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For Don

I woke up this morning to a distant view of dark hills and grey skies and thought inevitably about the opening stanza of WH Auden’s elegy to WB Yeats:

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Ruth Rendell was deservedly the most decorated of British crime writers. Among her many distinctions were a clutch of Daggers (four gold, one silver and the diamond for a lifetime of achievement) and two Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America who also gave her their Grandmaster Award. She was also garlanded with the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence.

None of that happened by accident or luck. Talent played its part but so too did hard graft. A book flowed from her prolific pen approximately every nine months. Her Stakhanovite work rate as a writer and as a working peer made most of us feel like dilettantes. And her reach always exceeded her grasp. Years ago, starstruck and young in my career, I said to her: “I suppose when you’ve written as many books as you have, it gets easier.”

She looked at me with a steely twinkle and said rather sternly: “No. It gets harder.” I didn’t understand that then but 20 years on, I get it.

Ruth was unique. No one can equal her range or her accomplishment; no one has earned more respect from her fellow practitioners. The broad church that is current British crime writing owes much to a writer who over a 50-year career consistently demonstrated that the genre can continually reinvent itself, moving in new directions, assuming new concerns and exploring new ways of telling stories. And doing it all in a smoothly satisfying prose style.

Along with her contemporaries PD James and Reginald Hill, Ruth transformed what had become a staid and formulaic genre into something that offered scope for a different kind of crime novel. In their separate ways they turned it into a prism for examining the world around them with a critical eye. Their work kicked a door open for subsequent generations of crime writers to storm through and their popularity among readers gave others the confidence to follow in their footsteps, secure in the knowledge that an audience existed for crime fiction that wasn’t pulp.

To lose all three of them in the space of two short years is hard to bear. All those books unwritten, unshared. Because if they’d had more time, there would have been more. All three of them were writing right up to the end. Some writers run out of steam. None of them did.

I first encountered Ruth’s work in the early 70s, when I picked up a copy of her debut novel, From Doon With Death, in the second-hand bookshop in Oxford’s Cowley Road where I bought most of my recreational reading. I devoured crime fiction in all shapes and forms, but I’d never read anything quite like this.

Inspector Reg Wexford wasn’t an aristocrat or a brilliant Oxbridge wit. He didn’t inhabit rarefied social circles or drive a Bentley. He wasn’t the idiot foil to some brilliant amateur. He was a decent bloke with a wife and grown-up daughters who struggled to make sense of the things we do to each other. He was blessed with intelligence and common sense but he was as flawed as the rest of us and he felt like someone you might meet in your local pub.

But it wasn’t simply that Ruth had created a cast of characters who felt rooted in reality. She also wrote about human relationships in a way that no other crime writer was doing then. The hinge on which From Doon With Death turns is lesbian love. Not coyly hinted at, as had been the way previously, but dealt with head-on in the most matter-of-fact manner. It was the first time I’d read a mainstream novel that made me feel fiction could embrace all of who I was without making a big deal of it.

The classic Rendell hallmarks were all there from the beginning – the sense of place, the delicate filleting of the characters’ psyches, the avoidance of the prosaic both in character and in motivation.

Right from the start, Ruth also demonstrated a keen fascination with the collision between society and the
individual, particularly where circumstances drive the individual to behaviour that society regards as somehow abnormal. Stable structures had only limited interest to her as a novelist; what set her creativity flowing was the point where things start to fall apart, and that was where Ruth excelled. Never content with mere description, she illuminated the human condition in all its obsessive complexity in a style that was invariably clear and compelling. She took time and trouble with her prose, reading it back to herself out loud, and her meticulousness shows.

Her politics too were a key aspect of her writing. The reason she was a baroness was not simply because she was distinguished in her field. She was a lifelong Labour supporter, committed actively to equality and humanitarian causes. Those political concerns found their way into her work, demonstrating the particular ability of the crime novel to engage with social issues because its cast of characters is drawn from so many strata of society.

But Ruth didn’t deal with politics in a tub-thumping, special pleading sort of way. She was far too subtle a novelist for that. Because she was a political animal, because these were her concerns in her own life, they inevitably emerge in her work, implicated in the darkness.

Perhaps one of the key reasons for the sustained quality of the Wexford novels is Ruth’s habit of variety. From the beginning of her career, she made it plain that she would not be pigeonholed into writing one kind of novel only. Her second novel, To Fear a Painted Devil, was a standalone with its roots in the classic English mystery. However, it bloomed into something very different under her care, giving us the first real hint of her skills as an anatomist of the abnormal human psyche.

