Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Ruth Rendell
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Copyright
The first girl had a bite mark on her neck. When the tabloids got hold of the story, they immediately called the killer ‘The Rottweiler’, and the name stuck.
The latest body was discovered very near Inez Ferry’s antique shop in Marylebone. Someone spotted a shadowy figure running away past the station, but couldn’t say for sure if it was a man or a woman. There were only two other clues. The murderer seemed to have a preference for strangling his victims and then removing something personal – like a cigarette lighter or a necklace…
Since her actor husband died, too early into their marriage, Inez supplemented her modest income by taking in tenants above the shop. The unpredictably obsessive activities of ‘The Rottweiler’ would exert a profound influence on this heterogeneous little community, especially when the suspicion began to emerge that one of them might be a homicidal maniac.
Ruth Rendell was an exceptional crime writer, and will be remembered as a legend in her own lifetime. Her ground-breaking debut novel, From Doon With Death, was first published in 1964 and introduced readers to her enduring and popular detective, Inspector Reginald Wexford.
With worldwide sales of approximately 20 million copies, Rendell was a regular Sunday Times bestseller. Her sixty bestselling novels include police procedurals, some of which have been successfully adapted for TV, stand-alone psychological mysteries, and a third strand of crime novels under the pseudonym Barbara Vine.
Rendell won numerous awards, including the Sunday Times Literary Award in 1990. In 2013 she was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in crime writing. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 became a Life Peer.
Ruth Rendell died in May 2015.
OMNIBUSES
Collected Short Stories
Wexford: An Omnibus
The Second Wexford Omnibus
The Third Wexford Omnibus
The Fourth Wexford Omnibus
The Fifth Wexford Omnibus
Three Cases for Chief Inspector Wexford
The Ruth Rendell Omnibus
The Second Ruth Rendell Omnibus
The Third Ruth Rendell Omnibus
Collected Stories
Collected Stories 2
SHORT STORIES
The Fallen Curtain
Means of Evil
The Fever Tree
The New Girl Friend
The Copper Peacock
Blood Lines
Piranha to Scurfy
NOVELLAS
The Thief
Heartstones
NON-FICTION
Ruth Rendell’s Suffolk
Ruth Rendell’s Anthology of the Murderous Mind
CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS
From Doon with Death
A New Lease of Death
Wolf to the Slaughter
The Best Man to Die
A Guilty Thing Surprised
No More Dying Then
Murder Being Once Done
Some Lie and Some Die
Shake Hands for Ever
A Sleeping Life
Put On by Cunning
The Speaker of Mandarin
An Unkindness of Ravens
The Veiled One
Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter
Simisola
Road Rage
Harm Done
Babes in the Wood
End in Tears
Not in the Flesh
The Monster in the Box
NOVELS
To Fear a Painted Devil
Vanity Dies Hard
The Secret House of Death
One Across, Two Down
The Face of Trespass
A Demon in My View
A Judgement in Stone
Make Death Love Me
The Lake of Darkness
Master of the Moor
The Killing Doll
The Tree of Hands
Live Flesh
Talking to Strange Men
The Bridesmaid
Going Wrong
The Crocodile Bird
The Keys to the Street
A Sight for Sore Eyes
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
Thirteen Steps Down
The Water’s Lovely
Portobello
For Jeanette Winterson
with love
THE JAGUAR STOOD in a corner of the shop between a statue of some minor Greek deity and a jardinière. Inez thought it said a lot about the world we lived in that to most people when you said ‘jaguar’ they took it to mean a car and not an animal. This one, black and about the size of a very large dog, had once been a jungle creature someone’s grandfather, a big game hunter, had shot and had stuffed. The someone had brought it into the shop the day before and offered it to Inez at first for ten pounds, then for nothing. It was an embarrassment having it in the house, he said, worse than being seen in a fur coat.
Inez only took it to get rid of him. The jaguar’s yellow glass eyes had seemed to look reproachfully at her. Sentimental nonsense, she said to herself. Who would buy it? She had thought it might seem more attractive at eight forty-five in the morning but it was just the same, its fur harsh to the touch, its limbs stiff and its expression baleful. She turned her back on it and in the little kitchen behind the shop put the kettle on for the tea she always made herself and always shared these days with Jeremy Quick from the top floor.
Punctual as ever, he tapped on the inside door, and came in as she carried the tray back into the shop. ‘How are you today, Inez?’
He, and he alone, pronounced her name in the Spanish way, Eeneth, and he had told her the Spanish in Spain, but not in South America, pronounced it like that because one of their kings had had a lisp and they copied him out of deference. That sounded like an apocryphal story to her but she was too polite to say so. She handed him his teacup with a sweetener tablet in the spoon. He always walked about, carrying it.
‘What on earth is that?’
She had known he would ask. ‘A jaguar.’
‘Will anyone buy it?’
‘I expect it will join the ranks of the grey armchair and the Chelsea china clock that I’ll be left with until I die.’
He patted the animal’s head. ‘Zeinab not in yet?’
‘Please. She says she has no concept of time. In that case, I said, if you’ve no concept of time, why aren’t you ever early?’
