by Ruth Rendell
At this rate she’d get no sleep at all. A blessing tomorrow—today—was another Bank Holiday. She put the light on, sat up and found on the floor beside the bed the Radio Times with the photograph of Martin in it. They were showing an old film in which he had a small supporting part, made years before the Forsyth series. He looked very handsome and very young. She resisted the temptation to kiss the picture, because that would be sentimental silliness. On Wednesday she would definitely ask Zeinab her intentions about her job and the wedding, and persist until she got a straightforward answer. Decisions were good, decisions helped to bring peace of mind. Martin had been very decisive. She said goodnight to him, put out the light and lay wakeful in the dark for a long time.
Julitta put the phone down and her feet up on Anwar’s bed. It was a tight fit as Anwar and Flint were also there, Flint smoking a joint which he passed to Julitta. The air was blue and sweet with marijuana fumes. They had only been back ten minutes but Keefer had already fallen asleep on a bag of Anwar’s dirty washing in the corner. Anwar alone was not absorbing anything stronger than a can of decaffeinated Diet Coke. He raised himself on one elbow to back away from Julitta’s smoke and, looking down at her neck, said, ‘Where’s that diamond thing?’
Her hand went to her throat, she sat up and screamed.
CHAPTER 26
He was to go to the cinema, the Odeon at Swiss Cottage, and take the money with him, drawing it from banks and cash dispensers as before, and carried this time in a computer carrying case. The Odeon was one of those multi-theatre cinemas and the film he was to choose, Bend It Like Beckham, was showing in auditorium three. The performance he must attend was at three fifteen on Wednesday and he must be there by five past. Most of the seats would never be occupied at that unpopular time in the afternoon. He was to sit in the fourth row from the back on the extreme right-hand side, the last seat on the right if possible. In the unlikely event of the fourth row being full he was to go back to the third.
Jeremy was incensed at her choice of film and he wondered if she had come to know more about him in the past week, including knowing how any of the other productions at the Odeon, such as Unfaithful or About a Boy would have suited him better. She also seemed to know he had a computer business and that therefore a carrying case was something he could easily acquire. That presupposed that she, or she and the boyfriend, if boyfriend there was, was intelligent, and this he doubted. It must all be coincidence. The girl’s final instruction was that after half an hour he was to place the carrying case under his seat, his seat, not the one in front, and leave. They would be watching, they would find it. But he was not to linger and if he involved the police … He, she, they, knew very well he wouldn’t tell the police.
The wearisome business of getting the money together began all over again and he had only a day and a half to do it in this time. As he walked from cash dispenser to cash dispenser to bank and back again, he thought how slight a risk they ran. If he went to the police—to Crippen, he supposed, or that Zulueta—he would have to tell them what the burglars had taken from his flat and that would be the end of him. After he had given them another five thousand he would have only a little over five thousand left, and that in investments. Those had been the extent of his savings and after they were gone he would have to sell his car or even his house. Don’t think about it now, he told himself, go to the cinema tomorrow, hand it over and then have a good think. Surely a man of his intelligence could outwit a teenager in a black robe and her cretin of a boyfriend, if there was a boyfriend.
Will had only been back in Star Street for an evening and a night but Kim was moving out. On the previous afternoon, having returned at lunchtime and expecting Will back by three or four, she had set about making his room and his kitchen immaculate, and in her mother’s word, ‘homelike’. The place was clean enough already but Kim got busy with vacuum cleaner, duster and spray polish. She bought pink tulips and white lilac, and arranged it in the only two containers she could find—one was intended for waste paper. And then, rather like a nineteen forties housewife getting ready for her man, she had a shower and dressed herself in the diaphanous summer frock she had bought on Saturday. In the nick of time she remembered she hadn’t changed the sheets on Will’s bed—vitally important in her plan—and set about doing it.
Her hair had been done that morning, by one of the assistants at the salon who came round to her mum’s specially. Normally, she wore very little or no make-up but this afternoon she had done her face with care and paid more attention than usual to her nails. When she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror—the only one in the flat—she thought she looked a lot like Cindy Crawford, only younger.
