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

Chapter 31

Copyright

About the Book

‘Found in Chepstow Villas, a sum of money between eighty and a hundred and sixty pounds. Anyone who has lost such a sum of money should apply to the phone number below.’

The chance discovery by Eugene Wren of an envelope filled with banknotes would link the lives of a number of very different people – each with their own obsessions, problems, dreams and despairs. It would also set in motion a chain of events that lead to arson and murder.

About the Author

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.

Also by Ruth Rendell

OMNIBUSES:

COLLECTED SHORT STORIES

COLLECTED STORIES 2

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

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

THE BABES IN THE WOOD

END IN TEARS

NOT IN THE FLESH

SHORT STORIES:

THE FALLEN CURTAIN

MEANS OF EVIL

THE FEVER TREE

THE NEW GIRL FRIEND

THE COPPER PEACOCK

BLOOD LINES

PIRANHA TO SCURFY

NOVELLAS:

HEARTSTONES

THE THIEF

NON-FICTION:

RUTH RENDELL’S SUFFOLK

RUTH RENDELL’S ANTHOLOGY OF THE MURDEROUS MIND

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

THE ROTTWEILER

THIRTEEN STEPS DOWN

THE WATER’S LOVELY

For Doreen and Les Massey with love

Chapter 1

IT IS CALLED the Portobello Road because a very long time ago a sea captain called Robert Jenkins stood in front of a committee of the House of Commons and held up his amputated ear. Spanish coastguards, he said, had boarded his ship in the Caribbean, cut off his ear, pillaged the vessel and then set it adrift. Public opinion had already been aroused by other Spanish outrages and the Jenkins episode was the last straw to those elements in Parliament which opposed Walpole’s government. They demanded British vengeance and so began the War of Jenkins’s Ear.

In the following year, 1739, Admiral Vernon captured the city of Puerto Bello in the Caribbean. It was one of those successes that are very popular with patriotic Englishmen, though many hardly knew what the point of it was. In the words of a poet writing about another battle and another war: ‘That I cannot tell, said he, but ‘twas a famous victory.’ Vernon’s triumph put Puerto Bello on the map and gave rise to a number of commemorative names. Notting Hill and Kensal were open country then where sheep and cattle grazed, and one landowner called his fields Portobello Farm. In time the lane that led to it became the Portobello Road. But for Jenkins’s ear it would have been called something else.

Street markets abounded in the area, in Kenley Street, Sirdar Road, Norland Road, Crescent Street and Golborne Road. The one to survive was the Portobello and from 1927 onwards a daily market was held there from eight in the morning to eight in the evening and 8 a.m. till 9 p.m. on Saturdays. It still is, and in a much reduced state, on Sundays too. The street is very long, like a centipede snaking up from Pembridge Road in the south to Kensal Town in the north, its legs splaying out all the way and almost reaching the Great Western main line and the Grand Union Canal. Shops line it and spill into the legs, which are its side streets. Stalls fill most of the centre, for though traffic crosses it and some cars crawl patiently along it among the people, few use it as a thoroughfare. The Portobello has a rich personality, vibrant, brilliant in colour, noisy, with graffiti that approach art, bizarre and splendid. An indefinable edge to it adds a spice of danger. There is nothing safe about the Portobello, nothing suburban. It is as far from an average shopping street as can be imagined. Those who love and those who barely know it have called it the world’s finest street market.

You can buy anything there. Everything on earth is on sale: furniture, antiques, clothes, bedding, hardware, music, food and food and more food. Vegetables and fruit, meat and fish, and cheese and chocolate. The stalls sell jewellery, hats, masks, prints, postcards old and new, shawls and scarves, shoes and boots, pots and pans, flowers real and artificial, furs and fake furs, lamps and musical instruments. You can buy a harp there or a birdcage, a stuffed bear or a wedding dress, or the latest best-seller. If you want to eat your lunch in the street you can buy paella or pancakes, piping hot from a stall. But no live animals or birds are for sale.

Cheap books in excellent condition are on sale in the Oxfam shop. A little way up the road is the Spanish deli which sells, mysteriously, along with all its groceries, fine earthenware pots and bowls and dishes. There is a mini-market in most of the centipede’s legs and at Portobello Green a covered market under a peaked tent like a poor man’s Sydney Opera House. In Tavistock Road the house fronts are painted red and green and yellow and grey.

The moment you turn out of Pembridge Road or Westbourne Grove or Chepstow Villas and set foot in the market you feel a touch of excitement, an indrawing of breath, a pinch in the heart. And once you have been you have to go again. Thousands of visitors wander up and down it on Saturdays. It has caught them in the way a beauty spot can catch you and it pulls you back. Its thread attaches itself to you and a twitch on it summons you to return.

