Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

“ ‘Before we go to paradise,’ ” quoted Matthew, “ ‘by way of Kensal Green.’ ”

They gave him uneasy smiles but Michelle thought they didn’t believe her. An alibi? They no more had one for this killing than for the one in the cinema. As always, they could only alibi each other and what was the use of that? They’d been in bed, asleep.

When they’d arrived this time, Matthew had just come back from the studios where he’d been making the first in the next series of his program and she’d been in the kitchen chopping mint for sauce. Matthew had progressed with such leaps and bounds that though he wouldn’t, of course, eat lamb, which mint sauce naturally accompanied, he was growing quite fond of having it on potatoes and last week had even eaten a miniature Yorkshire pudding. Violent Crimes fixed his eyes on the knife in her hand, a big thing like a butcher’s cleaver that could only be used to kill someone if you chopped their head off. But she had put it down and covered it and the mint with a sheet of kitchen roll as if she were guilty of the crime they seemed to suspect her of committing.

As usual these days she’d only been able to pick at the meal she’d prepared. But Matthew, by his standards, had eaten heartily of the potatoes and mint sauce, several slices of chicken, with caramel custard to follow. Six months ago he’d have thrown up at the sight of caramel custard. He talked about the program, that this first one concentrated on how taking on a new interest in life, earning money, and meeting new people could have a beneficent effect on the anorexic and citing himself as an example. Michelle always saw him with the eyes she’d seen the thin young man she’d fallen in love with, but even she, once she’d struggled to look at him as a stranger might, could make herself aware that he was very different in appearance from what he’d been the year before. This question of the images a woman might create of others and of herself interested her. She knew now that she’d always seen herself as fat, as a child, as a teenager, all through the years when she was normal-sized, and she did so now after all the weight she had lost. Did Matthew always see himself as emaciated?

She went upstairs and mounted the scales. They registered a weight loss so dramatic that it would have been frightening in anyone who didn’t know the reason for it. Stepping off, she looked at herself in the mirror and tried to apply that “stranger’s eyes” test. Up to a point she succeeded and for a moment or two the woman of twenty years ago looked back at her, a woman with just one chin, with a waist and a stomach which, though hardly flat, no longer made her appear in the seventh month of pregnancy. Once she’d turned away the fat lady was back. But what did it matter? What did any of it matter compared with their situation as suspects in two murder cases?

Matthew was washing the dishes. Or, rather, he had reached the stage of drying them. The mirrored woman, though not truly believed in when her reflection was gone, had just the same given Michelle the kind of self-esteem she hadn’t known for a long time. She trembled when she realized what it was: sexual confidence. She put her arms round Matthew from behind and laid her cheek against his back. He turned round, smiling. It was years since she’d seen that particular look on his face. He put his arms round her and kissed her the way he’d kissed her the second time they’d met, and with a tremor of joy and pain she understood that after the years of terror he was courting her all over again.

Jims had arranged everything, from his solicitor’s letter requesting Zillah to quit Abbey Gardens Mansions by the end of the week to the moving van that arrived at eight sharp on Friday morning. Another letter, this time from Jims himself and couched in the coolest terms, informed her she could keep her car. He would pay for Jordan’s operation to be carried out privately in a Shaston nursing home. Sir Ronald Grasmere, for old friendship’s sake, would permit her to move into Willow Cottage before completion of the purchase. He had already signed the contract.

A man who called himself Jims’s agent (he seemed to have so many) came in and labeled every piece of furniture in the flat either FOR STORE or FOR LONG FREDINGTON. Even Zillah had to admit Jims had treated her handsomely. By now she was resigned to the end of those dreams of TV stardom or fashionable life, Buckingham Palace garden parties, the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and cruises on a peer’s yacht. It was over and the crunch had come. But this time things would be very different. Her native optimism reasserted itself. She had the car. She had a vast wardrobe of new clothes. Willow Cottage was no longer rented from the wicked squire, it was hers .

Letting herself and the children in, she found the place even better than she’d been led to believe. The whole house carpeted and curtained, everything new in the bathroom and kitchen, gold taps and marble counter tops, built-in cupboards in all the rooms, a huge television and video. Almost with enthusiasm she arranged the furniture and made up the beds. She picked up the new phone and called her mother.

Eugenie surveyed the place without fervor. “I liked it better the way it was.”

“Well, I didn’t,” said Zillah.

“Want to see Titus.” On painkillers, Jordan was bemused but he’d stopped crying. “Want Titus and Rosalba and Daddy.”

Zillah’s eyes and Eugenie’s met, as if they were the same age. “Perhaps Annie will bring Titus and Rosalba round later.”

Annie didn’t come round later but someone else did. He tapped on the back door at eight o’clock, just after Zillah had put Jordan to bed. Zillah had no idea who this very tall, rather good-looking man in his fifties might be and she stared at him, smiling uneasily.

“Ronald Grasmere. I live up at the big house, pal of old Jims.”

Zillah introduced herself by her Christian name alone. She was vague about what her surname might actually be these days. “Sir Ronald, please come in.”

“Call me Ronnie. Everyone does. I’ve brought you a few strawberries from the kitchen garden and the last of the asparagus. It’s not what it was a month ago but I think it’s still worth eating.”

So this was her bogeyman, the slum landlord, the grinder of the faces of the poor, the fascist beast, as Jerry used to call people of his kind in their student days. The strawberries he’d brought were crimson, glowing, dewy, and firm, rather different from what was on sale in Westminster shops. Eugenie appeared in her dressing gown.

“There’s nothing to drink,” Zillah said. “You could have a cup of tea.”

Sir Ronald laughed. “I think you’re wrong there, my dear. Just take a look inside that cupboard.”

Gin, whisky, vodka, sherry, several bottles of wine. Zillah gasped.

“Don’t look at me. Nothing to do with me. That chap of old Jims saw to it when he came in the other day. Now what do you think of this little place? Not bad, is it, though I say it myself.”

The begging letter that came through Fiona’s letter box, along with a flyer for a restaurant in West End Lane and her American Express monthly account, was from a woman she’d never heard of, someone called Linda Davies. As soon as she realized what it was she recoiled from it, screwed it up, and was on the point of throwing it away. Then she remembered a resolve she’d made when first she’d read in the newspaper about Jeff’s past. Slowly and with a certain amount of distaste, she retrieved it, smoothed out the creases in it, and read to the end.

Linda was one of the women Jeff had lived with and used. “Preyed on” was the expression she employed. She wrote that she had taken out a mortgage on her Muswell Hill flat so that he and she could start a business together. Soon after she handed him the money he’d disappeared. Then followed a tale of disaster piled on disaster: Linda Davies’s loss of her job, her struggles to pay her now huge mortgage, her succumbing to chronic fatigue syndrome. She’d read about Fiona in the newspaper, that she’d been living with Jeff when he died, was well-off and successful. All she was asking was for a thousand pounds to pay off her debts and enable her to make a new start.