As if it wasn’t enough to write a successful series regularly interspersed with non-series novels, in 1986, Ruth reinvented herself as Barbara Vine. These novels of psychological suspense have the recurring theme of the long shadows cast by the past. In the Vine novels, the sense of place is even stronger than in the Rendells, sometimes assuming as much importance as the characters themselves. The Vines are themselves a significant body of work, revealing us to ourselves, negotiating the journey between past and present, between who we really are and who we present to the world.

This variety of outlets for her talent meant Ruth reduced the likelihood of becoming bored with her Kingsmarkham characters, bringing fresh interest to each Wexford chronicle. It also means she was never frustrated by the very real constraints that series writing imposes. When her imagination presented her with a story that clearly couldn’t be forced into the Wexford mould, that needed more scope and depth than the psychological Rendells offered, she gave herself the means to maximise its potential in another form.

If she had written nothing but the Barbara Vine novels, I believe Ruth would be regarded in a different light. She’d have been seen more in the terms offered to the likes of Kate Atkinson and John Banville – serious writers of fiction who can also turn their hands to the stylistic possibilities of genre. She’d have been on the shortlist for the Booker and the Women’s Prize and all those other awards that turn their face against genres other than literary fiction.

But once a crime writer, always a crime writer. There’s no shame in that, of course. We take as much pride in our work as anyone else. Ruth brought both pleasure and insight to millions of readers over the years, after all.

We still have the books, of course. What we’ve lost is the woman at the heart of them. Her shrewd assessments of herself and of others were always refreshing; her company always stimulating. One of the abiding memories I have of her is from the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in the summer of 2013, in Harrogate. We had given her the festival’s award for outstanding contribution to crime writing at the opening ceremony the previous evening, and Ruth had just appeared on stage in conversation with her dear friend Jeanette Winterson.

It had been a remarkable session – revelatory, irreverent, funny, generous and packed with nuggets of information about her practice as a writer. And afterwards, we sat on the lawn in the sun, talking and laughing about books and cats and mutual friends. Ruth wasn’t a sentimental person so I’m not going to say more about it than this: today, in the grey and windy cold, I’m glad I had that morning in the sunshine.

CHAPTER ONE

FOR MANY YEARS Wilfred Martin collected samples of alternative medicines, homeopathic remedies and herbal pills. Most of them he never used, never even tried because he was afraid of them, but he kept the lot in a cupboard in a bathroom in his house in Falcon Mews, Maida Vale, and when he died they went, along with the house and its contents, to his son Carl.

Carl’s mother recommended throwing it all out. It was junk, harmless at best, possibly dangerous, all those bottles and jars and sachets just taking up room. But Carl didn’t throw it out because he couldn’t be bothered. He had other things to do. If he had known how it, or one particular item among all the rest, would change his life, transform it, ruin it, he would have emptied the lot into a plastic bag, carried the bag down the road and dumped it in the big rubbish bin.

CARL HAD TAKEN over the former family home in Falcon Mews at the beginning of the year, his mother having moved to Camden when his parents divorced. For a while he thought no more about the contents of his bathroom cupboard. He was occupied with his girlfriend Nicola, his novel Death’s Door, which had just been published, and with letting the top floor of his house. He had no need of those two rooms plus kitchen and bathroom, and great need of the rent. Excited though he was about the publication of his first book, he was not so naïve at twenty-three as to suppose he could live by writing alone. Rents in central London had reached a peak, and Falcon Mews, a crescent looping out of Sutherland Avenue to Castellain Road in Maida Vale, was highly desirable and much sought-after. So he placed an advertisement in the Paddington Express offering accommodation, and next morning twenty prospective tenants presented themselves on his doorstep. Why he chose the first applicant, Dermot McKinnon, he never knew. Perhaps it was because he didn’t want to interview dozens of people. It was a decision he was bitterly to regret.

But not at the beginning. The only drawback Dermot seemed to have was his appearance – his uneven yellow teeth, for instance, his extreme thinness and round shoulders. But you don’t decide against a tenant because his looks are unprepossessing, Carl told himself, and no doubt the man could pay the rent. Dermot had a job at the Sutherland Pet Clinic in the next street and produced a reference from the chief veterinarian there. Carl asked him to pay each month’s rent at the end of the previous month, and perhaps the first mistake he made was to request that it be paid not by transfer into his bank account, but in notes or a cheque in an envelope left at Carl’s door. Carl realised that these days this was unusual, but he wanted to see the rent come in, take it in his hand. Dermot put up no objection.

