Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

The singing stopped. He called out, “Are you there?”

His voice had changed. It was lighter and quicker, not chocolate mousse any more, but it was his voice. And at last he was talking to her. While he was alive she thought she’d never want him to stop talking, she couldn’t get enough of his voice, but now she could. Not for the world, not for rest from all the other voices, could she have brought herself to answer him. How could you love someone so much and then hate him if it was the same person? She’d die if she answered him or the house would fall down or the world end. Perhaps this was the beginning of his moving back with her, speaking to her, taking shape when he chose or being a shadow on the wall when the sun shone.

She held on to brown woodwork with both hands. The flowers hadn’t worked; only one thing really worked, at least for a time. Slowly she took her hands away, they were icy cold against the bare skin of her waist. She lifted up her T-shirt, undid the waistband of her trousers, and withdrew the knife from its wrappings, holding it daggerwise. Her whole body was trembling now.

Perhaps because she hadn’t answered him, he called again. The same words: “Are you there?”

She turned round and stepped back to stand at the foot of the stairs, holding the knife behind her. This time she’d do the job properly, even if she had to do it every few months… When he appeared at the top, the shock, though she expected it, was almost too much for her. Her vision blurred and she stared upward into a dark fog through which he came walking down the stairs. And then, with a shaking hand, she stabbed haphazardly at his body, again and again, wild thrusts and glancing blows. At his first scream the doorbell rang, a long, imperious, shattering ring.

Minty dropped the knife and gave a whimpering cry. Very quickly it came to her what she’d done. The man was real. He wore jeans and a black leather jacket but he wasn’t Jock. Real blood was coming from his body, seeping bright scarlet through his blue shirt. He lay half on the floor, half on the two lowest stairs, groaning and holding with a cut hand a wound just below his waist and exposing another on his upper arm. She’d tried to kill a real man. No voice had told her to do it; she’d told herself.

The bell rang and rang, and someone was kicking at the door panels. If Minty waited a moment before opening the door it was because she couldn’t move, she couldn’t walk. But she did walk, she staggered and fell against it, she fumbled at the doorknob and at last it came open.

“What’s happening here? What’s going on?”

And then Sonovia saw the wounded man and the knife which had fallen across his thighs. She let out a series of short sharp screams, her hands up as if warding off blows. Laf came running out from next door. Minty was too afraid to think of anything but escape. Her strength came back, running through her like some fiery drink, she jumped over the little low fence between her garden and the Wilsons’ and ran down the road just as Laf turned in through her gate.

He called for help. He phoned 911 and his own DI. It was a piece of luck for the man on the floor that Laf was at home, on a day off, for Sonovia, usually so calm and practical, was in the throes of full-blown, old-fashioned hysterics. What was needed now, more than the police, was an ambulance. It arrived within four minutes and the man who had come to give Minty an estimate for her shower was carried out on a stretcher. This was a routine, not a necessary, measure. Shock, more than his superficial wounds, had laid him low.

But the police knew now, Laf knew, who was responsible for the cinema death and that of Eileen Dring.

“You couldn’t really call them murders,” Laf said to Sonovia later that day, when she’d calmed down and they were having a shock-remedy drink. “Not really. She didn’t mean to harm real people. She didn’t know .”

“I just hope the doctors realize that. Thank the Lord, poor Pete’s going to be okay.”

“What made you ring her doorbell, Sonny? Some sixth sense?”

“Not at all, my deah. I couldn’t claim to have that . I was at the window and I saw her come home, which was most unexpected, and I thought I’ll just pop in and tell her Pete’s there in case it gives her a shock.”

“What did she come home for?”

“It breaks your heart, it really does. After the ambulance had been and gone I was dying for a drink of cold water and that stuff that comes out of the tap-well, you don’t know what it’s been through, do you? I looked in her fridge and there were her sandwiches, all nicely wrapped up and waiting for her to fetch them. It brought the tears to my eyes, Laf.” And Sonovia began to cry, sobbing against Laf’s shoulder.

“She’ll be all right,” he said. “It’ll be best for her this way,” though he was by no means sure of this, any more than he had been when they found Minty three hours before.

It was Sonovia who’d said where she might be found.

“Her auntie’s grave is in there.” It couldn’t be, but what was the point of showing the poor thing up as a liar now?

Daniel and his wife and child had come over by then, to be with Sonovia and comfort her. So Laf had gone out with the DI and a detective sergeant and two women officers to search for Minty. The afternoon had grown very warm, sultry and amber-colored, the air heavy and dusted with gold, as it sometimes is in September. They went into the cemetery by the western gate half an hour before it was due to close. The man selling flowers said he’d seen Minty hours ago, she’d come running, out of breath and shivering, but she’d bought more from him than ever before, and she was a regular customer. Chrysanthemums she’d had and Michaelmas daisies, pink and purple asters, and the most expensive things he had, white lilies and pink ones. He’d never have believed she could afford them…

It took only about ten minutes to find her. When they did she was fast asleep. She was lying curled up like a child amid bunches and bunches of fast-withering flowers, on the grave of someone called Maisie Julia Chepstow who’d died a hundred years before. No one knew why she’d picked that one. The only man who knew and could have told them was dead, his ashes in an alabaster urn, forgotten at the back of a dark cupboard.

Ruth Rendell is the author of Road Rage, The Keys to the Street, Bloodlines, Simisola , and The Crocodile Bird . She is the winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award. She is also the recipient of three Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America and four Gold Daggers from Great Britain’s Crime Writers Association. In 1997, she was named a life peer in the House of Lords. Ruth Rendell also writes mysteries under the name of Barbara Vine, of which A Dark Adapted Eye is the most famous. She lives in England.