He laughed. Inez thought, and not for the first time, that he was rather attractive. Too young for her, of course, or was he? Not perhaps in these days when opinions about that sort of thing were changing. He seemed no more than seven or eight years her junior. ‘I’d better be off. Sometimes I think I’m too aware of time.’ Carefully, he replaced his cup and saucer on the tray. ‘Apparently, there’s been another murder.’
‘Oh, no.’
‘It was on the news at eight. And not far from here. I must go.’
Instead of expecting her to unlock the shop door and let him out, he went back the way he had come and out into Star Street by way of the tenants’ entrance. Inez didn’t know where he worked, somewhere on the northern outskirts of London, she thought, and what he did had something to do with computers. So many people did these days. He had a mother of whom he was fond and a girlfriend, his feelings for whom he never mentioned. Just once Inez had been invited up to his top-floor flat and admired the minimalist decor and his roof garden.
At nine she opened the shop door and carried the bookstand out on to the pavement. The books that went in it were ancient paperbacks by forgotten authors but occasionally one would sell for 50p. Someone had parked a very dirty white van at the kerb. Inez read a notice stuck in the van’s window: Do not wash. Vehicle undergoing scientific dirt analysis. That made her laugh.
It was going to be a fine day. The sky was a soft pale blue and the sun coming up behind the terraces of little houses and the tall corner shops with three floors above. It would have been nicer if the air had been fresh instead of reeking of diesel and emissions and green curry and the consequences of men relieving themselves against the hoardings in the small hours, but that was modern life. She said good morning to Mr Khoury who was (rather optimistically) lowering the canopy at the front of the jeweller’s next door.
‘Good morning, madam.’ His tone was gloomy and dour as ever.
‘I’ve got an earring that’s lost its what-d’you-call-it, its post,’ she said. ‘Can you get it repaired if I bring it in later?’
‘I shall see.’ He always said that, as if he was doing you a favour. On the other hand, he always did repair things.
Zeinab, breathless, came running down Star Street. ‘Hi, Mr Khoury Hi, Inez. Sorry I’m late. You know I’ve no concept of time.’
Inez sighed. ‘So you always tell me.’
Zeinab kept her job because, if Inez were honest with herself and she nearly always was, her assistant was a better saleswoman than she was. She could have sold an elephant gun to a conservationist, as Jeremy once said. Some of it was due to her looks, of course. Zeinab’s beauty was the reason so many men came in. Inez didn’t flatter herself, she’d plenty of confidence but she knew she’d seen better days, and though she’d been as good-looking as Zeinab once upon a time, it was inevitable that at fifty-five she couldn’t compete. She was far from the woman she had been when Martin first saw her twenty years before. No chap was going to cross the street to buy a ceramic egg or a Victorian candlestick from her.
Zeinab looked like the female lead in one of those Bollywood movies. Her black hair came not just to her waist but to the tops of her slender thighs. In nothing but her hair to cover her she could have ridden a horse down Star Street with perfect propriety. Her face was as if someone had taken the best feature from the faces of half a dozen currently famous film stars and put them all together. When she smiled, if you were a man, your heart melted and your legs threatened to buckle. Her hands were like pale flowers on some tropical tree and her skin the texture of a lily petal touched by the setting sun. She always wore very short skirts and very high-heeled shoes, pure white T-shirts in summer and pure white fluffy sweaters in winter and a single diamond (or sparkling stone) in one perfect nostril.
Her voice was less attractive, her accent not the endearing musical tones of upper-class Karachi but nearer Eliza Doolittle’s Lisson Grove cockney, which was odd considering her parents lived in Hampstead and, according to her, she was practically a princess. Today she was wearing a black leather skirt, opaque black tights and a sweater that looked like the pelt of an angora rabbit, white as snow and downy as a swan’s breast. She walked daintily about the shop, carrying her teacup in one hand and in the other a rainbow-coloured feather duster, flicking dust off silver cruets, ancient musical instruments, cigarette cases, thirties fruit brooches, Clarice Cliffe plates and the four-masted schooner in a bottle. Customers didn’t realise what a task it was keeping a place like this clean. Dust soon gave it a shabby look as if the shop was seldom patronised. She paused in front of the jaguar. ‘Where did that come from?’
‘A customer gave it to me. After you’d gone yesterday.’
‘Gave it to you?’
‘I imagine he knew the poor thing wasn’t worth anything.’
‘There’s been another girl murdered,’ said Zeinab. ‘Down Boston.’ Anyone not in the know might have thought she was talking about Boston, Massachusetts, or even Boston, Lincs, but what she meant was Boston Place, NW1, which ran alongside Marylebone Station.
‘How many does that make?’
‘Three. I’ll get us an evening paper the minute they come in.’
Inez, at the shop window, watched a car which was pulling into the kerb behind the white van. The bright turquoise Jaguar belonged to Morton Phibling who dropped in most mornings for the purpose of seeing Zeinab. No vacant meter was required as his driver sat in the car waiting for him and if a traffic warden appeared, was off circling round the block. Mr Khoury shook his head, holding on to his luxuriant beard with his right hand, and went back indoors.