Carl had already begun work on a second novel, having been encouraged by his agent Susanna Griggs to get on with it. He didn’t expect an advance payment until he had finished it and Susanna and his editor had read and accepted it. There was no payment promised on paperback publication of Death’s Door, as no one expected it to go into paperback. Still, what with being both a published author with good prospects and a landlord receiving rent, Carl felt rich.

Dermot had to enter Carl’s house by the front door and go up two flights of stairs to get to his flat, but he made no noise and, as he put it, kept himself to himself. Carl had already noticed his tenant was a master of the cliché. And for a while everything seemed fine, the rent paid promptly in twenty-pound notes in an envelope on the last day of the month.

All the houses in Falcon Mews were rather small, all different in shape and colour, and all joined together in long rows facing each other. The road surface was cobbled except for where the two ends of the mews met Sutherland Avenue and where the residents could park their cars. The house Carl had inherited was painted ochre, with white window frames and white window boxes. It had a small, very overgrown back garden with a wooden shack at the end full of broken tools and a defunct lawnmower.

As for the alternative medicine, Carl took a couple of doses of something called benzoic acid when he had a cold. It claimed to suppress phlegm and coughs, but it had no effect. Apart from that, he had never looked inside the cupboard where all the bottles and jars lived.

DERMOT McKINNON SET off for the Sutherland Pet Clinic at twenty to nine each morning, returning to his flat at five thirty. On Sundays he went to church. If Dermot hadn’t told him, Carl would never have guessed that he was a church-goer, attending one of the several churches in the neighbourhood, St Saviour’s in Warwick Avenue, for instance, or St Mary’s, Paddington Green.

They encountered each other in the mews on a Sunday morning and Dermot said, ‘Just off to morning service.’

‘I’m a regular attender,’ said Dermot, adding, ‘The better the day, the better the deed.’

Carl was on his way to have a coffee with his friend Stacey Warren. They had met at school, then gone to university together, where Carl had read philosophy and Stacey had taken a drama course. It was while she was still at university that her parents had been killed in a car crash and Stacey inherited quite a lot of money, enough to buy herself a flat in Primrose Hill. Stacey wanted to act, and because of her beautiful face and slender figure was given a significant part in a TV sitcom called Station Road. Her face became known to the public overnight, while her slenderness was lost in a few months.

‘I’ve put on a stone,’ she said to Carl across the table in their local Café Rouge. ‘What am I going to do?’ Other customers were giving her not very surreptitious glances. ‘They all know who I am. They’re all thinking I’m getting fat. What’s going to happen to me?’

Carl, who was very thin, had no idea how much he weighed and didn’t care. ‘You’ll have to go on a diet, I suppose.’

‘David and I have split up. I’m finding that very hard to take. Have I got to starve myself too?’

‘I don’t know anything about diets, Stacey. You don’t need to starve, do you?’

‘I’d rather take one of those magic diet pills that get advertised online. D’you know anything about them?’

The waitress brought the two chocolate brownies and the slice of carrot cake Stacey had ordered. Carl said nothing.

On his way home, still thinking about Stacey and her problem, he passed the bookshop kept by his friend Will Finsford. It was the one remaining privately run bookshop for miles around, and Will had confided that he lay awake at night worrying about having to close, especially as the organic shop down the road had not only gone out of business but had had the bailiffs in.

‘No, for someone else. A friend who’s got fat. That’s a word I’m not supposed to say, isn’t it?’

Carl found nothing he thought would be suitable. ‘Come over one evening, why don’t you?’ he said. ‘Bring Corinne. The beautiful Nicola would love to see you. We’ll ring you.’

Walking home, Carl realised it wasn’t really a book he wanted. Stacey had mentioned pills. He wondered if there were any slimming medications among his father’s stash of pills and potions, as he had come to think of them. Wilfred Martin had always been thin so was unlikely to have used that sort of thing, but some drugs claimed to serve a double purpose, improving the skin, for instance, or curing indigestion.

Carl thought of his father, a rather taciturn, quirky man. He was sorry Wilfred was gone, but they had never had much in common. He regretted that his father had not lived to see Death’s Door published. But he had left Carl the house, with its income potential. Had that been his way of offering his blessing on his son’s chosen career? Carl hoped so.

The house was silent when he got in, but it usually was whether Dermot was at home or not. He was a good tenant. Carl went upstairs and saw that the bathroom door was open. Dermot had his own bathroom in his flat on the top floor, so had no reason to use this one. Probably he’d forgotten to close the door himself, Carl thought, as he went into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.

