Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

“You’re not going to give it to her, I hope,” said Matthew. “She’s hardly your responsibility.”

“I am going to. I’ve just decided, just this minute. I can afford it. I won’t even notice the difference.”

MILL LANE WAS a very different place in July from what it had been in December. Or perhaps it was that Zillah was a different woman, for the weather was cold for the time of year and this was the kind of day when an anticyclone would as likely create a misty chill as it would warm sunshine. She was coming back from the Old Mill House, where she’d left Eugenie and Jordan playing on Titus’s new climbing frame while she went to the supermarket. Jordan was due to go into the hospital for his operation in four days’ time but these days cried only when he fell over. Zillah was dressed in the new natural-colored linen trouser suit she’d bought in a boutique in Toneborough and, though she wasn’t quite warm enough, she knew you had to suffer to be beautiful.

Treading carefully, watching her feet on the flat stones of the ford so as not to wet her narrow-strap sandals, she looked up to see Ronnie Grasmere approaching down the lane, accompanied by an enormous dog like an animated black hearthrug. For a moment she thought the dog was going to leap on her and, more to the point, on her suit. Ronnie, who was carrying a gun, said a quiet but commanding “Sit,” and the animal immediately did so, its forepaws straight, head held high. Zillah was impressed and said so.

“No point in having a dog if he’s your master.”

Zillah nodded. Never before had she known a voice to be so plummy and old Etonian. “And where are you off to, my pretty maid?”

Resisting an impulse to say she was going a-milking, Zillah told him.

“I say, d’you have to do your own shopping? What a shame.”

“Most people do, don’t they?”

His answer was hearty laughter. “Shoot, do you?”

She was more than ever aware of the gun sort of folded over his arm. Broken, did they call it? “I never have.” Sensing it was the kind of thing he’d like a woman to say, she added, “I’d be scared.”

“Not you. I’ll teach you.”

“Would you really?”

“Look, I have to take this great beast walkies, so alas I must leave you. But why don’t you have dinner with me one night? Tonight?”

“I couldn’t tonight.” She could have but playing hard to get was never wrong.

“Tomorrow, then?”

“That would be nice.” It would be her birthday.

Ronnie said he’d pick her up at seven. They’d go to a pleasant little unpretentious place outside Southerton called Peverel Grange. Zillah knew its reputation as the best restaurant in South Wessex. She walked back to Willow Cottage feeling better than she had for months. Annie would probably babysit for her or she’d know someone who would.

None of the neighbors in Holmdale Road had been able to confirm Fiona’s story. They were Londoners and took very little notice of what the people next door or the people opposite did. Their requirement in the neighbors was that they should keep from playing music at night, control their children, and keep their dogs in. Only one couple had even known the Jarveys’ name. All of them knew more about Fiona, whose notoriety came from her having been the murdered man’s partner. But where she had been that Saturday night, home or away, no one could tell. On the subject of cars they were more vociferous. Violent Crimes and Miss Demeanor had nothing to do with motor vehicles, except the ones they drove themselves, and were uninterested in the conduct of users of the two train stations who clogged West Hampstead streets with their parked cars. When would Camden Council introduce residents’ parking was the question four out of five householders asked. Violent Crimes neither knew nor cared. They were no nearer having a clue where the Jarveys and Fiona Harrington had been that night than when they started.

Newspapers had begun asking when the Cinema Slayer would strike again. It would have been easier for them if the two victims hadn’t been such disparate characters, if they’d been, for instance, young women. Then the stories they carried might have included warnings that no girl was safe on London’s streets. But what had a young, good-looking, comfortably situated man in common with an elderly female vagrant, except that neither had any money or owned property? All they knew was that there was nothing rational about this killer, no plan of action, and apparently no particular category of victims he or she targeted. Not politicians or vivisectionists, prostitutes or rich old women, capitalists or anarchists. What did the killer get out of it? No financial benefit, no sexual satisfaction, restored security, or freedom from menaces. Newspapers started calling the murderer the “mindless” or “aimless” killer.

The neighbors in Holmdale Road had known Michelle and Matthew only well enough to say “Good morning” or “Hi” (according to age) and Fiona only as the woman who had lost her fiancé in a very dreadful way. Being questioned as to these people’s movements on the night Eileen Dring was killed changed their attitude to this no longer harmless couple and this no longer blameless young woman.

There was no concerted campaign of ostracism and no dramatic shunning. But the woman whose nephew Fiona had suspected might be a detective began looking the other way when she passed her and the man next door to her, who’d always looked up from his weeding to comment on the weather, now kept his head down. The red graffiti that appeared on Fiona’s gateposts might have nothing to do with the murders, it might be coincidence, but, if it was, the aptness of the graffitist spraying KILL, KILL on the stucco wasn’t lost on her.

Fiona thought it was the police back again when the doorbell rang on a Saturday morning about ten. She felt like telling them to arrest her and have done with it. A point had been reached when she was beginning to understand how people made false confessions of murder so that they would be left alone and have a little peace. She opened the door to a woman about her own age. It wasn’t Miss Demeanor but someone of similar build, age, and dress. Another police officer?

“Good morning,” the woman said. “My name is Natalie Reckman. I’m a freelance journalist?”

Fiona said, rudely for her, “What do you want?”

“They’ve made a real mess of your gateposts, haven’t they?”

“They’re brainless morons. I don’t suppose it’s personal.”

“No? May I come in? I don’t want to talk about Jeff’s murder or who did what to whom. I was once his girlfriend too.”

“When?” Fiona’s mouth had dried. She felt a frisson of terror.

“Oh, long before you. Don’t worry. A woman from Kensal Green came between me and you.”

Fiona had to know. She couldn’t resist it. “Come in.”

Though the feature on the women in Jeff Leach’s life had been shelved, Natalie hadn’t been able to put it into the back of her mind as she had hoped. It kept surfacing. And one morning, when she woke after a dream in which she was hunting for the missing Jims Melcombe-Smith in Guatemala, the name of her predecessor came back to her. There it was, absolutely clear as if her memory had never mislaid it: Nell Johnson-Fleet and she’d worked for a charity called Victims of Crime International, or VOCI. Of course, Johnson-Fleets are not exactly thick on the ground, and Natalie soon found her address and number in the phone book.

Perhaps something was telling her the time had come to concentrate on this story. She made herself recall that last conversation she’d ever had with Jeff. In Christopher’s in Covent Garden it had been and when she’d asked who came after her he’d said, “A funny little thing who lived opposite Kensal Green Cemetery. I don’t think I’ll tell you her name. I called her Polo…” Knowing Jeff as she did and in possession of this limited information, had she a chance of finding this woman? For a start, he probably hadn’t meant she lived precisely opposite the cemetery but on the other side of Harrow Road in one of the streets that lay behind it. Natalie got out her London atlas and turned to page 56. There was a positive web of little streets in that hinterland. Instead of making a list of them, she photocopied the atlas page. At a cost of £200 you could buy access on the Internet that would give you the names, addresses, and a dossier of every single citizen of the United Kingdom. Or so she’d read in some cyberspace magazine. But would it help? She thought she still preferred the old-fashioned electoral register.