Make Death Love Me

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.

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Three thousand pounds lay on the desk in front of him. It was in thirty wads, mostly of fivers. He had taken it out of the safe when Joyce went off for lunch and spread it out to look at it, as he had been doing most days lately. He never took out more than three thousand, though there was twice that in the safe, because he had calculated that three thousand would be just the right sum to buy him one year’s freedom.

With the kind of breathless excitement many people feel about sex – or so he supposed, he never had himself – he looked at the money and turned it over and handled it. Gently he handled it, and then roughly as if it belonged to him and he had lots more. He put two wads into each of his trouser pockets and walked up and down the little office. He got out his wallet with his own two pounds in it, and put in forty and folded it again and appreciated its new thickness. After that he counted out thirty-five pounds into an imaginary hand and mouthed, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, into an imaginary face, and knew he had gone too far in fantasy with that one as he felt himself blush.

For he didn’t intend to steal the money. If three thousand pounds goes missing from a sub-branch in which there is only the clerk-in-charge (by courtesy, the manager) and a girl cashier, and the girl is there and the clerk isn’t, the Anglian-Victoria Bank will not have far to look for the culprit. Loyalty to the bank didn’t stop him taking it, but fear of being found out did. Anyway, he wasn’t going to get away or be free, he knew that. He might be only thirty-eight, but his thirty-eight was somehow much older than other people’s thirty-eights. It was too old for running away.

He always stopped the fantasy when he blushed. The rush of shame told him he had overstepped the bounds, and this always happened when he had got himself playing a part in some dumb show or even actually said aloud things like, That was the deposit, I’ll send you the balance of five thousand, nine hundred in the morning. He stopped and thought what a state he had got himself into and how, with this absurd indulgence, he was even now breaking one of the bank’s sacred rules. For he shouldn’t be able to open the safe on his own, he shouldn’t know Joyce’s combination and she shouldn’t know his. He felt guilty most of the time in Joyce’s presence because she was as honest as the day, and had only told him the B List combination (he was on the A) when he glibly told her the rule was made to be broken and no one ever thought twice about breaking it.

He heard her let herself in by the back way, and he put the money in a drawer. Joyce wouldn’t go to the safe because there was five hundred pounds in her till and few customers came into the Anglian-Victoria at Childon on a Wednesday afternoon. All twelve shops closed at one and didn’t open again till nine-thirty in the morning.

Joyce called him Mr Groombridge instead of Alan. She did this because she was twenty and he was thirty-eight. The intention was not to show respect, which would never have occurred to her, but to make plain the enormous gulf of years which yawned between them. She was one of those people who see a positive achievement in being young, as if youth were a plum job which they have got hold of on their own initiative. But she was kind to her elders, in a tolerant way.

The branch closed for lunch. There wasn’t enough custom to warrant its staying open. Joyce unlocked the heavy oak outer door and the inner glass door, turned the sign which said Till Closed to the other side which said Miss J. M. Culver, and went back to Alan. From his office, with the door ajar, you could see anyone who came in. Joyce had very long legs and a very large bust, but otherwise was nothing special to look at. She perched on the edge of the desk and began telling Alan about the lunch she had just had with her boy friend in the Childon Arms, and what the boy friend had said and about not having enough money to get married on.

Joyce knew everyone who banked with them by his or her name. She chatted pleasantly with Mr Butler and then with Mrs Surridge. Alan opened the drawer and looked at the three thousand pounds. He could easily live for a year on that. He could have a room of his own and make friends of his own and buy books and records and go to theatres and eat when he liked and stay up all night if he wanted to. For a year. And then? When he could hear Joyce talking to Mr Wolford, the Childon butcher, about inflation, and how he must notice the difference from when he was young – he was about thirty-five – he took the money into the little room between his office and the back door where the safe was. Both combinations, the one he ought to know and the one he oughtn’t, were in his head. He spun the dials and the door opened and he put the money away, along with the other three thousand, the rest being in the tills.

