by Ruth Rendell
She began to walk up and down the room. How long had she been in here? Five hours? Ten? Two? There was no way of knowing in this shuttered place. Damon might know she was here, the guv might know, Barry might, but why would any of them do anything? She had been to see Norman Arlen, here or in London, done what she had to do and gone home to write her report. That’s what they would think. They would do nothing. Bal wouldn’t even think about where she might be. He probably never thought of her at all anymore. She wasn’t expecting anyone to phone or come to see her, and her mother had said to keep the car until tomorrow. Hannah suddenly thought, how horrendous, her poor mother was so proud of that car and they were going to push it off a bridge…
She must be mad, thinking like that. Did she really believe her mother would be upset about a bloody car when her daughter was dead? She sat down again. It must be hours since she had eaten, but she wasn’t hungry. Once or twice more she had lapped water out of the basin. She got up again and went to the door to listen. It seemed to her that there was no longer absolute silence. In the far distance she could hear a faint echo that might be footsteps. Two sets or three? To her dismay she found she was trembling.
Maybe no one would come to her rescue or come too late. But she must do something to show them she’d been here. Her shaking hands still locked together, she lifted them above her head and forced them down to the back of her neck. Concentrating on the operation stopped the trembling. She closed her fingers over the clasp on the gold chain she wore, undid it and, lifting her hands back to her lap, held the chain tightly in her fist.
They were outside the door now. She heard the key turn in the lock. The chain pressed into the palm of her hand was strangely comforting.
He hadn’t been given a chance to tell the guv about the other thing he had remembered. Of course he knew very well why Wexford had stopped him being one of the team going to Hannah’s rescue. It was because he thought Bal was having an affair with Hannah. Or a “relationship,” as she would have called it. He thought of her tenderly as he quoted her in his mind, gently and with some amusement. “Relationship” was the most passion-killing term he could imagine, guaranteed to make you think of an earnest couple in anoraks and walking boots camping in Snowdonia.
Could he really think that what he remembered hearing in that absurd yellow-satin drawing room had any significance? Yet why would Arlen have talked about a road and a bridge unless he saw a dangerous corner as potentially useful to him? Useful one day. You never knew when you’d need it. On the other hand he might be a villain—he was—but he was a citizen as well. He must have the same concerns about safety and the environment as anyone else.
Bal didn’t go home. He sat in his car a little way down the High Street and watched the three cars move off. It was very cold and he didn’t want to heat the car by running the engine while stationary. Of course, if he went off to Yorstone he could put the heater on. Going there couldn’t do any harm. If he went home he wouldn’t sleep, he’d lie there wondering if he ought to have insisted on talking to Wexford, shouted above all the talk, followed him out to his car instead of doing what he was told and leaving. He switched on the ignition and the heater. As usual, icy air came out of it before it warmed up, a blast like a force eight gale. Bal wasn’t exactly sure where Yorstone was—somewhere west of Cheriton Forest and on the way to Sewingbury? This country was so badly signposted compared with everywhere else. The signs kept saying Sewingbury and Stowerton, Yorstone only when the turnoff was a hundred yards away. Even then it didn’t say Yorstone Lane. He knew that was what it had to be because to the left of him loomed the darkness of Yorstone Wood. He turned down the unlit narrow lane. His headlights on full beam created a bluish mist ahead of him and in the mist tree trunks reared up, dark and straight like figures in a fantasy.
The lane turned sharp left, almost at a right angle. But for the black and white arrows on the right-hand side he might have gone straight on and plowed in among the tall dark shapes. He was beginning to realize that his whole enterprise was stupid, based on nothing but a sort of hunch that had no real foundation. As he pulled up and parked under the trees, he felt for the first time true terror for Hannah, a real dread that something terrible had happened to her.
When they got to Pomfret Hall lights were shining from every window. Wexford got out of the car, went up to the front door, and pulled the bell, Burden and Karen behind him, the rest a few yards back. No one came to the door. Wexford rang the bell again, hammered on the paneled wood with his fists. He told Barry and Damon to go around the back. The house was so big that “around the back” required a walk of several hundred yards. Its rear, as Wexford said, was more in the nature of a “garden front,” with another double flight of stairs ascending to a terrace and another pair of double doors. Lawns, flower beds, shrubberies, and outlying meadows lay glittering under frost from the blaze of light that poured from the windows.
Ringing the bell and pounding on the door fetched no one. There was no sound except for the sound they made themselves.
“We have to go in there,” Wexford said. “Break the door down.”
They couldn’t do it. The combined efforts of Burden, Barry Vine, and Damon Coleman failed to move those heavy oak doors. Damon went down into an area behind the stairs, which housed two large stone urns and a ladder, and found a humbler door in the wall. This yielded the second time he ran at it, shivering the wood and splitting the lock. They all went in, through rooms full of flowerpots and brooms and garden tools, then a kind of laundry, on to the kitchens, newly refurbished with state-of-the-art equipment.
“One guy lives here on his own?” Damon had never seen anything like it.