Wilfred’s pills and potions were in a cupboard divided into five sections on the left-hand side of the washbasin. Only the topmost section was for Carl’s current use; he didn’t need much space, as his toothbrush and toothpaste and roll-on deodorant were on the shelf above the basin. Surveying the collection of bottles and phials and jars and packages, tubes and cans and blister packs, he asked himself why he had kept all this stuff. Surely not for its sentimental value. He had loved his father, but he had never felt like that about him. On the contrary, he regarded the pills and potions as mostly quack remedies, rubbish really, and quite useless. A lot of the products, he saw, taking small jars out at random, claimed to treat heart problems and safeguard against heart failure, yet his father had had two heart attacks and died after the second one.

No, there was nothing here that would encourage weight loss, Carl told himself. Best throw it all out, make a clean sweep. But what was that in a large plastic zip-up bag in the second section from the top? Yellow capsules, a great many of them, labelled DNP. The foolproof way to avoid weight gain! promised the label. Behind the bag of capsules was a box full of sachets also containing DNP but in powder-to-liquid form.

Taking the plastic bag out, he noted that, further down, the label advised using with care, and not to exceed the stated dose, etc. etc. The usual small print. But even paracetamol containers said that. He left the bag of capsules where it was and went downstairs to look up DNP on the computer. But before he got there, the front doorbell rang and he remembered that Nicola – beautiful, clever, sweet Nicola – was coming to spend the rest of the day and the night with him. He went to let her in, telling himself he must give her a key. He wanted her as a more permanent part of his life. With Nicola, his new novel and a reliable tenant, life was good.

Chapter One

Iron spikes surmount each of the gates into the Park, twenty-seven of them on some, eighteen or eleven on others. For the most part the Park itself is surrounded by thorn hedges but thousands of feet of spiked railings still remain. Some of these spikes are blunted, as on those enclosing the gardens of Gloucester Gate, some are ornamented and some take a bend in the middle. On the tall railings outside one of the villas the spikes have claw-like protuberances, six on each, curved and sharp as talons. A certain terrace has spikes on pillars, splaying out and blossoming like thorn trees. If you started counting spikes in the region of the Park and its surroundings you could reach millions. They go well with the Georgian architecture.

By night the Park is closed to people. Of the living creatures which remain within its confines most are zoo animals and waterfowl. The spiked gates open every morning of the year at six and dose every evening at dusk, which is at four-thirty in winter but not until nine-thirty in May. Its 464 acres of land fill a circle. Inside the ring of streets which surrounds it lies another ring and within this, widely separated, the equilateral triangle of the London Zoo, the lake with its three arms and four islands; and around the ornamental gardens a road which on the map looks like a wheel with two projecting spokes.

The Park is deserted by night. That is, the intention is that it should be deserted. The Park Police patrol between dusk and dawn, paying special attention to the restaurant areas that make likely shelters and to the Park residences, the villas, the expensive properties and Winfield House where the American Ambassador lives. No vagrant could sleep undisturbed under the lee of the pavilions or the bandstand but the police cannot search everywhere every night. The canal bank remains as a place of concealment and the wide green spaces and, in summer, the long grass under the trees.

To the north of the Park, beyond the zoo and Albert Road lie Primrose Hill and St John’s Wood; here are St John’s Wood Church, Lord’s Cricket Ground and, turning southeastwards, the London Mosque. Park Road runs down towards Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes by way of the London Business School and St Cyprian’s Church – Anglo-Catholic, white and gold inside and scented with incense. The Marylebone Road, the Planetarium, Madame Tussaud’s waxworks – most popular of all London’s tourist attractions, more visited than the Tower and Buckingham Palace – the Royal Academy of Music, Park Crescent and Park Square with their secret gardens and the tunnel passing under the road that links them. And so the Park is encircled, here by Albany Street, running from Great Portland Street Station due north, as straight as a Roman road, to meet Albert Road and Gloucester Avenue. The streets of Primrose Hill form a shape like a tennis racquet and Gloucester Avenue is its handle. There are railings everywhere, their spikes straight and pointed, twisted at a right angle or ornate and blunted.

Albany Street is not leafy and sequestered like almost every other street in the vicinity of the Park, but wide, grey, without trees. Barracks fill much of one side but beyond the other side of it lie the grandest and most lavish of the terraces – Cambridge, Chester and Cumberland, with their colonnades, their pediments, their statuary and their wealthy occupants. Beyond the barracks on the other side the area quickly becomes less respectable, though it has a long way to go before sinking to the level of Somers Town between Euston and St Pancras Stations. From one of these streets, near St James’s Gardens, a young man was walking across Munster Square, heading for Albany Street.