There came to him, as always, a sense of loss. He couldn’t have the money, of course, it would never be his, but he felt bereft when it was once again out of his hands. He was like a lover whose girl has gone from his arms to her own bed. Presently Pam phoned. She always did about this time to ask him what time he would be home – he was invariably home at the same time – to collect the groceries or Jillian from school. Joyce thought it was lovely, his wife phoning him every day ‘after all these years’.

No more shopkeepers today. They had all banked their takings and gone home. Joyce closed the doors at three-thirty, and the two of them balanced their tills and put the money back in the safe, and did all the other small meticulous tasks necessary for the honour and repute of the second smallest branch of the Anglian-Victoria in the British Isles. Joyce and he hung their coats in the cupboard in his office. Joyce put hers on and he put his on and Joyce put on more mascara, the only make-up she ever wore.

He parked his car in a sort of courtyard, surrounded by Suffolk flint walls, at the bank’s rear. It was a pretty place with winter jasmine showing in great blazes of yellow over the top of the walls, and the bank was pretty too, being housed in a slicked-up L-shaped Tudor cottage. His car was not particularly pretty since it was a G registration Morris Eleven Hundred with a broken wing mirror he couldn’t afford to replace. He lived three miles away on a ten-year-old estate of houses, and the drive down country lanes took him only a few minutes.

The estate was called Fitton’s Piece after a Marian Martyr who had been burnt in a field there in 1555. The Reverend Thomas Fitton would have been beatified if he had belonged to the other side, but all he got as an unremitting Protestant was fifty red boxes named after him. The houses in the four streets which composed the estate (Tudor Way, Martyr’s Mead, Fitton Close and – the builder ran out of inspiration – Hillcrest) had pantiled roofs and large flat windows and chimneys that were for effect, not use. All their occupants had bought their trees and shrubs from the same very conservative garden centre in Stantwich and swapped cuttings and seedlings, so that everyone had Lawson’s cypress and a laburnum and a kanzan, and most people a big clump of pampas grass. This gave the place a curious look of homogeneity and, because there were no boundary fences, as if the houses were not private homes but dwellings for the staff of some great demesne.

Alan had bought his house at the end of not very hilly Hillcrest on a mortgage granted by the bank. The interest on this loan was low and fixed, and when he thought about his life one of the few things he considered he had to be thankful for was that he paid two-and-a-half per cent and not eleven like other people.

His car had to remain on the drive because the garage, described as integral and taking up half the ground floor, had been converted into a bed-sit for Pam’s father. Pam came out and took the groceries. She was a pretty woman of thirty-seven who had had a job for only one year of her life and had lived in a country village for the whole of it. She wore a lot of make-up on her lips and silvery-blue stuff on her eyes. Every couple of hours she would disappear to apply a fresh layer of lipstick because when she was a girl it had been the fashion always to have shiny pink lips. On a shelf in the kitchen she kept a hand mirror and lipstick and pressed powder and a pot of eyeshadow. Her hair was permed. She wore skirts which came exactly to her knees, and her engagement ring above her wedding ring, and usually a charm bracelet. She looked about forty-five.

She asked Alan if he had had a good day, and he said he had and what about her? She said, all right, and talked about the awful cost of living while she unpacked cornflakes and tins of soup. Pam usually talked about the cost of living for about a quarter of an hour after he got home. He went out into the garden to put off seeing his father-in-law for as long as possible, and looked at the snowdrops and the little red tulips which were exquisitely beautiful at this violet hour, and they gave him a strange little pain in his heart. He yearned after them, but for what? It was as if he were in love which he had never been. The trouble was that he had read too many books of a romantic or poetical nature, and often he wished he hadn’t.

It got too cold to stay out there, so he went into the living room and sat down and read the paper. He didn’t want to, but it was the sort of thing men did in the evenings. Sometimes he thought he had begotten his children because that also was the sort of thing men did in the evenings.

After a while his father-in-law came in from his bed-sit. His name was Wilfred Summitt, and Alan and Pam called him Pop, and Christopher and Jillian called him Grandpop. Alan hated him more than any human being he had ever known and hoped he would soon die, but this was unlikely as he was only sixty-six and very healthy.

