Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

by Ruth Rendell

  “He wasn’t dead when she did it,” said Josephine. “And what d’you think, her and this MP got married on the same day as me and Ken. Look, I’ve got the Mirror here. D’you like her outfit? Jeans can be too tight, I don’t care what anyone says. And her hair’s all over the place. That’s some guy she was with, it doesn’t say who he is, not the husband, and that’s her little boy, sobbing his heart out, poor mite.”

  “It’s wicked to murder people,” Minty said. “Look at the trouble it causes.” She finished the last shirt and went home.

  She’d only been in five minutes when Laf came round with the papers. He wanted her to go to the Dome with him and Sonovia and Daniel’s little girl, but Minty said no, thanks, not this time, she’d got too much to do at home. She’d have to have a bath, she couldn’t go out again dirty, and they were off in ten minutes. Besides, there were the papers to read and the dusting to do and the floors to vacuum.

  “Not in the afternoon,” said Auntie the moment Laf was gone. “A good housewife gets her work done first thing in the morning. The afternoon’s for sitting down and catching up on the sewing.”

  Mrs. Lewis had to put her oar in. “She’ll say she’s got her job. You wouldn’t want her cleaning the place on a Sunday, I’m sure. Sundays are a day of rest or should be. There was some in my day as would get up at the crack of dawn and get the dusting and hoovering done before they went to work, but not anymore.”

  “Go away,” said Minty. “I hate you.”

  For some reason she thought they wouldn’t follow her out of doors and she was right. Maybe it was too bright for them or too hot or something. Ghosts faded away in sunshine, she’d heard that somewhere. She got out the mower and cut the little lawn, then the long-handled shears to do the edges. Mr. Kroot’s sister came out into the garden next door, dropping lumps of bread with green mold on it to feed the birds. Minty wanted to say it wouldn’t be birds that would come but rats, only she didn’t because she and Auntie had sworn never to speak to Mr. Kroot or the sister or anyone to do with them again.

  Auntie spoke to her at last, the minute she came into the kitchen. “I’d have had a bone to pick with you if you’d said a word to Gertrude Pierce.”

  That was her name. The dead knew everything. Minty remembered it now, though she hadn’t heard it for a good ten years. She didn’t answer Auntie. The two of them went on muttering somewhere in the background. She’d just have to put up with it until they got tired and went back to wherever they came from. They wouldn’t like her vacuuming, the noise would drown out their voices. Let them grumble all they liked. At least she couldn’t see them.

  She always did the dusting first. While Auntie was alive she’d had a lot of opposition from her over that. Auntie vacuumed first, but Minty maintained that if you dusted afterward all the dust went on to the clean carpet and if you were thorough you’d have to vacuum it all over again.

  Sure enough, Auntie started as soon as Minty took the clean yellow duster out of the kitchen drawer. “I hope you’re not going to use that before you’ve done the floor. I don’t know how many times I’ve told her, Mrs. Lewis. It goes in one ear and out the other.”

  “Might as well talk to a brick wall,” said Mrs. Lewis, for by this time Minty had begun moving all the ornaments on the little table and spraying the surface with liquid wax. “That stuff she’s using just swallows up the dirt and leaves a nasty deposit.”

  “My very words. I’d like a five-pound note for every time I’ve said that.”

  “It’s not true,” Minty shouted, moving on to the sideboard. “Not if you keep the place clean like I do. And it’s five-pound notes you ought to be giving me.”

  “She’s got a nasty temper, Winifred. You say a word to her and she bites your head off.”

  “I’d like to bite yours off! I’d like to get a big police dog to come and bite it off.”

  “Don’t you speak to Mrs. Lewis like that,” said Auntie.

  So they could hear her. Maybe it was only when she got angry. She’d remember that. She cleaned the whole house. Up in the bathroom she plugged her ears so as not to hear, but she still heard their voices through the cotton wool. Only while she had a bath and washed her hair was there silence. Lying in the water, she tried to picture what Mrs. Lewis looked like. She’d be very old. Somehow Minty had got it into her head that Mrs. Lewis had been knocking fifty when Jock was born. Her hair would be white and wispy, so thin that patches of bald pink scalp showed through, her nose a hook and her chin another hook coming up to meet the nose, with a mouth like a crack in a piece of coarse-grained brown wood in between. She looked like a witch, bent and very small because she’d have shrunk, and when she walked she took little stumbling steps.

