Dark Corners

by Ruth Rendell

  “It was my dad’s. I sort of inherited it—you know, when I got the house and the furniture and everything.”

  He reached into the cabinet and brought out the package with the yellow capsules. “This is supposed to make you lose weight. I expect he got it online.”

  “Did your dad use it?”

  “He can’t have. He was so thin he was practically a skeleton.”

  She took the package from his hand and looked at it. “DNP. Dinitrophenol. One hundred capsules.” Then she read the instructions and looked at the price marked on the package. One hundred pounds.

  Carl took the bag from her and replaced it on the shelf, but not at the back.

  “I could order some online. But—well, you’ve already got these. Would you sell me fifty?”

  Sell them? He knew he should just give them to her, but the hotel he and Nicola had stayed in, in Fowey, had been pricey, the restaurants they had visited in various other Cornish resorts as expensive as London—the kind they never went to in London—and the holiday, though the costs had been shared with Nicola, far more expensive than he had expected. Fifty pounds for these pills wasn’t all that much, but it would be a help. And Stacey could afford it; well, she certainly could if she lost that weight and kept her sitcom job.

  “OK,” he said, as he counted fifty out into a tooth mug and handed her the packet with the fifty remaining in it.

  He went downstairs, realising as he did so that Dermot was closing the front door on his way out. As he came down the stairs, could he have heard Carl’s conversation with Stacey? Perhaps. But what did it matter if Dermot had?

  By now Stacey had finished her makeup and joined Carl. They were going up the road to Raoul’s in Clifton Road. Outside on the pavement she handed over the fifty pounds.

  HE FORGOT ABOUT the transaction, not least because Nicola had moved in and he wondered why they had waited so long; it had been two years since Jonathan had first introduced them. But Carl’s novel wasn’t going well and he struggled to produce two or three paragraphs a day. Nicola asked about it, and he always said everything was fine. He had no idea why this writer’s block had arisen.

  May was a fine warm month in London, and because staring at his computer was useless and unprofitable, Carl had taken to going out in the late morning while Nicola was at work and picking up a copy of the Evening Standard. He chose the Standard rather than any other daily paper because it was free.

  He stared at today’s front page. There, in full colour, was a three-column photograph of Stacey. She looked beautiful, not smiling, but in a soulful pose, her long, thick blond hair draped about her shoulders in a theatrical head shot. Described as twenty-four years old, with her face familiar from her starring role in Station Road, she had been found dead in her Primrose Hill flat by a friend who had a key. Police said foul play was not suspected.

  It couldn’t be—but it must be. Carl broke into a sweat. The phone was ringing as he let himself into the house. It was his mother, Una.

  “Oh, darling, have you seen the news about poor Stacey?”

  “It’s in the Standard.”

  “She was so lovely before she put on all that weight. There was a time when I thought you might marry her.”

  His mother belonged to a generation where women always thought in terms of marriage. Useless to tell her, though he often had, that even girls seldom thought about marriage anymore. The subject only came up when they became pregnant, and often not even then.

  “Well, I can’t marry her now, can I? She’s dead.”

  “Oh, darling.”

  “We were friends. That’s all.”

  His mother’s words hardly penetrated as he thought about Stacey. He couldn’t believe she was dead. She had eaten for comfort, he supposed. Her addiction to food had been the opposite of anorexia. When food was around, especially butter and cheese and ham and fruitcake and anything in a rich sauce, she would declare that she mustn’t touch the stuff, she shouldn’t dream of touching it, but she couldn’t resist. As he watched her grow larger, visibly, it seemed, increasing each time he saw her, he stopped seeing her, only going over to her flat in Pinetree Court, Primrose Hill, when she begged him not to desert her, please, please to come. Then it seemed to him that she would stuff down food in front of him to annoy. That couldn’t have been her motive, but it seemed like it, especially when mayonnaise dribbled down her chin, fragments of carrot cake or macaroons stuck all over a close-fitting angora sweater, and her once-beautiful breasts were transformed into vast mounds of sticky cake crumbs.

  They had never been lovers but they had been best friends. Now she was gone.