Morton Phibling got out of the Jaguar, read the notice in the back of the dirty van without a smile and swept into the shop, leaving the door ajar, his open camel hair coat billowing. He had never been known to utter any sort of greeting. ‘I see there’s another young lady been slaughtered.’
‘If you like to put it that way.’
‘I came in to feast my eyes on the moon of my delight.’
‘You always do,’ said Inez.
Morton was something over sixty, short and squat with a head which must always have looked too big for his body, unless he had shrunk a lot. He wore glasses which were not quite shades but deeply tinted with a purple glaze. No beauty and not, as far as Inez could tell, particularly nice or amusing, he was very rich, had three homes and five more cars, all of them resprayed some bright colour, banana-yellow, orange, scarlet and Caribbean-lime. He was in love with Zeinab; there was no other word for it.
Engaged in sticking a price label to the underside of a Wedgwood jug, Zeinab looked up and gave him one of her smiles.
‘How are you today, my darling?’
‘I’m OK, and don’t call me darling.’
‘That’s how I think of you. I think of you day and night, you know, Zeinab, at twilight and break of dawn.’
‘Don’t mind me,’ said Inez.
‘I’m not ashamed of my love. I trumpet it from the housetops. By night in my bed I sought her whom my soul loveth. Rise up, my love, my fair one and come away.’ He always went on like this, though neither woman took any notice. ‘How splendid in the morning is the lily!’
‘D’you want a cup of tea?’ said Inez. She felt the need for a second cup; she wouldn’t have made it specially.
‘I don’t mind if I do. I’m taking you to dinner at Le Caprice tonight, darling. I hope you haven’t forgotten.’
‘Of course I haven’t forgotten, and don’t call me darling.’
‘I’ll call for you at home, shall I? Seven thirty do you?’
‘No, it won’t do me. How many times do I have to tell you that if you call for me at home my dad’ll go bonkers? You know what he did to my sister. D’you want him sticking a knife in me?’
‘But my attentions are honourable, my sweetheart. I am no longer married, I want to marry you, I respect you deeply.’
‘It don’t make no – I mean, it doesn’t make no difference,’ said Zeinab. ‘I’m not supposed to be alone with a bloke. Not ever. If my dad knew I was going to be alone with you in a restaurant he’d flip his lid.’
‘I should have liked to see your lovely home,’ said Morton Phibling wistfully. ‘It would be such a pleasure to see you in your proper setting.’ He lowered his voice, though Inez was out of earshot. ‘Instead of in this dump, like a gorgeous butterfly on a dungheap.’
‘Can’t be helped. I’ll meet you at Le whatsit.’
In the little back kitchen, pouring boiling water on three teabags, Inez shivered at the thought of Zeinab’s terrible father. A year before Zeinab came to work at Star Antiques, he had nearly murdered her sister Nasreen for dishonouring his house by staying overnight in her boyfriend’s flat. ‘And they didn’t even do anything,’ said Zeinab. Nasreen hadn’t died, though he’d stabbed her five times in the chest. She’d been months recovering in hospital. Inez more or less believed it was true, though no doubt exaggerated, that her assistant risked death if she got herself any suitor except one approved of, and chaperoned by, her parents. She took the tea back into the shop. Morton Phibling, said Zeinab, had gone off down the road to buy them a Standard.
‘So we can read about the murder. Look what he’s given me this time.’
Zeinab showed her a large lapel pin of two roses and a rosebud on a stem, nestling in a bed of blue satin.
‘Are those real diamonds?’
‘He always gives me real diamonds. Must be worth thousands. I promised to wear it tonight.’
‘That won’t be a hardship,’ said Inez. ‘But you mind how you go. Having that on show puts you in danger of being mugged. And you want to remember there’s a killer at large who’s well-known for stealing something off every girl he kills. Here he is, back.’
But instead of Morton Phibling it was a middle-aged woman in search of a piece of Crown Derby for a birthday present. She had picked up a paperback on her way in, a Peter Cheyney with a picture of a strangled girl on its jacket. Appropriate, thought Inez, charging her 50p for it, and wrapping up a red, blue and gold porcelain plate. Morton came back and courteously held the door open for her. Zeinab was still gloating over her diamond roses, looking like an angel contemplating some beatific vision, thought Morton.
‘I’m so glad you like it, darling.’
‘It still don’t – doesn’t – give you the right to call me darling. Let’s have a look at the paper, then.’
She and Inez shared it. ‘It says it happened quite early last night, about nine,’ read Zeinab. ‘Somebody heard her scream but he didn’t do nothing, not for five minutes, when he saw this figure running away down past the station, a shadowy figure, it says, man or woman, he don’t know, only it was wearing trousers. Then he found her – they haven’t identified her yet – lying dead on the pavement, murdered. They don’t say how it was done only that her face was all blue. It would have been another of them garrottes. Nothing about a bite.’
‘That bite business is all nonsense,’ said Inez. ‘The first girl had a bite mark on her neck but they traced the DNA to her boyfriend. The things people do in the name of love! Of course they called him the Rottweiler and the name has stuck.’
‘Did he take anything of hers this time? Let me see.’ Zeinab scanned the story to its foot. ‘Wouldn’t know, I suppose, seeing they don’t know who she was. What was it he took the other times?’
