Talking to Strange Men

by Ruth Rendell

  Each of the messages, like each one he had ever read of Stern’s commands, began with a number and ended with a number or row of numbers. You couldn’t tell whether the end one was supposed to be one large number or a series of single figures. First came a single number of one or two digits, as it might be 6 or 17, then letters all run into one another without a break, then a series of digits: 22 NDITBHGTYIBSWONMWPSCSWXAPNUGN 931, it might be, and the second message, 24 WQBHTSOPMHPSTRITVCXWTYRN 1003. The second ultimate number was higher than the first by eight but that didn’t seem to get anywhere. He tried adding the figures together, nine plus three plus one equals thirteen and trying a code based on an alphabet starting at the thirteenth letter which is M. Then he tried adding one to three and a code based on an alphabet starting with the letter E. Neither worked. And what about the 22 and 24 anyway?

  The window was wide open because it was very hot. He worked by the window, since the air was too still and heavy to blow his papers about. Angus’s music drifted in through his open door. Maybe there was some way he could get Angus to put the code on his computer but even a computer couldn’t tell him what those numbers were, could it? Graham with Ian and Gail came into view walking up Hill Street. They had all been swimming at the municipal pool in Fevergate. A green van with Mogul Palace printed on its side drew up down below in Church Bar. The driver got out and unloaded a stack of circular aluminium containers. Next to Indonesian, Mogul cuisine was Mungo’s favourite, and he leant out of the window hoping for a sniff of it but the containers were too tightly sealed to give anything away.

  He made his way downstairs as the Mogul van man disappeared round the back way. The numbers might be pages in a book, he thought, only it would have to be a pretty long book. The Bible? A whiff of tandoori chicken which now greeted him, coming up the stairs from the kitchen, suggested it might even be the Koran. Were there a thousand and three pages in the Koran?

  The parcel on the hall table was addressed to him. Mungo knew what it was by the feel of it through the paper. He was somewhat appalled and his hunger, which up to that moment had been raging, slightly abated. He began picking off the sticky tape. The last thing he had expected was that Dragon and Basilisk would actually do it – well, Dragon you might as well say, for he had no doubt whose had been the directing force. He had been sure Moscow Central would have been alerted well in advance and the fisherman moved before Charles Mabledene got there. Of course there was a possibility Rosie had tried to move it but had been prevented by her parents to whom the truth could not be told. But somehow Mungo didn’t believe this.

  Angus ran down the stairs and on down to the kitchen, turning briefly to look at Mungo, frowning. The fisherman now unwrapped, Mungo stood it on the crumpled brown paper and stared at it. Charles Mabledene had been instructed to eliminate it but presumably had had misgivings about that. He was getting too big for his boots. Mungo sighed. He had been so certain the fisherman wouldn’t be there that he had given no thought to the result if it was there. There was no doubt that this was stealing and he had always drawn the line at actual stealing. He couldn’t help thinking of what Angus had said about things ending in tears or even disaster. Still, disaster wasn’t going to come by way of this fishing gnome if he could avoid it.

  And as to Charles Mabledene being the traitor, nothing was proved except his deviousness, his subtlety.

  ‘Mungo!’

  ‘Coming,’ called Mungo, but his father had already appeared at the head of the stairs.

  At the sight of his youngest contemplating a large plaster figurine fresh from its wrappings, Fergus said worriedly:

  ‘Now, Mungo, what on earth possessed you to buy that? It must have cost a fortune. You haven’t got that kind of money. We don’t want that kind of thing here anyway. It’ll have to go back.’

  ‘Yes, Dad, I know,’ said Mungo. ‘Don’t you worry, it’s going back tomorrow.’

  3

  JENNIFER CAME DOWN the steps of the Albright–Craven building at a few minutes past one. She was wearing a light summery dress of white cotton with grey spots and flat white sandals and she had sunglasses on with very wide frames and dark lenses which concealed a good deal of her face, hardening it and robbing it of character.