  “A man and a woman can’t be friends,” said his mother. “I wonder if that’s what was wrong, that she ate for comfort.”

  “You mean if I’d married her, she’d have stopped eating?”

  “Don’t be silly, Carl.”

  He imagined himself married to Stacey and walking along Sutherland Avenue beside her, an increasingly ridiculous sight. He was thin, which had nothing to do with what he ate or didn’t eat and everything to do with his thin mother and thin father.

  He sat down in front of the computer and touched the tiny switch with its blue light. The screen showed him its usual picture, a green hill and a purple mountain behind it. Dermot had once come in just after Carl had switched it on and started singing some hymn about a green hill far away without a city wall. Now every time Carl saw the screen he thought about that stupid hymn and sometimes even began humming it. He had meant to move the mouse on to SacredSpirits.doc and try to get back into his novel, but instead he went to the Internet, telling himself he had never checked on those yellow capsules he had sold Stacey. The little arrow hovered over Google. He typed in the letters DNP, but went no further. He was afraid.

  Shutting his eyes—he didn’t want to know, not yet, maybe never—he shifted the cursor to exit.

  4

  FOUR DAYS BEFORE Carl read the story of Stacey’s death, Lizzie Milsom entered Stacey’s flat. Leaving the keys to one’s home outside the property was imprudent, and quite difficult to do so when the property was a flat. Still, Stacey Warren did it, and a good many of her friends knew about it.

  The four flats in Pinetree Court all had different-coloured front doors. The door to the ground-floor flat was blue, while those to the first- and second-floor flats were yellow and green respectively. A staircase went down to the basement flat, where Stacey had told Lizzie the front door was red. Stacey lived on the first floor; she secreted her two keys on a single ring inside the cupboard underneath the flight of steps that led up to the front door. The cupboard, which had no lock, held the four tenants’ waste bins. Beneath the loose brick in the floor, in the hollow space, were Stacey’s spare keys.

  Because Stacey had told her she would be out that morning, Lizzie Milsom lifted up the loose brick and helped herself to the keys. She then went into the entrance hall, and went up the stairs to the first floor. Once outside Stacey’s flat, she stood still and listened. Silence. All the occupants would be out at work. She intended to find some small object of no great value, such as a piece of pottery or a paperweight or a ballpoint pen—the kind of thing a friend might give you for a Christmas present—and take it away with her, having first substituted another valueless object in its place. The latter she had brought with her: a black-and-white plastic napkin ring. Doing this—and she often did it—gave her a sense of power. People thought their lives were private and safe, but they were not.

  She inserted the key in Stacey’s yellow front door and let herself in.

  Lizzie wasn’t beautiful, but she was the kind of girl people called attractive without specifying whom they were attractive to. She had lovely, caramel-blond hair, thick and long, large, innocent brown eyes, and pretty hands with nails she kept nice with different-coloured varnish that was never allowed to chip. Her figure was good. She would have liked to dress well but couldn’t afford it.

  She and Stacey had known each other
for years. Their parents’ homes had been so near each other that they had walked together to their Brondesbury school, which was just down the road. This wasn’t the first time Lizzie had been in Stacey’s flat, but it was the first illicit visit. She searched through the living areas, looking for some trinket or useless article, and after a while decided on a small diary, unused and three years out-of-date but with Stacey’s name printed inside the front cover. The napkin ring was substituted and the diary went into Lizzie’s bag.

  The rooms in Stacey’s flat were large. That is, the living room was large and Lizzie assumed the bedroom was too. She devoted half an hour or so to exploring and searching through cupboards and drawers. She had no intention of taking anything else, and what she had taken she would bring back. But she was more inquisitive than most people and, once in a place that wasn’t hers, was consumed with curiosity. She was also a consummate liar. In the unlikely event of someone’s entering the place she was exploring, she was always ready with the excuse—she called it a reason—that the owner had asked her to check that she or he had turned off the gas or not left the iron on.