  “I don’t want to see her,” she said aloud. “I don’t want to see her and I don’t want to see Auntie. They don’t need me, they’ve got each other.”

  No one answered her.

  Clean and in clean clothes, light grey Dockers from the charity shop and a white T-shirt with Auntie’s silver cross on the chain round her neck, Minty sat in the window reading the papers and from time to time looking up at the street outside. It was after five and the Wilsons hadn’t come back. Gertrude Pierce came out of Mr. Kroot’s with a letter in her hand. Her orange hair was quite white at the roots. She had a purple coat on with a fake fur collar, a winter coat on a warm summer afternoon. Minty watched her cross the street and walk down to the postbox on the corner of Laburnam. Now, returning, she was facing this way and Minty saw that she’d covered her face with makeup, coats of it, and scarlet lipstick and black stuff on her eyebrows. It made you shudder to think of wearing all that muck on your skin, and she must have been seventy-five if she was a day.

  The ghost voices didn’t comment. They hadn’t spoken for the past couple of hours. Minty made herself a cup of tea in a nice clean white mug and had a Danish pastry with it that she’d personally watched the man, wearing gloves, pick up with stainless-steel tongs from under a cover, on a white plate with a white doily on it. Then, when she’d washed up the mug and the plate and dried them, she put on a clean white cardigan and went across Harrow Road to the cemetery. On the way she passed Laf and Sonovia and the little girl and Daniel’s wife, Lauren, coming home in Laf’s car. They waved to her out of the open windows. Lauren had her long black hair done in what they called corn rows and pictures of flowers on her fingernails, which wasn’t right in a doctor’s wife.

  The cemetery was very green and lush, buttercups and daisies growing among the grass and fresh gleaming moss climbing over the old stones. The full gasometer loomed on the far side of the canal. Sometimes, when it was nearly empty, it was just the bones of itself, like the skeletons that lay everywhere here in moldering boxes under the ground. She went along the path between the ilexes and conifers where ivy clambered over mossy fallen angels and lichened mausoleums. Some of the gravestones had stone ivy carved on them with real ivy climbing over it. No one was about. It was just here, where the two paths intersected, that she had seen Jock coming toward her in his black leather jacket. She was sure she’d never see him again. She’d never pray to Auntie again, not after the way she’d been treated, and there’d be no more flowers on the grave.

  It was hard because Auntie had been all she’d got, really, until Jock came along. Sonovia had once said Auntie was like God to her, and Laf, who’d been there, was shocked and said not to talk like that, Minty didn’t worship Auntie, she didn’t pray to her. The truth was she did but she couldn’t say so, though when she went home she got down on her knees and prayed. She was muddled, she didn’t know what to do, to thank Auntie for dying and leaving her the house and the bathroom, or to wish her alive again. Well, in a way, that second wish had come true.

  The carnations and gypsophila she’d put on the grave a couple of weeks ago were dead now and brown. The water in the vase was brown too and only about an inch of it was left. She pulled out the dead flowers, threw the water on the ground, and put the vase back where she
’d found it, on the slab in front of some old man’s tomb. The sun warmed her and she lifted up her face to its gentle evening light. She’d expected Auntie and maybe Mrs. Lewis to say something. Auntie must know by now that she’d meant it when she’d said there’d be no more flowers. Removing the vase would have told her that. The dead knew everything, saw all. But no voices came, they’d gone away somewhere, back to where they’d come from.

  That done, she’d go to the pictures. On her own. Walk it, it wasn’t that far to Whiteley’s. If she was going to see them anywhere, she thought, it would be in the underpass by Royal Oak station, though she’d no special reason to associate either of them with tunnels under roads. And they weren’t there, not even their muttering voices. Something called The Insider and something else called The Beach were the choices before her. She chose the latter and had to sit through a story about a bunch of teenagers in some foreign place.

