly, looking for some hint or clue. And there, on page seven, it was.

  A paragraph ringed in red ball-point, with a street number inserted and a name underlined. Finn read the paragraph carefully, committing certain details to memory. Then he put on the yellow pullover and the PVC jacket. This was an occasion for covering his distinctively pale hair with a grey woolly hat and his memorable eyes with dark glasses. Both these items of disguise were acquisitions of Lena’.s Finn locked his door and went down to the garage in Somerset Grove.

  There he replaced his licence plates with a pair bearing the number TLE 315R. These he had two years before removed from a dark brown Lancia which had been left parked in Lord Arthur Road during a day and a night. He had known they would come in useful one day. Slightly disguised and in his slightly disguised van, Finn drove up to Fortis Green Lane and parked a little way down from number 54. It was just on three o’clock.

  It was impossible to tell whether the house was at present empty or occupied. The day was chilly, the kind of day that is called raw, with a dirty-looking sky and a damp wind blowing. All the windows in 54 Fortis Green Lane were closed and at the larger of the upstairs windows the curtains were drawn. It was too early to put lights on.

  The front garden was composed entirely of turf and concrete, but the concrete predominated. On the strip of it that ran round and was joined to the walls of the house was a dustbin with its lid on the ground beside it. The lid lay inverted with its hollow side uppermost and the wind kept it perpetually rocking with a repetitive faint clattering sound. Finn thought that if there was anyone in the house they would eventually come out to pick up the dustbin lid and stop the noise.

  Quite a lot of people passed him, young couples, arm-in-arm or hand-in-hand, older people who had been shopping in Finchley High Road. Their faces looked pinched, they walked quickly because of the cold. Nobody took any notice of Finn, reading his newspaper in his plain grey van.

  The dustbin lid continued to rock in exactly the same way until five when a sharper gust of wind caught it and sent it skittering along the concrete to clatter off on to the grass. Still no one came out of the house. Finn gave it another half-hour and then, when he could tell by the continued darkness of the house that it must be empty, he drove home.

  Lena was having tea with Mr. Beard. There was a net curtain with scalloped edges spread as a cloth on the bamboo table and this was laden with all the things Lena had bought for tea, lattice pastry sausage rolls and anchovy pizza and Viennese whirls and arctic roll and Mr. Kipling almond slices. Mr. Beard was talking very interestingly about Dr. Dee and the Enochian language in which he was instructed by his spirit teachers, so Finn sat down to have a cup of tea with them. Lena kept giving him fond proud smiles. She seemed entirely happy. He tried to listen to Mr. Beard’s account of Dee’s Angel, but he found himself unable to concentrate. He kept thinking, turning over in his mind, how was he going to do it? How was he going to kill this stranger he hadn’t yet seen and make it look like an accident?

  The next day he went back to Fortis Green Lane in the morning. The dustbin and its lid had gone. Finn sat in the van on the opposite side of the wide road this time and watched people cleaning cars and pruning rose bushes. No one came out of or entered number 54, and the bedroom curtains were still drawn.

  It wasn’t until Monday evening, though he went back again on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, that his watching was rewarded. First, at about a quarter to seven, a tallish man in early middle age appeared from the Finchley High Road direction, unlatched the white gate, walked up the path and let himself into the house. He was wearing a thigh-length coat of a sleek light brown fur and dark trousers and a dark grey scarf. The appearance of this man rather puzzled Finn who had expected someone younger. He watched lights come on in the hall, then the downstairs front room, then behind the drawn bedroom curtains. The bedroom light went out but the others remained on. After a while Finn went off and had a pineapple juice at the Royal Oak in Sydney Road and then he walked about in Coldfall Wood, in the dark, under the old beech trees with their steely trunks and sighing, rustling boughs. Finn wasn’t the kind of person one would much like to meet in a wood in the dark, but there was no one there to meet him.

  The lights had gone out in the house when he returned. It was as well for Finn that he was never bored. He sat in the van, on the odd-numbered side of Fortis Green Lane and, putting himself into a trance, projected his astral body to an ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas where it had been before and sometimes conducted conversations with a monk. Such a feat he could now accomplish with ease. The transcending of space was relatively simple. Would he ever accomplish the transcending of time so that he could project himself back into history and forwards into the future?

  He slept a little after his astral body had come back and awoke angry with himself in case his quarry had passed by while his eyes were shut. But the house still remained dark. Finn thought he would wait there till midnight, the time now being ten to eleven.