  She passed an interesting twenty minutes investigating Stacey’s desk drawers, where she found a wad of twenty-pound notes, a bunch of leaflets advertising weight-loss remedies, an unpaid electricity bill, and an envelope containing photographs of a naked Stacey taken in the days before she got fat. Lizzie told herself she wasn’t a thief and helped herself to only two twenty-pound notes, while anyone without principles would have taken the lot. She proceeded to the kitchen, found a half-full bottle of Campari in the fridge, which was otherwise empty of food and drink, and took a swig from it. It made her choke and she wondered what it could have been diluted with. Stacey had a lovely big bathroom, large enough to accommodate an elliptical cross-trainer and a rowing machine. “She doesn’t get much use out of them,” said Lizzie aloud.

  She nearly gave the bedroom a miss. She wasn’t interested in sorting through Stacey’s underwear or trying out her moisturiser. But the Campari had gone to her head and she thought a lie-down might be a good idea. She opened the bedroom door and stopped short. Stacey, in a lacy nightdress and velvet dressing gown, lay on her back on the floor beside her emperor-size bed. A small plastic packet, empty of whatever it had contained, was beside her, and a glass of what was possibly water. Pale yellow capsules were scattered across the pale yellow carpet.

  Lizzie knew Stacey was dead, though she couldn’t have said how she knew. She didn’t scream. Privately she believed that women who screamed when they saw or found a dead body only did it for effect. They could easily have controlled themselves. She made no noise at all.

  She knelt down on the floor and felt for Stacey’s pulse. But she didn’t need that; she only needed the coldness of the skin on Stacey’s face and the icy dampness of her hands to know that Stacey had been there for a long time, probably since the evening before. Lizzie also knew that she had to call the police, or maybe an ambulance, and that now Stacey was dead, she really needed no explanation for being in the flat. It would only be a tiny bit awkward. She tapped out 999 on her mobile, and the speed with which it was answered amazed her.

  “Police,” she said when presented with options. “I’ve just found my best friend dead.”

  Stacey wasn’t Lizzie’s best friend, but a small lie was necessary. She would have felt cheated if she had told anything in the region of the truth. Saying she had come into the flat with her own set of keys, keys that Stacey had given her, was only a way of supporting the best-friend statement. She mustn’t overdo it.

  The operator asked her if she would stay in the flat until the police arrived, and she said of course. She sat down, because in spite of her bravado, she felt quite shocked and afraid that she might fall if she stayed standing up. While she waited for the policeman and perhaps others to come, she replaced the diary in the living room and took back her napkin ring. Best do that—suppose they found her DNA on it?

  Alone with her thoughts and feeling stronger, Lizzie sat in an armchair in the living room and wondered what would happen to the flat. It had been Stacey’s own, free of mortgage, bought with an inheritance from her parents. Stacey had been proud of her financial independence, certain she could carry on with her acting, with big parts in TV serials, once she had lost weight. Her parents had died in a car crash on the M25 when Stacey was at university. She had been staying with her aunt Yvonne Weatherspoon and her aunt’s children when the accident happened and remained with them throughout her time at university. Lizzie wondered if she should phone Yvonne to tell her about Stacey’s death, but thought better (or worse) of it. Let the police do that. She didn’t have her number, and although she knew Stacey’s aunt slightly, she had never got on with her.

  In contrast to Stacey, Lizzie lived in a rented bedsit in Iverson Road, Kilburn. The rent was high for what it was, and the place was small, damp, and in dire need of redecoration. She thought about it while she sat in Stacey’s flat, thought too how little she wanted to return to it. Her job as a teaching assistant at a private school paid badly, although it had its advantages. To be able to walk to work was one of them, and a free lunch was another. She wasn’t supposed to have a free lunch, or indeed any lunch at school at all, but no one noticed her eating from one or more of the many untouched plates she removed from the children’s cafeteria. She also ate an evening meal at her parents’ once a week, not because she wanted to, but bearing in mind—never for a moment forgetting—that her father paid half her rent. Well, her father and her mother, her mother told her she should say, though Lizzie couldn’t see why, as her mother didn’t work—or wasn’t, as she preferred to put it, a wage earner. A breadwinner, said Lizzie’s father, who had been, until he retired, quite well-off.

