A Demon in My View

by Ruth Rendell

  Anthony shrugged. He felt cold, helpless. “You said Brian had disappeared?”

  Jonathan ran his fingers through his untidy ginger hair. “I haven’t been living in that bloody awful hole for the past week. It stinks and it’s overrun with mice. My sister said I could stay in her place while she’s away in Germany. She’s got a flat in West Hampstead. I went back there last night from the Duke. I got there about midnight and Brian turned up around half-past. He was pissed out of his mind and he was making all sorts of threats and accusations, only he passed out and I put him to bed.”

  “But how did he know you’d be there?”

  “God knows. I’ve gone there before when my sister’s been away.” Jonathan shivered. “The thing is, Vesta could have told him before he …”

  “Then where is he now?”

  Jonathan shook his head. “I left him there and went to work. The fuzz got hold of me at about midday and I told them everything, but when they got to my sister’s Brian had gone. They’re searching for him now. It’s no good looking like that, Tony old man, he must have done it. Why else would he vanish?”

  “He could have gone out and seen an evening paper and panicked. I don’t believe him capable of murder.”

  “D’you think I do? D’you think I like thinking that way about my old pal? We were like—like two red roses on one stalk.”

  Perhaps it was the crass ineptitude of this quotation, or that fact that, in these circumstances, Jonathan had quoted anything at all, which made Winston round on him. “If he did do it, it’s your fault. You shouldn’t have messed about with his wife.”

  “You lousy black bastard!” Jonathan turned his face into the sofa arm and his body shook. “God, I could do with a drink.”

  Not at all put out by the offensive epithets, Winston said calmly, “I wonder how many thousand times the ears of these walls have heard those words?” He shook Jonathan vigorously. “Why I didn’t leave you on the steps of the nick for the dustmen to pick up I’ll never know. Get up, if you want that drink. But we’re not showing our faces in the Waterlily till all this fuss has died down.”

  ———

  “They say,” said Barry, “as that bird as was done in lived in your house. Is that a fact?”

  “Yes,” said Arthur.

  “Only they don’t give you no number in the paper, just Trinity.” Barry spooned sugar from the basin into his mouth and crunched it. “Here,” he said, and thrust the Evening Standard under Arthur’s nose.

  The body of a woman, Mrs. Vesta Kotowsky, 36, of Trinity Road, Kenbourne Vale, West London, was found in Oriel Mews, Kenbourne Vale, early this morning. She had been strangled. Police are treating the case as murder.

  The print swam. Other words were superimposed on it. The body of a woman, Maureen Cowan, 24, of Parsloe Street, Kenbourne Vale, West London, was last night found in a footpath adjacent to Kenbourne Vale Cemetery. Police are treating the case … The body of a woman, Bridget O’Neill, 20, student nurse …

  Strangers to him, utter strangers. He had never even looked into their faces. Had he ever looked into any woman’s face but Auntie Gracie’s and Beryl’s?

  Beryl was Mrs. Courthope’s daughter. When he came home and found her there one evening, drinking tea with Auntie Gracie out of those china cups he now possessed and cherished, he had been jealous of her presence. Who was she to break in on their cloistered world? And she had been there again and again after that, sometimes with her mother, sometimes alone. It was better when her mother was there because then Auntie Gracie stayed in the room too instead of leaving Arthur and Beryl together. He had never known what to say when he was alone with Beryl, and now he couldn’t remember whether he had so much as uttered a word. He couldn’t remember whether Beryl was pretty or plain, talkative or silent, and he doubted whether he had known at the time. He was indifferent to her.

  But she liked him, Auntie Gracie said.

  “Beryl likes you very much, Arthur. Of course, that’s not surprising. You’re steady, you’ve got a good job, and though I shouldn’t tell you so, you’re a very nice-looking young man.”

  Beryl started coming with them to the Odeon. Auntie Gracie always arranged it so that Beryl sat between them. He dared to say he had liked things better before they knew Beryl and had been alone together.

  “There’s no reason why we should ever be apart, Arthur. This is a big house. I have always intended you to have the top floor to yourself one day.”