  While he had been there cars had passed continually, though the traffic had never been heavy. At just seven minutes to eleven a white Triumph Toledo pulled up outside number 54 and after a little delay a woman got out. She was young and tall with a straight nose and lips curved like the blades of scimitars and hair like a bronze cape in the sulphur light. Finn lowered his window. He expected to see emerge from the car the man in the fur coat, but instead he heard the voice of Mar
tin Urban call softly,

  “Good night, Francesca.”

  That settled for Finn certain questions that had been perplexing him. This was the right place, after all, this was it. He had doubted. He raised his window and watched the woman stand by the gate, then open the gate and walk up one of the concrete strips to a door between the house wall and the boundary fence. She waved to Martin Urban, opened the door and let it close behind her. Finn felt relieved. He watched the white car slowly depart, then gather speed.

  As it disappeared into a turning on the right-hand side, his eyes following it, there passed very close to the van’s window on the near side, almost brushing the glass, a brown f urriness like the haunch of an animal. Finn turned to look. Russell Brown was crossing the road now, unlatching the white gate, walking up the path. Although the woman must now have been in there for at least a minute, no lights had yet come on. Though, since she had entered by the back way, she might have put lights on only in the back regions. Russell Brown unlocked the front door and let himself into the house. Immediately the hall light came on.

  Finn switched on his ignition and his lights and drove away.

  XVII

  It saddened Francesca to have to give in her notice. She had liked working for Kate Ross, being among flowers all day, arranging flowers in the window and in bouquets, delivering flowers and seeing on people’s faces the dawning of delighted surprise. Tim had once said that there was something especially flower-like about her and that-he was presumably quoting-her hyacinth hair, her classic face, her naiad airs had brought him home from desperate seas. He had been rather drunk at the time. But there was no help for it; she had to leave. February 24 would be her last day at Bloomers, and Adrian Vowchurch had promised completion of the purchase of the Swan Place flat two days later.

  “You’ll be too grand, anyway, to work in a flower shop,” said Tim, and he put his mouth to the soft hollows above her collar bone. Francesca made purring noises. The air in the room was so cold that their breath plumed up from the bed like smoke. “Why don’t you ask Livingstone to buy you a garden centre?”

  “That would be pushing it,” said Francesca primly. “I think I’ve done marvels actually. I shan’t be getting any more out of him because I shan’t be seeing him. Not after he’s paid for the flat and that Adrian person has done the what-d’you-call-it. He won’t know where to find me when I’ve left Bloomers.”

  “He’ll be able to find you in delectable Swan Place, though perhaps mah clever honey chile won’t give him a key?”

  From the electric blanket came up waves of heat that made them both sweat, but that morning Francesca had found ice on the inside of the windows. The atmosphere held a bitter and quite tangible dampness. Tim lit a Gauloise and smoked it in the darkness. The glowing tip of it was like a single star in a cold and smoky sky.

  “I don’t think I’m going to go there at the beginning. I did think of moving in like he expects me to and after I’d, been there a few days stage a tremendous irrevocable sort of row with him and say I never wanted to see him again. But I don’t think I could. I’m not good at rows. So what I think now is I’ll just stay home here very quietly for two or three days and then I’ll write him a letter. I’ll tell him in that what I’d, have told him in the row, that it’s all over but that I know the flat’s mine and I need it and I’m going to live in it. How’s that? Shall we go and live in that lovely place, Tim, or shall we sell it and buy another lovely place?”

  “That will be for you to say.”

  “What’s mine is yours, you know. I think of you as my common law husband. Can you have a common law husband if you’ve already got an uncommon law one?”

  Tim laughed. “I’m wondering what steps, if any, Miss Urban will take when she discovers your coup. You’d, better not count on keeping the furniture.” He drew on his cigarette and the star glowed brightly. “I must say I shan’t be sorry when mah honey chile isn’t deceiving me every night with another woman.”

  “You must feel like a ponce,” said Francesca. “Ponces never seem to mind, do they?”

  “The minding, as you call it, fluctuates in direct proportion to the immoral earnings.” He stubbed his cigarette out and turned to her. “It has nothing to do with the activities. Personally, I hope you’re giving Livingstone a good run for his money.”

  “Well, yes and no. Oh, Tim, you’ve got one warm hand and one icy cold one. It’s rather nice-it’s rather fantastic….”

  Francesca brought Martin a large specimen of xygocactus truncatus from the shop. It had come late into flower and now, at the end of February, its flat scalloped stems each bore on its tip a bright pink chandelier-shaped blossom. Martin was childishly, disproportionately, pleased by this gift. He put it on the window sill in the middle of the window with the view over London. It was snowing again, though not settling, and the flakes made a gauzy net between the window and the shining yellow-and-white city.