  Lizzie was thinking rather wistfully of the shepherd’s pie and queen of puddings her mother would serve up tonight when the doorbell rang.

  The police had arrived.

  5

  CARL HAD NEVER attended an inquest and had no intention of going to this one. That it would happen, and quite soon, loomed large in his consciousness. He thought about it all the time, though unwillingly, because he would have preferred to forget it and dismissed the whole Stacey business from his mind. If he only knew when it was, he could go away somewhere, perhaps to Brighton, or to Broadstairs, where he had once spent a week with a girlfriend. But leaving town wouldn’t help him avoid seeing a paper or watching the TV news. Besides, like everything else in his life, he couldn’t afford another trip.

  Dermot settled the matter for him. He tapped on the living room door on June 1, the day after rent-payment day, handed over his money (a cheque this time) in the envelope, and said he was on his way to “the Stacey Warren inquest.” He expected he’d see Carl there, he said.

  Carl thought quickly. His nerves wouldn’t stand the idea of Dermot’s hearing all the evidence, even taking notes, and then coming back here and telling Carl in detail what had happened. He wanted to ask why Dermot was going. He had hardly known Stacey, having met her only once. Carl wanted to tell him that Stacey and her death weren’t Dermot’s business; she had been his friend, not Dermot’s. But Carl had no reason to be rude to Dermot, especially as the month’s rent had come on time.

  “You mustn’t think,” Dermot said after Carl had told him he wouldn’t be going, “that I’m taking time off work for this. It happens to coincide with my midday break.” Dermot smiled, showing the yellowish teeth. “A piece of luck.”

  Halfway down the path, he turned. “I’ll look in on the way back, tell you what happened.”

  HE RETURNED SEVERAL hours later and seemed to have plenty of time to spare, readily accepting the tea Carl felt constrained to offer. Dermot settled on the sofa Carl thought of as “Dad’s sofa” with his tea and a Bourbon biscuit and described the evidence of the doctor and the biochemist in detail.

  Dinitrophenol capsules had been lying all over Stacey’s bedroom floor, and the same substance was partially digested in h
er stomach and intestines. The doctor was unable to say if the dose she had recently swallowed was her first or the latest of many. Dinitrophenol—or DNP, as it was called, Dermot said—was known to bring about weight loss, but only if the dose was great enough. A heavy dose or series of doses raised the body temperature far above the danger level and increased the heart rate. Its side effects might be skin lesions, cataracts, damage to the heart, and—here he paused—death. The coroner asked a police officer who had been present at the medical examination where this substance could be obtained and was told it could be bought on the Internet.

  “The coroner asked this police officer if it wasn’t against the law,” said Dermot, “but he said it wasn’t, and then he added, ‘Not yet.’ Meaning it would be one day, I suppose.”

  Carl thought he shouldn’t ask but he had to know. “Did the coroner say anything about where Stacey got this batch of pills?”

  Dermot gave Carl a penetrating look. “I said, apparently it’s obtainable on the Internet. All right if I have another biccy?”

  Carl pushed the plate in Dermot’s direction.

  “The coroner called Stacey ‘this poor young woman.’ He looked quite sad. He said her death should be a warning to all women who were unwise and foolish enough to put the slenderness of their figures before their health.”

  “I suppose the verdict was accidental death?”

  “That’s right. My goodness, look at the time. I must be off. See you later.”

  So the coroner had assumed Stacey had bought the pills online. Everyone would assume that. While Carl was disappointed to have his fears about the DNP confirmed, he felt relieved that buying or taking the drug was not against the law, and that therefore, in selling Stacey fifty capsules of it, he had done nothing illegal.

  NICOLA WAS DUE home at about six. She used the tube: Westminster to Baker Street, then changed to the Bakerloo Line for Maida Vale. Dermot walked from the veterinary practice in Sutherland Avenue, and this evening he arrived before she did. He was in Carl’s living room, and the door was open so there was no avoiding him. He was carrying a large carrot cake in a box.