Quite a long way up the Portobello Road, a glossy arcade now leads visitors into the hinterland. There is a children’s clothes shop, for the children of the wealthy who go to select private schools, a shop that sells handmade soaps, pink and green and brown and very highly scented, another where you can buy jerseys and T-shirts but exclusively cashmere, and a place that calls itself a studio, which offers for sale small watercolours and even smaller marble obelisks. It was here, long before the arcade came into being, that Arnold Wren had his gallery. He never called it that but preferred the humbler designation of ‘shop’.

Stalls filled the pavement outside. Mostly fruit and vegetables up here. When Arnold’s son Eugene was a little boy the vegetables and fruit were of a kind that had been sold in English markets for generations. His grandmother could remember when the first tomato appeared and he, now a man of fifty, saw the first avocado appear on old Mr Gibson’s stall. The boy’s mother didn’t like the taste, she said she might as well be eating green soap.

Arnold sold paintings and prints, and small pieces of sculpture. In rooms at the back of the shop stacks of paintings occupied most of the available space. He made enough money to keep himself, his wife and his only son in comfort in their unprepossessing but quite comfortable house in Chesterton Road. Then, one day when the boy was in his teens, his father took his family on holiday to Vienna. There, in an exhibition, he saw paintings by the Swiss Symbolist Arnold Böcklin on loan from various European galleries. The Christian name struck him because it was the same as his own. Arnold Wren never forgot them; they haunted his dreams and later on he could have described some of Böcklin’s works in the greatest detail entirely from memory, The Isle of the Dead, the frightening self-portrait with the skeleton’s hand on Böcklin’s shoulder, the Centaurs Fighting.

He had forgotten where most of the paintings in the rooms behind the shop came from. Some had been inherited from his father. Others were sold to him for shillings rather than pounds by people clearing out their attics. There were thousands of attics in old Notting Hill. But looking through them one day, wondering if this one or that one were worth keeping at all, he came upon a picture that reminded him of Vienna. It wasn’t at all like The Isle of the Dead or The Centaur at the Forge but it had the scent of Böcklin about it, which made him catch his breath.

It was a painting of a mermaid swimming inside a glass vase with a narrow neck, trying perhaps – from the expression on her face of fear and desperation – to climb out of the water and the vase. All was glaucous green but for her rosy flesh and her long golden hair. Arnold Wren called the picture Undine in a Goldfish Bowl and showed it to an expert without telling him what he suspected. The expert said, ‘Well, Mr Wren, I am ninety-nine per cent certain this is by Arnold Böcklin.’

Arnold was an honest man and he said to the potential purchaser of the painting, ‘I’m ninety-nine per cent sure this is a Böcklin,’ but Morris Stemmer, rich and arrogant, fancied himself an expert and was a hundred per cent sure. He paid Arnold the sort of sum usually said to be ‘beyond one’s wildest dreams’. This enabled Arnold to buy a house in Chepstow Villas, a Jaguar and to go further afield than Vienna on his holidays. His was a Portobello Road success story while old Mr Gibson’s was a failure. Or so it appeared on the surface.

When his father died Eugene Wren moved the business to premises in upmarket Kensington Church Street and referred to it as ‘the gallery’. The name in gilded letters on a dark-green background was ‘Eugene Wren, Fine Art’, and partly through luck and partly due to Eugene’s flair for spotting new young artists and what from times past was about to become fashionable, made him a great deal of money.

Without being a thief himself, Albert Gibson the stallholder married into a family of thieves. His only son Gilbert had been in and out of prison more times than his wife Ivy cared to count. That, she told her relatives, was why they had no children. Gib was never home for long enough. She was living in Blagrove Road when they built the Westway, which cut the street in two and turned 2 Blagrove Villas into a detached house. The Aclam Road mini-market separated it from the overhead road and the train line, and the Portobello Road was a stone’s throw away if you were a marksman with a strong arm and a steady eye.

Chapter 2

JOEL ROSEMAN NEVER walked with a purpose, a destination. He wasn’t going anywhere but mostly round in a sort of circle from his flat in a mansion block at the eastern end of Notting Hill Gate and back again. Once, when he first tried it, he had attempted going out in the late afternoon but it was March and still broad daylight. Next time he went out after dark and that was better. Sometimes he walked clockwise into Bayswater, down to the Bayswater Road and home again, sometimes widdershins, in a loop up to Campden Hill and back to the High Street. Mostly he wandered aimlessly.

For a long time now he had found life better in darkness. That was why he dreaded the summer when it wouldn’t start getting dark till ten. But now it was April and exceptionally warm, light too in the evenings but dusk coming at seven. He wore sunglasses, a special pair in which the lenses were darker than usual. At home he had several pairs of sunglasses but none with lenses as black and smoky as these.

The allowance Pa had paid into his account regularly on the tenth of the month had just come in on the previous day. Joel brooded on Pa as he walked along, wondering in despair what made him tick, why he was so cruel and how it was possible that a man whose child had drowned could have that picture hanging up in his house. He stopped thinking about it when he found a cash dispenser in a bank wall at the bottom of Pembridge Road. The sunglasses had to come off briefly while he drew out a hundred and forty pounds. It came in twenty- and ten- and five-pound notes. Carefully looking over his shoulder (as the bank said you should) he put twenty-five pounds into the pocket of his jeans and the rest into an envelope. This went into an inside breast pocket of his rainproof jacket. There was no sign of rain but Joel possessed few clothes and this jacket had happened to be hanging up, in the dark, just inside his front door.