Becky brought Will home three hours later than Kim expected. By that time the roast chicken was overcooked, the oven chips blackened and dried up, and she had redone her face. Her anger was compounded by Becky coming in with Will. A man of his age didn’t want his aunt running around after him like a hen with one surviving chick.
‘You’re very late.’ Kim was conscious as she spoke of sounding just like her mother.
‘I don’t think we said any definite time, did we?’ said Becky.
‘Will said he wouldn’t be late. He said it last Friday.’
Becky took a bottle of wine out of Will’s fridge and drew the cork. She must have put it there herself because Will never drank wine and mostly Kim couldn’t afford it. But she accepted the glass Becky offered her. She needed it.
‘Seven is hardly late,’ Becky said mildly. She drank her wine very fast, poured a second glass and remarked on the cleanliness of the flat. Kim liked that, she was calming down, but she wanted Becky to go all the same. What was she hanging about for? She’d got a home of her own and a boyfriend.
But Becky stayed and chatted, saying she was glad of a chance to get to know Kim better, and how nice she looked, and though she thought she could smell something cooking, Will wouldn’t need another meal as he had had his before they left Gloucester Avenue. Kim turned off the oven and as soon as Becky was finally off and the front door closed behind her, tipped all the food into the waste bin. By this time Will had had the television on for half an hour. He had smiled at Kim and said hello but after that not said another word.
Despondently, she sat down beside him and watched the serial. Since she had failed to see any previous episodes, it was meaningless to her. Anyway, she scarcely saw it. She was thinking about her plan. Surely she hadn’t been wrong about Will’s feelings for her? This past week, when they sat on the sofa together, she’d held his hand and he’d seemed to like that. One evening, as they were going to bed she’d given him a hug and he’d hugged her back, very tightly, the way her brother Wayne’s boy did when she’d given him something. For some reason that comparison made her feel uncomfortable, as if she were thinking of Will as a kid, which was absurd and impossible in a grown-up man who had to shave and was six feet tall.
She took his hand now and he turned his head and gave her a lovely smile. The serial was succeeded by another one, police this time instead of people in a pub, and then by the news. Will never wanted the news, so he played with the remote until he got a comedian and a bunch of leggy girls in glittery bras and miniskirts.
‘Aren’t you tired?’ Kim asked. ‘It’s late.’
‘I want to see this programme. I’ll go to bed when it’s over. Promise.’
It was another reminder of her eight-year-old nephew. She wished she’d never thought about him because now she couldn’t get him out of her head. Everything Will said—‘In a minute, in a minute’ and ‘I’m coming, I said I was coming’– seemed an echo of Wayne’s little boy. But at last the programme was over and obedient Will had turned off the set and gone to the bathroom. She put all the lights out but his bed lamp and pulled the curtains round her bed only to get into her nightie, a new one, short and pastel-blue. He hadn’t seemed to notice her frock but perhaps he’d notice this.
But when he emerged in pyjamas, she felt sudden
ly shy and drew the curtain round herself quickly. Her heart was beating fast. She heard Will get into bed. The place went dark as he switched off the bed lamp. That was something she hadn’t bargained for but she lacked the nerve to switch it on again. She almost gave up then, but thought, if I don’t I won’t be able to stay here, the way I feel. It’ll be lovely once I’ve shown him I want it, maybe that’s what he’s been waiting for, five minutes and he’ll be thrilled I showed him how I felt. She came out from behind the curtain, went over to Will’s bed and whispered, ‘Will, Will …’
‘What is it?’ He sounded half asleep.
‘Shall I come in with you?’
She didn’t wait for an answer but pulled back the cover and got in beside him. He would, he must put his arms round her. And she’d let him take her nightie off, he’d like that. She put her hands on his chest and lifted her mouth to his.
What happened was worse than anything she’d feared. He turned his head away so that his thick fair hair was in her face and shook her hands off him. ‘I don’t like other people in my bed,’ he said and rolled over. His forehead was against the wall and his knees drawn up to his chin. ‘Go away. Go away.’