  A man came and sat beside her and offered her a Polo mint. She shook her head and said no, but of course it reminded her of Jock, and when the man put his hand on her knee she remembered how she’d told Jock she was his and would be forever. There’d never be anyone else. It made no difference that Jock had stolen all her money. She picked up the man’s hand, digging her nails into the back of it until he cried out. Then she moved three seats along the row and after a minute or two he left.

  When she came out of the cinema it was dark and no longer very warm. She walked up toward Edgware Road and waited for a 36 bus. It was while she was standing there, quite alone, in a dreary, isolated place near Paddington Basin, that she saw Auntie sitting on the seat under the bus shelter. She wasn’t as clear as Jock had been but a shape that you could see through, a semitransparent entity that was nevertheless unmistakably Auntie from her iron gray hair in a coil on the back of her head and her rimless glasses to her sensible black lace-up shoes.

  Minty wasn’t going to speak to her, she wouldn’t give her the satisfaction, but she did wonder if taking the vase away and throwing out the dead flowers was what had brought her back in visible form. Of Mrs. Lewis there was no sign. Minty stared at Auntie, and Auntie purposely looked away toward the bridge over the canal. Within a few minutes the double-decker came. I’m not getting on it if she does, Minty said to herself. But when the bus stopped Auntie got up and went away toward the underpass.

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Minty said as she passed her money to the driver.

  “You what?”

  A lot of people were staring at her.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” she said to the driver, and to the rest of them, “or any of you.”

  She went upstairs to the top, to escape them.

  Chapter 21

  NEVER IN HIS life, as far as he could recall, had Jims been so angry, and his anger was compounded in part of rage and in part of fear. Up to a point he was an imaginative man and he saw his career lying in smithereens while ever before him loomed the ogrelike shape of the Opposition chief whip.

  He was lying in bed in Fredington Crucis House, having dutifully listened to an hour of the Today program on his bedside radio. At eight-thirty Mrs. Vincey brought him up a cup of tea-something she’d never done before-and two tabloid newspapers. They must have been her own, for Jims took no papers in the country and, if he had, would never have chosen these. He’d often thought she hated him and now he was sure of it.

  This was the day he was supposed to go over to Shaston and support the Conservative candidate. He pictured the media with their cameras and recording devices waiting for him and was just making up his mind not to go because it would do more harm than good to the Party, when the phone rang.

  It was Ivo Carew. “Look, lovey, I’ve got a confession to make. I told the cops about you skiving off our luncheon. I more or less had to. They asked me.”

  How they could have when he hadn’t even mentioned Ivo’s existence to them, Jims couldn’t imagine. “Have you seen the papers?”

  “Who hasn’t?”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “Well, my old love, in your place I’d pretend I didn’t know. I mean, about the husband still being the husband.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  Ivo plainly didn’t believe him. “I’d simply maintain my innocence. Stoutly maintain it. A bridegroom”-he sniggered nastily at the word-“can’t be expected to scrutinize his bride’s divorce papers. She said she was divorced and you accepted it.”

  Jims said nothing.

  “Why on earth did you marry her?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jims. “It seemed a good idea at the time.”

  “Shall I come over, lovey?”

  Get into bed with him, no doubt, and further complicate things, not to mention old Vincey, downstairs but with her ears on stalks. “Better not. I’m going home.”

  Showered and dressed, Jims felt slightly better, though in no fit state to eat the plateful of fried eggs, bread, bacon, and potatoes swimming in fat, unaccountably prepared for him. He drank a cup of Nescafé and reconstituted milk. Were things quite so bad as he’d thought at first? As a politician, Jims believed that there were few situations in public life that couldn’t be remedied with the right strategy, few errors that couldn’t be made good by (apparent) frankness, sincere apology, and an earnest air of innocence. And he was innocent. What more likely than that two people like Zillah and Jerry Leach, feckless and sloppy, had shacked up together and had two kids without ever marrying? Of course he’d believed her. He could say something about her first marriage being too painful for her to wish it commemorated in any document. That would do. Well, no, it wouldn’t do, but it would help.

