Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

Fiona thought how unkind she’d been to Jeff that evening in Rosmarino when she’d told him to save his silly stories for their baby, she was grown-up. She remembered how she’d reproved him for not being as nice as he might have been to Michelle. Oh, why hadn’t she loved him as he’d deserved?

Responsibility for the recycling and rubbish bins in the neighborhood of Ladbroke Grove station was not Westminster’s or Brent’s but that of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The men who came to empty them on Monday regarded anything in them worth having as their especial perks, and discarded goods were generally picked over with an eye to unconsidered trifles.

The green Marks and Spencer’s bag was still fairly near the top of one of the bins and the younger of the recycling men spotted inside it something wrapped in tissue. It looked as if whoever had used it as a waste receptacle-it was sure to be a she, he said scornfully to his mate-had forgotten she had left a newly bought item inside. And so it was. Investigation revealed a pale blue cashmere sweater, which would do admirably as a birthday present for the recycler’s girlfriend.

Something else was in the bag. They unwrapped it. By that time everyone in the country who read a newspaper or watched television knew the police were looking for the weapon used by the Cinema Slayer. This might well be it.

The cemetery desecration made an even better story than Natalie Reckman had expected. Witchcraft appeared to have been involved, and an interview with an English resident in Rome revealed the possibility of satanic rites carried out near the burial place of Shelley’s heart. Building a new theater was a project she thought she might work up into an article if she described what was happening on the Palatine Hill and recommended something similar for London as a sort of follow-up to millennium celebrations. It might be called the Millennium Theatre or even, thought Natalie, her imagination running away with her, the Natalie Reckman Theatre.

Before getting on the plane home on Monday morning, she bought an English newspaper. It was, of course, a paper from the day before, the Sunday Telegraph , and there she read that the dead man, victim of a murderer becoming known as the Cinema Slayer, was Jeffrey Leach.

Most people, however tough and however experienced, feel some pang, frisson, or tremor of nostalgia on learning of a former lover’s death. Natalie had never loved Jeff but she’d liked him, enjoyed his company, and admired his looks, even when quite aware he was using her. In the prime of life, he had met a horrible death at the hands of some madman. Poor old Jeff , she said to herself, what a thing to happen, poor old Jeff .

That horrible death must have taken place no more than an hour or so after his leaving her in Wellington Street. Sitting in the aircraft, that morning’s paper delivered to her and on her lap, Natalie remembered, as they left the restaurant, how Jeff had asked her to go to the cinema with him. If she’d gone, would things have been different? Maybe she’d have chosen a completely different cinema to go to. But another possibility was that she’d have been killed too.

The someone she’d told Jeff she was very happy with was at Heathrow to meet her. They had lunch together and Natalie told him all about it. A journalist himself, though of rather a different kind, he saw what she meant when she said there might be a story in it. “Poor Jeff looked a bit funny when I talked about this Zillah woman. Guilty, I felt. Well, maybe not so much guilty as having something to hide. There’s been something fishy going on. I’m wondering if they were never divorced at all. That would be just like Jeff.”

“It’s easily checked.”

“Oh, I shall check it. Never fear. I’ve already put my researcher on to it. I called her on the flight.”

“You are a fast worker, my love.”

“But first I think I’ll be good and contact the bill and tell them Jeff had lunch with me last Friday.”

Natalie wasn’t alone in believing something fishy had been going on. The investigating officers had never been satisfied by Zillah’s explanation of the letter she had written to Jeffrey Leach. The word he had used to her on some unspecified visit he’d paid to Abbey Gardens Mansions when he’d stolen her credit card wasn’t “cow,” whatever she might say. Zillah Melcombe-Smith wouldn’t be fazed by that. And she had been fazed, she’d been very frightened. Such a woman, doubtless, seldom wrote letters to anyone, she wasn’t that sort; but she had written to Leach under great pressure of-what? Guilt? Extreme fear? Terror of some sort of discovery? Perhaps all those.

When they interviewed Natalie they were glad to be further on with piecing together the ways Leach had spent the day prior to his cinema visit. And she was able to contribute to the history of him they were starting to compile, something of his past. That, for instance, he’d been newly married when he’d first lived in Queen’s Park, that besides his wife there had been many women before her, all owning their homes and able to keep him. Natalie told them things they already knew about Fiona Harrington and Zillah Melcombe-Smith and something they didn’t know: that when she split up from Leach rather more than a year before he had moved back to Queen’s Park, this time to Harvist Road, and there doubtless had found himself another woman. They returned to their scrutiny of the letter.

Mrs. Melcombe-Smith had remarried in March. Her divorce had taken place in the previous spring. Or so she said. There were children involved, questions of custody and child support, so the divorce could hardly have been a simple, quick affair. If the word Leach had used to her had aroused so much terror, might it not perhaps have something to do with that divorce, some factor that had come out in the proceedings or resulted from the process? To check would be easy and uncomplicated, starting with January of the previous year and going on from there.

The sergeant’s wife still had a copy of the Daily Telegraph Magazine in which Natalie Reckman’s piece had appeared; she was one of those people who seldom throw anything away. He hadn’t looked at it the first time round but he did now. He read with particular interest the passage where Natalie wrote that Mrs. Melcombe-Smith appeared to have lived the first twenty-seven years of her life in jobless, manless isolation in Long Fredington, Dorset. No mention of a former husband, no talk of children.

Both those Melcombe-Smiths were behaving oddly, to put it mildly. No one could be found who had seen the MP in Fredington Crucis on Friday or Saturday, but two people had told the local constable that his distinctive car, which he always left parked outside the front door of Fredington Crucis House, wasn’t there after 9 A.M. on Friday. The postman who delivered a package at 8:45 A.M. on Saturday took it away again because no one answered the door. Irene Vincey, coming in to clean half an hour later, found the house empty and no sign that Jims’s bed had been slept in.

No porter at Abbey Gardens Mansions had seen him between midday on Thursday and Sunday afternoon. The most damning thing for Jims was when the manager of the Golden Hind in Casterbridge called to say that Mr. Melcombe-Smith had canceled his table reservation for lunch and someone had told him this was information to interest the police. A man called Ivo Carew, the chairman of a cancer charity, reluctantly confirmed this, using a few choice epithets about the Golden Hind manager.

With no idea of what might lie in store for him, Jims made a speech in the Commons about the Conservatives being the party of old-fashioned values but new-fashioned kindness, consideration, and true freedom. Quentin Letts quoted it in the Daily Mail (wittily and with a few snide comments) and rumors began running around the Palace of Westminster that the member for South Wessex was tipped for an under-secretaryship. Shadow, of course, which rather reduced the glory.