  That was Wednesday and Martin let her go home in a cab, but on Thursday she spent the day and stayed the night in Cromwell Court. Martin took the day off and they bought bed linen and towels, a set of saucepans and a French castiron frying pan, two table lamps, a Japanese portable colour television, and a dinner service in Denby ware. These items they took away with them. The three-piece suite covered in jade-green and ivory velvet, the brass-and-glass dining table and eight chairs would, of course, have to be sent. Francesca said she would be bringing her own cutlery and glass. She was bored with shopping for things she doubted she would be allowed to keep.

  They had dinner at the Bullock Cart in Heath Street. Martin said he had heard from John Butler and that he and his wife would move out of Swan Place first thing Monday morning. He would give the key to the estate agent, or if Martin liked he could call in and fetch it himself during the week-end.

  “We could collect it on Saturday,” said Francesca who could foresee the difficulties of any other course.

  When Mr. Cochrane rang the bell at eight-thirty in the morning Francesca opened the door to him. She was wearing the top half of Martin’s pyjamas and a pair of blue tights. Martin had come out of the kitchen with the Worcester sauce apron on. His expression was aghast. Mr. Cochrane came in without saying anything, his eyes perceiving the flowering cactus, his nostrils quivering at the scent of Ma Griffe. He closed the door behind him, said, “Good morning, madam,” and walked into the kitchen where he put his valise down on the table.

  “How’s your sister-in-law?” said Martin.

  “Home again,”said Mr. Cochrane. He looked at Martin through the bi-focals, then carefully over the top of them. Then he said, “Yes, home again, Martin, if you can call it home,” and, carrying a tin of spray polish and two dusters, he went into the living room where he scrutinised the cactus and, lifting up each item and examining it, the sheets and towels and saucepans and lamps they had bought on the previous day. At last he turned to Francesca, his death’s head face convulsed into a smile.

  “What a blessing to see him leading a normal life, madam. I like a man to be a man, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean all right,” said Francesca, giggling.

  “Is there anything special you’d, like me to do, madam, or shall I carry on as usual?”

  “Oh, you carry on as usual,” said Francesca. “I always do,” and she gave him her best and most radiant smile.

  It was her last day at the shop since Kate had said she needn’t come in on Saturday morning. Next week, when she had disappeared, would Martin come to the shop and ask Kate about her? It wouldn’t really matter what Martin did after Monday, after the deal was completed and the money handed over. Perhaps she should screw up her courage and really move in on Monday afternoon as Martin thought she was going to, move in, invite him that evening-and tell him the truth, that legally the flat was hers and she intended to live in it without ever seeing him again. She would never summon up that courage. The only way was to do as she had told Tim she would do, disappear, write to
him, when he made a fuss let Tim explain to him, finally take possession when it had all blown over. The flat is yours, hang on to that, she told herself. It’s yours in the law and nothing can shake that.

  Martin called for her at ten to six and they went back to Cromwell Court where he cooked the dinner. At about eleven he drove her up to Fortis Green Lane and Francesca was again obliged to take refuge in the back garden of number 54. Tonight the house was in darkness. She stood against the stuccoed wall, listening for the car to go. As it happened, she came out too soon. It hadn’t been Martin’s car but a small grey van pulling away. Martin was still there, still watching the house-watching for lights to come on?

  She told him she had left her key in the house and would have to wake Russell to let her in.

  “Please go, darling. I’ll be all right.”

  Reluctantly, Martin did go. Francesca was actually trembling. She had to sit down on the low wall for a moment. When she got up and turned round to look warily at the house she half-expected to see its occupant glaring at her from an upper window. But there was no one. It was colder tonight than it had been for a week, the sky a dense unclouded purple and the air very clear. She really needed something warmer on than the red-and-blue-striped coat over her corded velvet smock. Each time Martin landed her up here she tried walking in fresh directions to find a taxi, but now she had exhausted them all. So was it to be down to Muswell Hill or across to Finchley High Road? Martin had headed for Muswell Hill … Francesca, who wasn’t usually very apprehensive or given to improbable fantasies, found herself thinking, suppose his car broke down and I walked past it and he saw me…? Now that her task was so nearly accomplished, she was growing hourly more and more frightened in case anything should happen at the eleventh hour to stop her getting the flat. People said it was virtually impossible to withdraw from such a deal once the contracts were exchanged. He wouldn’t have to withdraw, though, he would only have to have a new contract made with his name on it instead of hers.