Ruth Rendell - The Girl Next Door

‘It was a few weeks later he started a fire in the garden. I was home from school early and I saw him pour petrol on the wood he’d piled up. But it wasn’t only wood. There were two shapes in sacks – no plastic in those days. Two long shapes in sacks tied at the top with string. I watched him out of my bedroom window. The fire burnt down and John poured paraffin on more logs and the two things in the sacks. He fetched another can of petrol. I remember thinking he must be desperate to burn whatever that was because petrol was rationed and very hard to come by. It was after that that the fire got out of hand and spread to the shed and trees and someone called the firemen, probably several people did.’

Alan said, ‘You never told your mother about Winwood? I mean, what Winwood had done to you?’

‘I never did. You see, it wasn’t what he had done to me, it was what we did with each other. I know you’ll say I was only twelve but I’ve explained that. I was old for my age, years older.’

‘And now you are young for your age.’

She smiled, ‘Well, perhaps. You’ve seen what was in the papers and on television about those celebrities raping young girls and assaulting them. Some of them told their parents and they weren’t believed. I knew I wouldn’t be believed, and what would I have said? That I’d had sex – well, sort of sex – with the man next door? And that I’d enjoyed it? I don’t think so.’

She emptied her glass. ‘I needed that. I’ve never told anyone about John Winwood before.’ She put out a hand and took his. ‘You don’t mind, do you? About me doing that, I mean.’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Why would I?’

‘Some men would. I never spoke to John again. After the fire, I mean. I never saw him again except in the distance. He moved away somewhere and eventually he sold the house. I’ve told the police. About the fire, I mean, nothing about my – my relationship with John Winwood.’

Alan made supper, scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. Daphne drank water. He had a glass of wine and then another, hoping to deaden his feelings. ‘Drown your sorrows,’ people used to say. He hadn’t any sorrow or shock really. The emotion he felt he couldn’t define. He had told a lie and he minded about that. Daphne sat close to him and held his hand. She turned on the television, which he didn’t want, but he thought silence would be worse. And more explanations from her, more details, worse than silence.

The programme, which was the next instalment of a serial, came to an end. Daphne began to talk about their recent holiday, about walking along the broad top of the city wall of Lucca and about the Roman forum. They hadn’t taken many photographs and those they had they still had to print out from their mobile phones.

‘We’re neither of us great photographers, are we? Prefer to keep pictures of what we’ve seen in our memories, I suppose.’

‘That’s right,’ he said.

‘Something else we have in common, if you can have a negative something in common.’

‘Why not?’

They went to bed early. As he held her, one arm round her waist, he thought of her at twelve, a little girl in love with a film star lookalike. Waking three hours later, he murmured to himself in the dark, ‘My world has changed. Everything is changed.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

GIVING A SAMPLE of his DNA was almost the last thing Lewis Newman did before going off on his boat trip up the Danube. It was a cruise he and Jo had always intended to do, and then Jo fell ill, was ill for months before her death, and that kind of holiday was impossible. He missed Jo, but not as much as he told himself he ought to. Many a bereaved husband would have hesitated to take a trip that could only have reminded him that his wife should have been with him, but for Lewis that couldn’t be and he wasn’t going to let it spoil his cruise.

The trip was luxurious. He had a lovely cabin with en suite bathroom that the company called a stateroom, and on his second evening, when he approached his table as the ship was moving away from Bucharest, the organiser of the party came up to him and asked him if he would mind sharing his table with a lady passenger. She was travelling alone, as was he. Lewis didn’t much care for the idea, envisaging a plump, brightly painted blonde in a low-cut red dress. He had a rooted objection, almost a phobia, to the sight of cleavage on an elderly woman. He sat at his table and got to his feet almost immediately when a pretty sixty-year-old came up to him a little shyly. She was slender and nearly as tall as he, and the dress she wore, quite high-necked pink wool, showed off a neat figure.

They shook hands.

‘Melissa,’ she said.

‘Lewis.’

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said, ‘but I saw your name in the paper when they dug up that ghastly box with the hands. There was a piece in the Standard about the people who were children in Loughton when the box was put there. I grew up in Loughton myself, though I was – well, a bit younger. So I thought it would be nice to meet an old Loughton person – oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you were old.’

He laughed. ‘I’m delighted.’

Two days later, going ashore in Budapest, they were not only eating together but walking together when the party went sightseeing. Instead of returning to the ship for dinner, they dined at a restaurant in Vienna on their last evening. They had discovered that they lived not far from each other in London, he in Ealing and she in Chiswick. There was no end to the coincidences. Both were widowed, her dead husband had been a GP as Lewis had been. As a child she had lived with her parents in Tycehurst Hill. Phone numbers were exchanged and an arrangement made to have lunch and pay a visit to Kew Gardens, where Melissa had never been. Lewis felt positively happy when he let himself into his house and picked up the heap of correspondence from the front doormat.

He hadn’t thought about the DNA sample all the time he was away and now, remembering, he saw there was nothing from Caroline Inshaw. His head full of Melissa Landon, he wasn’t much interested in the hands in the box and what had happened sixty years ago, except that those hands had brought him and Melissa together. The letters were mostly bills, but there was one with an Australian stamp. He set it aside, paid one of the bills and marvelled at another printed in scarlet and threatening him with the steps that would be taken if he kept them waiting any longer for their payment. The money was only three days overdue. Let them wait a little longer.

He had never been one of those people who study the appearance of a letter and the mysterious handwriting of the sender before opening it, but then he seldom heard from previously unknown people. Studying this one told him nothing. He sat down in an armchair and opened it. The address was Perth, the sender a woman called Noreen Leopold, who in the first line introduced herself as his cousin. Lewis immediately thought this must be nonsense as he had no cousins, but he read on, at first disbelieving, then astonished.

Noreen continued, I am coming to Britain in the spring, March, I think, and hope to meet you as you are the only cousin I have. You may possibly remember my dad, Jimmy Rayment, who died twenty years ago. He came here and settled at the end of the 1939–1945 war, married my mum Betty and later became the father of five children with her. I am one of them. My dad was always going to get in touch with you but never got around to it .

Here, Lewis laid down the letter and marvelled some more. James, Uncle James, had been living in a distant part of the world, as his mother always thought he might have. He had lived all those years in Perth and had all those children. Lewis picked up the letter again and read to the end. Let me have a line from you. My email address is Noreenl@periwinkle.com. I would really like us to meet and have a chat about your parents and mine. Your cousin, Noreen .