Alan didn’t say anything. Pop came very close and read the back page. Turning his fat body almost to right angles, he read the stop press. His sight was magnificent. He said he saw there had been another one of those bank robberies, another cashier murdered, and there would be more, mark his words, up and down the country, all over the place, see if he wasn’t right, and all because they knew they could get away with it on account of knowing they wouldn’t get hanged.

‘It’s getting like Chicago, it’s getting like in America,’ said Pop. ‘I used to think working in a bank was a safe job, Pam used to think it was, but it’s a different story now, isn’t it? Makes me nervous you working in a bank, gets on my nerves. Something could happen to you any day, any old time you could get yourself shot like that chap in Glasgow, and then what’s going to happen to Pam? That’s what I think to myself, what’s going to happen to Pam?’

‘That’s a comfort, that’s my one consolation. I say to myself when I get nervy, I say to myself, good thing he never got promotion, good thing he never got on in his job. Better safe than sorry is my motto, better a quiet life with your own folks than risking your neck for a big wage packet.’

Alan would have liked a drink. He knew, mainly from books and television, that quite a lot of people come home to a couple of drinks before their evening meal. Drinks the Groombridges had. In the sideboard was a full bottle of whisky, an almost full bottle of gin, and a very large full bottle of Bristol Cream sherry which Christopher had bought duty-free on the way back from a package tour to Switzerland. These drinks, however, were for other people. They were for those married couples whom the Groombridges invited in for an evening, one set at a time and roughly once a fortnight. He wondered what Pam and Pop would say if he got up and poured himself a huge whisky, which was what he would have liked to do. Wondering was pretty well as far as he ever got about anything.

Pam came in and said supper was ready. They sat down to eat it in a corner of the kitchen that was called the dining recess. They had liver and bacon and reconstituted potato and brussels sprouts and queen of puddings. Christopher came in when they were half-way through. He worked for an estate agent who paid him as much as the Anglian-Victoria paid his father, and he gave his mother five pounds a week for his board and lodging. Alan thought this was ridiculous because Christopher was always rolling in money, but when he protested to Pam she got hysterical and said it was wicked taking anything at all from one’s children. Christopher had beautiful trendy suits for work and well-cut trendy denim for the weekends, and several nights a week he took the girl he said was his fiancée to a drinking club in Stantwich called the Agape, which its patrons pronounced Agayp.

Jillian didn’t come in. Pam explained that she had stayed at school for the dramatic society and had gone back with Sharon for tea. This, Alan was certain, was not so. She was somewhere with a boy. He was an observant person and Pam was not, and from various things he had heard and noticed he knew that, though only fifteen, Jillian was not a virgin and hadn’t been for some time. Of course he also knew that as a responsible parent he ought to discuss this with Pam and try to stop Jillian or just get her on the pill. He was sure she was promiscuous and that the whole thing ought not just to be ignored, but he couldn’t discuss anything with Pam. She and Pop and Jillian had only two moods, apathy and anger. Pam would fly into a rage if he told her, and if he insisted, which he couldn’t imagine doing, she would scream at Jillian and take her to a doctor to be examined for an intact hymen or pregnancy or venereal disease, or the lot for all he knew.

In spite of Christopher’s arrant selfishness and bad manners, Alan liked him much better than he liked Jillian. Christopher was good-looking and successful and, besides that, he was his ally against Wilfred Summitt. If anyone could make Pop leave it would be Christopher. Having helped himself to liver, he started in on his grandfather with that savage and, in fact, indefensible teasing which he did defend on the grounds that it was ‘all done in fun’.

‘Been living it up today, have you, Grandpop? Been taking Mrs Rogers round the boozer? You’ll get yourself talked about, you will. You know what they’re like round here, yak-yak-yak all day long.’ Pop was a teetotaller, and his acquaintance with Mrs Rogers extended to no more than having once chatted with her in the street about the political situation, an encounter witnessed by his grandson. ‘She’s got a husband, you know, and a copper at that,’ said Christopher, all smiles. ‘What are you going to say when he finds out you’ve been feeling her up behind the village hall? Officer, I had drink taken and the woman tempted me.’

