by Ruth Rendell
‘Even if we were a union,’ said June in a rather sad voice, ‘we couldn’t make people ask other people to a party.’ She brought out the phrase she had carefully learned. ‘And if we could it would only create a precedent.’
The agenda was going nowhere. Any Other Business was sometimes a fruitful area for discussion but today the only item of any interest was Dex’s declining work. He was too shy to raise the subject himself but had made a prearrangement with Jimmy to tell the meeting how he had been threatened with dismissal by the Neville-Smiths and turned away by Mr Sohrab and Ms Lambda. There was nothing wrong with his work. It was just that the recession had bitten so hard that everyone was short of money these days.
‘Me too,’ Dex interrupted. ‘Aren’t I short?’
June intervened to say that the Saint Zita Society wasn’t a union. With a frown that furrowed his forehead into ridges and ruts like a ploughed field, Jimmy went on to say that Dexter also had a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with the would-be vendors of number 10, empty now for six months, to keep the garden and lawn tidy, ‘Which they reneged on,’ said Jimmy.
‘Well, you know what I always say,’ said Richard, ‘a gentleman’s agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.’
When the laughter from those who hadn’t heard the old joke before subsided, it was agreed that Dexter should advertise his services in Mr Choudhuri’s shop window. Meanwhile, Thea proposed that he should do a couple of hours a week for herself and the other residents of number 8. As soon as the words were out she began worrying what Damian and Roland would say. Suppose they refused to pay him and left it down to her? When the society members came out into Hexam Place the Thanksgiving guests were leaving in taxis or their own cars. Walking a few paces behind, Dex followed Montserrat to the nearest Tube station. Montserrat ought to have waited for him so that they could walk together but she didn’t want to, she didn’t want passers-by to see her with him and maybe think they were friends or even worse.
Preston hadn’t invited her. She had invited herself and he had said, ‘I suppose so.’ She wanted him to give her a key. ‘In case you’re not back.’
‘I expect I shall be,’ he said. ‘You don’t need a key.’
Not long and he would ask her to move in with him. Then she would have a key. Perhaps she ought to ask Preston if he’d have Dex to work for him – well, work for Lucy and the kids, do the garden at number 7. He and Lucy always said the garden was a mess but never did anything about it.
‘Why should I?’ was Preston’s initial response. ‘I’m not even living there any more. I don’t care if it looks like a hayfield. Besides, he’s mad. Someone told me he tried to kill his mother.’
‘He was let off,’ said Montserrat. ‘He was unfit to plead or something.’ She thought it would be unwise to say that he, Preston, had not only tried but succeeded in killing Rad Sothern.
His face turned away from her, Preston studied the Evening Standard which he had brought in with him. For several days there had been nothing about Rad Sothern except an article predicting the producers of Avalon Clinic’s plans for the future. But tonight there was a further rehash of Sothern’s past; from where she sat it looked like an examination of his childhood and early youth, his previous television roles.
‘He had a harem of women,’ Preston said suddenly. ‘It was you brought him into my house. You’d been one of them, I suppose. And you brought him into my house. To meet my wife.’
‘Lucy met him at a party at the Princess’s.’
‘That’s your story.’
Montserrat said nothing. Quarrelling with him must be avoided. He got up and poured himself another glass of wine, then, as if on second thoughts, refilled her glass. ‘Aren’t you soon going to Barcelona?’
‘I was. I’ve changed my mind.’ She wasn’t going to tell him it would be unwise to go when things had got to this stage between them. ‘Do you think the police will leave you alone now?’
‘I hope so. I haven’t done anything and they know that very well.’
Any minute now and he would ask her to go to bed and say he would follow her. It was hardly romantic but you can’t expect romance from someone you’d been associated with the way they had. She waited, half smiling, sweeping back her long dark curls with one carefully manicured hand. Instead he said, ‘You must give me an undertaking you won’t talk to the police if they come again.’
‘I don’t want to talk to them.’
‘Don’t.’ He folded up the paper. ‘If they ask you just say you know nothing. You’ve told them everything you know.’ He got up, took a step towards her. Was he going to kiss her? He wasn’t. ‘I’ll call you a taxi,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you want to get the Tube at this time of night.’
Christmas trees from the Belgrave Nursery were a little more than twice as expensive as those from a typical garden centre but most of the residents of Hexam Place were untroubled by matters like that. This year Mr Siddiqui was taking orders in early November and promising his daughter that Khalid would personally be delivering the tree for number 7.
‘It’s nothing to me, Father, who delivers the tree. It is just that Mrs Still would like a fine big one to make fun for the children. No one else in the street has small children so she should have the best.’
The truth was that Lucy had expressed no opinion on the size or quality of the Christmas tree or even said she wanted one at all. Rabia had asked her if she should buy one of these festive conifers and Lucy had said, ‘Oh, do as you like. I don’t care.’
Why Christian children enjoyed looking at a Norway spruce hung with glass ornaments and packed around with presents, silver strings woven through its branches and a fairy doll on top, she had never understood. That was of no importance. All that mattered was that Thomas should gaze and clap his hands and laugh.
