Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

The voices crowded in on her while she was studying the one she’d have installed. Jock and Mrs. Lewis and another that must be Jock’s dad. It couldn’t be his brother. His brother was still alive. He must have been to send her the money. Maybe the ex-wife was dead too and the brother’s wife. Were they all there because she’d never visited Jock’s grave?

They never answered but she asked just the same. “Where’s he buried? Where have they put Jock?”

Silence. It wasn’t a reply, more a piece of knowledge that suddenly appeared inside her head. No one said it, for the voices had once more gone away. The thought, the fact, came in and she knew absolutely that it was true. He’s in the one by Chelsea football ground. As if she hadn’t understood, it came again. The one by Chelsea football ground.

Edna had lived down there. When she was a little girl and Edna was still alive, had another ten years to live, Auntie used to take her over there to Edna’s for tea. She had a little gray house, one of a long, flat-fronted row, with a door opening on to the pavement.

Minty went over there in the evening after work, and she took a knife with her, one of the smaller ones from the drawer. She went by bus, or rather a series of buses, ending up on the 11, which took her to Fulham Broadway.

It was years since she’d been there, twenty-five years. Even then, the football hooligans used to break the place up if their team got beaten by Chelsea. Auntie had pointed out smashed shop fronts to her and turned the demonstration into a lesson on the wickedness of destroying property. No smashed windows now, none of the old shops. The place had been smartened up. She went to look at Edna’s house. It was as bright and fresh now as the Wilsons’, with a red front door and carriage lamps, frilly curtains inside the windows, and boxes full of flowers outside them. All the houses were like that, only the flowers were of different kinds and the doors blue or yellow. Edna always wore a crossover overall and slippers, and a turban like she had on the production line during the war. Most of the time Uncle Wilfred was in his darkroom developing his photographs. He wanted Minty to go in there with him but usually Auntie wouldn’t let her, not unless the door was left open, which it obviously couldn’t be in a darkroom. She didn’t know why it was forbidden, hadn’t then and didn’t now, though she could still remember the meaningful glances Auntie and Edna exchanged when Uncle Wilfred shrugged and turned away.

She entered the cemetery from the Old Brompton Road end. Although she had often gazed at it from Edna’s windows-there was little else to do-she’d never been in before. And she found it frightening in a way Kensal Green never was. This had something to do with the eight-sided chapel and curving colonnades you had to pass by or between, something perhaps with the gloom of the evening, a typical London summer evening of heavy cloud and excluded sun and windless, thick air, though it was still a long way off twilight. There was a tomb with a lion on it like the lions in Trafalgar Square and another piled with black cannonballs. As she walked she was sure she would meet her ghosts, or some of them, or one. Jock himself frightened her more than the others. With old women, even with their shades, she could cope. But she sensed in Jock a violence she had never known from him in life. It was as if, in death, he was slowly realizing his full potential of savagery and malice.

As she looked to the right and left of her for his grave, for a new grave, perhaps only a mound with as yet no memorial stone, she tried to comfort herself with the thought of the new shower that was coming, that Jock’s brother or sister-in-law had been considerate enough to pay for. But the distraction barely worked. She knew by this time that there were no recent burials in this dark, forlorn cemetery, which had an atmosphere about it of having been forgotten and abandoned. For the first time she noticed there were no people about, no visitors apart from herself. This made it seem as if the place were not really there at all but belonged in another world, empty of anything, men and women, animals, even ghosts. And somehow this was more frightening than the ghosts themselves, for she might be trapped in it, caught up in a timeless deserted waste forever. She looked at the ground, at blades of grass, at the gray, still air, and saw not even a bird, not even an insect. Then she started to run, away from the colonnades, the immovable, eternal gray stone pillars, down, down, down to the gate and the street and houses and people…

IN THE COURSE of her work Natalie had often thought of how she would handle the press should a journalist contact her. The advice she gave herself was much the same as that offered by a lawyer to his or her client in confrontations with the police. Say nothing, or, if you must speak, use monosyllables. Like most reporters and most policemen, she seldom encountered members of the public who took this advice. Nell Johnson-Fleet was the exception.

Opening the door of her Kentish Town flat, she looked straight into Natalie’s face but said nothing. Natalie, who was looking straight into hers, said who she was and might she have a word.

“No,” said Nell Johnson-Fleet.

Like all Jeff’s women-Zillah had been the odd one out-she was a tallish, thin blonde and dressed as he liked them to be, in trousers and a sweater. Natalie well remembered his preferences. “I was one of his girlfriends too. Victims, if you like. It might be a help to talk about it, don’t you think?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you prefer to put it all behind you? Try to do the impossible and forget it ever happened.”

Gently, Nell Johnson-Fleet closed the door. Natalie wasn’t one to give up as easily as that. She rang the bell again and, getting no answer, went round the corner of the street, where she sat down on a wall and dialed the woman’s number on her mobile. The call was answered with a curt, “Yes?”

This, at least, was different. “It’s Natalie Reckman, Nell. I hope you’re going to let me in for just five minutes.”

“No,” and the phone went down.

You had to admire it, Natalie thought, returning to her car just as the traffic warden was approaching. It was a wonderful technique. A good thing most of the public weren’t like that. On the other hand, people went through moods, they had good days and bad days, and this might be a bad one. Nell Johnson-Fleet might have had a row with her boyfriend or seen him with another woman; the way she happened to be this evening was no guide to her normal behavior. She’d try again tomorrow, give her a chance to regret passing up her opportunity. Now for Kensal Green.

The police had left them alone for nearly two weeks. They had threatened to come back but they never had. Michelle had begun eating again, not much and sensible food, but she no longer felt as if every mouthful would choke her. Her weight had gone down to what it had been ten years earlier. And while she was quite content with a salad and single slice of bread for lunch, Matthew was regularly eating a two-egg omelette. He’d begun to drive the car again, uncertainly at first, like someone who has just passed his test, but with increasing confidence. When they hadn’t seen or heard from the police for long enough to feel safe, they did something they hadn’t done since they were first married. They went away together for the weekend.

For the first time since she’d known her, Michelle fancied she saw envy of her in Fiona’s eyes. This didn’t please her, it was the last thing she wanted to excite in anyone, but she noted it because it was so unusual.

Fiona envied her for having a husband who loved her and wanted to be alone with her in a hotel in the countryside. “I hope you’ll have a lovely time,” she said. “You deserve it.”