He was taking these precautions with his money because he intended walking up the Portobello Road. It would be his first visit. He put his sunglasses on again and the world went dark and rather foggy. When she was young his mother had lived in Notting Hill and she had told him – she went on speaking to him when Pa did not – that if your house was burgled and your silver stolen the police would advise you to go and look for it on the stalls in the Portobello Road where you were likely to find it up for sale. This had made Joel think that the market was a dangerous place, somewhere to be careful, but by 7.30, he had decided, the stallholders would be packing up. He was surprised to see that this was not so. The place was blazing with light and colour, packed with jostling people, voices and music, a flourishing trade still going on. When the natural light was dying they had to make up for it artificially. They never thought what it was like for people of his sort. He blinked behind his glasses. According to his mother, Pa called him a mole and sometimes an earthworm.

No one took any notice of him. He walked up the western side, past knitwear shops and blanket shops and print and china shops. It was a surprise to him to see any shops at all because he had expected only stalls. These were there in abundance, shops on the left, stalls on the right, and people, hundreds of people, walking, dawdling, strolling between them and up the roadway itself. All the people looked busy and they looked happy. Joel could always spot happiness, he was an expert at noticing it, perhaps because in everyone he personally knew it was absent. On the other side of the road crowds were going home, heading southwards for the tube and the buses. They looked happy too and, the ones carrying bags and packages, satisfied or excited. He went on, not stopping, not considering buying anything. There was nothing he ever needed except food and not much of that. He shopped for nothing else. The special sunglasses were his last buy and he had had them for two years.

By the time he had been walking fairly steadily for twenty minutes he came to the pub Ma had mentioned called the Earl of Lonsdale. He crossed the road and turned down Westbourne Grove. No one had looked menacingly at him while he was in the market and he was beginning to think reports of the place had been exaggerated. But it was still a relief to find himself among the genteel boutiques and soon the gracious houses of this corner of Notting Hill. He had begun to feel a little tired. Well, they told him he had a heart problem. Young as he was, he had a bad heart.

It was very quiet. The poor live among strident voices, clatter, crashes, deafening music, barking dogs, shrieking children, but places inhabited by the rich are always silent. Tall trees, burgeoning into spring leaf, line their streets and their gardens bloom with appropriate flowers all the year round. Joel was reminded by the silence, if by nothing else, of Hampstead Garden Suburb where Pa and Ma had a big low-roofed house squatting in landscaped grounds. Around here wasn’t much like that but the peace and quiet were the same, yet somehow uneasy, almost uncanny.

No one was about but for two men, not much more than boys, loitering on an opposite corner. They wore jackets or coats with hoods pulled down over their eyes and Joel had learnt from newspapers he occasionally saw that hoods meant their wearers were up to no good. They looked at him and he looked at them, and he told himself that they would do nothing to him because they could see he was young and tall and they didn’t know that his pockets were full of money. He looked poor in his old clothes, his ragged jeans and that jacket with one sleeve torn and the other stained.

Once he had read somewhere about the assassination of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, how she had been walking on to a boat, which was to take her across Lake Geneva, when she had felt someone jostle her and she received a mild enough blow in the chest. It was only when she was in her stateroom, some minutes later, that it was realised she had been stabbed and was about to die. This was how Joel thought afterwards of what happened to him on the corner of Pembridge Crescent and Chepstow Road. He had been struck, not in the chest but on the left shoulder and from the back. He felt the pain grip him with iron claws down his left upper arm.

Perhaps he cried out. He never knew. He fell or sank or plunged to the ground. But he must have leant backwards at some point for his head struck against the bellpush in a plastered brick pillar, which was one of the gateposts of the house on the corner. Had someone assaulted him, as someone had assaulted the Empress Elisabeth? He forgot that he had a bad heart, he forgot everything as he lost consciousness.

The two boys in the hoods crossed the street and stared fearfully at this shabby long-haired man who lay spreadeagled on the pavement. They thought he was dead. The front door of the house behind those pillars opened. They ran.

If Joel had fallen forwards, his mother told him, no one and nothing would have pressed that bell. He would have died. What she didn’t tell him, until a lot later and she was in a temper, was that his father had said it was a pity he hadn’t. As it was, the occupants of the house had come out to see why their chimes were ringing and ringing. They found him slumped against the pillar and called an ambulance.

Chapter 3

JUST FIFTY YEARS old, single still but not unattached, Eugene Wren was a tall handsome man who would have looked young for his age but for his white hair. It was thick hair, a glossy thatch, but there was no doubt that it aged him. This was something he minded but he was very careful not to let it show that he minded, just as, though he chose his clothes with care and wore them with appropriateness, he gave the impression of being indifferent to his appearance. Only his girlfriend knew that his sight wasn’t perfect but that he wore contact lenses.