Pam washed the dishes and Alan dried them. It was for some reason understood that neither Christopher nor Pop should ever wash or dry dishes. They were in the living room, watching a girl rock singer on television. The volume was turned up to its fullest extent because Wilfred Summitt was slightly deaf. He hated rock and indeed all music except Vera Lynn and ballads like ‘Blue Room’ and ‘Tip-toe Through the Tulips’, and he said the girl was an indecent trollop who wanted her behind smacked, but when the television was on he wanted to hear it just the same. He had a large colour set of his own, brand new, in his own room, but it was plain that tonight he intended to sit with them and watch theirs.

When the film had begun Alan quietly opened his book. The only chance he got to read was while they were watching television because Pam and Pop said it was unsociable to read in company. The television was on every evening all the evening, so he got plenty of chances. The book was Yeats: The Winding Stair and Other Poems.

Jillian Groombridge hung around for nearly two hours outside an amusement arcade in Clacton, waiting for John Purford to turn up. When it got to eight and he hadn’t come, she had to get the train back to Stantwich and then the Stoke Mill bus. John, who had a souped-up aged Singer, would have driven her home, and she was more annoyed at having to spend her pocket money on fares than at being stood up.

They had met only once before and that had been on the previous Sunday. Jillian had picked him up by a fruit machine. She got him starting to drive her back at nine because she had to be in by half-past ten, and this made him think there wouldn’t be anything doing. He was wrong. Jillian being Jillian, there was plenty doing: the whole thing in fact on the back seat of the Singer down a quiet pitch-dark country lane. Afterwards he had been quite surprised and not a little discomfited to hear from her that she was the daughter of a bank manager and lived at Fitton’s Piece. He said, for he was the son of a farm labourer, that she was a cut above him, and she said it was only a tin-pot little bank sub-branch, the Anglian-Victoria in Childon. They kept no more than seven thousand in the safe, and there was only her dad there and a girl, and they even closed for lunch, which would show him how tin-pot it was.

John had dropped her off at Stoke Mill at the point where Tudor Way debouched from the village street, and said maybe they could see each other again and how about Wednesday? But when he had left her and was on his way back to his parents’ home outside Colchester, he began having second thoughts. She was pretty enough, but she was a bit too easy for his taste, and he doubted whether she was the seventeen she said she was. Very likely she was under the age of consent. That amused him, that term, because if anyone had done any consenting it was he. So when Tuesday came and his mother said, if he hadn’t got anything planned for the next evening she and his father would like to go round to his Aunt Elsie’s if he’d sit in with his little brother, aged eight, he said yes and saw it as a let-out.

On the morning of the day he was supposed to have his date with Jillian he drove a truckload of bookcases and record-player tables up to London, and he was having a cup of tea and a sandwich in a café off the North Circular Road when Marty Foster came in. John hadn’t seen Marty Foster since nine years ago when they had both left their Colchester primary school, and he wouldn’t have known him under all that beard and fuzzy hair. But Marty knew him. He sat down at his table, and with him was a tall fair-haired guy Marty said was called Nigel.

John said how he had this friend who was a cabinet-maker and they had gone into business together and were doing nicely, thank you, mustn’t grumble, better than they’d hoped, as a matter of fact. Hard work, though, it was all go, and he’d be glad of a break next week. This motoring mag he took was running a trip, chartering a plane and all, to Daytona for the International Motor-cycle Racing, with a sight-seeing tour to follow. Three weeks in sunny Florida wouldn’t do him any harm, he reckoned, though it was a bit pricey.

‘I should be so lucky,’ said Marty, and it turned out he hadn’t had a job for six months, and he and Nigel were living on the Social Security. ‘If you can call it living,’ said Marty, and Nigel said, ‘There’s no point in working, anyway. They take it all off you in tax and whatever. I guess those guys who did the bank in Glasgow got the right idea.’

John shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t be worth going inside for,’ he said. ‘Those Glasgow blokes, they only got away with twenty thousand and there were four of them. Take that branch of the Anglian-Victoria in Childon – you know Childon, Marty – they don’t keep any more than seven thou, in the safe there. If a couple of villains broke in there, they’d only get three-and-a-half apiece and they’d have to deal with the manager and the girl.’