  He didn’t know what she meant or why she was hoarding her clothes coupons or examining so closely the best of the linen she had kept packed away for so long or talking of furniture being so hard to get in this aftermath of wartime. He didn’t like being left with Beryl and talked about among Auntie Gracie’s particular friends as if Beryl were his particular friend.

  The night it had happened was the night Auntie Gracie had such a bad headache she couldn’t face the Odeon and the film about American soldiers in the Pacific. Arthur said that in that case he wouldn’t go either.

  “You must, Arthur. You can’t let Beryl down. She’s been looking forward to going out with you all the week. You don’t realise how fond of you she is. I know you’re fond of her too, only you’re shy. You haven’t been friendly with any other girls, I’m glad to say.”

  Friendly … Beryl came to the house in Magdalen Hill and they set off together in silence. But when they had to cross the road she took his arm and held on to it all the way to the cinema. Her body was warm and clinging. Suddenly she began to talk. Her talk was madness. He thought she was mad.

  “I’ve never had a boy friend before, Arthur. Mother wouldn’t let me go out with boys till you came along. I know I’m not very attractive, nothing special, but I could have had boy friends. Now I’m glad I waited. Mother’s told me, you see.”

  He said hoarsely, “Told you what?”

  “That you like me very much, only you’re too shy to say so. I like shy boys. I’ve been hoping and hoping for weeks you’d ask me to go out with you alone and now you have.”

  “My aunt’s ill. That’s why she hasn’t come, because she’s ill.”

  “Oh, Arthur. You don’t have to pretend any more. I know you’ve been trying to put her off coming with us for weeks and weeks.”

  They went into the cinema. Sweets were just coming back into the shops. He bought her a bag of things called Raspberry Ruffles and muttered to her that he had to go to the gents. “I want to be excused,” was what he said like you said in school. There was an emergency exit between the foyer and the lavatory. Arthur walked straight out of it into the street. He walked and walked until he had put two miles between himself and Beryl, and then, for the first time in his life, he went into a pub. There he drank brandy because he didn’t know what else to order.

  Soon after ten he left and began to walk home along the path that bordered the cemetery. There was a girl standing near the end of the path, and as he came up to her she said good evening. Later, he had learned she was a prostitute, waiting for the pubs to turn out, though at the time he had scarcely known of the existence of prostitutes.

  He went up to her and put his hand into his pocket where he had stuffed his scarf. Perhaps she thought he was feeling for his wallet, for she moved towards him and put her hand on his arm. He strangled her then, and she was too surprised to struggle or cry out. Afterwards, when he understood what he had done, he knew he would be caught, tried, hanged—but nothing had happened. The police never came to the house in Magadalen Hill, and if they had they would have discovered nothing, for Beryl told neither his aunt nor her mother that he had left her alone in the Odeon. She gave them the impression that it was she who had jilted him, left him finally at eleven that night and never wanted to see him again. Auntie Gracie was hot against her for her ingratitude and her fickleness, and of course she understood why Arthur, disappointed in love, fell ill suddenly from some virus the doctors couldn’t diagnose and was off work for six weeks. He never saw Beryl again, though later he hear
d that she had married a greengrocer and had two children.…

  “Reckon her old man done it,” said Barry.

  Arthur couldn’t summon the energy necessary to rebuke Barry for this slangy, coarse, and ungrammatical usage. He digested the sense behind the words. They would suppose Kotowsky had done it. Glass, evidently, already supposed so. But Arthur was still unable to struggle out of the paralysis of fear in which he had been gripped since eight-thirty. Impossible to get over the fact—yet equally impossible to grasp the full significance of it—that he had not only killed a woman he knew but one who lived in the same house. Impossible too to forget or come to terms with another aspect. He had lied to Inspector Glass, that piranha-faced man, lied under the pressure of panic and forgetting that his lie could easily be detected. Anthony Johnson could show the police he had lied. Anthony Johnson, emerging from the lavatory at twenty to twelve, had seen him creeping up the stairs in the dark.

  He could, of course, say he had merely been down to deposit rubbish in the dustbin. He? At that hour? In his overcoat? No, whatever he said, Anthony Johnson’s testimony would be enough to draw their attention to him. And naturally Anthony Johnson would tell them. By now they would know, would perhaps be waiting for him at 142 Trinity Road.

