by Ruth Rendell
The regional news at noon was almost entirely devoted to the fatal stabbing of a woman in Oxford Street. The Princess watched it with Gussie on her lap and called June when it was too late to see or hear much beyond the police saying it was murder. The woman had not yet been identified. The huge crowds whose preference on this special day was Oxford Street had been dispersed with difficulty. June watched, fascinated to see women young and old herded on to buses and driven into Tube stations. She supposed the murder had been done by one of those gang members, the only difference being that it took place in a Christmas crowd in the West End rather than in Brixton or Peckham.
She gave the Princess her lunch on a tray, a chicken breast with oven-cooked French fries and defrosted peas, and took herself off to the dining room with a sandwich to prepare the agenda for tonight’s meeting of the Saint Zita Society, the last of the old year. Typing with her left hand took a long time. As chair, she intended to be firm with those who wanted to resume discussion of the canine excrement question. That must come to an end this evening and not be raised again. The Saint Zita Society had done its best and had failed, as must sometimes happen. She would establish with Thea what arrangements she was making for Miss Grieves’s Christmas dinner and, rather more subtly, for serving a suitable meal to herself and the Princess. June had to keep going back over what she had written, correcting the mistakes made by her stumbling left hand.
She added ‘the gardening question’ to her agenda and ‘disposal of Christmas trees’ and then she was done. The little pink lights had to be checked. One of them had burnt down faster than the others. This puzzled June but was hardly important. She replaced it and the one next to it with new candles. The Princess was asleep, the lunch tray still balanced precariously on her lap. June lifted it off, noticed that the brandy bottle had joined the flagon of sparkling water the Princess hadn’t touched, and helped herself to a generous tot.
The lights behind the blinds at the home of Arsad Sohrab and Bibi Lambda had gone out. Henry, sent by Lord Studley to check on all the candles, rang their bell and reminded them of the importance of keeping up the tradition. Arsad said, ‘What importance? You tell me.’ But Henry couldn’t. He lacked his employer’s logical mind and adversarial skills. ‘I don’t know. Just do it,’ he said and passed across the street to where Jimmy had failed to replace the candles at number 3.
‘His Lordship relies on you,’ he said severely. ‘You’ve made a good job of it up to now.’
Jimmy, who was wearing an apron with a grinning cat on it over his jeans, invited him in and gave him a glass of the port which had already been broken into. ‘Have you seen Thea?’
‘Not since this morning. She was on her way to do some last-minute shopping.’
‘It’s not like her not to answer her phone.’
Henry had his own share of what he called ‘woman trouble’.
He raised his eyebrows at the grinning cat, said, ‘You can’t keep her tied to your apron strings for ever, you know,’ and laughed at his own joke.
The Neville-Smiths had returned and placed two candles in handsome brass holders on their windowsill as Henry was passing, Montserrat with Ciaran came up the area steps and the two of them persuaded him to join them for a pre-Christmas drink in the Dugong. Maybe he should stick to tonic water as he had already had the port with Jimmy. He was due at Huguette’s around two. Any more drink was out of the question. He had to drive Lord Studley to a coalition Christmas party at Spencer House at six.
Now all their meetings took place at Huguette’s flat in Chelsea. It was safer than number 11 Hexam Place and as he broke a rule and drove to Carlyle Square in the Beemer he could see no reason why this arrangement should not continue for ever – well, for several pleasant years. The improbable had happened. She had got a job with a PR company much favoured by the Conservative Party. No doubt Daddy had helped, thought Henry.
Her flat was small but luxurious, consisting of a pretty bedroom, a minimalist living room, a lavish bathroom and a kitchen smaller than the larder in her father’s house. Henry had to say no to a share in the bottle of Chablis Huguette opened and they went straight to bed. Thanks probably to his abstemiousness, he enjoyed himself even more than usual and Huguette was rapturous about his performance. If it could always be like this, he wouldn’t resist when she talked about telling her father of their relationship and future marriage. Time flew by as it always did when she was in a sweet and clinging mood and it came as a nasty shock to catch sight of his watch on the bedside cabinet and see that it was 5.21.