‘A silver cigarette lighter with her initials in garnets from the first one,’ said Morton, showing his considerable knowledge of jewellery, ‘and a gold fob watch from the second.’
‘Nicole Nimms and Rebecca Milsom, they was called. I wonder what it’ll be off this one. Won’t never be a mobile, I reckon. All the bastards on the street nick mobiles, wouldn’t be like his trademark, would it?’
‘Now you be careful coming down to Le Caprice tonight, darling,’ said Morton, who seemed not to have noticed the jaguar. ‘I’ve a good mind to send a limo for you.’
‘If you do I won’t come,’ said Zeinab, ‘and you’ve called me darling again.’
‘Are you going to marry him?’ said Inez when he had gone. ‘He’s a bit old for you but he’s got a lot of money and he’s not so bad.’
‘A bit old! I’d have to run away from home, you know, and that’d be a wrench. I wouldn’t like to leave my poor mum.’
The bell on the street door rang and a man came in, looking for a plant stand. Preferably wrought iron. Zeinab gave him one of her smiles. ‘We’ve got a lovely jardinière I’d like to show you. It came over from France only yesterday.’
In fact, it had come from a junk shop having a clearance sale in Church Street. The customer gazed at Zeinab who, squatting down beside the jaguar to pull this three-legged object out from under a pile of Indian bedspreads, turned her face up to him and lifted from it the two wings of black hair like someone unveiling a beautiful picture.
‘Very nice,’ he mumbled. ‘How much is it?’ He didn’t demur, though Zeinab had added twenty pounds on to the agreed price. Men seldom tried bargaining when she was selling them something. ‘Don’t bother to wrap it up.’
The street door was held open for him as he struggled out with his purchase. A shy man, almost bowled over, he took courage once on the pavement and said, ‘Goodbye. It was very nice to meet you.’
Inez couldn’t help laughing. She had to admit business had taken a turn for the better since Zeinab had worked for her. She watched him go off in the direction of Paddington Station. He wasn’t going to take it on a train, was he? It was nearly as tall as he. She noticed that the sky had clouded over. Why was it you never seemed to get a fine day any more, only days that started off fine? The dirty white van had gone and another, cleaner, one was being parked in its place. Will Cobbett got out of it and then the driver got out. Inez and Zeinab watched from the window. They saw everything that went on in Star Street and one of them usually provided a running commentary.
‘That one that’s got out, that’s the one called Keith what Will works for,’ said Zeinab. ‘He’ll be going down the Edgware Road to the building materials place. He always comes over here on account of it’s cheaper. What’s Will doing home at this hour? He’s coming in.’
‘I expect he’s forgotten his tools. He often does.’
Will Cobbett was the only tenant who hardly ever came through the shop. He went in by the tenants’ door at the side. The two women heard his footsteps going up the stairs.
‘What’s with him?’ said Zeinab. ‘You know what Freddy says about him? He says he’s a couple of dips short of a limbo.’
Inez was shocked. ‘That’s nasty. I’m surprised at Freddy. Will’s what used to be called ESN, educationally sub-normal, but now it’s “learning difficulties”. He’s good-looking enough, I must say, learning difficulties or not.’
‘Looks aren’t everything,’ said Zeinab, for whom they were. ‘I like a man to be intelligent. Sophisticated and intelligent. You won’t mind if I go out for an hour, will you? I’m supposed to be having lunch with Rowley Woodhouse.’
Inez looked at her watch. It was just gone half past twelve. ‘You’ll be back around half past two then,’ she said.
‘Who’s being nasty now? I can’t help it if I’ve no concept of time. I wonder if you can go to a class in time management? I’ve been thinking of an elocution course. My dad says I ought to learn to speak right, though him and mum have got accents straight out of downtown Islamabad. I’d better go or Rowley’ll create.’
Inez recalled how Martin had taught elocution for a while. That was before Forsyth and the big-time, of course. He’d been teaching and taking bit parts when she first met him. His voice had been beautiful, too patrician for a detective inspector on the television now but not in the eighties. She listened to Will’s footsteps drumming down the stairs. He ran out to the van, his toolbag in his hand, just as the traffic warden arrived. Then Keith appeared from the other direction. Inez watched the ensuing argument. Bystanders always do watch confrontations between traffic wardens and hapless drivers, wistfully hoping for a punch-up. Inez wouldn’t go as far as that. But she thought Keith ought to pay up, he ought to know a double yellow line when he saw one.
She waited while two blonde women with thickly painted faces wandered round the shop, picking up glass fruit and figures which might or might not have been Netsuke. They were ‘just looking’, they said. Once they had gone, checking that the doorbell was in working order, she went into the kitchen at the back and switched on the television for the one o’clock news. The newscaster had put on that expression presenters such as he are (presumably) trained to assume when the first item is grim or depressing, as in the case of the girl murdered in Boston Place the night before. She had been identified as Caroline Dansk of Park Road, NW1. She must have come down Park Road, thought Inez, crossed over Rossmore and gone down into Boston Place on her way to somewhere, perhaps to the station. Poor little thing, only twenty-one.