He was secretive. Why? Who can tell why we are the way we are? Psychiatrists can. Innumerable books have been written tracing our faults and foibles, fantasies, criminal tendencies, sexual tastes, inhibitions and other peculiarities back to events in our childhoods. Eugene had read a good many of them without being any the wiser. He could have understood his secretiveness if when owning up to something as a child he had been punished, but his parents had been unvaryingly loving, easygoing and kind. In fact, he was encouraged to be open. It made no difference. He kept hold of his secrets. Like his mind, his house in Chepstow Villas held many secret drawers and locked boxes.

One of his secrets was his addictive personality. He had been a heavy drinker and had never given up drink but, by an almost superhuman effort, cut down to a reasonable couple of glasses of wine a day. That was before he met Ella, so he was able to keep his one-time alcoholism a secret from her. The break-up with his previous girlfriend, a long-term partner of several years, had happened because she found the bottle of vodka he kept in the bottom of a wardrobe he thought he had locked. His smoking was impossible to hide. But as he had with his drinking habit, he eventually conquered it. Several attempts were made at giving up, the last and successful one helped by nicotine patches and hypnotism. It had been horrible for Eugene to reveal his weakness to Ella, not least of it the disclosing that he had a weakness. But when it was over he was quite proud of himself and Ella was very proud.

‘You can’t really continue to smoke when you are going about with a doctor of medicine,’ he said to her with a light laugh.

For a while he was without an addiction, but not for long.

He hoped he wouldn’t put on weight, though he didn’t say this to Ella, and when he did put it on he did his best to keep it secret. The difficulty was that he tended to eat between meals. Once he would have had a cigarette. Eugene called his habit snacking and Ella called it grazing. To combat it he tried eating Polo mints but he didn’t really like the taste of mint and, besides, Polos had sugar in them. Considering how he fulminated against gum-chewing, especially against those who spat out their gum on to the pavement, he couldn’t take it up himself. Well, he could but it would have to be done in secret and that would be just one more secret. He was anxious not to succumb to deception with Ella. No doubt he would soon propose to Ella and they would live happily ever after, something he sincerely wished and thought likely. Then he had what he called the fat bridegroom dream. He was standing at the altar in a morning suit, marrying Ella, and when he looked down to take the ring out of his pocket all he saw was his huge paunch. Needless to say, he said nothing of this to Ella but pretended to be indifferent to weight or girth.

It was a Saturday morning and he was on his way to the shops. It would be a long walk, some of it perhaps not a walk but a taxi ride. What he sought wasn’t readily obtainable even in the sort of shops whose business (he thought) was to sell it. On occasion it was a weary quest he undertook. Although it had been going on for no more than six weeks, sometimes he found it hard to remember what he had done with his time before that day he went into the pharmacy at the top of the Portobello Road.

But spring had come, the day was fine and his scales had just informed him he had lost two pounds. Think of the positive things, he told himself, think what a harmless indulgence this is, and then, glancing down at the pavement, he saw the sprawl of litter. A tumble of fish and chips remains, part but not all of a bright blue polystyrene container, a can that had once held Red Bull and some fragments of a meat pie. Eugene recoiled from this rubbish but braced himself to remove it. The plastic carrier he always took with him on a shopping expedition (in the interest of saving the planet) he took out of his pocket and, covering his fingers with a tissue, picked up and deposited inside it the remains of some lowlife’s supper. Underneath it – or, rather, behind it, up against a garden wall, pillar and hedge – was an unsealed and bulging envelope. When he picked it up he could see that inside were five or six twenty-pound notes, a ten and a five.

Without counting the notes, he put the envelope into his pocket before dropping the plastic bag into the next waste bin he passed. Ahead of him he could see in the distance the swarms of people, mostly young, heading for the Portobello Road market. It was always the same on Saturdays. They poured off the buses and out of Notting Hill tube station and charged along, talking and laughing at the tops of their voices, in their weekly quest for bargains and the companionship of their fellow shoppers.

As soon as he had the chance, Eugene turned left to avoid them. Not that he disliked the Portobello Road, but he preferred it on Sundays when it was half empty and you could see its buildings and feel its charm. On weekdays he only went there now for one purpose and he had been up to the pharmacy in Golborne Road on the previous Tuesday. Today one of the other selected shops he patronised must be visited. So now to the serious business of the morning.

What would they think he was in need of and was off to buy, those shoppers heading for the market whose indifferent gaze rested briefly on him before passing on? If they thought about it at all they would assume that a man seeking an addictive substance would look for alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, ecstasy, crack or, at the very least, marijuana. Eugene allowed himself to feel vaguely glad that it was none of these he sought.