‘My God, I’ve got to go! Your dad’ll kill me.’
Henry was never so carried away as to forget his job and his duty and instead of dropping his clothes on the floor he had draped them carefully over a chair. He was stepping into his underpants when he heard the faint creak of the lift and a high-heeeled footstep in the passage outside. How they both knew who this must be neither could have said but they did. Huguette flung open one of the wardrobe doors and pushed him inside, thrusting his clothes after him. The doorbell didn’t ring. Henry heard the letter-box flap lifted and a familiar voice call, ‘Hi, darling. It’s Mummy.’
It would almost have been better if the caller had been Lord Studley himself. Inside the wardrobe it was stuffy and the scent from Huguette’s clothes almost overpowering. Skirts and trousers and jeans and long scarves and stoles hung down, teasing his face. Henry was afraid to move much in case Oceane heard the noise he made. He was also aware that Huguette had given him his clothes but left his shoes under the chair. The memory came to him of a film he had once seen about the Duke of somewhere or other visiting his girlfriend and having to get into a cupboard just like him because her other lover had arrived and her other lover was the King. Charles the Second, he thought it was, and maybe it was the other way round and the King had to get into the cupboard when the Duke arrived. It wasn’t a very good film.
He listened, hoping that Oceane hadn’t seen his shoes or the Beemer – it was parked some distance up the street – and that she’d say she couldn’t stay long. It seemed she had brought the shoes and handbag which were Huguette’s Christmas present because Mummy and Daddy were off to France the following day. But as for not staying long, she had accepted a cup of tea and then a gin and tonic and was admiring her present, now apparently on Huguette’s feet, and telling her that the bag came from Chanel. Huguette had also failed to hand Henry his watch but he could guess that it must by now be a quarter to six. He was hastily fumbling his way into his clothes.
Oceane had a clear and penetrating voice. He heard her ask for a second gin and tonic and remark that Huguette’s father would shortly be going to a party. ‘Naturally I was asked and naturally I said no.’
‘If I go and get dressed, do you think we could go to the Ice Bar?’
Oceane laughed. ‘As if it wasn’t cold enough outside!’
With exceptional perceptiveness Henry thought how having qualms about this igloo-like drinking place where everything was composed of ice, showed her age. No young person would ever have made that remark. ‘And then we’ll have dinner at the Ivy. They’ll always give me a table.’
‘I’ll call Henry and he can take us. Daddy can go to his party in a taxi.’ Huguette came into the bedroom, whispered to him, ‘When I’m dressed I’ll take Mummy into the kitchen. You can get out of here, give it two minutes and then ring the doorbell. OK?’
She had saved, if not his life, the best part of it. He heard her placating her father, telling him she’d order him a cab. Her resourcefulness was a surprise to him and he decided that next time she proposed to him he would give in. The arrangement and the several pleasant years would apply just the same when he was a married man.
The Evening Standard had the story and so did the BBC’s regional news at six thirty. Montserrat hardly ever watched television but she fetched the paper from the corner shop and walked home looking at the picture which filled the front page of what looked like a million people in Oxford Stre
et, nearly as many police and something lying alone on the pavement. It was too dark to read anything smaller than the headline: FATAL STABBING OF SHOPPER.
The dead woman had not yet been identified or if she had the police were not telling. It wouldn’t be anyone Montserrat knew, she was sure of that. Indoors she read an interesting story about someone being killed by her pet cat, an animal of exceptional size and ferocity, and another concerning a model who had broken her leg through wearing shoes with seven-inch heels, and then she got dressed in a frock and filmy stole for her surprise visit to Preston Still, adding as an afterthought the red quilted jacket that was a Christmas present from Ciaran.
June and the Princess got no dinner that evening. June was obliged to open a can of spaghetti bolognese and forage for ice cream in the freezer. She was late for the meeting of the Saint Zita Society but that hardly mattered as the only other member to turn up was Dex who sat as usual by himself, drinking Guinness and listening to the various voices, pleasant and unpleasant that his pressing of digits on his mobile conjured up.