  She came up to John unsmiling, so much hidden behind those black glasses.

  ‘It’s terribly hot. I can’t stand this kind of heat, it’s so humid.’

  He had never known her complain about heat before. She had seemed to long for the sun and revel in it when it came. He thought she looked tired and strained. On his way he had gone into a wine bar in Fevergate and seeing that they had tables out on the pavement with striped sunshades over them, had booked one. The table they had given him was in the deep shade cast by the largest remaining fragment of city wall, a bastion of narrow Roman and medieval brickwork hung with wallflowers and virginia creeper. Jennifer, who had hardly spoken, sank down into the cane chair, laid her arms on the table and said in a rather breathless pleading tone:

  ‘Have you thought about what I asked you? Are you going to do it?’

  She seemed to have forgotten the purpose of their meeting.

  ‘Would you like a drink, Jennifer? We could have a bottle of wine or a soft drink, something cold.’

  ‘I don’t mind. Wine, if you like.’ She looked up and said rather miserably, ‘I expect you think I was threatening you, it did look like that. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I wouldn’t take any money from you, you know, I wouldn’t dream of taking a share of your house.’

  He felt as if a hand had wrenched at his heart. He thought, I know why people, those old writers and poets, talk about the heart, about the heart breaking, it’s because that’s where you feel it, in your chest, in the middle of you.

  ‘I want us to share the house,’ he said. ‘Do you know how much I want that?’

  She was shaking her head. A waitress came and he ordered the wine and some ice in case it wasn’t cold which it probably wouldn’t be. Jennifer said:

  ‘I wish I smoked. There are times when it would be wonderful to have a cigarette, only I don’t smoke. I never could take to it.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  We have so much in common, John thought, we feel the same about such a lot of things. He was sure now that like him she wouldn’t want to eat though there was a menu here written up on a blackboard.

  ‘I don’t want anything to eat,’ she said. ‘It’s too hot.’

  He wasn’t wearing a jacket, just a thin cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up. In his trouser pocket he could feel the sheet of paper, folded in four, on to which the newspaper library had photocopied the Peter Moran story for him. The slippery surface of the paper felt cool against his fingertips.

  ‘We should never have got married,’ Jennifer said suddenly and rapidly. ‘It was an awful mistake. I married you because I couldn’t have Peter, you must know that. I was fond of you but I wasn’t in love with you. I ought to have known he’d come back one day.’

  ‘Has he ever told you why he went away?’

  She seemed surprised by the question. Before she could answer the wine came. After the fashion he had learned from Mark Simms but never would have followed in the old days, John drank a glassful down. Jennifer’s answer wasn’t really a reply. She said, looking into the golden faintly sparkling wine in her glass:

  ‘I have to be with someone who needs me. I’ve found out I have to be with someone who needs me to look after them. Most of my life I’ve looked after people, my father was ill all those years, and then my mother. Well, you know all that. There’s something wonderful about feeling you hold someone in the hollow of your hand, their fate, their life. They’re absolutely in your keeping. I thought you wanted looking after, John, but you don’t, you’re strong. You were going to look after me. Peter depends on me, he leans on me, he’d be lost without me.’

  John’s voice shook. ‘I am lost without you.’

  ‘No, that’s not true. You’re a survivor. He’s not. He clings
on to me as if I were – well, some kind of life-support machine. I have to ask you again, I have to keep on asking you, will you give me a divorce? Please, John.’

  John poured himself a second glass of wine. He thought, now or never. It’s right to tell her anyway. It’s right for her to know. I am her husband and any means I can use to get her back are right for me to use, any lodestone that will draw her to its pole. Why then did he feel he was about to do something wicked and wrong? She had bowed her head and sat there patiently. The black glasses still covered her eyes but now she put up her hand and took them off. John’s hand slowly withdrew the folded paper from his pocket and as he looked up he saw over Jennifer’s shoulder that Mark Simms was sitting at one of the tables near the wine bar’s entrance. He was alone, a carafe of red wine in front of him and a plate of some sort of salad which he seemed to have left untouched. John turned his head sharply away. He said:

  ‘I said to you on the phone I’d got something to tell you.’