Lights seemed to be on in every room. “Why is that?” Barry asked but no one knew the answer. “Surely not to make anyone calling think there were people in here.”
“Maybe he’s afraid of the dark,” said Burden. “Come to think of it, it was early afternoon when Bal and I came here, but he had a lot of lights on then.”
Just as the place was brightly lit, so it was as warm as a sunny summer’s day. Wexford thought briefly of such a day in August when Amber’s body had been found. They climbed the stairs to the gallery and the first floor, and as they came to a pair of double doors, Damon said suddenly, “Where’s Hannah’s car?”
“She didn’t come by car,” Burden said. “Her car’s parked outside the station. But wait a minute, how did she get here?”
“Taxi?” Wexford opened the doors, revealing a huge bedroom with four-poster bed, the whole place as neat as if no one had ever undressed, slept, and dressed in it. “She must have taken a taxi. Get on to the station, Damon, and have someone start calling taxi firms now.”
If she came here, he thought, if she was ever here. All we know is that she was going to see Arlen. She might have been meeting him somewhere on neutral ground. The others seemed to have the same thought, voicing it as they walked through the bedrooms.
Karen and Barry spoke almost in unison: “We don’t know she came here.”
“No, but we have to search,” said Wexford.
They went up to the third floor, more empty rooms, more light. Down again, across the gallery, down the great wide curving staircase into the hall, the dining room, the yellow drawing room where Bal might or might not have seen a gun. Back into the hall again, having been through an empty silent house that felt as if no one had lived in it for years, as if it were merely a showplace, open for tours and tour guides on certain days of the week.
“What now, sir?” said Barry.
Wexford didn’t answer. He bent down and picked up from the floor a thin gold chain, fine as a hair. “She has been here,” he said. “I’ve seen her wearing this.”
“So have I,” said Karen. “It was a present from Bal.”
Wexford considered. “It was a mistake sending Bal home. He may know more than we do. I’ll call him.”
In the distance he heard the sound of the four-by-four’s engine. Its lights s
howed between the tree trunks and then it appeared, coming slowly and cautiously down Yorstone Lane. His heart had leapt, but now he thought, It’s just a car. It’s someone going home from a party or a long-distance drive. But no, it was a silver car—Hannah’s mother had one just like that. There were hundreds like it. It was probably the most popular car in the neighborhood. They’ll go over the bridge and on up the lane on the other side, he thought. But a dozen yards this side of the bridge the car stopped and a man got out. It was Rick Samphire.
He was hooded as usual. He moved onto the bridge and looked down at the road below, every movement shown up clearly in the four-by-four’s headlights. If it’s just him, Bal thought, I can handle him on my own, no problem. He was asking himself where Arlen was when the man got out of the driver’s seat. Were there any more? Shocking him, his phone suddenly rang.
It could only be Wexford or Burden. If he answered it they would tell him…what would they tell him? Something unacceptable, he was sure. He let it ring, hating the sound of it. Then he saw Hannah’s face. It appeared at the window by the passenger seat. He answered the phone.
Wexford’s voice said, “Where the hell are you?”
“At Yorstone Bridge,” said Bal. “Sir. They’ve got Hannah here.”
He put the phone down, knowing it might cost him his job.
What were they going to do? A cold shiver like icy water trickling the length of his back ran down his spine. She wouldn’t stay there unless they were forcing her to do so. And, co-occurring with the thought, she was staying there no longer. The door opened and she stepped down from the passenger seat, as if of her own volition. Then he saw there was someone behind her and he recognized to his astonishment the man called Lawson who was Rick’s alibi for the eleventh of August. He must be holding something pressed to the small of her back—the gun he had seen that day in the yellow drawing room?
Rick had crossed to the other side of the bridge and Norman Arlen with him. They were looking down over the low parapet and as they did so a car passed underneath them. Just as Amber Marshalson’s had passed when Rick had dropped that lump of concrete. Hannah was still standing there, almost leaning, it seemed, against the burly thickset figure of Lawson. They’ll put her back in the car, he thought, and—throw her over the bridge? Try to do that…But they didn’t. Rick was still on the far side of the bridge, but Arlen was coming back. Whatever means was being used to keep Hannah rigid and leaning backward, Arlen took it over. Lawson got back into the car, into the driving seat, reversed it with a roar of the engine and drove it forward down the slope toward the bridge.
It was the sight of the handcuffs that galvanized Bal. He watched Arlen, unmistakably a gun in one hand, unlock the handcuffs with the other and Hannah lift up her hands to cover her face. Bal leapt from his car, without a thought, without the least caution or fear. Later he was to think, so that’s how it feels in a battle, how it felt when they used to go “over the top,” when adrenaline surges and puts the frightened mind to sleep.
He leapt upon Arlen like an animal on its prey. His onslaught was so violent that he barely noticed the crash as the four-by-four went over the parapet, Lawson leaping out onto the bridge at the last moment. Arlen sank to his knees, swaying, then falling forward. In that moment Bal saw what the gun was, a child’s toy of lightweight gunmetal plastic. Rick was running back now, but Hannah, her hands free, swung around and delivered a high kick that caught him in the crotch. As he doubled up, Lawson came at her, reaching with his hands for her throat. This time it was Bal who kicked out, toppling him and seeing his agonized face in the blazing lights of the police cars coming down the lane.