The name everyone called him by was Hob, the three letters of which were the initials of his two given names and his surname. Apart from this, the feature that distinguished him from his contemporaries was the size of his head. His body was solid and thickset but his head still looked too big for it. When he reached fifty, if he ever did, his jowls would be down on his shoulders. His fair hair was cut an inch long all over his big head and gleamed in the yellowish chemical light. It was an unusual combination, that of fair hair and brown eyes. His eyes were a curious textured brown, like chocolate mousse, and the pupils were sometimes as big as a cat’s and sometimes the size of a full stop on a keyboard.

Hob had a job to do, for which he had just been paid half his fee of fifty pounds. That is, he had been paid twenty-five pounds. This he intended to put with everything else he had, to buy what he needed before he could do anything at all. Often he wished he were a woman, because for women making money was quick and, as far as he could see, easy. One of the first things he remembered hearing from a grown-up – it was an uncle, his mother’s boyfriend – was that every woman is sitting on a fortune.

He was in a state. That was how he put it to himself, the phrase he always used for his present condition. One of his stepsisters had described her panic attacks to him and in her description he recognised his own state. But his was longer-lasting and somehow bigger. It took in the whole world. It made him afraid of everything he could see and hear and just as frightened of what he couldn’t see and of silence. As the state intensified a huge bubble of fear like a glass ball enclosed him so that he wanted to beat and thrash at its curved walls. Sometimes he did, even out in the street like this, and people crossed the road to avoid this madman who punched at the empty air.

He did not yet have pain or nausea. But beyond walking to his destination, up this long, wide, grey street where at present there were no people to avoid him or to stare, he could have done nothing; certainly not the job for which he had received half the fee. Walking became mechanical. Even in a state he sometimes thought he could have walked for ever, on and on, over the dark lawns, the green peak, the hills of north London, to the fields and woods far beyond.

But walking miles would be unnecessary. Gupta or Carl or Lew would be on the other side of the Cumberland Gate where the Chinese trees were. He walked through the wells and alleys and up the slope at Cumberland Terrace. His shadow was a lumbering black cut-out on wrinkled cobbles. Lights shone up on walls and behind cascades of leaves.

The Outer Circle, so busy by day, was deserted at night and no single car was parked on its gleaming surface. The great terraces, palaces in woodland, slept heavily behind dark foliage, and though many of their eyes were shuttered, some were alive with orange light. Lamps were lit along the pavements as far as he could see in each direction. The spaces between them were filled with shiny darkness. He crossed the road. The Cumberland Gate was locked and had been for nearly three hours.

The railing of which the gate was made was topped with iron spikes, eighteen on each gate. When he was well – the term he used for his condition when not in a state – he would have thought nothing of climbing the gate. Now he scrambled over it like an old man with an old man’s caution and fear of puncturing flesh and breaking bones. On the other side an expanse of half-dark lay – grey lawn, pale paths, black trees, spindly black Chinese trees that made him think of scorpions.

The police patrolled in cars, on foot, on bicycles, sometimes with dogs. It was a principle of his, and of Carl’s, that they cannot ever be everywhere. Mostly they were not where he was or Carl was. He walked into the trees. He meant not to make a sound but when a young scorpion leapt off its parent’s back and grew wings and turned into a pterodactyl – it was a pigeon flying from a treetop – he let out a cry of fear.

A hand came from behind and went over his mouth. He wasn’t afraid, he knew who it was. Gupta said:

Even in the dark he could see Gupta’s bloody teeth when he spoke. They looked as if he’d been chomping on raw steak but in fact it was betel he chewed. All the money Hob had was exchanged for what Gupta produced, a zip-lock bag holding a small block of something like a white pebble but rough and irregular, not smoothed by the sea. Automatically, he thought of his strength and Gupta’s frailty and of the other white stones in the yogurt carton, enough to keep him well for a long time. But it was no use. Retribution would be swift. He’d carried out some of it for them so he knew. They’d start by breaking his legs. He doubted if he would even get beyond the first thump of his fist into Gupta’s skinny belly.

It was strange, but he had stopped trying to understand it. The state was so awful, so why did he want to prolong it? He always did. That uncle – or one of them – would have said it was like banging your head against a wall: it was so good when you stopped. But that wasn’t quite how he felt; rather it was as if the pain and the state, the panic and the total meaninglessness of everything, became pleasure when he knew he had the means of ending them. The state became almost enjoyable and he walked inside his glass bubble, rolling his head and mouthing something like a smile.

If he headed for Chester Road and the Inner Circle he would be bound to encounter the police, so he turned back. But instead of climbing the Cumberland Gate once more, he kept close along the dark grass under the hedge, aware now that he was cold. The night was cold as nights in April are. The sweat which kept on breaking out on his face and chest dried cold and salty. He could taste the salt when he licked his dry upper lip.