Alone at number 3, Jimmy had a fridgeful of food and no one to eat it. He had sent three texts to Thea, left her four voicemail messages and three emails. None had been answered. She had left him, he was sure of it, had been half expecting it ever since she had made it clear Damian and Roland’s civil partnership was more important to her than their own wedding date. Yet when his mobile finally rang all this misery and all these doubts were overthrown and he knew it was her, calling to tell him that she loved him and had been absolutely unable to get to a phone all day.
It wasn’t Thea. It was her sister Chloe.
‘Are you sitting down? This is going to be a shock.’ Her voice had a catch in it, like a sob. ‘You want to prepare yourself.’
‘What is it?’ Yet somehow he knew.
‘That girl that was stabbed in Oxford Street. That was Thea. The police got hold of me to identify her. My number was on her mobile and yours was too. I was her next of kin.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
‘You,’ said Preston Still, opening the door to Montserrat.
‘Who did you think it was?’
He was looking at her as a man might look at a ghost before he realised it couldn’t be true, that whatever this was it must be a manifestation from his imaginings. She was suddenly terribly frightened. She thought of the car and herself spreadeagled across its grid, of the shove into the middle of her back that nearly resulted in her falling on to the Tube line. Now the idea of entering his flat brought on a shivering he stared at.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
If she accused him outright she was too scared of what he might do but something kept her there, unable to retreat or take a step forward. When she spoke she stammered. ‘It’s Thea who’s dead.’ She was afraid to say it was Thea he had killed.
He didn’t seem to know who she meant. ‘Who’s Thea?’
‘My friend.’ It seemed to her now that her voice was someone else’s or coming from a long way off. ‘Girl with red hair, only it’s not any more. It’s dark, like mine.’ The moment she uttered those words, even before they were fully out, she knew. She went on making the parallels. ‘And she’s got a black jacket like mine and she’s my height and she was going where I meant to go.’ It was too much for her and she broke off into a hysterical laughing and crying, clutching on to Preston because there was nothing else to hold on to, screaming and crying into his face.
As a door on the other side of the hallway opened, he pulled her inside, hissing at her to stop, to stop, keep her voice down, be quiet. She fell on to the floor. She would have kicked out at him if he hadn’t quickly stepped away. He picked up his mobile phone from the table and she recognised the digits he gave as his reference number at the cab company he used. ‘As soon as possible,’ he said. Then he said, as she struggled to her feet, edging away from him, ‘When that woman was stabbed this morning I was at my office in Old Broad Street at a board meeting with half a dozen other people. When you tell the police I think you should tell them that too.’
She said nothing. He took her down in the lift and the cab was waiting outside. The driver must have thought it odd that she didn’t speak and Preston Still didn’t speak but opened the door for her, closed it and walked away up the steps without looking back. It was cold inside the taxi and Montserrat asked if she could have some heat, please. The driver appeared to be one of those who scarcely speak. The heat came on and he maintained his silence, finally saying as they drew up in Hexam Place, ‘Going away for Christmas?’
Montserrat shook her head, and realising he couldn’t see her, said, ‘No.’
She got out, making no reply to his parting words, whatever they were, she hadn’t heard them. Before she even got into the house, while she was still going down the area steps, she called Ciaran. Something strange had happened to her. She had lost her friend, her friend had been killed by mistake for her, she had been enormously frightened, but now when she heard Ciaran’s voice and spoke to him, she was filled with an emotion quite new to her. She didn’t want him just for sex or for a man to be with.
‘Oh, Ciaran,’ she said, ‘please come to me. Please come now. I do love you so.’
Christmas Eve and Thea was dead and Jimmy couldn’t quite believe it. He hadn’t seen a paper. All he knew was what Chloe had told him and Chloe wasn’t a reliable person. Once before she had told him Thea had been to the cinema with her when she had really been serving drinks at the party Damian and Roland had had to celebrate their being together for ten years. That was an outright lie and so might this be because Chloe wanted Thea to break their engagement. Jimmy wasn’t sure whether he believed this or that Thea’s death was the reality. She couldn’t have made that up about the police, could she? Or a stabbing in Oxford Street. She could, though. It wasn’t so very way out. He ought to go up to Mr Choudhuri’s shop and buy a paper, but instead of going, he began walking up and down and round the house, looking out of the front windows.