  Arthur went back there because he had nowhere else to go. No police car, no policeman in the hall. He stood in the hall, listening, wondering if they were up there on the top landing. A door above him crashed for all the world as if Jonathan Dean were back. And he was. Arthur stared. Jonathan Dean was coming downstairs with that black man and Anthony Johnson.

  He managed to say good evening. Winston Mervyn said good evening back, but Jonathan Dean said nothing. He was drunk perhaps. He looked drunk, leaning on Mervyn’s arm, his face grey and puffy. They went out into the street. Anthony Johnson said, “I’ll be with you in a minute,” and turned away to the hall table where he began sifting through the heap of letters Arthur hadn’t felt capable of arranging methodically that morning. Arthur couldn’t leave him to it and go upstairs. He edged along the hall almost shyly, but his heart was pounding with terror.

  Anthony Johnson was looking annoyed. He said rather absently to Arthur, “An awful thing, this murder.”

  Arthur found a voice, a husky weak voice that came from somewhere in the back of his neck. “Have the police—have they interviewed you?”

  And now Anthony Johnson turned round to face him, his blue eyes very penetrating. “No, they haven’t, oddly enough. I’m surprised, because I do have things to tell them.”

  “I see.” Arthur could hear his own voice as strange, as throaty. “Will you—will you go and tell them off your own bat, as it were?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. They can come to me if they want me. I don’t see myself as the instrument of justice or the means of shutting a man up for life. Except, maybe, in very special circumstances. I mean, if an injury were done to me or mine, for instance.”

  Arthur nodded. Relief caused sweat to break over him, flushing him with heat. Anthony Johnson’s meaning was unmistakable, hardly veiled, and as if to reinforce it, as Arthur began to walk away, he called:

  “Mr. Johnson?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been meaning to thank you for that note you left me. It was weeks ago but we don’t seem to have met since. You remember? When you opened my letter by mistake?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was thoughtful of you to leave that note.” Anthony Johnson’s voice was very gentle now, very considerate. Was he imagining the hint of menace that underlay it or was that menace really there? “I wouldn’t like you to think I’d bear a grudge. It wasn’t as if it was a very personal letter.”

  “Oh no,” Arthur stammered. “No, indeed. A personal letter-that would be a dreadful intrusion.” He cleared his throat. “An injury,” he said.

  15

  ————

  Brian Kotowsky was the only son of Polish Jews, now dead, who had emigrated to this country in the nineteen thirties. Stanley Caspian told Arthur that Jonathan Dean and Vesta’s brother were the only close associates Brian had had, and they had been, therefore, closely questioned by the police as to his possible hiding place. The brother-in-law remembered hearing of an aunt of Brian’s, his mother’s sister, who lived in Brighton, but when the police went to her house they found that she had been in hospital for a minor operation since the day before Vesta’s death.

  “I don’t know.” By this Arthur meant he didn’t know how Stanley could know so much. Some grass-roots system, perhaps, that had often proved reliable in the past.

  “He’ll have skipped off to South America,” said Stanley, jabbing full stops into Li-li Chan’s rent book. “They must have had a fortune stashed away, him and her, considering they were both working and not paying me more than a poxy fourteen quid a week for that flat.”

  “Two rooms,” said Arthur absently.

  “A two-roomed flat with fridge and immersion heater. Cheap at the price. Put the kettle on, me old Arthur. Mrs. Caspian’s sister’s mother-in-law’s got a pal who knows a chap that keeps a paper shop up West Hampstead, West End Lane, and he told the pal he’d been helping the police in their enquiries on account of Kotowsky going in there Wednesday morning to get some fags and a paper. Identified him, this paper-shop chap did, from photos. And he’s the last living soul to have set eyes on him. Have a bit of pie?”

  “No, thank you,” said Arthur.

  “God knows what he was doing in Hampstead. It’s more than I can understand, a chap killing his own wife, me and Mrs. Caspian having been a pair of real lovebirds all our married life. A cream passionate is what they call it. Thank God it wasn’t under my roof. There’s nothing like that to give a place a bad name. What’s worrying me is when I’ll be able to relet the flat. I can’t afford to take a drop in my income at this juncture, I can tell you.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder,” said Arthur with malice, “if the authorities don’t seal it up for months and months. And now, if I might have my little envelope?”

