Ruth Rendell - Portobello

'I will find you a way,' Joel said to him. 'I know how to get you there and I'll do it soon.'

When he made this promise, and he was starting to make it every day, Mithras was silent and Joel knew he was grateful. Once he had been wary of addressing Mithras in Noreen's presence but now he spoke to him loudly in front of her so that she would think him schizophrenic.

Lance appeared in the magistrates' court and was once more released on police bail. Not many years before, in Uncle Gib's day for instance, they would have remanded him in custody. But there was no vacant cell in the police station and no room in the prisons, so Lance came home and made his way to his parents' flat in Acton, for he knew the well-tried dictum that home is all that is left for you to go to and where they have to take you in.

They weren't pleased. Another rule in these homecomings is that Dad is hard-hearted and will do his best to show you the door while Mum remembers how she carried you for nine months and what a lovely baby you were, only son et cetera, and dissuades him. They had a spare room, which had once been Lance's room and was now full of defunct kitchen equipment, old motorcycling magazines, a broken bicycle and a stack of car tyres of unknown provenance. But a space was cleared for Lance to sleep there.

More than anything, he missed Gemma. He lay awake in that horrible bedroom trying to think of ways to reach her. Traffic thundered past the block where his parents lived. There was a pothole in the roadway just outside and every time a heavy lorry passed over it the place shook as if an earthquake were happening, and Lance was afraid the broken bike and the stacked tyres would topple over on top of him. One of the neighbours had written to the council that it was time they mended the road but nothing was done. He tried to phone Gemma when he calculated Fize would be at work but he never got a reply.

The police were determined to victimise him. The 'perpetrator' they called him, a word Lance hadn't previously heard. 'Alleged' was another word he didn't understand. Of course he could have told them he couldn't have set fire to Uncle Gib's house because he was breaking into Elizabeth Cherry's at the time but he dismissed that solution out of hand. The chances were they'd never be able to prove arson, and therefore murder, and he'd get off scot-free while being found guilty of burglary, which would land him in prison. Uncle Gib always used to say that the British never cared much about what you did to other people, it was property they thought more of. Lance hadn't taken much notice at the time but those words came back to him while he was in a police cell and now in his parents' flat.

Lying in his uncomfortable bed at night, shaken and buffeted by the lorries going past, he thought of Gemma and he repeated that word 'perpetrator' to himself, trying to decide whether it sounded worse than 'burglar' or better.

The Notting Hill Carnival starts on Saturday but Sunday and Monday (a Bank Holiday) are always the big days. Its route this year, much the same as last year, eventually wound its way up Ladbroke Road and it was there that Uncle Gib stationed himself. In years gone by, when he hadn't been inside, he regularly attended the Notting Hill Carnival and he didn't see why he should miss this year just because his house had burnt down. He was a thief, or rather had been a thief, so he knew that pickpockets and bag snatchers infested the Carnival route, mingling with the crowd. For this reason he took no money with him. If he had possessed credit cards, a watch and jewellery, he wouldn't have taken those things with him either. He was unaccommodated man but for his second-hand trousers bought off a stall in the Portobello Road and one of Reuben's collarless shirts. If anyone had stolen from his person he would, as a former thief himself, have been deeply ashamed, so he gave them no opportunity.

Among the crowds watching the floats, the bands and the dancers, the blazing colours under a freak sunny sky, he spotted first Lance and later Fize with a black guy and a white one. To some extent Uncle Gib had what the average person (but not psychiatrists) call a split personality. A born-again religious man, he of course deplored stealing as in direct defiance of a Commandment but, as a reformed thief, he watched with enjoyment the antics of such as Ian Pollitt, the black one and the white one as they sized up the hundreds who lined the route and calculated which pocket or handbag might be rifled with impunity. He actually saw the white one remove what looked like a credit card from a woman's jacket pocket and Pollitt attempt, but fail, to extract a purse from a handbag.

Distracted by all this as he was, Lance caught him off-guard. There was no escape. Uncle Gib rounded on him before he could speak. 'If I wasn't against bad language like I am, I wouldn't call you an arsonist but an arse hole .'

'I haven't done nothing,' said Lance.

'Why aren't you banged up? That's what I want to know.'

'I don't know. They never said. I'm on bail. Can I come and live at your place?'

Uncle Gib almost spat. 'I haven't got a place. I'm homeless. Some dear friends took me in out of the goodness of their hearts and there's no room for the likes of you.'

Next day came Dorian Lupescu's funeral, a grand extravagant affair at the Russian Orthodox church in Moscow Road. Uncle Gib was invited. How Dorian's parents and wife and aunts and uncles and cousins knew of his existence and where to find him Uncle Gib didn't know, but they did find him and sent an invitation on beautiful cream-laid paper with a black border and a black silk ribbon bow. His striped suit having perished in the fire, he borrowed one from Reuben along with another shirt and black tie. Poor Dorian's body was transported in a mahogany coffin with brass fittings in a black-and-gold carriage drawn by four black horses with black feathers on their heads. The service was in Russian or Greek or something but Uncle Gib sang along with the hymns in English, though he didn't really know the tunes.

Afterwards, they all stood out in the street smoking strong Russian cigarettes and Dorian's mother thanked Uncle Gib in the best English she could manage for being kind to her son and Gib was so moved that he had tears in his eyes for the first time since he was an infant. Back at home with the Perkinses a piece of good news awaited him. The Children of Zebulun had clubbed together and bought him a new computer. Maybelle was giving him the box room for a study to use for answering his Agony Uncle letters.

August went out like a lion, a very wet and bedraggled lion, and September came in like a lamb, skipping in the sunshine. At the beginning of the first week, in the middle of the afternoon, Elizabeth Cherry came back from her holiday. Almost the first thing she noticed was the glassless window frame. Rain had soaked the curtains, which had dried again with unsightly stains, and left a damp patch on the carpet. She phoned Susan, who knew nothing about it and who began abject apologies for not noticing. You can't castigate your neighbour who has been keeping an eye on your property without payment even though that eye has failed to spot the only thing it was kept there for. Would Elizabeth like Susan to come over? Elizabeth said not now, tomorrow perhaps, and carried her case upstairs. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed. She unpacked her clothes and tipped the contents of the small jewel case she had carried with her – a spare watch in case the battery in hers gave out and a ring to wear for a dress-up evening – into the large jewel box on her dressing table.

In the kitchen, she looked through the freezer for a packet of strawberry ice cream. No sign of it. She supposed she was getting forgetful and had eaten it herself. The toaster was full of crumbs. She was sure she hadn't left it that way. Elizabeth went back upstairs to scrutinise the jewel box. The difficulty was that she couldn't now remember what had been in the box when first she opened it half an hour before and what she had added to it from the contents of her carry-on case. Still, there could be no doubt about what was missing: a diamond ring and and diamond eternity ring, both of which had been her mother's, a gold chain and a gold bracelet. Elizabeth phoned the police.