Soon, if the state were too long prolonged, trembling would start, and the sick feeling, and the great weakness as if he was ageing years in as many minutes. It was a matter of striking the happy medium. Again he climbed a spiked railing – this time at the Gloucester Gate – and this time it was harder; he was an even older man with worse arthritis and more frightened bones.

He got over the gate and waited at the lights at the top of Albany Street. Some seconds, a whole minute probably, passed before he understood that the lights had changed from red to green and back to red again. A solitary car stopped and waited. He went across, holding on to the wall of the bridge now, just another drunk to passers-by, turning clumsily into Park Village East and pushing open the gate into the ruined garden.

They were doing up the house that loomed above him in darkness. Its windows were gone, leaving black pits. The builders’ materials lay in heaps – timber, bricks, a ladder. He nearly blundered into a concrete mixer, a thing like a great pale zoo animal with heavy backside and tiny stupid head. Down the slope, black but with the gleam of water in its depths, lay the Grotto. He scrambled down, scratching his hands on brambles, trying to avoid the coils of barbed wire. There, at the bottom, his seat on the coping lit by a thin shaft from a lamp on the bridge, he shivered and hunched his body before feeling in the pocket of his jacket for his materials.

They were kept in a red velvet drawstring bag, the kind of thing a box containing a ring or necklace is put into in a jeweller’s shop. He had found it in a waste bin in York Terrace where the rubbish is of high quality. From the bag he took first another find, the metal rose from a galvanised iron watering can, then a tin lid that by chance (he had searched for quite a long time) exactly fitted over the rim of the rose. Then came the screwtop from a vodka bottle with Purveyors to the Imperial Russian Court and the dates 1887–1917 printed on it in red, then a drinking straw still in its plastic wrapping (he had helped himself to this from the counter at the refreshment place near the Broad Walk), and finally a cigarette lighter.

First he took the white crystalline substance he had bought from Gupta between finger and thumb. His hand was shaking but that didn’t matter as all he had to do was crumble the substance up. He dropped it through the neck of the rose on which he had bored two holes about a centimetre apart. He removed the drinking straw from its wrapping, cut it in half with nail scissors and inserted the two halves to a length of about three centimetres into the holes in the neck. It was just light enough to see to do this, but he could have done it in pitch darkness.

Having checked by feel that the straw halves were inserted to the correct length – very important this – he struck the cigarette lighter and set the flame to the perforations on which the rock rested. The second it caught he closed the lid over the base of the rose, took the straws into his mouth and drew in a deep inhalation. At this, the first draw, he always made a noise. It was a sound of joy, of orgasmic happiness, but to others it would have seemed like a groan of despair.

No one heard him. There was no one to hear. When educating him to work for them, Lew had told him jumbo took just ten seconds to reach the brain. He told him it would change him from one kind of person into another kind and he had been right. Hob grunted his satisfaction. A car passed along the bridge and the trees shook a little. The state began to recede like something evil in a dream being sucked away out of a door. It struggled as it went but the door closed and clouds of warmth filled its space, and sweet singing and hope. He closed his eyes. Once, when he first used the watering can rose, he had simply turned it upside down and inhaled through the perforations, but he found you wasted a lot that way. Waste was a crime.

After a while he removed the vodka cap from the neck of the rose, shook out the rose and the lid, put them back into the jewel bag and threw the straws away into the bushes. He had begun to feel strong and immensely happy. That was just the start.

Traffic was at its lightest – no heavy lorries or containers, only private cars. There are always some private cars. There are always people in Camden High Street, no matter what the hour. After midnight, for a while, London throbs softly but it still throbs. Chemical lamps colour the darkness greenish-white and dull orange, and the traffic lights change from green to amber to red to amber again and to green silently and often to an empty street. At such a place, where the lights changed to no purpose, to a deserted roadway, he crossed to Albert Road, to Parkway. When he was well he was a different person and he walked springily.

The different person, the person who was not in a state, was a joker, facetious, a user of peculiar slang. Everything made him laugh. He was strong; he could do anything. He could certainly do the job for which he had received half-payment. The watch he had often been tempted to sell told him it was twelve minutes past one.

The mark was due to arrive in London on the nine-twenty-five train from Shrewsbury which comes into Euston Station at one-fourteen. Euston was less than a mile away, the nearest of all the London termini. If the train was on time and a taxi was waiting, he had just enough time to make it to St Mark’s Crescent – nice time, in fact. A mark living in St Mark’s Crescent was something else to make him laugh, and he did so, but quietly, to himself.