  ‘I’d forgotten,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

  He was certain then that she already knew. That was what she meant by all that life-support stuff. It was a damp squib after all, this revelation of his. Perhaps it was better that way. He began to talk in a rapid neutral voice, setting out the facts, telling her what he had learned, giving a précis of the newspaper story. When he got to the part about Peter Moran pleading guilty to molesting the child, he saw that all the colour had drained out of her face. She was quite white, with a purplish bruise-like mark on the bridge of her nose where the sunglasses had pressed.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said when he had finished.

  ‘You didn’t know, then? I thought you might already know.’

  ‘You’ve made it up.’

  Feeling sick now, he pushed the paper across the table to her. A drop of spilt wine made a grey stain in the middle of it. He drank some more, pouring and spilling some more. She read the account, one hand up to her forehead. There was sweat in beads on her upper lip, on that livid whiteness. He looked away. He looked at Mark Simms and then wished he hadn’t, for Mark saw him and raised one hand in a tentative wave. To his horror, Jennifer began to cry. At first she sobbed soundlessly, dry-eyed, sitting stiffly upright, then she lowered her head to the table, on to her folded arms, and wept bitterly, her whole upper body shaking.

  People going by looked curiously at her. John felt nothing but a kind of emptiness, a deadness. He remembered a phrase that came from he didn’t know where about being cruel only to be kind. He had been that, he had had her welfare at heart, or he thought he had. Had it only been his own?

  ‘Jennifer,’ he said. ‘Jennifer, I’m sorry.’

  She made no answer. He touched the shaking shoulder and had the dreadful experience of feeling the flesh shrink away under his hand. His eyes briefly squeezed shut, he asked himself what he was going to do, what was the next step? He opened his eyes to find Mark Simms bending over him.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘No,’ John said. ‘Thanks, but no.’

  ‘I thought perhaps I could help.’

  ‘How can you help? Just leave us alone. You’ve done enough damage.’

  Jennifer suddenly flung up her head. She looked terrible, white and feverish and distraught, her face swollen and actually wet with tears.

  ‘I’m going,’ she said. ‘I must go. I must go back.’

  She didn’t say she must go home. John noticed and exulted in the midst of his fear. Mark Simms stood there, looking at them, waiting for an introduction. Moving like an old woman, Jennifer struggled to her feet. She rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. John took a handkerchief, which was clean though not ironed, out of the pocket where the newspaper photocopy had been and offered it to her. It was absurd how his heart leapt when she didn’t refuse it, but took it, covering her face, spreading hand and handkerchief across her face.

  ‘I’ll go and get a bus,’ she mumbled through her fingers.

  ‘You’re not fit to go on your own.’

  John had to find the waitress and pay. He looked round rather wildly but she had disappeared inside the wine bar. Jennifer had sagged against the table, leaning there, supporting her body on her arms. The whole thing was suddenly taken out of John’s hands by Mark Simms – whose presence, whose existence, he had forgotten – saying:

  ‘You’re Jennifer, aren’t you? My name’s Mark, I’m an old friend of John’s. Let me help, let me take you home.’

  The taxi seemed to materialize before them, it was as if Mark summoned it out of the air. John’s eyes met Jennifer’s and they held each other’s eyes for a long moment. Then she was gone and the taxi gone before he had even paid for the wine.

  What had he expected? That she would promptly repudiate Peter Moran and throw herself into his, John’s, arms? Or that she would defy him and declare herself loyal to Peter Moran whatever he had done? One or other of these he had expected while knowing things are never as you anticipate them. At home, pottering about the garden after an almost sleepless night, John tried to tell himself things were good, the outcome of their interview had been the best possible. He must allow for the effects of shock and simply wait for it to wear off.