Rick turned to run the other way as Hannah gave chase. Halfway across the bridge he turned around to face her, but pain from Hannah’s kick seemed to catch him. He doubled up, clutching the tops of his thighs, as Hannah came at him again. As if he dreaded another onslaught, he first flinched and, as her hands made to seize him, reared backward like someone in muscle spasm from a poisonous alkaloid. He fell backward across the parapet, whimpered something, cried out something, and struggled to get back on his feet. But his heels slipped on the wet ice, his arms rose and windmilled in the air, and he went over with a scream, thirty feet down to the road below.
CHAPTER 31
* * *
What was it he said before he went over?” Burden asked.
“Something about bloody women,” said Wexford. “Ironical, wasn’t it? He was obsessed with this idea that women meant to destroy him, and in the end it was a woman…”
“I didn’t mean him to die, guv.”
“Everyone knows you didn’t, Hannah. He’d happily have destroyed you. You’d better go to the hospital, you know. There’s an ambulance down there waiting to take you.”
“Do I have to?”
He laughed tiredly just when he was thinking he’d never laugh again. “No, you don’t have to. Bal can take you home.”
By this time it was raining heavily and they were all soaked. Barry Vine and Damon Coleman got Norman Arlen into the car and took him away to the police station, where he would spend what was left of the night in a cell before appearing before the magistrates in the morning.
“What are we going to charge him with?” Burden asked when he and Wexford were under cover. “Possession of a firearm? Attempted murder? False imprisonment?”
“All that and a good deal more. Deception, for one thing.
“Perverting the course of justice. There’ll be more charges later.”
Donaldson got out and opened the car doors for them. Getting in, Burden said, “Were all those women really fools enough to believe they could go to Africa, be given an anesthetic, and wake up with a baby? A black baby?”
“I don’t think we, as men, will ever quite understand the longing some women, many women, have for a child. We hear talk about sex and self-preservation being the strongest of human instincts or urges. Maybe they are in men. In women the strongest can be the passion for a child of their own. Those women Norman Arlen deceived wanted to believe, they psyched themselves up to believe against all reason because each one of them wanted a baby of her own more than anything in the world. Ten thousand pounds apiece? Twenty? A child of one’s own would be cheap at the price. Fly to Africa, undergo an anesthetic, do something with passports you know in your heart must be illegal—all that is nothing as the price for having your own precious baby. By the way, my daughter Sylvia’s had a girl and she’s keeping it. Bye-bye, surrogacy.”
“How did that come about?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow. I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. Meanwhile, we have to get some sleep.”
When they got to her flat he meant to carry her upstairs. Vague memories returned to him of once seeing a video of Gone With the Wind, of Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett up a great antebellum staircase. He did try but the flights up to Hannah’s flat were steeper than those in 1860’s Atlanta and at the sixth tread they both collapsed in a giggling heap and began a passionate kissing. With a muffled “We can’t stay here,” Hannah finally got up, pulled him up after her, and, clinging to each other, they got inside her flat.
“I feel so dirty,” Hannah said.
“I don’t care.”
“We could have a bath.”
“We could have a bath in the morning,” said Bal and his next effort at carrying her he did manage. He carried her to bed. As her clothes were hurled past him, landing on various pieces of furniture, he stripped off his own, leaving jeans and pants and sweater and shirt on the floor. When he had switched off the light and got into bed beside her, she was already fast asleep. He lay close to her, spoons-fashion, his arm around her waist, smiling in the dark. All those weeks he had refused her and now he was willing—more than willing, urgently desirous—she was refusing him. But the morning would come.
After Norman Arlen had been charged on several counts and remanded in custody, Wexford and Burden came away from the court and walked across toward the police sta
tion. After snow, rain, and finally hail in the small hours, it was a mild clear morning, a pale sun shining, the streets still wet and gleaming.
“What are you going to do about Bhattacharya?” Burden asked.
“I’ve done it. Nothing. Told him off, that’s all. He rescued her. She’d probably be dead now but for him. I hope gratitude won’t spoil things for them.”
Burden looked at him inquiringly.
“Well, you know the old joke. Why does he hate me so much? I never did him any good.”
Burden changed the subject. “D’you remember the day we had that fry-up? I’d like to go back there. Not for egg and chips but a coffee and a huge Danish pastry.”
“I shouldn’t,” said Wexford, “but I will. I was too tired to have breakfast.”
It wasn’t that the superior greasy spoon in Queen Street looked more inviting than on the previous occasion but that this time they saw how much more it had on offer. Ten different kinds of coffee seemed impossibly sophisticated and it was hard to choose between Danish pastries and Florentines.
“It’s a funny thing,” said Wexford when they had sat down at a table in the window, “that everyone but the Danes call these things Danish pastries.”
“What do they call them, then?”