It had begun when he decided he must find some way to curb his appetite. Some kind of slimming pills, he had thought vaguely. But when first he turned out of the Portobello Road in the direction of the illuminated green cross outside the Golborne Pharmacy, it wasn’t with slimming or appetite suppression in mind but in search of a plug-in mosquito repellent for the summer ahead. Though it was early March, on the previous night his sleep had been disturbed by the whine of a mosquito in his bedroom and he had spent a frustrating quarter of an hour flapping about with a towel before squashing the thing. Paying for the device, he noticed a row of packets of sugar-free sweets absurdly named Lemfresh, Strawpink and Chocorange on the counter by the till. Probably they tasted disgusting. But he picked up a Chocorange and read the label on it: Sugar-free, healthy, tooth-friendly, it said, only 4 calories per pastille. Suppose they didn’t taste too bad. He could eat one halfway between breakfast and lunch, and one between lunch and dinner or maybe two. At any rate, he could give it a try. They had no sugar in them and very few calories.

He took two packets, one Chocorange and one Strawpink. It was four o’clock and hunger was beginning to bite. Like every container these days, the Chocorange pack was hard to open but he got there. It held perhaps a dozen dark-brown lozenges. Tentatively, Eugene put one in his mouth and was pleasantly surprised by the taste. A rich chocolate flavour with a hint of sharp citrus. Delicious, really. And no bitter aftertaste, which used to be the case with sugar substitutes. He took another to confirm his judgement, trying a Strawpink this time. Nice enough, with an authentic flavour of strawberries but a bit insipid, not a patch on Chocorange.

Why not keep some of these by him so that he could help himself to one or two instead of snacking? Money didn’t worry him but if it had, these were cheap enough for anyone to afford: seventy-five pence a packet. And he knew where to find them. Golborne Road was ten minutes’ walk away from his house. It looked as if he had found the solution. No voice inside his head said, ‘Don’t go there.’ No small cautionary thought came to him, telling him to remember the cigarettes, climbing from five to forty a day, or the drinking, which started with two glasses of wine and mounted to a bottle of vodka plus wine, and now was only shakily reduced to two glasses once more. Don’t go there was unspoken or went unheard.

Should he tell Ella? Sucking a Chocorange, he had asked himself that on the way home from the pharmacy. Of course. He must. She would be pleased that he had found such a simple solution. On the other hand, perhaps he wouldn’t tell her. She, after all, was a doctor and one who often said how much she disapproved of additives, E numbers and the various inadequately tested chemicals that found their way into food today. The Chocorange packet carried a daunting list of the chemicals in it. She might try to stop him. She might tell him it was healthier to have an expanding waistline than fill up his body with junk.

‘We’re not talking about obesity,’ she had said the other day apropos of something else. ‘Being a little overweight won’t do you any harm.’ After all, she was a little overweight herself, though he loved her the way she was.

But it should remain his secret. After all, he was a secretive man and there was no use in pretending otherwise. Not to himself. He might pretend to others but was that not the essence of secretiveness?

* * *

Six weeks had passed since that day, which had also been fine and sunny, much like this one, only today was hotter than had been expected for April, but that, of course, was global warming. It was hard not to be glad of its side effects, warmth and perpetual sunshine. The trees were in the sort of full leaf usual three weeks later, the cherry blossom was past and the lilac out. The gardens of this part of west London had the exaggerated look of a seedsman’s catalogue illustrations, banks of pink and white blossom above cushions of purple and rose, all overhung by frondy branches of lemony green and a rich dark emerald. Six weeks. In those weeks he had consumed a large number of packets of Chocorange and now he was on his way to replenish his stocks. In them too he had lost weight.

Visiting pharmacists was what this now regular Saturday morning quest of his was all about. One of these was in sight, in a parade of shops on the other side of Notting Hill Gate; he couldn’t bring himself to call in there. He had visited it last Saturday and the pharmacist would remember such a recent purchase and, worse, make some comment such as, ‘You’re really fond of these things, aren’t you?’ or, most horrible and shame-making because almost true, ‘You must have your fix, mustn’t you?’

He began to walk down Kensington Church Street where there were no pharmacists but only antique dealers, picture galleries and purveyors of eighteenth-century furniture. About to pass Eugene Wren, Fine Art, in accordance with his nature, rather in the way he wished for no comments on his behaviour from pharmacists, he kept his eyes averted as if fascinated by the sight on the opposite side of the street of a young man emerging from the florists under an enormous bouquet of flowers. It wasn’t that he doubted all was well inside the shop but, rather, that he wanted to go about his Saturday business unobserved. Dorinda Clements, in charge in his absence, was entirely reliable. He sometimes made jokes with valued customers, for instance, that she was ‘management incarnate’ and that he trusted her more than he trusted himself. But he didn’t want her knowing his private business.

