Talking to Strange Men

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I’m sorry if I’m boring you, Colin. If that’s the way you feel I’m sorry I gave in when you insisted I should come.’

  ‘I insisted? That’s rich, that is. That’s very funny. John rang up and you’d rushed in where angels fear to tread before I even got into the room.’

  ‘Are you calling me a fool, Colin?’

  They went on sparring like that until John got up and said he had to get back. He and the Honda returned to the city via the village of Ruxeter and down Ruxeter Road. A glance at 53 told him nothing, for the house was in darkness and the windows of the lower storeys still boarded up. The clock on the CitWest tower registered nine fifty-three and twenty-one degrees. A bright star, a smaller, more brilliant winking light, passed behind the green digits and reappeared on the other side, a meteorite or a satellite perhaps or just an aircraft very high up. John went over Alexandra, over the glassy still river, reflecting lights like a mirror, down into the hinterland of the east, into Berne Avenue, Geneva Road. It wasn’t until afterwards that he noticed the car, the Diane. There were so many cars parked on both sides of the street at night. He was humping the Honda up over the pavement to shove it through the gate and down the side way, when she came to him out of the shadows like a ghost, she seemed to glide from under the branches of his flowering tree, to stretch out her hand and lay it on his arm.

  ‘Jennifer!’

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you for two hours,’ she said and her eyes were glittering in a wild white face.

  4

  THE ADMIRING CIRCLE round the mynah’s cage broke up when John came in, Sharon drifting back to her check-out, Les resuming his sweeping of the floor, and only Gavin and the two customers, a young couple, remaining to hear the mynah utter once more and incredibly:

  ‘I’m an empty nester!’

  John was late.

  ‘Thought you’d forgotten it was back to work today,’ Sharon said.

  He tried to smile. The young couple went off towards the fertilizers and seed packets with their wire basket. Gavin turned to John.

  ‘Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said? I taught him.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘What’s with you, then? A right Tafubar, by the looks.’

  ‘A what?’ said John.

  ‘Things are fucked up beyond all recognition.’

  ‘I’m an empty nester,’ said the mynah bird.

  ‘Gracula religiosa,’ said Gavin, ‘is the world’s best talker, better even than your grey parrot.’

  It was Monday morning. John put on his canvas coat and walked through into the greenhouse where the chrysanthemums were, their bitter scent which he rather disliked making a tingle in his nostrils as he opened the door. Rain drummed on the roof and ran down the glass walls so that all you could see of outside was a blur of various greens. The heatwave had broken on the previous night in a spectacular thunderstorm which kept John awake, though he probably wouldn’t have slept anyway.

  A deep depression, a trough of low pressure, the meteorological people said. This change in the weather had a similar effect on him, casting him into his own deep depression. For up until yesterday evening, though unhappy, devastated, almost distraught, he had still been full of rage, a need to fight, a desire for revenge. It was in that mood that he had gone back to cats’ green and taken that curious step, an action he couldn’t explain to himself at the time or later, of taping his own coded message into the central upright of the flyover. Someone had taken away the cat’s body. He had approached the place shrinking a little, expecting a swarm of flies, a foetid smell, but when he looked towards the pile of grass he had made, when he forced himself to look, there was nothing. Even his grass had gone. Had there ever been anything, a death, the covering of a corpse? Was the cat dead or had he imagined it?

  In the heat of the day, the sun that made sizzling mirages on the deserted roadways down here, the melting tarmac, in the absence of the cat’s body, John had a sense of unreality, a feeling of being in an uncomfortable dream. Without thinking, or thinking only of his hatred of Peter Moran, whom nothing could expel, whom nothing apparently could dislodge from Jennifer’s consciousness, he had removed the message from its plastic envelope and substituted another of his own devising . . .

  He passed along the central aisle of the greenhouse and on into the next one where the seedling alpines were and the begonia leaf cuttings. Gavin had taken care of everything efficiently in his absence. The plantlets were damp but not wet, green and healthy-looking, the place swept clean. But John could feel no enthusiasm for it, only aware of a dreary sensation that he might as well be here as anywhere else, he might as well be here as at home.

