Authors: Ruth Rendell
“It was yours, wasn’t it?” said Winder in his dull neutral voice.
“Yes, it was mine. I had a right to sell it.”
“How long did you live there, Mr. Verne-Smith?”
“Stay there? A week or two. I don’t remember exactly.” Adam waited to be asked if he had stayed there alone but he was not asked. Neither man was writing any of this down and this gave Adam a small amount of confidence. He did not like the impersonal, breezy, almost automatonlike tone of Winder’s voice, but it might be natural to him; it might be that he always talked like this, even to his wife and children.
“And after you left at the end of the week or two, did you ever go back?”
“Not to live there,” said Adam.
“You never lived there in the first place, did you? Did you ever stay there again?”
“No.”
“You put Wyvis Hall on the market, is that correct? Your father has told us you put it on the market in the autumn of 1976 and then withdrew it from sale in the spring, when you had had no acceptable offers. You offered it again in the autumn of 1977, finally selling it to Mr. Langan.”
None of this was being written down, but this time Adam told the strict truth.
“I didn’t offer it for sale at all until the late summer of 1977.”
“So your father is mistaken?”
“He must be.” Anticipating a fairly obvious question, Adam said, “I was in my last year at university. I had my finals coming up. I didn’t want the bother of selling property. Besides, I was told that if I hung on to it, it would go up in value and it did.”
This seemed to satisfy them. Stretton asked him what he had been dreading but knew must come, the first of a series of questions that would lead up to the matter of the animal cemetery and the contents of the grave.
“Did you know there was an area on your property where family pets had been buried?”
“I used to go there when I was a child, you know. I think I must have been shown it then.”
“You think, Mr. Verne-Smith?”
“I don’t remember,” Adam said. “I knew there was an animal cemetery there somewhere but I don’t remember when I first saw it.”
“You didn’t, for instance, go up to look at it while you stayed at Wyvis Hall in June 1976 or again before you offered the property for sale in August 1977?”
“I don’t think so. Not that I recall.”
“You are aware, of course, of what was found buried in the animal cemetery a couple of weeks ago?”
“I think so.”
“The skeletons of a young woman and a baby. Death occurred between nine and twelve years ago—which really means most probably ten or eleven years ago? Would you agree?”
Adam wasn’t at all sure if he would. That is, he would not in general agree to an assumption of that sort and he was quite sure a court would not. On the other hand, he knew very well when death had occurred—ten years and two months ago.
“The young woman met a violent death. The child, too, possibly. Suicide is a possibility in the woman’s case but she didn’t kill herself and dig her own grave. She didn’t bury herself.”
Adam nodded. A rueful smile would have been in order but he could not smile. Winder had said “kill” and not “shoot,” which meant they did not know a gun had been used, they didn’t know about the pump action twelve-bore. Nor, perhaps, had they found the lady’s gun, buried in the Little Wood. He had thought that if you shot something—for up till then he had shot only birds and few of them—the victim staggered, fell, and died. Like on the screen, like on television. He had not anticipated the flying blood, the fountains of blood, as the ball bearings struck arteries, great and small blood vessels. So it had been. So it must have been for Sebastian up in the Pincushion Room, the arrows summoning forth spouts of blood instead of the flesh receiving them passively as it might so many acupuncture needles… .
He had to exert himself not to drop his head into his hands.
“While you were down there in the summer of 1976—when would that have been exactly?”
“From the eighteenth of June for about a week,” said Adam.
“You didn’t happen to see a young woman about, I suppose? Pushing a baby in a pram, for example? A girl might have taken a child for a walk down the entrance drive.”
“It’s a private road.”
“Well, yes, Mr. Verne-Smith, but the village people do use it occasionally. That sort of rule is more honored in the breach than the observance, don’t you find?”
Adam shook his head. The idea of people having walked up and down the drift without his knowledge made him feel almost faint.
“You never saw a girl in the vicinity while you were there?” He waited for Adam’s denial. “You won’t mind my asking, I’m sure. It was a long time ago. You never had a girl staying with you there?”
“Absolutely not.” Adam was astonished at the vehemence with which he could lie.
