Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

The newspapers flopped onto the mat at six-thirty in the morning. Jims had only slept for about an hour. He was up drinking coffee. If he grabbed the papers with unseemly haste, there was no one to see him. He sighed with relief for there was nothing more about him than the usual “man helping.” So far, so good. A pity, really, that there was no point in going back to bed at this hour. He could have slept at last.

The manager-he called himself the chief executive-of the Merry Cookhouse on the A30 remembered Jims, identifying him from a photograph without any trouble. He had been the rudest and most difficult customer the man behind the counter had come across for some time. When he’d finished insulting the décor and the service, he’d said the food wasn’t fit for pigs, it was a suppurating sore on the fair face of England, and the staff were morons who couldn’t tell a chicken breast from a pig’s balls.

That had been at three o’clock on the Friday afternoon. Violent Crimes reasoned, rather to their disappointment, that with the state of the traffic, Jims couldn’t possibly have got from this point in Hampshire to Marble Arch in under two hours, more likely three. They didn’t bother to tell him so. Why not let him sweat for a bit? He was obviously guilty of something, if not murder. Once they’d got the evidence of the Merry Cookhouse man, they didn’t take the trouble to call on Amber Conway, though they might have done so if they’d known Natalie Reckman had forestalled them.

“This MP chap, he was a mate of Leonardo Norton, was he?” Natalie was asking this question at the very moment Violent Crimes’s visit was due. “What you’d call a close friend?”

“More than that,” said Amber. “You won’t mention my name, will you?”

“Absolutely not.”

“I suppose I’m naive, but I thought for a long time it was politics. We’re all very political in Westminster, you know.”

Natalie switched off the recording device Amber hadn’t noticed she was using. “Often borrowed your key, did he?”

“I’ve never known him do it before. He had a key of his own.”

Back at home, Natalie found a message waiting for her on her answering machine. It was from Zillah Melcombe-Smith and for a start it sang, rather well and in tune: “ I’m getting married in the morning .” This was followed by spoken words: “Sorry if I wasn’t very nice to you last time. I was under a lot of pressure. Once I’m legally married to that sod I’ll have a story for you. Would you like to come round on Wednesday afternoon, say about three?”

Natalie put everything on hold. The inquest having taken place and been adjourned, Jeff was getting himself cremated that afternoon at Golders Green. She might as well go. After all, she’d been attached to him for longer than most of his other women and though she’d finally thrown him out, their parting had been as amicable as possible in the circumstances, and her fondness for him had endured until his death. That was probably because she’d never been under any illusions about him.

At two o’clock she dressed herself in a black skirt and jacket. Some precept lingering from years ago when she’d lived at home with her mother made the idea of a trouser suit worn to a funeral seem indecent. Natalie didn’t like hats and only had one, an unbleached straw with a big brim she’d bought for a holiday in Egypt. It wouldn’t do, so she went bareheaded. So did Zillah Melcombe-Smith, whom she hadn’t expected to see. She smiled at her across the chapel, and waved in a discreet and funereal way, suitably subdued to be appropriate for the occasion. Zillah had a child with her, the little boy who was always crying and was Jeff Leach’s son. No doubt, there was no one around for her to leave him with. The voluntary set him off and he was screaming at the top of his lungs by the time the coffin was carried in.

The weeping woman in deepest unrelieved black must be the current girlfriend, or rather, the most recent past girlfriend. Fiona Something. Blond, as usual, with the exception of the one he’d married. She cried all through the perfunctory service. The fat woman who’d come with her put an arm round her shoulders, then pressed her to the biggest bust-you couldn’t call it “breasts”-Natalie had ever seen. That man who’d made such a success of a TV program about anorexia was with them, singing hymns in rather a good baritone. Natalie hadn’t sent any flowers. She’d been feeling guilty about that, but now felt worse, there were so few wreaths. Those there were lay on a paved courtyard outside the crematorium, gerberas and lilies and ranunculus mostly, and Natalie thought how flowers sold in Britain had changed in the past ten years. Before that, it would have been all roses and carnations. A card on the biggest sheaf read: In adored memory of my darling Jeff, Your Fiona . Next to it was a wreath of white dianthus, tightly packed, that looked uncannily like a large Polo mint. The In loving memory card said, From Dad and Beryl . Nothing from the widow. No other former girlfriends there.

Natalie, who’d split up from Jeff just after the Christmas before last, found herself wondering who had come between her and this Fiona. Jeff had mentioned someone, but now she couldn’t remember the details. What had Jeff said about her? If Natalie was going to write an intimate story about all of them she’d have to discover this missing woman’s name as well as that of the girlfriend who came before her and maybe the one before that.

The mourners had all left the chapel by this time and were standing about admiring the flowers, some of them tearfully. Not one among them looked even remotely likely to have been her successor and Fiona’s predecessor. The plump lady with the pretty face was impossible-too old and the wrong shape. A blonde, not unlike Fiona to look at, she recognized as a detective inspector. Natalie introduced herself to a tall, thin woman of sixty who said she’d been Jeff’s landlady in Harvist Road, Queen’s Park.

“He was a lovely man, dear. Never gave a moment’s trouble.”

“I bet he got behind with his rent.”

“There was that. Fancy his wife going and marrying someone else while she was still married to him. Is that her? I think I’ve seen her somewhere before.”

“Was he away much overnight while he was living in your house?”

“For days on end and often at weekends, dear. But it was all above board. He used to go to Gloucester to see his mother. I was ever so worried he might have been on that train that crashed.”

Not likely, thought Natalie, considering he was driving his old banger back from Long Fredington at the time. Jeff’s mother, she knew for a fact, had died in 1985 and his father was living in Cardiff with a woman Jeff disliked, the Beryl of the Polo mint wreath. They hadn’t spoken for years. “That was at weekends. Was he away much in the week?”

“In the summer he was and maybe September too. ‘I think you’ve found yourself a lady friend,’ I said and he didn’t deny it.”

Natalie went over to have a word with Zillah. “Congratulations on your impending nuptials.”

“You what? Oh, yes. Thanks.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Who could the other woman, the intervening woman, be? Well-off, naturally, either with money or in a well-paid job. Owning her home and that home somewhere in London. North London, Natalie thought. Jeff had been one of those people who treat south London as alien territory for which you probably needed a passport. Once he’d boasted that he’d never even crossed a river bridge. That made her wonder what had become of his car, that twenty-year-old Ford Anglia he’d never cleaned while he was with her. She imagined it in a pound somewhere, having been clamped or grabbed from wherever he’d abandoned it in one of the myriad interlaced streets that lie between the North Circular Road and the Great Western line.