  Nothing that could happen now would surprise him, he felt. If Peter Moran himself arrived raving or Mark Simms turned up as a self-appointed intermediary, if Colin rang to say it was a different Peter Moran, he had made a mistake, if Jennifer phoned asking for time to make up her mind, she was no longer anxious for a divorce – if any of those things happened he would be prepared. For half the day, though, he felt he shouldn’t go far from the phone. But when it didn’t ring and no one came, as the hot sultry day shambled on towards afternoon, he took his books back to the Lucerne Road library and on an impulse walked the further half-mile down to the flyover and cats’ green.

  There was a message inside the upright. John opened the plastic package, copied down the message and deciphered it there and then. ‘Leviathan to Charybdis,’ he read, ‘Martin Hillman, Trevor Allan, investigate and report.’ Who were these people? Shopkeepers, proprietors of small businesses the gang wished to intimidate? And why did he care? Surely he had more pressing personal matters to concern him. He replaced the message in the upright.

  There were no cats about today – or was that a gleam of yellow fur under the last stunted bush where the curve of the road dipped to meet the ground? John hardly knew why he went closer. Perhaps because of the stillness of it, the absence of glinting eyes. He pushed through the dusty coarse grass, the litter of picked bones.

  The king cat lay stretched out dead, its eyes open and glazed, in this heat the flies already busy. Yet there seemed no mark on the body, no blood. The stiff muzzle had a white frosting, he had been an old cat, perhaps old enough to die a natural death. John didn’t even like cats and this one had been no purring pet but a savage near-wild animal, yet he felt absurdly moved, distressed even by this death in the heat, this untended corpse left a prey to scavengers. If it had been possible to bury the cat he would have done so but all he could do, in a futile gesture, was pull up handfuls of grass and cover the body with it. By the time he had finished he was choking and gasping for breath. Whatever it was in feline biology that promoted asthma, it survived death.

  It was a slow homeward journey he made, his chest full of phlegm and his eyes weeping. He might actually have been crying, he thought, for the king cat and for his own loneliness and Jennifer’s pain and for Cherry. But no one he passed looked at him. In stupefying heat people didn’t look at each other, they lost their alertness, their desire to observe. The phone was ringing as he entered the house. He thought it must be one of them, any of them, Jennifer, Mark Simms, Colin, even Peter Moran. But it was only Gavin.

  ‘I thought you’d like to know Grackle is OK again.’

  For a moment John couldn’t remember who Grackle was. Then, when he did realize, he thought aggrievedly that it was only because he was alone, a kind of widower who ne
ver went away or did anything exciting, that Gavin thought he could call him up like this and talk nonsense. Gavin was going on and on in his barely comprehensible slang about the mynah’s illness, some kind of bird virus, and its B-cells, whatever they might be. He had taken it to the vet three times.

  ‘I suppose the firm is expected to foot the bill,’ John said and immediately wished he hadn’t, for after all the mynah belonged to Trowbridge’s and was worth a lot of money.

  ‘I’ll pick up the tab for that,’ said Gavin.

  The phone didn’t ring again. This was his holiday, John thought when it got to seven, and he hadn’t been anywhere, he hadn’t even been to see his aunt. Constance Goodman answered when he phoned Colin’s home and seemed to take it for granted that the invitation to go out somewhere for a drink would include herself, so John found himself in the snug of an unpopular country pub where the tables were dirty and the licensee indifferent, apparently committed to an evening of conversation with Mrs Goodman on the subject of the decline in standards of British primary school education. No one mentioned their last meeting or Peter Moran but after a while Mrs Goodman began to talk in a very dogmatic way about modern marriage, how glad she was Colin had never married, for he and his wife would surely have split up by this time. Mrs Goodman scarcely knew of any marriage in which the parties were under fifty which had lasted. She enumerated the many she knew of that had come to grief. Colin yawned.