He had impressed them, he knew, with his job and his comparative affluence. Now he couldn’t resist impressing them further. ‘I know the manager’s daughter, we’re pretty close, as a matter of fact. Jillian Groombridge, she’s called, lives in one of those modern houses at Stoke Mill.’

John couldn’t help laughing himself. ‘The Childon one does,’ he said, and then he thought all this had gone far enough. Speculating about what might be, and if only, and if this happened and that and the other, was a sort of disease that kept people like Marty and Nigel where they were, while not doing it had got him where he was. Better find honest work, he thought, though he didn’t, of course, say this aloud. Instead he got on to asking Marty about this one and that one they had been at school with, and told Marty what news he had of their old schoolfellows, until his second cup of tea was drunk up and it was time to start the drive back.

Marty Foster also was the son of an agricultural labourer. For a year after he left school he worked in a paintbrush factory. Then his mother left his father and went off with a lorry driver. Things got so uncomfortable at home that Marty too moved out and got a room in Stantwich. He got a job driving a van for a cut-price electrical goods shop and then a job trundling trolleys full of peat and pot plants about in a garden centre. It was the same one that supplied Fitton’s Piece with its pampas grass. When he was sacked from that for telling a customer who complained because the garden centre wouldn’t deliver horse manure, that if he wanted his shit he could fetch it himself, he moved up to London and into a squat in Kilburn Park. While employed in packing up parcels for an Oxford Street store, he met Nigel Thaxby. By then he was renting a room with a kitchen in a back street in Cricklewood, his aim being to stop working and go on the Social Security.

Nigel Thaxby, like Marty, was twenty-one. He was the son and only child of a doctor who was in general practice in Elstree. Nigel had been to a very minor public school because his father wanted him brought up as a gentleman but didn’t want to pay high fees. The staff had third-class honours or pass degrees and generally no teachers’ training certificates, and the classroom furniture was blackened and broken and, in fact, straight Dotheboys Hall. In spite of living from term to term on scrag-end stew and rotten potatoes and mushed peas and white bread, Nigel grew up tall and handsome. By the time excessive cramming and his father’s threats and his mother’s tears had squeezed him into the University of Kent, he was over six feet tall with blond hair and blue eyes and the features of Michelangelo’s David. At Canterbury something snapped in Nigel. He did no work. He got it into his head that if he did do any work and eventually got a degree, the chances were he wouldn’t get a job. And if he did get one all that would come out of it was a house like his parents’ and a marriage like his parents’ and a new car every four years and maybe a child to cram full of useless knowledge and pointless aspirations. So he walked out of the university before the authorities could ask his father to take him away.

Nigel came to London and lived in a sort of commune. The house had some years before been allocated by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to a quartet of young people on the grounds that it was being used as a centre for group therapy. So it had been for some time, but the young people quarrelled with each other and split up, leaving behind various hangers-on who took the padding off the walls of the therapy room and gave up the vegetarian regime, and brought in boy friends and girl friends and sometimes children they had had by previous marriages or liaisons. There was continuous coming and going, people drifted in for a week or a month and out again, contributing to the rent or not, as the case might be. Nigel got in on it because he knew someone who lived there and who was also a reject of the University of Kent.

At first he wasn’t well up in the workings of the Social Security system and he thought he had to have a job. So he also packed up parcels. Marty Foster put him wise to a lot of useful things, though Nigel knew he was cleverer than Marty. One of the things Marty put him wise to was that it was foolish to pack up parcels when one could get one’s rent paid and a bit left over for doing nothing. At the time they met John Purford in Neasden, Marty was living in Cricklewood and Nigel was sometimes living in Cricklewood with Marty and sometimes in the Kensington commune, and they were both vaguely and sporadically considering a life of crime.