  Probably the best line to take would be that he hadn’t known. Zillah believed herself divorced and, now that Jeffrey Leach was dead, he-Jims-would make everything good by immediately remarrying the widow. Did he really want to do this? Of course not. He’d rather never see her again. But he didn’t have a choice. Needs must when the devil drives, and the devil had never driven harder and faster than this. They could always get divorced when the fuss died down. Perhaps he should issue a statement. Call Malina Daz now and get her to help him word it. It would still be too late for the Evening Standard. Best go home first, work out the statement in his head on the way, and talk to that unspeakable little bitch Zillah he wished he’d never set eyes on in the first place. He’d call Malina on his car phone and then he’d call Leonardo.

  But perhaps he did have a choice. Perhaps there were other options. He picked up the phone and dialed Ivo’s mobile. When all was said and done, Zillah wasn’t very bright.

  Michelle didn’t much care about her and Matthew being suspected of murdering Jeffrey Leach, as she’d had to learn to call him. That was an exaggeration. Of course she would care if they really suspected them, if all that questioning hadn’t been just routine. They had to ask questions, it was their job. She and Matthew were still treating it as a joke. They’d even given jokey names to the principal police officers, calling the woman Miss Demeanor and the man Violent Crimes. But even if they’d truly put Mr. and Mrs. Jarvey of Holmdale Road, West Hampstead, on their list of suspects and had real suspicions about them, that would be nothing to Fiona’s betrayal.

  When they’d called yesterday morning, and wanted to know where she and Matthew had been a week ago on the day Jeff was killed, when they’d said she understood they’d disliked Jeffrey Leach and made it plain they did, she’d asked them how they knew that. Of course, they wouldn’t tell her; they’d said they weren’t able to divulge that information. But Michelle knew and the knowledge lacerated her. Only Fiona could have told the police for no one else had heard of their dislike. She and Matthew were barely acquainted with anyone else, apart from her sister and his brother, whom they hardly ever saw and would never have confided in. Fiona knew the Jarveys didn’t like her fiancé-she and Michelle had discussed it-and, when asked if Jeff had any enemies, named the people next door. Her friends. The woman who loved her as a mother might a
nd who thought herself loved in daughterly fashion in return. It was monstrous. Didn’t Matthew think it was, asked Michelle in tears.

  “You can’t be sure, darling. They may only have assumed we disliked him because it seems that most people did except these poor women he strung along.”

  “No. Fiona told them. How would they know no one liked him? They don’t know anyone he knew. His past life is a blank, Fiona said. She’s betrayed me and I hate to say this, but I can never feel the same about her again, never.”

  “Don’t cry, darling. I can’t bear to see you cry.”

  Miss Demeanor and her twin-it was two women this time-wanted something Michelle had always believed wasn’t a real requirement but only a feature of detective stories and television sitcoms. They asked her and Matthew to provide an alibi. At first this shocked her. Living in a sheltered world where honesty was taken for granted, she believed the senior of the two women would take her word.

  “My husband and I were out shopping together. First we went to Waitrose at Swiss Cottage and then, because it was such a lovely day, I drove us up to the Heath.”

  “Hampstead Heath?” Miss Demeanor asked this as if there were dozens of open spaces in London known familiarly as the Heath. Michelle nodded. “You parked and sat in the car? Where exactly was that?”

  Everyone must surely know how difficult it was to park anywhere in the vicinity. You could no longer go where you chose, as was the case when she and Matthew first came to Holmdale Road, but had to settle for wherever you could find a space.

  “It was by the Vale of Health pond.”

  “What time would that have been, Mrs. Jarvey?”

  She couldn’t remember. All she could say was that they’d left and gone home soon after half past four because Miss Harrington was coming in to have a drink with them at five-thirty.

  Matthew said, “We went out shopping at half past two and were at the Vale of Health by a quarter to four. We stayed there for three-quarters of an hour.”