The only regular stockists of what he sought were the pharmacy and cosmetics chain Elixir. They had become his default store and, like Dorinda, unfailingly reliable, but again their assistants were human, had eyes and memories, and were also capable of remarking on his frequent visits. How satisfactory it would be when you could do all your shopping without benefit of other human beings and, as you already could in some supermarkets, put your credit card into a machine, key in various numbers and hey presto! You had paid for your goods. You had kept your own secrets. Better not go to Elixir today, then, though he could see the branch he most often used ahead of him in Kensington High Street. That was the one where, a few weeks back, he had bought his second packet of Chocorange, replacement for the one from Golborne Road. And, as he had intended it should, Chocorange had admirably fulfilled its purpose. As a between-meals snack it worked, deadening his hunger and staving off grazing; the result had been that he had lost those two pounds he had gained and then one more. If it had a drawback, this was, paradoxically, that it tasted too delicious. Eugene had never got over how something synthetic and harmless could taste so good. The result was that instead of one or two eaten in the morning he tended to take three or four and, in the late afternoon, once he had started he found it hard to stop. Sometimes, between three and reaching home at six, he ate half a packet. Still, it worked and that was the main thing. The unfortunate thing was that not all pharmacists stocked them and those that did tended to run out.

He would try a place further along towards Knightsbridge. This was a small shop called Bolus, run by a stout Asian man with a chilly manner. That suited Eugene. He went in and picked up two packets of tissues and a tube of toothpaste before raising his eyes to the section on the counter where Mr Prasad presided. The brown-and-orange design on the small packets always leapt to Eugene’s eyes before any other colours – you might have said that in this situation there were no other colours – but their absence was as immediately noticeable. The red and pink of strawberry flavour were present, the green of mint but not a single pack of Chocorange. Mr Prasad had sold out. Eugene might have admitted to himself, but did not, that this was largely due to his own excessive buying. After all, the inhabitants of this part of west London, though no strangers to addiction in various forms, weren’t prone to spend their leisure time seeking sugar-free sweets.

Eugene was paying for his tissues and his toothpaste when Mr Prasad said in what sounded like sarcastic tones, ‘Your favourites will be in by the end of the week.’

The unexpectedness of this assault as well as its content brought the blood rushing into Eugene’s cheeks. He muttered, ‘Er, yes, thanks.’

‘Would you like me to put in a double order next time?’

‘Oh, no, thank you. Really, that won’t be necessary.’

He wanted to flee but he made himself saunter out of the shop. He would never go in there again. That went without saying. This subtraction reduced the possible Chocorange outlets to ten. And yet, why couldn’t he have looked the man in the eye, laughed lightly and said, yes, he’d like some ordered specially for him? He was more or less hooked on the things, as Mr Prasad doubtless knew, ha-ha. They were so tasty. Why couldn’t he say all that? He doubted if he could actually utter the word ‘tasty’, just as he couldn’t say ‘toilet’ or ‘kinky’.

He began to recognise he would have to go further afield, perhaps to the outer suburbs. Of course, as always happened in these circumstances, he began to experience a craving for a Chocorange, the smooth oval shape of it, the rich creamy flavour of milk chocolate and the sharp sweetness of citrus. There was nothing for it now but Elixir. They always had Chocorange in stock; indeed, in stock in reassuringly large quantities. His most recent visit to one of their branches had been to the store in Marylebone High Street and before that to New Oxford Street. It must be at least a fortnight since he had used the branch in Paddington Station. Enough walking had been done for one day and Eugene hailed a taxi.

He didn’t ask the taxi driver to take him to Paddington Station; not, that is, through the glazed-in approach area in front of the entrance where Isambard Kingdom Brunel, architect of the Great Western Railway, sits on his plinth. That would have led to the driver asking him what time his train was, whether he wanted him to take this route or that and what was his destination. Better ask the man to set him down in one of the streets that run from Sussex Gardens to Praed Street and leave him to make his own way to the station. He had tried to remember street names but only came up with Spring Street. That would do.

The first thing he noticed – the first thing he always noticed – was the illuminated sign with the green cross on it that hangs above pharmacies. There it was, halfway up little Spring Street, a small shop like Mr Prasad’s between a bank and an estate agent. Eugene felt that catch of breath and lifting of the heart most people would associate with the sight of the person one is in love with. He used to feel it at first sight of Ella; now it was for a purveyor of sugar-free sweets. Don’t think of it like that, he told himself, don’t be silly. The pharmacist this time was a woman, also Asian, wearing a sari, beautiful, calm, with downcast eyes. But he didn’t look at her. The moment he entered her shop a plethora of Chocorange, radiant in their orange-and-brown wrappings, seemed to leap up and meet his eyes, to jostle for his attention. This was a treasure to add to his list, a number eleven to oust Prasad’s Bolus for ever. Without bothering to stock up on more tissues and toothpaste, he went up to the counter, picked out three packets of Chocorange and laid them in front of the deferential shopkeeper. She smiled at him, but courteously, without a hint of cunning or amusement, and rang up the sum of two pounds twenty-five.