Vivien came into his mind—inevitably. He saw her in her bright blue dress, the bodice embroidered with crude birds and flowers in red and gold. She had been a squatter. London was full of squatters in the mid-seventies.
“I believe people might have used the house in my absence. When I went back in 1977 there were—well, signs that people had been in, sort of camped there.”
They were keen on that. They wanted to know more. Yet even as he invented, describing a broken window in the washhouse, the paper wrappings nibbled by mice, a few missing ornaments, he sensed their disbelief. He sensed that they were simply interested in hearing what he would come up with next, that they were patiently paying out the rope, yards and yards of it, with which he would ultimately hang himself.
But it was over. They were going. They had not asked him where else he had been that summer and he had not had to invent a Greek holiday or involve others in an alibi. As he slowly eased himself from his chair, getting up ponderously as if he were prematurely arthritic, as he was poised there, supporting himself by his forearms pressing the arms of the chair, Winder said: “Is there anything else you would like to tell us?”
It was uttered with the utmost casualness, lightly thrown away. But Adam found the question deeply disconcerting. It sounded sinister and deliberate.
He said again, “I don’t think so,” reflecting what an absurd rejoinder this is, this squeamish, cautious substitute for “no.”
He opened the front door for Winder and Stretton, and Winder thanked him for his help, adding as if this were an afterthought, a tiny minor matter, something so unimportant that it had nearly gone out of his head, that perhaps in the next few days Adam would not mind going into his local police station and there make a statement to the effect of what he had just told them. They were Suffolk police, but “liaising” of course with the crime squad, and if Adam were to ask for CID or better still for Sergeant Fuller …
Anne had come out into the hall and was listening to what they said. She looked disdainful but at the same time quite upset.
“Sergeant Fuller would take the statement from you,” Winder said. “Anytime will do, at your convenience, but let’s say before the weekend, shall we?”
“It’s a funny thing,” said Stretton, prolonging their departure. “It’s a funny thing how people—the public, that is—how they think that just because a crime was committed a long time ago, I mean, say, ten years ago, it’s less important than if it had been committed, well, yesterday. But that’s not so at all. I mean, that’s not the way the police look at it.”
“No,” said Winder in a preoccupied way. “No, you’re right, it’s not. We’ll say good night, then. Good night, Mrs. Verne-Smith.”
After he closed the door Adam felt a little like he had that day when he came home with the gun in the golf bag and found his father in the front garden. He longed to be alone but he should not have married if he felt like that. One of the objectives of marriage was to have an ally.
“Just what is all this?” Anne said.
“It’s nothing to do with me. They think squatters got into Wyvis Hall and lived there without my knowing.”
“Why did that man want a statement from you then?”
Adam did not answer her. He looked up Rufus’s phone number once more. If she comes up behind me and touches me, he thought, if she says any more, I’ll kill her. And then he thought how that phrase, which was the general routine threat of the harassed person, was banned to him forever, because to those others it was fantasy while to him it was real.
Anne was sitting in the armchair reading, but she was watching him with half an eye. Adam learned Rufus’s number and repeated it over and over to himself. He put the phone book back and thought how much he longed to talk to someone who
knew,
to one of them. It seemed to him that he had soldiered on, bearing this alone through eons of time. Ten years in fact, but most intensely for five days.
“I thought I heard Abigail,” he said.
“Did you? I didn’t.”
“I’ll just go up and look.”
Anne’s face wore that peevish exasperated expression that always signified he was being too concerned a parent. In the hall Adam looked at his watch and the digits told him nine fifty-six. A bit late to make a phone call but perhaps not too late. Five to ten at Ecalpemos had been the start of the evening, the infancy of the young night. And he and Rufus, like sultans, had reclined on quilts and smoked hashish, the pungent trails of smoke rising into the dark air and mingling with the scents of the summer night. For ever and forever farewell, Rufus. And whether we shall meet again I know not, let us therefore our everlasting farewells take… .
