Ruth Rendell - A Demon in My View

The chairman was enthusiastic about Anthony’s idea. For months his association had been campaigning for the council to convert the waste ground into a children’s playground. This would be a feather in its cap. They could have a big party on November 5 and maybe invite a council representative to be present. Linthea said she would make hot dogs and enlist the help of another friend, the mother of David, the third boy. And when Anthony told them about the wood, Steve said his elder brother had a box barrow which he could bring over to 142 on the following Saturday.

Then they discussed the guy Steve’s mother said she would dress in a discarded suit of her husband’s. Linthea made lots of strong, delicious coffee, and it was nearly lunchtime before Anthony went back to Trinity Road. He had forgotten that this was the day of Jonathan Dean’s departure. The move, he now saw, was well under way. Jonathan and Brian were carrying crates down the stairs and packing them into Brian’s rather inadequate car. Vesta was nowhere to be seen.

“I’ll give you a hand,” Anthony said, and regretted the offer when Brian slapped him on the back and remarked that after Jonathan had deserted him he would know where to turn for a pal.

Jonathan, like Anthony, possessed no furniture of his own but he had hundreds of records and quite a few books, the heaviest and most thumbed of which was the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations . While they worked and ate the fish and chips Brian had been sent out to buy, the record player remained on, and the laughter sequence from Strauss’s Elektra roared out so maniacally that Anthony expected Arthur Johnson to appear at any moment and complain. But he didn’t appear even when Jonathan dropped a crate of groceries on the stairs and collapsed in fits of mirth at the sight of egg yolk and H.P. Sauce and extended-life milk dripping from the treads.

They had to make several journeys. Jonathan’s new home was a much smaller room than the one he had occupied at 142, in a squalid, run-down house in the worst part of South Kenbourne. And this alternative to Trinity Road seemed to perplex Brian as much as it did Anthony. What had possessed Jonathan? he kept asking. Why not change his mind even at this late stage? Caspian would surely let him keep his old room if he asked.

“No, he wouldn’t,” said Jonathan. “He’s let it to some Spade.” And he added, like Cicero but less appositely, “O temporal O mores!”

The record player was the last thing to be shifted. A container was needed in which to transport it, so Brian and Anthony went down to Anthony’s room where Anthony said he had found a cardboard box in the wardrobe. The books impressed Brian and soon he had found out all about Anthony’s thesis, taking up much the same attitude to it as he would have done had he learned Anthony was writing a thriller.

“There’s a study for you,” he said as they drove past the cemetery. “You could use that in your writing. Twenty-five years ago last month that’s where the Kenbourne Killer strangled his first victim. Maureen Cowan, she was called.”

“What, in the cemetery?”

“No, in the path that runs along the back of it. A lot of people use that path as a short cut from the Hospital Arms to Elm Green station. She was a tart, soliciting down there. Mind you, I was only a kid at the time, but I remember it all right.”

“Kid?” said Jonathan. “You mean you’re kidding . You were thirteen.”

Brian looked hurt but he made no response. “They never caught the chap. He struck again”—he employed the journalese quite unconsciously as if it were standard usage—“five years later. That time it was a student nurse called Bridget Something. Irish girl. He strangled her on a bit of open ground between the hospital and the railway bridge. Now would he be a psychopath, Tony?”

“I suppose so. Was it the same man both times?”

“The cops thought so. But there were never any more murders—not unsolved ones, I mean. Now why, Tony, would you say that was?”

“Moved out of the district,” said Anthony, who was getting bored. “Or died,” he added, for he had been less than a year old when that first murder was committed.

“Could have been in prison for something else,” said Brian. “Could have been in a mental home. I’ve often wondered about that and whether he’ll ever come back and strike again.” He parked the car outside Jonathan’s new home. “What a dump! You could still change your mind, Jon old man. Move in with Vesta and me for a bit. Have our couch.”

“Christ,” said Jonathan. “There’s one born every minute.” He delivered this platitude as if it were a quotation, as perhaps, Anthony thought, it was.

They invited him to accompany them to the Grand Duke for an evening’s drinking, but Anthony refused. It was nearly five. He went home and read J. G. Miller’s doctoral dissertation: “Eyeblink Conditioning of Primary and Neurotic Psychopaths,” remembering at ten to put his clock and his watch back. It was the end of British Summertime.

Watching from his eyrie, his living-room window, Arthur saw the new tenant of Room 3 arrive on Sunday afternoon. At first he thought this must be some visitor, a disreputable friend perhaps of Li-li’s or Anthony Johnson’s, for he couldn’t recollect any previous tenant having arrived in such style. The man was as black as the taxi from which he alighted, and not only black of skin and hair. He wore a black leather coat which, even from that distance, Arthur could see had cost a lot of money, and he carried two huge black leather suitcases. To Arthur’s horrified eyes, he resembled some Haitian gangster-cum-political bigwig. He had seen such characters on television and he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that a couple of revolvers and a knife were concealed under that flashy coat.

Staying here obviously, but as whose guest? Arthur put his own front door on the latch and listened. The house door closed quietly, footsteps crossed the hall, mounted the stairs. He peeped out in time to see a sepia-coloured hand adorned with a plain gold signet ring insert a key in the lock of Room 3. He was incensed. Once again Stanley Caspian hadn’t bothered to tell him he’d let a room. Once again he had been slighted. For two pins he’d write a strongly-worded letter to Stanley, complaining of ill-usage. But what would be the use? Stanley would only say Arthur hadn’t given him the chance to tell him, and it was vain to grumble about the new man’s colour with this Race Relations Act restricting landlords the way it did.

On Tuesday Arthur learned his name. He took in the letters, a whole heap of them this morning. One for Li-li from Taiwan, sender Chan Ah Feng; two for Anthony Johnson, one postmarked York, the other, in a mauve-grey envelope, Bristol. Her letters, Arthur had noted, always came on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, and were still addressed to A. Johnson Esq., 2/142 Trinity Road. Mrs. R. L. Johnson, however, had learned sense and put Room 2. All the other correspondence, five official-looking envelopes, was for Winston Mervyn Esq., 3/142 Trinity Road. Winston! The cheek of it, some West Indian grandchildren of slaves christening their son after the greatest Englishman of the century! It seemed to Arthur an added effrontery that this presumptuous black should receive letters so soon after his arrival—five letters to fill up the table and make him look important.

But he didn’t see the new tenant or hear a sound from him, though nightly he listened for voodoo drums.

As Anthony had expected, the departure of Jonathan Dean was the signal for Brian to put on the pressure. He was marked to succeed Jonathan, and evening after evening there came a knock on the door of Room 2 and a plaintive invitation to go drinking in the Lily.