Lucy had followed up her indifferent comment on the Christmas tree by one equally dismissive. ‘It will be the last one they ever have, I expect. The kind of flat we shall be able to afford won’t have room for luxuries like that.’
Rabia pushed Thomas in his buggy up to look at his favourite tropical fish. Khalid was there, setting out on display pots full of red and white poinsettias. In spite of what she had just said to her father, she found herself looking properly at Khalid for perhaps the first time. He was very good-looking and, more than that to her, he had a kind face, the firm red mouth always ready with a smile. His eyes were bright and keen.
‘Good morning to you, Mrs Ali, and how are you today?’
There was no need to snub him. What harm had he done her? ‘Good morning, Mr Iqbal.’
Her thoughts she could never put into words but she could think them. If I were to marry and have a baby boy of my own, a healthy one with no troubles that would take him to an early death, would I be able to forget Thomas? Were there any substitutes for someone much-loved? Perhaps. But not if the substitute didn’t yet exist, if it was only a doubtful dream.
She need commit herself to nothing. To become friends with a man – in one’s father’s presence, of course – was a long way from promising to be his wife. As she began pushing Thomas back to the main building where her father was, she thought of Nazir, her husband, who had been kind if demanding, but the memory of him was already growing vague while she could see her children before her eyes as if they were there, walking along the path ahead of her – her two dead children with Thomas between them now he could walk so well. Lucy had always been kind to her, but while she knew that Khalid was reliable and honest and Mr Still too probably, Lucy might say to her on a Tuesday that she Rabia, was so good with the children they couldn’t get on without her, and on a Wednesday, ‘Oh, darling, we’re moving out tomorrow and you’ll have to leave.’
Would she? She might. Outside the door to her father’s office, she picked Thomas up, hugged him tightly, then carried him inside to where Abram Siddiqui sat behind his desk.
‘This big boy is too heavy for you, my daughter. Put him down. Let him
walk about the room.’
‘We shall not stay long, Father,’ said Rabia but she put Thomas down and watched him make his still unsteady way across the carpet to a display of violently coloured seed packets, fortunately just out of his reach. ‘I came to ask you to invite Mr Iqbal to tea when I come next Sunday. No, you must not look like that. It is nothing, it is just getting to know someone a little better.’
The newspapers had carried no mention of interviews held with suspects ‘helping the police with their inquiries’. Perhaps there were no inquiries. Sondra maintained that she had seen Detective Sergeant Freud and Detective Constable Rickards twice call at Miss Grieves’s flat but these calls had no perceptible consequences. Asking Montserrat’s guidance as to whether she should accept Jimmy (to which she received a very positive ‘Don’t you dare!’), Thea, perhaps not liking to be so violently dictated to, said that Miss Grieves had once again seen the red-headed detective talking to Montserrat on the basement doorstep of number 7.
‘That’s a lie for a fucking start,’ said Montserrat, more savagely than the statement warranted.
‘All right. Calm down. You want to watch your mouth. I must have been mistaken. No doubt you know dozens of guys of about thirty with orange hair.’
‘No doubt that old bat’s a mental case. She must be a hundred years old.’
So relations between them became very strained. Thea might have accepted her friend’s advice and said no to Jimmy, but Montserrat’s violent reaction to a simple observation made her change her mind, and during an outing in the Lexus that afternoon, she told him rather grudgingly that she wouldn’t mind getting engaged. The ring that Jimmy had been carrying about for days in his pocket was much prettier than she had expected.
She needed a boost after the snub she had received from Roland. Telling him that she had suggested to Dex that he might do some work at number 8, met with a chilly, ‘You did what?’
‘He’s really quite good at what he does and he does need the money.’
‘Damian and I are not a charitable trust,’ said Roland, and Thea lacked the nerve to remind him that at present she did the gardening for nothing.
But what Miss Grieves had said was not a lie. DC Rickards had been at number 7 and not just on the doorstep but inside. Montserrat remembered what Preston had said and told the policeman she knew no more and had nothing more to say.
‘Tell me something,’ said Rickards as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘If Mr Sothern came in this house and it wasn’t to see you, why did he use the basement door?’
‘To get in,’ she said, forgetting he wasn’t supposed to have come in at all but only to have stood outside and asked the way to Sloane Square.
‘So he did come in but not to see you. If he came to see someone else why not use the front door?’
‘He didn’t come in and he didn’t use any door and I’m not saying any more.’
She realised that she had gone to far, said too much when she had promised Preston to say nothing. It was four days since she had seen him or even heard from him. Was she to see him now? Perhaps it would be a good idea to tell him of the conversation she had just had with Colin Rickards. It might frighten him. He had to learn he couldn’t treat her like this, sleep with her when it suited him, take her out for a crappy meal and then ignore her for days.
She had to leave a message with him on his voicemail. How many other people would hear it? She didn’t care. He took twenty-four hours to call her back.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
To become engaged was one thing, to let everyone know it quite another. As it happened, Jimmy’s mother’s ring was far too big for her. The woman must have had enormous hands. Thea said it wouldn’t be right for Jimmy to have it made smaller, surely one’s mother’s ring was sacred and shouldn’t be tampered with.