The picture switched to the trainline out of Marylebone and the street running alongside it, with its high brick wall. Quite upmarket, the houses smartened up and trees planted in the pavement. Police were about and police vans and crime tape everywhere, the usual small crowd gathered behind, seeking what it could devour. No photograph of Caroline Dansk yet and no TV appearance of her distraught parents. That would come in due time. As no doubt would a description of the object her killer had taken from her after he had stifled her life out with that garrotte thing.
If it was the same man. They could only tell, now the biting had proved a nonsense and therefore the sobriquet inappropriate, by the stealing of one small object. These young people had so much, thought Inez, all of them with computers and digital cameras and mobile phones, unlike in her day. A sinister expression that, as if everyone had her day and when it was over started on the long decline into night, twilight first, then dusk and finally the darkness. Her day had come quite late in life, only really begun when she met Martin, and it was after he died that the daylight began to dim. Come on, Inez, she said to herself, that won’t do. Get yourself some lunch, as you’ve no Rowley Woodhouse or Morton Phibling to get it for you, and switch on to something more cheerful. She made herself a ham sandwich and got out the Branston pickle but she didn’t want any more tea, a Diet Coke would be all right and the caffeine would wake her up for the afternoon.
I wonder what he’s taken off this girl? I wonder who he is and where he lives, if he has a wife, children, friends. Why does he do it and when and where will he do it again? There was something degrading in speculating about such things but almost inescapable. She couldn’t help being curious, though Martin could have helped it, risen above such relish for ugly details. Perhaps it was because he was obliged to involve himself in fictitious crime each time he acted in a Forsyth production, that he wanted nothing to do with the reality.
The doorbell rang. Inez wiped her lips and went back into the shop.
SATURDAYS WERE TO be treasured. Sundays weren’t the same at all because Monday loomed dangerously near and hung over the day, reminding you that only one night lay ahead before the grind began again. Not that Becky Cobbett disliked her job. Far from it. Hadn’t it raised her up the class ladder and given her all this? By ‘all this’, vaguely waving one hand, she meant the large, comfortable flat in Gloucester Avenue, the Shaker furniture, the rings on her fingers and the small Mercedes parked at the kerb. All of it achieved without the intervention of a man. Men there had been but all of them less successful than she, none of them remarkable earners and not a serious present giver among them.
Realising it was Saturday within seconds of waking was one of the high spots of her week. If she wasn’t going away somewhere or her nephew wasn’t coming over, the morning always followed the same course – well, and half the afternoon too because she’d have lunch out. It wasn’t always the West End she went to, Knightsbridge sometimes and Covent Garden at other times. Today was an Oxford Street and Bond Street day. She might not buy anything big but she would buy something, little items, small toys really, a lipstick, a CD, a scarf, a bottle of bath oil or a bestseller from the top ten. The window shopping was extensive, and the inside-the-store-gazing shopping and the exploration of departments she had never visited before, and the slow considered purchase of some cosmetic in order to get the free gift. Her bathroom cabinet was stuffed full of toilet bags in every shape and colour because they were what had contained the free gifts. Large items of clothing were a different matter, choosing them a serious business and one to which she devoted much prior thought.
‘I’m not rich,’ she was in the habit of saying, ‘but I think I can say I’m well-off.’
Clothes she bought rarely and when she did they were very good and very expensive, but selecting them and paying for them was not to be undertaken on these Saturday jaunts. Those were entirely frivolous and had nothing to do with finding a new black suit for the office or a clingy dress for the firm’s annual dinner. Everything about Saturdays was to be enjoyed light-heartedly from the moment she left the house to get the tube from Camden Town station, to her return home five or six hours later in a taxi.
She never wasted time having coffee, but pursued her chosen itinerary until just before one. Then it was time to find a restaurant or a cafeteria or oyster bar inside a store and have her lunch. Afterwards there were a few more shops to be visited, perhaps even to turn her thoughts towards those serious clothes purchases but only in cautious anticipation. It was out of the question for her actually to buy anything or even make up her mind to buy it at some future date. Garments in that price range would also be bought on a Saturday but a Saturday set aside for that purpose, the frivolity and the enjoyment absent.
She knew all the best spots for picking up a cab. Unlike those who barked out a command to the driver, she always spoke politely.
‘Would you take me to Gloucester Avenue, please?’
They didn’t always know where it was but confused it with Gloucester Terrace or Gloucester Place or Gloucester Road.
‘North of Regent’s Park,’ she usually said. ‘You go towards Camden Town and turn left at the lights.’
She asked him to stop while she bought a Daily Mail. At home again she made tea, spent ten minutes with the paper. That poor young girl who had been strangled in Boston Place the night before had her picture all over the front page. ‘Caroline Dansk, 21’, the caption said, latest victim of the Rottweiler.
‘Police have no new information as to the identity of the shadowy figure seen running away from the crime scene,’ Becky read. ‘“It is impossible to say”, said a spokesperson, “whether this was a man or a woman.” The garrotter is distinguished by his habit of taking some small artefact from the victim’s body and by a more macabre detail, a bite. This time the stolen object seems to have been a keyring, from which Ms Dansk’s keys had been removed and left in her bag. However, sources close to the family say there was no sign of a bite.