So now, at seven thirty in the morning, after a sleepless night of incomprehension and shame, she was moving out. Will would be leaving for work in an hour but she wanted him to see her go, wanted him to understand he couldn’t get away with treating her like an unpaid cleaner and cook when she wasn’t his girlfriend. But he seemed to have forgotten all about last night.
‘I’m leaving, Will,’ she had told him. ‘I can’t stand any more. I’m not your mum to sleep in your room when you’re scared at night.’
‘My mum’s dead,’ he said quite cheerfully, ‘but I’ve got Becky.’
She would have liked to attack him for that, beat him with her fists and scratch him with her long nails. Instead, she finished her packing and, since he didn’t offer to carry her cases downstairs, put them outside the door herself. She’d take them to work and after work—well, it’d be great if the three girls she knew would let her move into the Kilburn flat with them. If not, it would be back to her mum and dad in Harlesden.
‘Goodbye, Will,’ she said.
He was watching breakfast television and he didn’t look round. ‘Bye-bye.’
To tell James she never wanted to see him again, Becky had to get drunk. She had been in a bad enough way on the return journey from Star Street. Twice she mounted the pavement and once missed going into the back of someone else’s car by about a millimetre. The driver said she had touched his bumper but there wasn’t a mark. Much worse was being told, with a lot of effing and blinding, that she was ‘pissed’ and should be ashamed.
If she hadn’t been drunk she would have understood that it’s not very brave, not to say badly behaved, to tell your lover goodbye on the phone. But the pleasant unsteady haze she found herself in, the room rising and falling in waves, took away any ethical feelings. She phoned James, said their relationship was over and please not to try to see her.
‘Becky, how much have you had to drink?’
‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Not much. Not much at all.’
‘You probably think I never noticed all those secret sips you were having but I did. Oh, I did.’
‘I hate you,’ she said, as Will might have done, and, as Will would never have done, slurring every word, ‘You’re a puri-puri-puritannical moraletic—mor-al-istic, moralistic, boring prude.’
She slammed the phone down before he could. He was all the things she had said, anyway, and nasty to Will, and impatient and—well, all sorts of other things. What things she didn’t know because she had fallen asleep.
Next day she felt so ill she phoned the office and said she wouldn’t be in, she had summer flu. With the help of aspirins, Alka-Seltzer and at last a hair of the dog, it still took her all the morning and most of the afternoon to recover. Shame and self-recrimination set in. Guilt too, as she wondered if Kim Beatty had noticed anything odd about her. God knows, she was justified in having a few drinks. Will, reluctant to leave the flat in Gloucester Avenue, had begun pleading with her, as soon as lunch was over, to let him stay, not to make him go back to Star Street. He had been so happy these past two days. There was plenty of room in her home, it wasn’t true that she hadn’t a second bedroom. It was big enough for him, he didn’t want any more.
It had been a long time since she had last heard him whine as he was whining then. ‘Please, please, go on, let me stay. Say I can, Becky, go on.’
‘You’re happy with Kim, aren’t you? You’re not alone.’
Before resuming his pleas, he had looked at her as if he hardly knew who Kim was. And she had been so sure the arrangement was a satisfying one for both of them, even wondering at one point if what was surely the inevitable had happened, what she believed had really been Kim’s wish all along and perhaps his too, and they were lovers. Now she was almost certain she had been wrong. Had she been, only half consciously, pimping for Will? The blood mounted hotly into her face.
‘I do want to stay here with you, Becky. You won’t make me go away, will you?’
Recourse to the gin got her through the afternoon. Sullenly, he watched television. She made herself raise the subject again when he hadn’t whined for half an hour. ‘Your staying here isn’t going to be possible, Will. Please don’t ask me again. I’m going to cook you your favourite meal, a big fry-up, and then I’m going to drive you home.’
He hadn’t replied.
The pendant was lost. Tired though they had been, they had searched the room and been up and down the stairs and into the street, but all in vain. The clasp must have come undone and the chain and diamond fallen to the ground when the three of them were among the crowds in the Mall.