Now free to make his other purchases, Eugene took a bus back to Notting Hill, where he bought the ingredients for the dinner he intended to cook for Ella that evening and dropped into one of the bags the envelope he had picked up earlier. Walking home with his two fairly heavy bags and sucking his second Chocorange of the morning, he wondered if tonight would be a good time to ask Ella to marry him, whether it might not be better to put it off for a further week or two. After all, their present arrangement worked very pleasantly. There were none of the problems of living under the same roof but plenty of lovely sex two or three times a week. He checked these thoughts, while telling himself that all men thought along these lines. He loved Ella. If she wasn’t quite the only woman he had ever loved, he loved her best. He could hardly imagine being parted from her.

But he was a secretive person. Should someone who treasured his privacy so much marry at all? Still, he had been more or less living with Ella, at least at the weekends and on holidays, for three years now. She hadn’t probed into his secret life. But another problem was this habit of his. Even as things were, there were difficulties. Once or twice she had caught him out and he had had to say he had a sore throat and was ‘just giving these things a go’. Worst of all, he had been obliged to offer her one, which she had taken and liked. When he got married he would have to give up. He knew he must give up anyway and to some extent longed to give up but, like St Augustine and sex, he asked to be released from his habit but not yet. After all, as he told himself every day, several times a day, it was harmless. He enjoyed it so much. And it stopped him eating calorific food. Once, when he was cooking as he intended to cook this evening, he would have picked at and tasted the ingredients. Tasted again during the process and before he served the food. Now two Chocoranges would see him through.

At home he unpacked the groceries first. The Chocorange were in his shoulder bag and there also was the envelope containing the ten-and twenty-pound notes and the five-pound note he had found on the corner of the street. Sucking his third Chocorange of the day, he counted the notes. Some drug dealer’s haul, he thought vaguely, but perhaps not. Eugene wasn’t indifferent to other people’s feelings, especially in the matter of money, and it might be, though he couldn’t as yet see how, that these were someone’s legitimate earnings that he had dropped – while being attacked? Such things happened and more often than ever these days. The obvious thing was to take the money to the police station in Ladbroke Grove. But he had another idea.

He sat down at his desk and wrote, ‘Found in Chepstow Villas a sum of money between eighty and a hundred and sixty pounds. Anyone who has lost such a sum should apply to the phone number below.’ He transferred this to his computer in various sizes and styles of type and printed it out. He would attach it to one of the lamp posts as his neighbours attached appeals for lost cats. Armed with Sellotape and blu-tak, he went outside into the street with his sheet of paper and looked for a suitable lamp post. For the past week such an appeal had been fastened to the post outside number 62 and it was still there, though the missing animal, a spiteful Persian kitten called Bathsheba, had returned home two days before. Eugene peeled off the notice and put up his own in its stead.

He thought about it while he was cooking Ella’s dinner. The applicant had only a telephone number. But he had no intention of handing over the money on a phone call alone. Whoever applied must be invited here and then asked to name the sum he had lost precisely. Not eighty pounds or a hundred and sixty pounds but somewhere in between. There was no way anyone could get it right except by the most enormous coincidence or by being the true loser of the money.

The phone call was really something to look forward to. He would tell Ella all about it later. Absently, he helped himself to another Chocorange.

Chapter 4

YOU COULDN’T WALK down any of these posh streets without coming on a notice appealing for a lost cat. Always on the lookout for money-making scams, Lance thought it might be a good idea to find one of them and take it as a what-you-call-it, a hostage. You could ask a big ransom. Those crazy cat owners would pay anything you cared to name. The difficulty, of course, was to catch a cat. One of them, a stripy chestnut and dark-brown job, had just come out from a bank of greenery and flowers and sat down on the wall opposite the lamp standard on which a member of its tribe was posted as missing. It began to wash its face.

Grab it, thought Lance. No, maybe go and get a sack or bag from somewhere first. He put up one hand, then the other, to see how easy grabbing it might be. The cat was a lot faster than he. Quick as a flash, its paw shot out and scratched him right across his four fingers and the back of his wrist. With a curse, Lance put his bleeding hand up to his mouth and stepped back. The cat had gone.

Kidnapping a cat was obviously a tougher task than he had supposed. He turned to read the notice on the lamp standard. It would be just his luck if the missing animal turned out to be that stripy thing, which looked valuable but had now disappeared. But the print on the sheet of paper wasn’t about a cat at all. Found, Lance read, found in Pembridge Crescent, a sum of money between eighty and a hundred and sixty pounds. Anyone who has lost such a sum should apply to the phone number below. That was a funny way of putting it. Was it eighty or a hundred and sixty and what was the point of putting the two amounts? It took Lance a few moments to understand and when he did it made him angry. Trying to catch people out, that’s what it was. The person who stuck that up there wanted to have a good laugh when the caller said a hundred pounds and it was really a hundred and twenty or ninety or whatever. Lance felt like tearing it down and stamping on it. He didn’t. It would have been a woman who had written that, he was sure of it. He’d remember that number all right, it was the same code as his ex-girlfriend’s and the four digits were those of his birthday 2787. Phoning would do no harm. But think about it first. Think carefully.