Nigel had a curious manner of speech. It was the result of careful study in an attempt to be different. His accent was mid-Atlantic, rather like that of a commercial radio announcer. People who didn’t know any better sometimes took him for an American. He had rejected, when he remembered to do so, the cultured English of his youth and adopted speech patterns which were a mixture of the slang spoken by the superannuated hippies, now hopelessly out of date, in the commune, and catch phrases picked up from old films seen on TV. Nigel wasn’t at all sophisticated really, though Marty thought he was. Marty’s father talked Suffolk, but his mother had been a cockney. Mostly he talked cockney himself, with the flat vowels of East Anglia creeping in, and sometimes he had that distinctive Suffolk habit of using the demonstrative pronoun ‘that’ for ‘it’.

Seeing that Marty was serious or ‘really into’ an attempt on the Childon bank, Nigel went off to Elstree, making sure to choose a time when his father was in his surgery, and got a loan of twenty pounds off his mother. Mrs Thaxby cried and said he was breaking his parents’ hearts, but he persuaded her into the belief that the money was for his train fare to Newcastle where he had a job in line. An hour later – it was Thursday and the last day of February – he and Marty caught the train to Stantwich and then the bus to Childon which got them there by noon.

They began their survey by walking along the lane at the back of the Anglian-Victoria sub-branch. They saw the gap in the flint walls that led to the little yard, and in the yard they saw Alan Groombridge’s car. One one side of the yard was what looked like a disused barn and on the other a small apple orchard. Marty, on his own, walked round to the front. The nearest of the twelve shops was a good hundred yards away. Opposite the bank was a Methodist chapel and next to that nothing but fields. Marty went into the bank.

The girl at the till labelled Miss J. M. Culver was weighing coin into little plastic bags and chatting to the customer about what lovely weather they were having. The other till was opened and marked Mr A. J. Groombridge, and though there was no one behind it, Marty went and stood there, looking at the little office an open door disclosed. In that office a man was bending over the desk. Marty wondered where the safe was. Through that office, presumably, behind that other, closed, door. There was no upstairs. Once there had been, but the original ceiling had been removed and now the inside of the steeply sloping roof could be seen, painted white and with its beams exposed and stripped. Marty decided he had seen as much as he was likely to and was about to turn away, when the man in the office seemed at last to be aware of him. He straightened up, turned round, came out to the metal grille, and he did this without really looking at Marty at all. Nor did he look at him when he murmured a good morning, but kept his eyes on the counter top. Marty had to think of something to say so he asked for twenty five-pence pieces for a pound note, wanted them for parking meters, he said, and Groombridge counted them out, first pushing them across the counter in two stacks, then thinking better of this and slipping them into a little bag like the ones the girl had been using. Marty said thanks and took the bag of coins and left.

So they hung about until five to one. Then Nigel went into the bank, timing his arrival for a minute to. A middle-aged woman came out and Nigel went in. The girl was alone. She looked at him and spoke to him quite politely but also indifferently, and Nigel was aware of a certain indignation, a resentment, at seeing no admiration register on her large plain face. He said he wanted to open an account, and the girl said the manager was just going out to lunch and would he call back at two?

Fiction had taught Alan Groombridge that there is such a thing as being in love. Some say that this, indirectly, is how everyone gets to know about it. Alan had read that it had been invented in the middle ages by someone called Chrétien de Troyes, and that this constituted a change in human nature.

He had never experienced it himself. And when he considered it, he didn’t know anyone else who had either. Not any of those couples, the Heyshams and the Kitsons and the Maynards, who came in to drink the duty-free Bristol Cream. Not Wilfred Summitt or Constable Rogers or Mrs Surridge or P. Richardson. He knew that because he was sure that if it was a change in human nature their natures would have been changed by it. And they had not been. They were as dull as he and as unredeemed.

With Pam there had never been any question of being in love. She was the girl he took to a couple of dances in Stantwich, and one evening took more irrevocably in a field on the way home. It was the first time for both of them. It had been quite enjoyable, though nothing special, and he hadn’t intended to repeat it. In that field Christopher was conceived. Everyone took it for granted he and Pam would marry before she began to ‘show’, and he had never thought to protest. He accepted it as his lot in life to marry Pam and have a child and keep at a steady job. Pam wanted an engagement ring, though they were never really engaged, so he bought her one with twenty-five pounds borrowed from his father.