  In his pocket was another, mauve-grey, postmarked Bristol, which he had picked up from the doormat ten minutes before. Who could have suspected that she would write again, having been turned down, or apparently turned down, and send a letter to arrive on a Saturday? However, because Stanley Caspian was already parking his car at the kerb, he had snatched it up. Now he wondered why, for he intended no further revenge on Anthony Johnson. Far from it. Just as Anthony Johnson had forgiven him for opening that letter from the council, so he would forgive Anthony Johnson for that act of destruction by fire. Must forgive him, because now he was entirely in Anthony Johnson’s power.

  Dropping the Bristol letter on his kitchen table, Arthur forced himself to think clearly. Anthony Johnson had said plainly that he wouldn’t pardon the theft of a personal letter. No letter could be more personal than last Tuesday’s. Therefore, he must never know that Arthur had taken it. He would surely go to the police and tell what he had seen if he suspected Arthur of interfering with his correspondence. So Anthony Johnson must have this letter. But what if H. mentioned in it that she had written before? Arthur plugged in his electric kettle. The envelope flap reacted obediently to the jet of steam and curled easily away. With extreme care, he took out the sheet of flimsy.

  Darling Tony, Why haven’t I heard from you? I couldn’t believe it when the post brought me nothing from you. Letters don’t go astray, do they? But the alternative is that you didn’t want to write, that you’re angry with me, making me wait now as I made you wait in the past. Or is it that you need time to think in, to make plans for where we shall live and so on? I see you may need time to adjust to a new life and disrupt the new one you have already made. But if you need weeks, if you want to wait till your term ends, can’t you understand that I’ll understand? I’m so entirely yours now, Tony, that I’ll do anything you ask. Only don’t let me endure suspense, don’t leave me in fear.

  But there isn’t any real need to be frightene
d, is there? I know you’ll write. Is it possible that someone living in your house would take your letters by mistake. Surely, no one who did that would keep a letter like mine, a true love letter. And yet I hope and hope this is what happened. Or that this murder in your street I’ve read about in the newspapers has somehow made the police take people’s post.

  Because I have to believe you didn’t get my letter, I’ll repeat what I said in it, that I’ll leave Roger and come to you whenever you like. Your most devoted and loving, H.

  Arthur read it several times. He wondered at the emotion conveyed in it. Strange that anyone could put such exaggerations, such drama, on paper. But her guesswork was correct. Her previous letter had been purloined by someone living in the house, and therefore Anthony Johnson must no more receive this one than he had received the last. He must never be allowed to receive any letter in a mauve-grey envelope, postmarked Bristol.…

  When nothing had arrived from Helen by the weekend, Anthony’s attitude towards her wavered between resentful anger and the more reasonable feeling that her letter had got lost in the post. She would, in any case, write again next week. It brought him a small, bitter pleasure to think she might have written to say she had made up her mind in his favour. How ironical if it were that letter which had got lost and she now be wondering if he were paying her back in her own coin. But he didn’t really think she would have decided for him. The likeliest answer was that she had written with her usual ambivalence, given the letter to some colleague or friend to post, and it lay even now in that friend’s pocket or handbag.

  On Saturday night he phoned Linthea, but she was out and Leroy’s sitter answered. However, on Sunday evening she was free and Anthony was invited to the flat in Brasenose Avenue.

  The Sunday newspapers all had photographs of Brian Kotowsky, dog-faced Brian with his wild hair and his unhappy eyes. POLICE MOUNT MASSIVE SEARCH FOR VESTA’S HUSBAND. She was Vesta now to everyone, a household word, her Christian name on the lips of strangers enough to summon up immediate images of violence, terror, passion, death. But, keeping their options open, the less genteel of the Sundays also carried whole page spread stories entitled in one case, WAS VESTA KENBOURNE KILLER’S VICTIM? and in another, echoing poor Brian’s own words, KENBOURNE KILLER STRIKES AGAIN?