He might even ask Uncle Gib. He hated Uncle Gib and his religion and his horrible house but still he had to admit that the old man was clever. Not cleverer than him, of course, but clever in a different way.

Gilbert Gibson had put down a deposit on the house in the days when he was a burglar. Prison was an occupational hazard in his job and, all in all, he must have spent about twenty years inside. While he was away, his wife Ivy went to work in the Chevelure hair products factory to pay the mortgage and had just handed over the final instalment when she dropped dead of a brain haemorrhage. Her death coincided with Gilbert’s exit from his fourth term of imprisonment. It would be his last. While inside this time his cellmate had been the Assistant Shepherd at the Church of the Children of Zebulun and the result of their frequent talks and Reuben Perkins’s proselytising was that Gilbert got religion. This meant no more breaking of the eighth commandment. It also meant clothing the naked and giving shelter to those without a roof over their heads.

Uncle Gib, as he was known to everyone in the family, knew no one who was naked. However, his own nephew – in fact, his late wife’s great-nephew – was without a home. When Lance Platts’s parents threw him out and the girlfriend he moved in with got her brother to deal with him after he blacked her eye and knocked out one of her teeth, Uncle Gib took him in. Lance didn’t want to live with Uncle Gib. It wasn’t that he was fastidious or ambitious – he was in no position to be either – but even his parents’ flat was moderately clean, had central heating and quite a nice bathroom. The girlfriend’s place had been newly decorated by the council before she moved in with her baby. She had a microwave and an espresso coffee maker, and a huge flat-screen TV on which you could get about five hundred channels. Her flat in Talbot Road was always clean and gleaming, and had a balcony that caught the afternoon sun. Uncle Gib’s house, on the other hand, standing in Blagrove Road right up against the Westway and the train line, was in much the same state of decoration now as it was when he put down that deposit on it in 1965. What had changed was the immediate neighbourhood, now packed with social housing, blocks and blocks of flats, rows and rows of little houses. Lance knew this because Uncle Gib often boasted about the unchanged condition of his home and the virtues of his wife.

‘My poor dear wife, your Auntie Ivy, she couldn’t afford the paint, let alone what you might call structural alterations. Everything she earned went into paying off the mortgage. A saint she was. They don’t make them like that no more.’

The saint had nailed up the bathroom door when only a rusty trickle was coming out of the cold tap and the old geyser broke. The prevailing view held by Uncle Gib and Auntie Ivy was that when you had a kitchen sink and an outside toilet you didn’t need a bathroom. One icy morning in early spring when Lance opened the toilet door he saw a rat scuttle away behind a rag-wrapped pipe. He reported this to Uncle Gib who merely looked up from his scrambled egg and slice of black pudding and said, ‘Don’t let the folks next door hear you or they’ll all want one.’ When he had got over laughing at his own joke, he added, ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’

Lance was a beggar and he couldn’t be a chooser. He lived on the benefit and Westminster City Council paid his rent to Uncle Gib. The council had been told he had the whole first floor but this was a joke, considering Uncle Gib had the main bedroom, the box room was unusable on account of a leak in the roof over the window where water came in every time it rained, and the bathroom was boarded up. There was a second floor but this was never used or even visited. A rope had been tied across the bottom stair with a card hanging on it which said No Entry like on a one-way street. Lance and Uncle Gib lived in the quite large kitchen and a kind of cavern with a stone floor and a sink the old man called the ‘scullery’. The front room and ‘dining’ room were never used, though they were furnished with hand-downs inherited by Auntie Ivy when her own parents died in the seventies. These rooms, according to Uncle Gib, were to be kept ‘looking nice’ for when he put the house on the market and prospective vendors came to view it.

When he wasn’t writing tracts for the Church of the Children of Zebulun or being an Agony Uncle, answering The Zebulun magazine’s readers’ queries, Uncle Gib spent his time leafing through the glossy brochures estate agents put through his letter box almost every day. The neighbourhood was ‘coming up’ and houses soaring in price into the four and five hundred thousand bracket and beyond. Only after considerable refurbishment, of course, a requirement that Uncle Gib ignored while reiterating the enormous advantage of the house being made detached by the construction of the flyover. His laptop in front of him, he sat at the kitchen table drinking cup after cup of dark-brown tea and chain-smoking. Another thing Lance hated about the house was the all-pervading stink of cigarettes.

‘There’s a poky little place here,’ said Uncle Gib, ‘only two bedrooms, no garden, what they call a patio, which means a backyard, no scullery, couple of streets away in Elkstone Road, what d’you think they’re asking?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lance. ‘Might be five fucking million for all I know.’

‘Don’t you use that language here. This is a godly house. Of course it’s not five million. Have a bit of sense. Be your age. Four hundred and fifty thousand, that’s what.’