He walked up Gloucester Avenue, took the fork into Regent’s Park Road and up the fork to the right. The Park was invisible, though lying only a few yards behind the tree-shaded walls. Dark shadows and leaves that scarcely rustled. Dustbins awaiting emptying. A cat that padded as silently as the place was silent, listened, froze, smelt or intuited him, and streaked, quick as a weasel, over the wall.

Lights were on in the houses, but not many. There were no lights on any floor of the house that was his destination. It had a dingy front garden, thick with weed bushes. He knew some of these were brambles because they caught on his clothes as he dropped down among them. A briar tugged at the back of his hand, scratching and puckering, making a zip fastener of blood on the skin.

It was so quiet that he heard the taxi when it was still in Regent’s Park Road. He felt very calm and happy, wishing only that he had someone to talk to and clown with, maybe put on his hit-man act, talking like a TV actor. The taxi turned the corner and pulled up outside the garden where he was hiding. Its light shone right on him, into his eyes. He kept as low down as he could get. He heard the exchange.

The gate opened. The taxi started, moved, began to turn. If the driver had waited till the front door came open he didn’t know what he’d have done. A suitcase was pushed in on to the path, and the gate closed behind it and its owner with a soft click. The lights of the taxi dwindled, disappeared and the throb of its engine faded.

He stood up and used his bare hands, first his hands, then his feet. One hand over the mouth from behind, a stranglehold armlock to bring him down, and when he was on the ground, the kicking. Not enough to kill or permanently disable but enough to injure, break a couple of the mark’s ribs, maybe not improve the future prospects of his spleen. Some dental work would probably also be needed.

He enjoyed it. He admired himself for doing it so well, particularly his skill in doing it in silence. Long practice and the use of his hands had ensured not a sound escaped from that mouth out of which blood now trickled in a thin stream. He knelt down. There was nothing in his brief about robbing the man but when you came to think of it the fee was laughable. He was entitled. He put his hand inside the jacket, felt in the pocket and found a wallet. Credit cards were no use to him. There was only one thing he wanted to buy and neither Carl nor Gupta would take Visa. Ten pounds, twenty and another twenty … Joy began to fill the spaces of his body with warmth. Eighty pounds. He stuffed it into his pocket alongside the red velvet bag.

Then, because he liked a joke and was feeling cheerful, he opened the suitcase and took a look inside. Not surprisingly, it was full of clothes. The surprise was that they were women’s, mostly women’s underwear. It now came back to him that he had heard there was something funny about the mark, though he’d half-forgotten what.

He set about hanging the stuff on the bushes – red silk bikini pants, French knickers, a black bra, a black lace nightie. It looked as if a couple of girls were camping there and had done their washing before they kipped down for the night. Whatever the name of the black see-through thing was – a sort of all-in-one with a fastening in the crotch – he didn’t know but he draped it over the gate and dropped a couple of suspender belts on the mark’s recumbent body.

The faint groaning coming from that half-open mouth meant it was dangerous to remain any longer. He left the garden, licking the blood off the scratch on the back of his hand, walking fast, going in the opposite direction this time, towards Primrose Hill. His spirits had begun to sink. Lew had told him about the ten-second effect but said nothing about depression coming back half an hour later. It was too late now. Gupta would no longer be among the Chinese trees but Carl or Lew might be on the Hill or the Macclesfield Bridge. He headed that way, his gains in his pocket.

‘Jumbo, jumbo,’ muttered Hob, and then he sang it to keep his spirits up. ‘Jumbo, jumbo …’

Chapter Two

The letter came the day she left. There was a postcard from her grandmother, a bill for water and this letter in a brown envelope with the Harvest Trust logo that looked like a scarlet mushroom, but was not of course that, was something quite other than that. She postponed opening it. Her grandmother’s postcard was from a place called Jokkmokk in the north of Sweden. It said: Dear Mary, I shall be back in London next Thursday, by which time you will be settled in Park Village. Will phone. Surprising heat here and midnight sun, Much love …

‘I’ll want a cheque for your half of the water,’ Alistair said, very sour and cross, truculent with resentment.

Mary said nothing about having paid all the electricity bill herself. He had got hold of the other envelope and was looking at the red logo.

‘Very unlikely.’ She was trying to keep everything she said to him brief, civil, equable. The rows were in the past. ‘It will just be the update. They keep in touch.’

‘It would be the best and ultimate way to show you how you’ve wasted your time and rubbished your body.’

He followed her into the bedroom. There were two open suitcases on the bed, one half-filled with her clothes. She put the letter and the postcard on top of a blue T-shirt and laid her trouser suit, folded with tissue, on top of that. A week had gone by since she had slept in that bed with him. During that week, he had slept in the bed and she had had the sofa-bed in the living room. It was easier that way, if her aim was a quiet life – for what was left of it for the two of them together, anyway. She found her cheque book in a drawer and wrote him a cheque for half the water rate.