‘“Caroline had her keys on a gold keyring with a Scottie dog fob,” said her stepfather, Mr Colin Ponti, 47. “It was a Christmas present from a friend. She never went out without it.”
‘Noreen Ponti, Caroline’s mother, was too distraught to speak to the media . . .’
Becky shook her head, folded up the paper and examined what she had bought. If it was music she played it, leaning back in an armchair. The bag which held the free gifts had to be opened and each sachet or small bottle examined. This time it was a CD and she put it into her Walkman, resting her head against a cushion and closing her eyes. This evening she would devote to watching television or the video from the cassette she had also bought while she was out.
All in all it was continuous hedonistic pleasure, innocently luxurious and self-indulgent. But it wasn’t unalloyed. There was always, as she had overheard someone say in Oxford Street, a bone in the kebab. The bone in her kebab was her outsize sense of guilt and this was particularly active on a Saturday, especially this Saturday when she knew quite well she hadn’t seen Will for over a week and instead of strolling down South Molton Street she should have been on the phone inviting him to lunch. Lunch, not dinner. They had had their main meal at midday in the children’s home, he had got used to it and that was what he still liked best.
Becky had managed to banish thoughts of her nephew from her mind while she was choosing the night cream and the body toner that would make her eligible for the free gift. She had kept those thoughts away while she was lunching at Selfridges, but now she was home and the CD had come to an end, they came flying back on the dark wings of guilt. Will would have been all alone. In spite of looking like a heavier and more burly David Beckham, he was too simple and naïve to make friends, too diffident to take himself alone to the cinema or some sporting event. Tonight, with luck, the man whom he called his friend, who had been one of the social workers in the home, might take him across to the Monkey Puzzle for a drink but that didn’t happen every Saturday or even every other. Besides, someone else’s intervention did nothing to dispel her own feelings that she had failed Will and been failing him for twenty years. Self-disgust washed over her, making her feel quite sick, when she thought how she had spent her day and how much she had enjoyed it.
Becky’s sister Anne had been killed in a car crash. The car belonged to a man who was driving her to Cambridge to meet his parents, the first man Anne had been out with since Will was born. Not that she often went out with him. That was the first time for months. The car was hit head-on by a lorry on the M11. Its driver fell asleep at the wheel and crashed through the barrier on the central reservation. He died and Anne died while the man she had almost decided to marry lost both his legs.
Two policemen came to Anne’s flat to tell Becky about the accident. She had been looking after Will, aged three. Of course she stayed with him, taking a fortnight off work. She and Anne had been very close, she was almost as familiar to Will as his own mother, and she had been in the habit of saying that she had all the pleasures of motherhood without its responsibilities. That remark came back to her in the days that followed Anne’s death. Would she be expected to take Anne’s place, stay with Will and be a mother to him? Would she be expected to adopt him?
Now she remembered how she had often told Anne she loved him as if he were her own. Was that true? At the time she was working for a travel agent and studying for a degree in business management in the evenings. That would go if she became a foster-mother to Will, there wouldn’t be any evenings. Going to work at all would be hard enough. But, of course – what was she thinking of? – he had a father. She tracked him down and phoned him. He had never paid any child support and his visits to Will had been rare but now he said he would come.
Becky took another two weeks off and her boss wasn’t very pleased. While she was at home she managed to get Will into a nursery and, bracing herself to do it, screwing up her courage, she phoned Social Services to acquaint them with the situation. Will’s father came and Will, who was friendly and trusting with everyone – too friendly and trusting – sat on his knee while the man told Becky how impossible it would be for him to have the little boy living with him: his wife was only nineteen and she was pregnant, she couldn’t be expected to look after a child of three as well.
Will was taken into care. Becky cried for most of the night before Social Services came to take him away, but she couldn’t keep him, she couldn’t. A little comfort was to be derived from the happy and innocent way he took the social worker’s hand and smiled at her. He will be all right, she kept saying to herself, he will be all right, he will be better than he would be with me, he will go to good foster-parents or maybe someone longing for a child will adopt him. But no one did. Beautiful though he was and sweet-natured and good – too good – no one wanted a child who had ‘something wrong with him’. Becky’s worst torment was wondering whether he was this way because she had allowed him to be taken into care, if she had done it by her selfishness. She spent long hours trying to recall instances of his difference from other children before his mother’s death and she did manage to recall Anne’s saying he was too quiet, too well-behaved, not wild and rebellious the way a little boy should be. Remorse still haunted her.
She compensated, or tried to, by visiting him at the home, which was frowned on, and taking him out, which had limited approval. As her fortunes improved and her business prospered, she began buying him presents she had to keep in her own home lest they excite envy in the other children. When he was twelve she offered to pay the fees of a private school in New England where pupils of his sort received one-to-one attention. Social Services put a stop to that. They were very progressive, very left-wing, and they reminded Becky that she had no control over his fate or future, she was only his aunt. As for his father, he had gone off to Australia, leaving behind another woman and a child.
‘The ball is in our court, Ms Cobbett,’ said Will’s social worker. ‘The decision is down to us.’