‘We don’t have to have a ring to be engaged.’
It was the sort of thing you said to a child. She had a sense of déjà vu and remembered that when she got a new tea set aged nine, she said to her friend that they didn’t have to have real tea in the cups. Jimmy seemed content.
‘I’ll get you a super wedding ring.’
Her heart sank a little but moved up a few millimetres when he said, ‘I’m really sorry I won’t be able to come to Damian and Roland’s civil partnership. I’ve got a ticket for Arsenal playing at home.’
Along with the other ‘servants’ they hadn’t invited him. Now she wouldn’t have to explain. She imagined the future civil partners’ reaction if they heard that he called them by their given names. Sooner or later one or other of them (maybe both) would get a knighthood, men in their position always did, and then woe betide anyone who didn’t call him ‘sir’.
Would she ever marry Jimmy? Quite possibly she would, simply to avoid trouble, the way she avoided trouble by doing all Damian and Roland’s small chores for them, by getting Miss Grieves’s shopping, by paying the Belgrave Nursery to plant all those flowers to make the house look lovely, and getting no reimbursement or thanks for it.
On Sunday Preston had his children for the day and when he brought them back in a taxi at six in the evening, Montserrat, making an intelligent guess as to his timing, was waiting for him. She let him in before he could get his key out and when he had left them with their mother, Thomas screaming for Rabia who was still at her father’s, asked him to come down to her flat.
From the start she handled it badly. She had dressed herself up for him in a miniskirt and low-cut top, too-high heels and that dark red lipstick she had thought so flattering. With earrings like chandeliers and a triple string of pearls bought in the Portobello Road, she was dressed for a party not a Sunday night in front of the television. And she was in a nervous state as she waited for him to join her, fidgeting, pacing up and down. He walked in without knocking. But perhaps to knock would have been a sign of formality. She would have liked him to have put his arms round her, called her by some endearment, though she knew better than to expect it.
She opened the bottle of white wine she had forgotten to put in the fridge. ‘Preston,’ she began, ‘I think I must have missed your calls. Actually, I did get a missed call come up on my mobile but I didn’t recognise the number.’
‘It wasn’t me.’ He took a sip of his wine, made a face and pushed it a few inches across the table, sure sign he wanted to drink no more of it.
She tried to gather up her courage. Although she knew she must always unconsciously have felt this way, she realised she was afraid of him. It took a lot of nerve to say what she had to say. An urge charged through her to take off those stupid pearls but she squashed it. He would only think she was starting to strip.
‘I thought we were having a relationship.’ There, she had said it. ‘I thought you sleeping with me was the start of it.’
He didn’t seem the least embarrassed or indignant or angry or anything at all really. He just looked at her, the pale grey eyes staring. She noticed for the first time that the whites of his eyes showed all the way round the irises. Surely that wasn’t common, she didn’t know anyone else like that.
‘I’m still married,’ he said.
‘You were married when you slept with me. You were married when you asked me to your flat.’
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he said, watching her drink the warm wine, ‘you and I were associated in a kind of enterprise. You know what I refer to. I was grateful for your help.’
‘Is that all?’
‘What else is there? I don’t need to go into details, we both know what happened. There was an accident. You persuaded me – frankly, against my better judgement – not to call the police. No doubt you meant it for the best. I have my own views on that. Any relationship, as you call it, between us must be over, if it ever began.’
Anger throbbed inside her head. ‘If it wasn’t for me you’d be in prison by now, d’you realise that?’
‘Oh, I doubt it,’ he said. ‘It was an accident. You seemed to forget that.’
Why had he sto
pped calling her by her first name? The last time they’d met he’d called her Montsy. Somehow she knew he never would again, unless she did something, took positive steps. ‘It’s not too late for me to go to the police now.’
He shook his head, got out of his chair and walked to the window. Once more he looked very big, tall, heavily built, strong. Perhaps it was only in her imagination that he had gone pale. ‘And tell them what? You’re as much involved as I am, remember.’
‘I never touched him. I didn’t push him down the stairs. You want to remember I could turn Queen’s evidence.’ Could she? Did it even exist any more? ‘I could say you forced me, you threatened me. I could make a plea bargain.’ Was there such a thing outside of America or the movies?
‘And just what proof would you have for any of this?’
She had given these details almost no thought but now they came to her as if they had been lying just below the surface of her mind, waiting for use. ‘Suppose I told them to go to Gallowmill Hall and in the luggage room to look for a car-roof case. They’d find Rad Sothern’s DNA all over the inside, hairs and fibres from his clothes.’ What a godsend in situations like this were the detective and mystery dramas on television, teaching one about police procedure and search warrants and forensics. ‘They’d find blood from where he hit his head and maybe dust and whatever from that floor.’
She had drawn him into it against his will. ‘And how would they know the case was yours?’
‘I can prove it. Henry Copley who drives for Lord Studley sold it to me.’
She was sitting on the bed and he came and sat beside her. ‘Look, Montsy, you don’t mean anything of this, you know you don’t. It was a joke, wasn’t it?’