Ruth Rendell - A Demon in My View

His watch had broken in the fall and the hands still showed twenty past nine. It must now be about eleven hours later than that. His watch had broken but not his glasses, which remained intact in their case. He put them on, although they were reading glasses that threw the world out of focus, but they would help disguise his eye. As to his lip—he licked a corner of his scarf and worked blindly at the cut, wincing because the rough fibres prickled the edges of the wound. But the morning was very cold and now he saw that a thin sleet had begun to fall, little granules of ice that melted as they struck the ground. The kind of day, he thought, when a man with a muffled face is accepted as normal.

Shaking a little, controlling his shaking as best he could, he went out of the office, locking the door behind him. He had left no vestige of his presence. As he approached the gates, the falling sleet thickened into a storm. Snow, the first of the year, swirled about him, flakes of it stinging his lip. He pulled the scarf up to cover his mouth and, with lowered head, took what was a kind of plunge into Magdalen Hill.

There was no one about but a boy delivering Sunday papers. His encounter with the girl-boy in the car park had happened too late at night for there to be anything about it in the papers, and this little boy in thick coat and balaclava didn’t look at him. A man walking a retriever in Balliol Street didn’t look at him, nor did the cleaning woman who was letting herself into the public bar of the Waterlily. She too had a scarf swathing the lower half of her face. Arthur entered the mews as All Souls’ clock struck eight.

Someone had left a newspaper, last evening’s, on top of a dustbin in the mews. He picked it up and tucked it under his arm so that anyone who saw him would think he had been out to buy it. But no one saw him. Li-li’s curtains were drawn. He crept upstairs through the sleeping house. On the top landing, resting against his door, was the orange laundry bag. At some point Li-li had brought that bag up the stairs. Had she knocked on his door? And if she had, would she have assumed he was asleep? Or had she left it downstairs, and had Anthony Johnson, the only other occupant of the house, been responsible for bringing it here? There was no way of knowing. If Anthony Johnson were awake now light would show from his window on to the court, for Room 2 was dark in winter till nine. But there was no cross-barred cast of light to be seen on the green stone. Snow whirled down the well, flying against the cellar door and streaming down it as rivulets of water.

Arthur cut up his handkerchief and flushed the pieces down the lavatory. He washed his scarf and, pulling it out from the lining, washed too the pocket of his overcoat Then, and only then, did he dare look at his face in the mirror.

His eye socket was the colour of meat that has lain exposed, a dark, glazed red, and the lid was almost closed. And his lip was split, a cut running up unevenly at the centre join of the upper lip. He looked quite different, this wasn’t his face, not his this sore, bulbous mouth. Would it scar? It didn’t seem bad enough to need stitching. He washed it carefully with warm water and antiseptic. It couldn’t be stitched. Every casualty department in every hospital in London would be alerted to watch for a man coming in with a wounded mouth.

He mustn’t show himself at all. At any cost, he must remain here, hidden, until his lip and his eye healed. It was hours since he had eaten or drunk anything, hours since he had slept, but heknew he could no more sleep than he could eat a crumb of bread. He drank some water and gagged on it, its coldness burning his throat.

Shrouded by the nightdress frills of the net curtains, he crouched at the window. If the police did a house-to-house search he would be lost. He watched people go by, expecting always to see the piranha face of Inspector Glass. The church bells rang for morning service and a few elderly women went by, carrying Prayer Books, on their way to All Souls’. At lunchtime he put on the television, and the last item in a news bulletin told him, as only this high authority could really tell him, what he had done and where he stood.

“A man was attacked last night in a car park near Kenbourne Lane tube station in West London …” And there, on the screen, was the car park overhung by the ramparts of the Taj Mahal. Arthur trembled, clenching his hands. He half expected to see himself emerge from behind a row of cars, caught by those cameras like a stalked animal. “From the circumstances of the attack, police believe his assailant mistook him for a woman and are speculating as to whether the attacker could be the same man who, for a quarter of a century, has been known by the name of the Kenbourne Killer. A massive hunt in the area has so far been unsuccessful …”

Arthur switched off the set. He went once more into the bathroom and looked in the mirror at the face of the Kenbourne Killer. Never, in the past, when he had thought of the things he had done, had he ever really considered that title and that role as belonging to him. But the television had told him so, it was so. Those marks had been put upon his face so that he and the world should know it. Looking at his face made him cry so he went back to his window where the nets veiled his face. The television remained off, blank, though an early Rogers-Astaire film was showing, until five when there was more news.

An Identikit picture appeared on the screen, a hard, cold face, sharply lined, vicious, elderly. The subject had a hare lip and a blind eye. Was that how he, so spruce and handsome, had looked to the boy with the Citroën? He felt faint and dizzy when the boy himself appeared and seemed to stare penetratingly into his own eyes. The boy put a hand up to that deceiving hair and smiled a little proudly.

“Well, I reckon this guy thought I was a girl, you know, on account of me being skinny and having long hair.”

The interviewer addressed him with earnest approval. “Would you be able to identify him, Mr. Harrison?”

“Sure, I would. Anyway, I knocked his face about a bit, didn’t I? Anyone’d be able to identify him, not just me.”

And now Inspector Glass himself. Arthur shivered because his enemies were being ranged before him through this medium, once so friendly, once the purveyor of his second best delight.

The lips curled back and the great teeth showed. “You can take it as certain that the police won’t rest until we’ve got this chap and put him out of harm’s way. It’s only a matter of time. But I’d like to tell the public that this man is highly dangerous, and if anyone has the slightest suspicion of his identity, if he or she feel they’re only going on what you might call intuition, they must call this number at once.”

The telephone number burned in white letters on a black ground. And the voice of Inspector Glass, the voice of a devourer of men, came heavy and grim.

“At any time of the day or night you can call this number. And if you hesitate, remember that next time it could be you or your wife or your mother or your daughter.”

The diesel rattle of a taxi called Arthur back to the window. Li-li came out of the house carrying two suitcases. There was another gone who might see his face and not hesitate. Snow had begun to fall again through the bitter cold darkness. He watched her get into the taxi.

And now he was alone in the house with Anthony Johnson.

22

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That Sunday it was nearly noon before Anthony got up. Room 2 was icy and he had to use powdered milk in his tea because he had run out of fresh. The courtyard was wet, although it wasn’t raining, and the triangle of sky had the yellowish-grey look snow clouds give.