So Will went to a special school where all the children had learning difficulties, a school without enough teachers and where the ones it had were all exhausted by the amount of paperwork they had to do. It was remarkable to Becky that he could read at all, and he could only when the words were short and simple, but he was rather good at sums. Perhaps he would have done no better at the Vermont private school. What would become of him when he was sixteen and had to leave? How would he earn a living?
Social Services found him a place on a college building course. He was nice to everyone, polite and anxious to learn, but the diagrams he was expected to look at, the technical handbooks he was expected to read, meant nothing to him. There was no simple arithmetic, only weights and measures and calculations, all of which were beyond him. He was living at the time in a house occupied by six young people who had been in care and selected to get on together, but although he never complained, Becky sensed that they teased or bullied him. What would he like to do?
‘Live with you,’ he said.
The ground under her feet shifted, her world turned over. Afterwards she thought it was the worst moment of her life. She had a boyfriend at the time who spent Saturday and Sunday nights with her and the occasional night in the week. When he wasn’t there she needed her peace, her special Saturday mornings. But saying what she had to say was her low point.
‘This flat isn’t big enough for two, Will. You know there’s only one bedroom. How about living on your own if you and I saw each other often? If you came over here a lot and we went out?’
He smiled his sweet smile. ‘I don’t mind.’
The local authority that ran the course got him his job, unskilled labouring for Keith Beatty, and after a while he did pick up basic skills. It was Becky who found the flat above Star Antiques. Convenient for his job in Lisson Grove and not too far from her, it was the right size for him to manage, just a bedsit with kitchen and shower room. And the other people in the house were nice: Inez and a very jolly Caribbean chap called Freddy something, and a pleasant man on the top floor. Ludmila she had never encountered. She worried that Will wouldn’t know how to keep it clean and she prepared herself for the chore of cleaning it for him, but there he surprised her. Not only did he maintain it in spotless condition but he added all kinds of pretty things to the basics Inez provided. Some of them, a green glass vase, a china cat, a lamp whose stand was a Chinese abacus, she suspected Inez had given him, some she had provided herself, but some he had bought, the pink-and-grey cushions, the white cups and plates with rainbow-coloured spots. He had to have a phone, she would never have had a quiet moment if he were without a phone, though she doubted if he knew how to make a call properly.
He loved going to the zoo, so she took him there. They went in the canal boat to Camden Lock and on the river as far as the Thames Barrier. Once or twice they went to the cinema but these visits made her uneasy because what he saw on the screen he believed to be real. Sex he found bewildering, while violence terrified him, he whimpered and clutched at her till she had to take him out. Harry Potter, which had seemed innocent enough to her, so affected him that next time they met he told her he had been to King’s Cross Station looking for platform nine and three-quarters and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t there. Mostly she invited him to Gloucester Avenue, but she told herself it didn’t happen often enough, it ought to be at least once a week and more would be better. What did he do when he was alone in Star Street? In doubt and trepidation because of his reaction to the cinema, she had bought him a television and he loved it. How he managed about violence and sex she didn’t know and was afraid to ask. Reading beyond the level of the simplest children’s book was beyond him and he had no interest in listening to music. He cleaned the flat, she supposed, and rearranged his ornaments. And there was always that occasional mainstay, the childcare officer who took him round to the pub for a beer.
The really desirable thing, she thought, as she slipped a new video into her recorder, would be for him to find a girlfriend. A nice sensible girl, a bit old-fashioned if such a person existed, who would mother him and care for him. A dating agency? The worst thing in the world for the likes of Will. Perhaps Inez would know someone. Becky made up her mind to talk to Inez and soon. Before starting the video, she dialled Will’s number and when he answered, as he always did, with a timorous, questioning ‘Hello?’ asked him over for lunch and supper the following day.
He accepted, with the excited enthusiasm another young man might have shown responding to the offer of a round-the-world tour.
WILL COBBETT WAS very likely the only occupant of the house, thought Inez, who knew nothing about the latest murder and didn’t even know it had taken place. The only resident of Star Street, probably. Everybody was talking about it, but Will, whom she had encountered in the back hall when she went down to pick up her Sunday paper, said only that it was a nice sunny day, Mrs Ferry, and that he was on his way to spend it with his auntie. His mild blue eyes seemed to glaze over as he looked at the 48-point headline on the front page and he registered no interest, only lifting his head and saying how much he looked forward to the day ahead.
‘I do like going to her place. She cooks me my dinner at twelve and we always have the things I like.’
He was so handsome and always so clean and neat that he looked as if he must be intelligent too. How could a man be so tall and slim, have that straight nose and firmly cut mouth, that blond hair and those eyes, and be – well, not quite like other people? Most people expected the illiterate and the simple to be ugly and squat but Will was beautiful. There was no other word for him and if she had been thirty years younger she’d have gone overboard for him.
‘You say hello to your auntie from me.’ She liked Becky Cobbett who was marvellous with Will. Few aunts would go to all the trouble she did. Selflessness wasn’t common. ‘Give her my kindest regards. Next time she comes over here you must bring her down for a drink.’
‘And I could have raspberry and cranberry juice.’
‘Of course you could. We must make a date.’
