Ruth Rendell - Portobello

Now he had a very vivid memory of thinking that Lance Platt must be up to no good. And then, immediately afterwards, telling himself that it was bad to be suspicious of someone just because he was out in the street at the time when people he thought of as law-abiding were in bed asleep. It looked as if he had been right that first time. Still, whatever Platt had been doing walking along outside his house, it was obviously unconnected with murder and arson half a mile or more away on the Kensal borders.

Uncle Gib also read about it. His source was a giveaway newspaper called Metro and the news item brought him considerable satisfaction. It wasn't that he thought the police must be right or even that Lance had indisputably done the deeds, but rather that someone he had always disliked and disapproved of was getting his come-uppance at last. Gemma read it when she bought the Sun . She was out shopping in the Portobello Road Tesco with Abelard in the buggy and, in her own words to her mother, it gave her quite a shock. It was a crying shame, it must be a mistake. Lance hadn't been with her that night but maybe she should go along to the police station and say he had been.

'Oh, no, you don't,' said her mother. 'You want to keep a low profile. Suppose they've got proof it was him and you've stuck your neck out. You could go inside and then what about your boy? Come and give nanna a cuddle, my lambkin.'

Fize was refitting a transformer at a house in East Acton. As he put it himself, he broke the rule of a lifetime and went down to the pub in his lunch break. It was Ian Pollitt's local and, being without a job or having the prospect of getting one, Fize knew he would be likely to find him passing his empty midday hours in the Duchess of Teck. Fize had a lager and lime, which Ian said was a woman's drink, as bad as 'lady juice', which was what they called white wine.

'Maybe,' said Fize, 'and maybe I don't want to do my head in when we're talking about a couple of thousand volts. What d'you reckon to Lance Platt?'

Ian tilted his head back and poured down getting on for half a pint of stout. 'Best thing that's happened to me for years.'

'Yeah, but you know what I mean.'

'It's not like they're going to top him,' said Ian. 'Not like they used to. What with eighty thousand banged up there's no space for him. He won't go down for no more than five or six years.'

'He never done it,' said Fize. Now he'd bought it he no longer felt like his lager and lime and he pushed it away across the table. 'You know he never done it.'

'I don't know nothing. My mind's a blank. Don't even know when it was.'

'August fourteen.'

'Is that right? Now that's funny. I was away on my holidays in Tenerife August fourteen.' Ian laughed uproariously at his joke and was still laughing when Fize left and went back to work.

There was no bail for Lance this time. He was remanded in custody for however long it took. In his cell at the police station, stranded there until they decided where they could possibly put him until his appearance in a higher court, he took a philosophical view. Things could be worse. He'd get free meals with no effort on his part, he would no longer have to sleep in company with the bike and the car tyres. As for freedom, there wasn't much you could do with it if you'd no money.

They had altered the design on the pack. Instead of the bold chocolate-brown-and-orange lettering and the (hideous, Eugene the connoisseur had to admit) drawing of a kind of beigecoloured lozenge with a stream of something pouring on to it, the new colours were muted, the illustration more abstract and the name changed. Chocorange was now called Oranchoco. Accumulating enough of them to keep him going on his honeymoon, Eugene thought at first, with a sinking heart, that Elixir had run out of his favourite sugar-free sweets. An assistant passing by while he was scouring the shelf both embarrassed and gratified him by telling him this was simply a name change.

'A lot of our customers have remarked on it. But don't you worry, they're just the same. Same taste, different pack, that's all it is.'

Eugene got out of there as fast as he could, having first bought four packs of Oranchoco and the last remaining Chocorange in the shop. Hoping, but not very confidently, that this innovation might be confined to Elixir, he visited two branches of Superdrug and the lady in the sari in Spring Street. She alone still had Chocorange. Superdrug had changed everything in the store around, putting shampoos where skin creams used to be and switching vitamins with baby-care products. Eventually he found a single packet of Oranchoco in the sweets and chocolate section, which was now where perfumes used to be. No more than six months ago he would have considered knowing the layout of a pharmacy so that he could find items in the dark beneath his dignity. How are the mighty fallen! Perhaps to be brought so low was good for his character.

On his way back to Eugene Wren Fine Art he split open one of the new packets, took a sweet and tasted it. Whatever that shop assistant had said, it wasn't the same. There was a subtle difference and not for the better. The essence of Chocorange had been its smooth creaminess but this new one had a rough edge to the flavour, an undertaste of slight – very slight – bitterness.

His disappointment was profound. He would get used to it, he told himself. The difference was too subtle to affect him that much. But the change made him angry for the rest of the afternoon and even angrier that something so stupid, so banal and petty, could disturb his equilibrium to this extent. A woman who had arrived in a chauffeur-driven Bentley would certainly have bought Priscilla Hart's Study in Precious Metals if his brusqueness hadn't driven her out of the gallery. Walking home, he tried to dismiss the whole thing from his mind but, as he struggled to do this, bitter resentment kept coming to the surface. How could they do this to him, causing him to endanger his business? How could they spoil a flavour and a texture that had been close to perfect?

And then, what did I think about six months ago, he asked himself, before this thing took hold of me? When I look back it seems to me that I was free and that freedom I voluntarily gave up just for a taste, for something to put in my mouth. All the time he was thinking this way he was sucking an Oranchoco, unwilling to waste a precious Chocorange on something so mundane as a walk home.

He chewed up the last of it, no better pleased with its flavour than he had been four hours before when he tasted the first one.

Ella called out to him as he let himself into the house, 'Is that you, darling? You're nice and early.'

His pockets were stuffed full of sweets packets. He hung up his coat, leaving the sweets where they were. She poured him a dry sherry and one for herself, taking them into the study. The warmth he so often felt when they met again after a short separation, even if that parting was no more than a matter of hours, filled him with the kind of pleasure that made him smile. She was so nice, so sweet, and she looked just the way he wanted a woman to look, pretty rather than beautiful, not thin but not plump either, a lovable woman and wonderfully intelligent.

'What are you thinking?'

'That I'm lucky to have you.'

She smiled, took a sip of her sherry, passed him a dish of olives. 'There's something I want to ask you but it can wait till we've eaten.'

'That's quite terrible,' he said, laughing. 'It makes me think you've postponed your question, whatever it is, because if you ask it I shall be put off my dinner.'

'Oh, no, it's nothing like that. It's quite trivial, really. Let's say it's a question of our – well, our medical care after we're married. I mean, I shall go on going to Malina in the practice but you might think you could leave Dr Irving and I could look after you. Only I don't really think that's a good idea. Of course I'll still be a doctor and I'll still tell you when I think you ought to go to Dr Irving because you've got something that needs attention. Am I being too fussy, do you think?'