  For a while he had believed that his interview with Jennifer marked the last occasion on which they would ever meet and this certitude returned to him now. Yet when she had come up to him, white-faced, out of the shadows, he had thought with a leap of the heart that she was returning to him. And she had said nothing, only preceded him into the house when he unlocked the front door, gone straight into the living room ahead of him as if it were still her home, as if he and she would sit down in there together, have a nightcap perhaps, turn out the lights and go upstairs to bed.

  What had actually happened was that she turned to face him as soon as they were together in that room. He switched on the new table lamp. The atmosphere was warm and rather stuffy. Her face was grim, almost tragic. He had never seen her look like that before, a changed woman.

  ‘I decided to come and tell you what you’ve done,’ she said.

  He said nothing, he just looked at her.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you for hours but I’d have waited all night.’

  To repeat that he had made that revelation to her for her own sake suddenly seemed the rankest hypocrisy. He stood facing her. Oddly, the settee was between them, she holding on to the back of it as if to a barricade.

  ‘I’ll be honest,’ he said. ‘I told you to put you against him. I was in possession of a piece of information that I thought would turn you against him. I saw it as being to my own advantage and I used it – as a weapon.’

  She nodded, as if he had confirmed what she already knew. ‘The police came – after that little boy went missing, the one who was found drowned. Drowned,’ she said, her voice hoarse, ‘after being – abused. The police came to question Peter. I didn’t know why. How could I? They talked to him alone, J wasn’t there. Did you send them?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. They go to people like him as a matter of course when something like that happens.’

  ‘I hate you, John.’ Her voice was still sweet, she couldn’t change that. ‘As if Peter would hurt a child . . . Whatever he may have done he wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ John was still wincing from what she had said. ‘I don’t know what he would do.’

  ‘You thought telling me would get me back. I want you to know it was the worst thing you could have done. Do you think that makes you love a person, telling them a thing like that? You hate any bearer of bad news, it’s well known. And when it’s that sort of news – John, I was angry with you before, I was bored with you, I was sick of it all but I didn’t hate you. This has made me hate you.’

  He shivered under the onslaught. His body shook. Instead of defending himself, he said:

  ‘You can’t still love someone who has done what he’s done. You can’t love a man who molests little boys.’

  ‘I hate you for telling me,’ she said, her tone growing calmer, colder. ‘You didn’t have to tell me. If you love someone the way you say you love me, you ought to want their happiness, you ought to want to protect them from suffering.’

  That one didn’t work, he knew that, though he couldn’t have said why.

  ‘What good did it do, telling me? What did you think, that I’d jump into your arms and say it had all been a dreadful mistake?’

  Some curious intuition, some reading of her mind that was in itself an agony because it bore wit
ness to their mutual knowledge, made him say with slow realization:

  ‘It’s made you feel differently about him though, hasn’t it? It has changed you. You don’t care for him so much.’

  A wave of pain passed across her face, or rather it was as if something under the skin, inside the features, dragged briefly at the muscles. She wouldn’t lie to him, he thought, she never would, even though now it would have been easy, it would almost have been expected of her. She said remotely, in the tone of one who has been dealt a blow:

  ‘It has made a difference, yes. I don’t feel the same about Peter. How could I? You did that, you’re responsible for that.’

  ‘I’m not sorry.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t be. But I’ll tell you something. It’s made me understand he needs me to look after him more than ever, he needs me to protect him – from himself as well as other people. While he wants me I’ll stick to him whether you divorce me or not. And there’s another thing, John. Maybe you never considered this. I know why he left me the way he did before our wedding. It wasn’t for another woman or because he didn’t love me, I know that now. It was because he thought what he’d done would come out and he might go to prison.’

  ‘And suppose he goes to prison in the future? What then?’

  She made no answer. She turned and walked out of the room, looking over her shoulder and saying as she reached the front door:

  ‘I’ll never willingly see you again, John. I’ll never speak to you again.’