The night before, after he put the phone down, he had gone into Dr Jefferson’s bathroom and found a foil pack of what he thought were sleeping tablets. The name was new to him, he had never heard it before, but he took two of the pills so that he would sleep and not be able to think about what Chloe had told him. It was the first thing that came into his mind when he woke up. That is, when he struggled through apparent layers of fog and fluff and something thick like soup and lay there telling himself nonsense like Thea being dead. It took about an hour of dozing and coming round for him to recall the phone conversation and what exactly she had said. Now he stood at the window, looking down at Henry who had just walked along and got into the Beemer and then at June, her plastered arm in a sling, walking that little dog. Both of them wore quilted jackets, June’s red, the dog’s dark blue.
The candles on the windowsill had burned down and gone out. He must have gone to bed and into that drugged sleep without putting them out. The house might have caught fire. Dr Jefferson had a good stock of candles and it was only a matter of setting them into the holders and putting a match to them, but Jimmy hadn’t the heart. Thinking about cooking Christmas dinner tomorrow was equally dispiriting – no worse, impossible. He looked at the duck. He had collected the orange sauce in a china bowl, the potatoes waiting to be peeled. He put the duck into a carrier bag and carried it out into the front garden. Beacon was bringing the Audi round to park it outside number 7. Jimmy walked down the street in his short-sleeved shirt, not noticing the cold. He tapped on the Beemer’s offside front window.
Beacon got out, said, ‘That was a terrible thing about Thea. I’m very sorry.’
So it was true. In a way he had always known it. ‘Would you like to have this duck? I’ve no use for it now.’
‘That’s very good of you. We’ve got a goose but Dorothee will be pleased to have this bird as well.’ Beacon cleared his throat, assumed what Montserrat called his vicar’s face. ‘She is with God now. Where she’s gone there’s no
more pain. Sorrow and sighing shall flee away. You have to remember that.’
‘Yes, thanks,’ said Jimmy. ‘I will. Enjoy the duck.’
Contemplating the plaster that sheathed her right arm, June said, ‘I’ve been thinking that if I’d done it back in September this thing would be off by now and I’d be able to cook our Christmas dinner.’
The Princess was trying to unzip Gussie’s quilted coat and had already received a small nip. ‘You couldn’t have done it in September because there wasn’t any ice to slip on.’ She made growling noises at Gussie, very like his own. ‘You’re a naughty dog to bite poor Mamma.’
‘We shall just have to have one of those ready meals from Waitrose or somewhere, madam.’ June was about to go out again, easing what the Princess called her ‘stone arm’ into her red quilted coat sleeve, when Rocksana arrived with a young Chinese man, his face, as the Princess put it, with more metal studs in it than the back of her leather sofa. His name was Joe Chou, he was a guitarist and Rocksana’s new boyfriend.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Rocksana said, accepting a gin and tonic for herself and one for Joe Chou. ‘I mean, you don’t think me insensitive, Rad being your sort of nephew, but you can’t argue with love, can you?’
‘We weren’t close,’ said June, taking off her coat
‘And now someone’s murdered your friend Thea. It’s got to be the same person, hasn’t it? Only it makes you wonder how many more people down here are going to snuff it. Now tell me what you’re doing for Christmas?’
‘Bugger all,’ said the Princess.
‘That’s what I wanted to hear because you’re going to have it with us. Me and Joe have got a carful of nosh outside and we’re going to come and cook it for you, turkey and all the trimmings. Pop outside and bring it in, Joe, there’s a lamb.’ Rocksana lit a cigarette and held out her gin glass for more. ‘The fact is I’ve had to give up my place in Montagu Square that was Rad’s, I can’t afford it. And Joe’s only got one room so you’re doing us a favour letting us have Christmas here. I forgot to mention Joe’s a chef when he’s not being a guitarist, so you’ll get a brilliant meal.’