She wasn’t going to mention Caroline Dansk or what had happened to her. Becky had told her that any sort of violence, even the idea of it, upset him a lot. There were plenty of other people in the house or, come to that, the street, more than willing to discuss the murder. Inez took the paper upstairs, made herself coffee in the little one-cup cafetière and ate a Danish pastry. Caroline Dansk’s picture had been in yesterday’s evening paper but this was a different one. She looked older but prettier, her lips parted, her large eyes, thought Inez, full of hope. Much good that had done her, dead at only twenty-one.
It was the age she had been when she married her first husband. If she had been a bit older she would have known better than to tie herself up to a man who couldn’t keep his eyes or, as often as not, his hands, off every girl he encountered, attractive or not. Inez had been very good-looking, fair-haired and brown-eyed with regular features and long thick hair, but that hadn’t been enough for Brian. She ought to have seen the signs and she saw them. It was a matter of interpreting them wrongly, a matter of the old, old story, that she thought she could change him. Really, it wasn’t until Martin came along that she had a man she didn’t want to change. She sighed, went back to the front page.
There it was again, a keyring the murderer had taken this time, the ring itself made of onyx and gold plate, a gold-plated chain and a scottie dog in onyx suspended from it. The police and the newspaper hadn’t seen the keyring, of course, but an artist had drawn his impression of it according to the description given him by Caroline’s stepfather. Inez didn’t see the use of that. The garrotter wasn’t going to leave it lying about for anyone to find. The paper said Noreen Ponti, the poor girl’s mother, had recorded an appeal for her killer to be found. Understandable but pointless. Everybody would like to find him, that wasn’t the problem. She turned the page to a Tory scandal, a top doctor involved in a flagellation ring, and the wedding picture of an elderly politician who had got married to another elderly politician.
Inez had kept for herself the first floor of the house. She had a large living room, fair-sized kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. With the money Martin left her, she had had the three floors over the shop she and Martin shared converted into flats and all the rooms fitted with cupboards, rewired, new fitments put in and the floors carpeted. No philanthropist, she knew she could get far more rent that way and she had long ago resolved, like Scarlett O’Hara, never to be poor again. On the level above her the two studio flats, basically one room with bathroom and kitchen, were occupied by Will at the back and Ludmila Gogol at the front, Ludmila’s more than half the time by Freddy Perfect as well.
Ludmila’s footfalls could be heard overhead now. She never got up till very late on Sundays and stayed in one of her many dressing gowns all day, even if she went up the road to get a paper or a pint of milk. Gogol, Inez thought, had been the name of a famous Russian writer. That didn’t mean it couldn’t be Ludmila’s real name, there were people called Shakespeare and Browning, Martin had had a cousin called Dickens, but it somehow made it less likely. Her accent came and went. Sometimes it was quite strong, central European movie-speak, and at others more the way the clients spoke in the Lisson Grove Job Centre.
Inez was interested in people. It had failed to make her a judge of character, though. She knew that but didn’t know how to change. How, for instance, was she to know if Freddy Perfect was what he seemed, a cheerful though unfunny clown, or a bit of a small-time crook? And Zeinab – why would she never allow anyone to visit her at home, not even let anyone drive her home? Her father, being strict as some Moslems are, might dislike the idea of boyfriends, especially non-Moslem boyfriends, but why, unless he was a raving paranoiac, would he object to her being brought home by a woman? She, Inez, had only last week offered her a lift home in the course of delivering a bronze bust of Field Marshal Montgomery to a house in Highgate, but she had become quite frightened at the prospect. Human beings were impossible to understand.
These two old people in the paper who had got married, for example, what prompted that? Their combined ages added up to a hundred and forty-six. How did they think they could learn each other’s by now rigid habits and idiosyncracies at their age? And did they have the energy to make the attempt? After Martin, Inez was resolved on never marrying again, even supposing someone asked her, but she would have liked a man around. A nice man in his late fifties, who would take her about, take her out for a drink sometimes or to the pictures. And occasionally stay the night, why not? Sometimes, on warm summer nights, she would walk past a café with tables out on the pavement, soft light falling on the couples who sat there, and feel almost sick with longing to have Martin back again. Failing that – and it must always be failing that – a man with certain of Martin’s traits, someone who, for the time being, would rather be with her than with anyone else. She wasn’t asking for passionate love or even the kind of devotion she had had from Martin, only a nice man who attracted her and enjoyed her company.
She had done her best with her looks, kept her figure, been lucky in having that kind of dark-blonde hair that seldom goes grey, but every man who came into the shop saw Zeinab as well as her and that was it. Invariably. She wouldn’t have looked twice at Morton Phibling but, as any reasonable woman would agree, someone of her age was a far more suitable choice for him than a girl of twenty. Men never saw it like that.
Sunday stretched ahead of her. Refusing to admit to loneliness the rest of the week, she was very solitary on Sundays, on her own unless friends invited her to lunch or dinner or she made the effort and invited them. Perhaps she should try to do that more often, even though it meant cooking and dressing up. The day would be spent doing the washing, the ironing, running the vacuum cleaner round the place, and if it didn’t turn cold, an early-evening walk through the park or along the Bayswater Road where the couples sat in the cafés, holding hands across candlelit tables. And when she got home – even perhaps instead of going out – the videos. The twelve hour-long films that had become her most precious possession.