Julitta kept saying she wished she could put the clock back and she’d give anything not to have worn the bloody thing.
‘You’ve got nothing to give now,’ Anwar said brutally, though Julitta still had her share of the ten thousand and he had had no intention of letting her keep the pendant. ‘It’s too late anyway, so you can stop crying. I can’t be doing with a fucking woman crying.’
But Julitta continued to sob. ‘Someone’ll have picked it up and kept it,’ she bawled and, unconscious of the irony, ‘Fucking thieves.’
Flint dragged her home. It was three in the morning. When they had gone Anwar made himself a cup of cocoa on his gas ring and crumbled up a chocolate milk flake on the top. It helped him reflect. It was he himself, not Julitta, who had worn the abaya and picked up Jeremy’s backpack from Aberdeen Place. As had been his intention, the diamond geezer had thought it was a girl. Perhaps he should do it again. On the other hand, it was their turn …
This time Flint could pick up the dosh and if they had the luck to succeed in a third attempt, it would be Julitta’s turn. The geezer was too frightened to be anything but harmless. Keefer, who had succumbed to shooting up heroin again along with his methadone, a dangerous mix, had become so comatose and speechless that he and Flint had carried him downstairs between them, put him in the white van and dumped him on the steps of St Mary’s Hospital. It only went to show, thought Anwar, who could be sententious at times, how the unfamiliar possession of money went to the heads of the weak-willed and those of low intelligence.
He finished his cocoa, got under the duvet and was asleep in two minutes. It was two in the afternoon before they met next day, and that was too early for Julitta who kept yawning. She seemed to have recovered from the loss of the pendant but it was hard to tell with someone who had her mouth open most of the time. They discussed plans for retrieving the second instalment of the money.
Flint wanted to disguise himself in turban and djellaba but felt humiliated when Anwar told him that the headgear and the garment each belonged to different cultures. He would do much better to wear his black hooded jacket and dark glasses.
‘I could get a tache from the joke shop.’
‘And my mum’s go
t a wig,’ put in Julitta. ‘She had it for her alopecia.’
‘Grow up, will you?’ said Anwar. ‘And for fuck’s sake stop yawning. I’m pissed off with the sight of your tonsils.’
In the end Flint went off to the Odeon at Swiss Cottage dressed just as Anwar recommended, in blue jeans, black leather boots, a loose hooded jacket and shades like goggles, with a rolled-up Tesco carrier in one of his pockets. The geezer was instructed to enter the cinema at five past three but Flint wasn’t surprised to see him cross the road from the bus stop, carrying a computer case, at three minutes to. There’s nerves for you. He wouldn’t dare leave before three forty-five. Flint went across the road for a coffee.
Sitting at the extreme right-hand end of the fourth row, the case on his lap, Jeremy looked around the cinema for a woman in a black robe. No one. The only other people were two middle-aged women together, a woman with a child of about six and several solitary men. The commercials and the trailers were still running when the half-hour was up. He looked around him again, uncertain whether there had previously been seven people in the cinema including himself or eight. Had the figure in the hooded jacket had been there from the start or had he recently come in? It made little difference. Was it a man or a girl? It seemed too slight for a man, even a very young one. Its hands, a sure giveaway of sex, were concealed in black gloves. Still, it must be the same girl. It was her height and, as far as he could tell, her shape. Suppressing a sigh, useless anyway in the circumstances, he put the computer case under his seat, got up and left.
Flint, who had once wanted to go on the stage—Hollywood, Bollywood, or just the TV—and still occasionally had dreams of acting, made a big display as of a laid-back girl sashaying out of the cinema. Behind the partition dividing the back row from the entrance and foyer, he paused, stared idly over the top of it at the screen for five minutes, then strolled a yard or two down the right-hand aisle and sat down where the geezer had sat. The film had started. Pity he had to leave, really, he was beginning to enjoy it, but when on a job stick to the job, he told himself virtuously. This was work, not pleasure. He pulled the case out from under the seat, put it into the Tesco bag and made his way out. No one seemed to notice or care.