  Regrets first for playing it the way he had and saying the things he had said, then anger, then a desire for revenge. Wriggling in among it a worm of hope, the only vital thing in that carcase of negative emotions. If her passion for Peter Moran, her starry-eyed love, was over, killed by what she now knew, there was hope for him, wasn’t there? Yet she had said she would never see him again.

  At cats’ green on the Sunday he took the message from the inside of the pillar and added Peter Moran’s name to the two names already printed there in the ‘Brontosaur’ code. The message now read: ‘Leviathan to Dragon: Martin Hillman, Trevor Allan, Peter Moran: observe and tail.’ What was the good of it John hardly knew. He had some vague idea of thus harassing Peter Moran, of causing him anxiety or even fear, and he derived great satisfaction from what he had done for quite a long while. He felt better, he felt that at last he had made an attack on Peter Moran instead of waiting passively and effecting no retaliation. Besides, what was the use of being in possession of the key to the codes if he never took advantage of it?

  But during the early hours of the morning, this morning, while the storm rumbled in the surrounding hills and the rain pounded on his bedroom window, he awoke out of an uneasy doze to a kind of shocked realization. What had he done? What absurd game was he playing? Was he really setting a bunch of gangsters on to his wife’s lover? Dismay soon gave place to reason. They wouldn’t know who Peter Moran was. He didn’t have a phone, they wouldn’t be able to find him. It was then that, inexplicably, depression descended and enclosed him, remaining with him now, dulling all his perceptions, as he walked through the greenhouses and out into the covered way that led to the gardens and the tree and shrub grounds. The rain was falling in straight rods with a perfect steady evenness. He turned back into the shop and was immediately appealed to by a woman wanting to know how to get her last Christmas’s poinsettia to bloom again this year.

  The rain went on all Monday evening and through most of the night. They probably didn’t pick up those messages at cats’ green every day, John thought, and heavy rain like this was as likely to stop their activities as other people’s. If he went there before going to work in the morning he might be in time to change the message back again, to remove Peter Moran’s name. When he inserted it into the message he must have been a bit mad. Well, not mad exactly but off balance, unhinged as his mother used to put it, as if the mind were a room with a door to it that somehow got slewed off its hinges. And it was true that he had felt like that in the heat and humidity and in his misery.

  The temperature had fallen dramatically. A fresh breeze ruffled the water that reflected a sky of clouds and rare patches of blue. The rain had laid the dust of summer and everywhere had a washed look as of a huge clean-up operation that extended even to the leaves on the trees and the annuals in the flowerbeds. Pools of water still lay in the hollows on Beckgate Steps, a lake of it on the landing of stone slabs. John shied away from thoughts of Cherry as he had done ever since Mark Simms’s confession and his revelations as to her true nature. He gave his attention instead to the Beckgate pub, closed of course at this hour, a slow drip-drip of water falling from the hanging basket over the saloon-bar door. The gang he was involving himself with had damaged furniture and a phone in there and threatened worse violence. John climbed the Beckgate Steps rapidly and broke into a run up the lane, impelled now by an urgent need to get to cats’ green as soon as he could.

  A steady rumble came from the flyover, carrying its morning load of traffic southwards. A thin young tomcat with wet orange fur was licking itself dry, sitting on an upturned wooden box which hadn’t been there on Sunday. Was this the new king? John didn’t want a repetition of Friday’s asthma attack and he kept well clear of the cat. Because of this he didn’t see the interior of the upright until he was close up to it. For the first time, there were two messages inside, two plastic envelopes taped to the metal. But even before he took them down John could see that the one to which he had added Peter Moran’s name was gone.