In his bedroom he lifted the receiver and put his forefinger to the nine button on the phone. Rufus’s exchange was nine five nine. Adam knew he was being hysterical, a bit mad, those policemen had sent him over the edge, but he did not just want to talk to Rufus, he
longed
for Rufus. He wanted, at that moment, to hold Rufus in his arms and possess Rufus’s body with his body, and be lost in him as he had once wanted to lose himself in Zosie.
He was trembling. He dialed the number very quickly before his nerve could fail. If a woman answered he would put the phone down. He was holding his breath. The phone was answered and Rufus gave the number. It was the same languid drawl, very cool, very Rufus.
“This is Adam Verne-Smith.”
“Ah,” said Rufus.
Now that he had done it he did not know what to say.
“I rather expected to hear from you,” Rufus said. “Sometime or other.”
“I have to talk to you.”
“Not now.” The voice was stony, remote.
“No, all right. Not now. Tomorrow? Thursday? We could meet.” Adam would know the minute Anne picked up the receiver downstairs; he would hear the click and have the sense of a door opening somewhere along the line, yet knowing this perfectly well he was nevertheless afraid he might already have missed hearing and sensing it and all the time Anne had been listening, was even now attending to this rather sinister exchange between him and Rufus. “Hold on,” he said, and he went to the head of the stairs, looked down, of course could see nothing, and had to come right up to the living room door and look in to make sure she was still reading. She looked up and stared back at him, unsmiling. Adam returned to the phone and Rufus. “Some policemen have been here.”
“Christ.”
“I didn’t mention you—or anyone. I said I’d never lived there.”
“Where do you work?” said Rufus. “I mean, where’s your office or whatever?”
“Sort of Victoria, Pimlico.”
“Call me tomorrow in Wimpole Street. We might have a drink.”
“All right.”
Rufus replaced his receiver first. But Adam found he did not much mind, it wasn’t a rejection and it didn’t hurt. It was strange how Rufus’s tone had changed while he, Adam, was downstairs checking up on Anne. In those thirty seconds he had become the old Rufus again, his best friend, once very nearly his lover, his partner in crime, his Cassius. Suppose this were to pass away, all of it, suppose by a miracle they were to escape, would it be possible to be friends with Rufus again?
He found he was trembling at the thought of it and he got up from where he had been sitting on the bed and went into Abigail’s room. Standing by her side, looking down, he thought how unlikely it was he would sleep that night, how he must anticipate lying wakeful for hour upon hour.
And then he really looked at the crib, looked into it in the light that came in here from the landing, and saw his daughter lying face downward, utterly still, her face buried in the small flat pillow. His breath caught and held, he stared. He lowered the side of the crib. There was no movement at all; she wasn’t breathing, there was no delicate rise and fall of the frail shape. The sheet and blanket and down quilt lay motionless on her small, rigid body.
The room was silent, warm, expectant of the most appalling disaster. Adam cried out, a yell of terror, and snatched up Abigail in his arms. Very much alive, she burst into screams of fright. Anne came running upstairs. The light was put on, was painfully bright, making Abigail sob and cry the more, poking fists into her eyes.
“What the hell are you doing to her?”
Adam gasped. “I thought she was dead.”
“You’re mad. You’re insane, you ought to see someone. Give her to me.”
Without a word he handed her over. Instead of his wife and child, he seemed for a moment to see Zosie standing there with the baby in her arms. He could have married Zosie, he thought. She had wanted to marry a rich man and in her eyes then he had been rich, the lord of Ecalpemos. Avoiding such thoughts, he had never considered it till now, but was it he she had had in mind when she talked of her career? And had he thrown her away through simply failing to recognize this?
Exiled from Abigail’s room, he went downstairs again, aware of his aloneness, appreciating this rare solitude. Anne he had deeply offended, but he was indifferent to this. It meant, anyway, that she would not pursue him with questions. He indulged in fantasizing briefly, in a dream of her leaving him, walking out on him and Abigail. He would have to get a nanny, of course, but he could afford that. Someone like Vivien perhaps …
All roads led back to Ecalpemos. Whatever he thought of brought him back into the Ecalpemos file which Undo and Quit keys only briefly expelled from his mind’s screen. Or he had lost the knack of escape.