A nod, no smile, no thanks, and he had put it in his pocket. ‘If you hadn’t this plushy place to go to you wouldn’t be going, would you? If it was a furnished room, for instance? Or back to Grandma?’

‘And when they come back from this protracted holiday – what then? When they kick you out of glitzville? You’ll come back here and say you’ve made a mistake and can you have your old bed back.’

‘If you like.’ Why did she always weaken, compromise? ‘We may both feel differently after four months.’

‘You’ll allow for that, will you? That I may feel differently. That I may no longer want to marry you? That’s going now, you know, that’s been on the wane ever since you deceived me over that Harvest thing I’m not supposed to mention. Since you deliberately made yourself ill for nothing, for no more than to get on a feel-good high, to be a martyr, to have “done some good in this world” – wasn’t that the phrase?’

‘Not used by me,’ she said, and she felt her temper going, slipping away, a ball dropped on a slope, running downhill: She made a grab at it, hung on. ‘I never said any of those things, never.’ Thank God, I never married you, she thought. Things could be worse, I could have married you.

She closed the lid of one suitcase, started filling the other. He watched her, his upper lip slightly curled back, an animal’s expression she had never seen when first they knew each other. ‘If my grandmother phones, will you give her this number? I’m sure she has it but just in case.’

She had written it down along with the address: Charlotte Cottage, Park Village West, Regent’s Park, London NW1.

‘It’s near my work,’ she said. ‘I can walk to work from there.’ As if that was why she was doing it, as if proximity to the museum was her reason.

He had an uncanny way of intuiting these things, of picking up on a weakening. His face changed and he wheedled. He had never wheedled when first they met. ‘You’ll ask me over, won’t you? Come to that, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t move in there too.’

‘There is a reason,’ she said quietly. Her temper was back with her. It had never had much independence, was almost incapable of getting lost; a timid thing like its owner, not much good at standing up for itself. She fastened the second suitcase, picked up her bag, put it down again to get into her jacket. ‘There are quite a few reasons, Alistair, but there isn’t any point in talking about it.’

‘You don’t seriously believe I’d ever –’ he hesitated, looking for a word, a silly word perhaps, a baby word, something that reduced violence to play ‘– smack,’ he said, ‘smack you again, do you?’

Yes, she did. Not that there had been much of that but there had been enough. Enough to change her from the woman, typical, normal, who says, He wouldn’t hit me twice, who says of abused women, Why do they stay? to the half-accepting kind, the it-was-only-once kind, even the kind who says, He was provoked beyond bearing. Except that she wasn’t staying or accepting or bearing but getting out.

He stood in the doorway, between her and the hall, and she had to pass him. What was I thinking of, she asked herself then and there, what was I thinking of, staying for even five minutes with a man who frightens me? An unreasonable man who thinks he owns me, body and soul?

She took a suitcase in each hand and walked by him, every muscle tense, her breath held. Instead of stepping back, he stood his ground and she had to push past him. He didn’t touch her with his hands. Once, she remembered, he had stuck out a foot and tripped her up. That had been in the early Harvest days, when he first found out. He had extended a foot and sent her sprawling and said when she picked herself up, ‘That wasn’t me, that was your bones; you’ve weakened your bones, you’ve made yourself into an old woman.’

But he didn’t touch her. ‘Alistair, goodbye,’ she said, a safe distance from him.

And if he seized hold of her, struck her face with one hand, then the other, shook her, threw her to the floor, used his fists …? He had never done anything like that, nothing on that scale, but she found herself shaking her head. She opened the front door. Outside by the lift someone was waiting. Thank God … Alistair said, in his old warm voice, ‘Goodbye, darling. Keep in touch,’ but whether it was for her benefit or the listener at the lift she couldn’t tell.

She had forgotten to call for a cab to take her to the tube. She lugged the suitcases round the corner, to a point invisible from any window in the flat, and sat on the low wall in front of the estate agent’s, waiting for a taxi to come.

Devonshire Street was the farthest south any of Bean’s dogs lived. This was Ruby the beagle. The next one was Boris the borzoi in Park Crescent, rich dogs both of them, well-fed, with top-grade veterinary insurance, sleek and proud and indulged. But all Bean’s dogs were like that or they wouldn’t have been his dogs. It would have been unthinkable for him to walk a cross-breed or a mongrel.

Also by Ruth Rendell

CHAPTER ONE

Chapter One

Chapter Two