  He had a curious unaccountable feeling of excitement. And as he unfolded the papers he remembered how he had used to think of his investigations into these messages as a kind of therapy. His interest in them and his curiosity about them had saved him from falling into total despondency. He ought now to be aghast at his action in giving the gang Peter Moran’s name, that he was too late to remedy the mischief, but he felt no remorse. He had an inexplicable desire to laugh but of course he couldn’t start laughing there, out in the open street. He read the two messages with the aid of the key in his notebook. The first said: ‘Unicorn to Leviathan: Stern resignation confirmed effective 1 August.’ The second meant more to him personally. Reading it, he had a momentary sensation of dizziness. ‘Dragon to Leviathan: Peter Moran not known. Address required soonest.’

  John replaced the message about Stern in its envelope and attached it once more to the upright, using a fresh length of tape from the roll he had brought with him. The other he put into his pocket. As he walked away and up to the bus stop the excitement seemed to ebb away and depression to return. Without knowing why such an idea should have come to him as he walked along a street where there was nothing to evoke her, not a name or a picture or an object to remind him, he realized suddenly and clearly that Jennifer would never leave Peter Moran. Somehow he had never quite accepted this before, he had always had hope, always believed that marriage itself, the solid fact of it, would draw her back. Now he didn’t. While Peter Moran remained she would stay with him, and the lodestone, instead of exerting a magic pull over her, seemed to have further toughened the bond between them.

  They – or he whose code name was Dragon – had actually asked for Peter Moran’s address. John kept on thinking about this and in a kind of wonderment, perhaps at the fact that his own message had been taken seriously. But why not? How could it have been otherwise? Dragon believed the message to have come from Leviathan and he was obviously accustomed to obeying Leviathan’s commands. The code would change at the end of the week, John thought, and he might easily miss the announcement of what the new code was to be. Therefore, if he wanted to pass any information to them he ought to act in the next few days.

  A sense of reality returned to expel these ideas. He was a law-abiding citizen, middle-aged and respectable, too dully respectable perhaps. If he had been a lawbreaker with criminal tendencies his wife might have loved him, have stayed with him. The ideas came back again when he returned home to his lonely empty house in the evening.
Most people in his position wouldn’t hesitate, he thought, people who found themselves by sheer chance with access to the services of hit men. What did they call it? Putting a contract out on someone? Gavin would know but of course he couldn’t ask Gavin.

  On the Wednesday evening he did what he had been promising himself to do for some time, he phoned his aunt, and as a result found himself spending the following afternoon and evening with her and his uncle. They didn’t know about Jennifer and he didn’t tell them, just said she was at work. Returning home on the Honda, taking a route via cats’ green was one of the possible options, so of course he went that way. The message inside the upright read: ‘Leviathan to Dragon: October Men to take over from Sunday.’ John got out his notebook and added to the foot of it in Brontosaur: ‘Twenty-two Fen Street Nunhouse.’ He replaced the message, telling himself that by not inserting Peter Moran’s name he had not really taken any significant step, he hadn’t done anything wrong.

  But on the next evening when he saw the police car draw up outside the house and the man and woman – plainly CID people – get out of it, he thought they had come to arrest him.

  5

  THEY AGREED THAT Graham should set the test for Charles Mabledene. It was neither more nor less than that Dragon should get Stern’s code – or Rosie Whittaker’s code, as they must now call it. If he had the ‘in’ at Utting which he claimed to have this should be possible, only loyalty to Moscow Centre would prevent it. If he got the key to the code he would prove his loyalty to London Central beyond a doubt. Graham wasn’t going to use the flyover drop – indeed, Mungo didn’t think he even knew of the location of the drop, using for his particular agents (Scylla, Wyvern and Minotaur) another near the Shot Tower – but intended to meet Dragon at the safe house.

  Mungo usually looked forward to Corfu but this year his expectations were tempered with doubt. Could he afford to be so long as a fortnight away from the centre of operations? The situation was especially touchy now that Rosie Whittaker had taken over. Mungo suspected Rosie of a special brand of dynamism. And he wondered who would be coming into Utting among the autumn term’s intake, more effective recruits for Moscow than Martin Hillman and Trevor Allan, he thought, whom Basilisk had reported as being scared by the prospect before them both academically and (as Basilisk put it) spy-wise.