Authors: Ruth Rendell
And it’s getting worse. I honestly think you need to do something about it.”
“You’ve been listening to your mother.”
“Why not? Yes, maybe I have. I do listen to my mother sometimes. I think she’s got a lot of sense. But I haven’t been listening to her on the question of your sanity, I’ve never discussed it with her. I think you’re losing your mind, Guy, and all because you’ve got this crazy idea in your head that you and I would be happy together. We wouldn’t. You’ll do much better with Celeste, if only you’d look at it rationally. Actually, it’ll be better when I’m married and out of your way, when you can’t see me. You’ll get over it then.”
They were neither of them able to eat their lunch. He drank the wine, though, he could always drink. She drank her water and made the bread roll into a heap of crumbs. She said that these days meeting him only made her miserable and him too, but she promised to have lunch with him again on the following Saturday.
She had given him a lot to think about. When had he made the offer to pay for her flat? It must have been in the December and January three and a half years ago. Between then and the previous August someone had told Anthony Chisholm about the Con Mulvanney affair. Perhaps Leonora had told him. But who had told her? Who was it had said, “Do you know the sort of person you’ve been going about with?”
But it had happened long before he offered the “loan,” it was just that he hadn’t seen Anthony for six months. No doubt Anthony had deliberately avoided him. He must have known a few days after Poppy Vasari put the police on to him. Poppy had immediately started telling people, as she had threatened to do, and one of the people she had told was—why hadn’t he thought of that at once?—Rachel Lingard.
The chances of Poppy coming across Tessa were not very great. Tessa was only a voluntary worker in a hospital and the CAB. But Rachel was a social worker for some London borough, he couldn’t remember which one, if he had ever known. If she worked for the Social Services in some South London borough while Poppy worked with addicts, what more likely than that they knew each other? They might even be friends.
“His name’s Guy Curran, he’s got a luxury mews house in just about the best part of Kensington.”
“Guy Curran?”
“Don’t say you know him!”
“Oh, I know him. My best friend’s thinking of marrying him.”
She
had
been thinking of marrying him once. The first time he took her to see his house, on the way there in his car—he’d had a Mercedes in those days—“It’ll be your house too,” he’d said, and she had given him that smile, only he remembered it as freer and more open then, less contained. “When we get married,” she’d said.
She
had
said that? He hadn’t imagined it? Of course he hadn’t. He wasn’t losing his mind. She had loved him entirely, but the separations imposed by university and training college had driven them apart. It was natural, it would have happened to anyone. The point was that she was coming closer to him again, she had agreed to go on holiday with him, they were going out together two or three times a week. And then Con Mulvanney died.
Poppy Vasari had been gone no more than ten minutes when the Drugs Squad arrived. They searched the house and found nothing. There was nothing to find. Thank God he had put that grass and those amphetamines down the john three days before. They had been known to take the drains apart. Not that they did that in Scarsdale Mews. He could tell they were impressed by the house, they couldn’t help being, and it had to affect them, the elegance of it, the quietness, the beautiful things.
They questioned him at home and at the police station. The interrogation went on for hours. He denied everything. The club was doing well at that time, the travel agency was well past the planning stage, the original-oil-paintings business had started bringing in the money. They could see where the money came from.
His two new rifles came to light, each in its case. He had his gun license, as member of an accredited rifle club. He said he had never heard of Cornelius Mulvanney, the man had never come to his house. One thing he would like to tell them, he said, was that while he was at a party in a pub in Balham at the weekend, someone had come up to him and asked if he had any hashish. In those words? Well, no, not in those words, he didn’t want to repeat the words, but if they insisted, what he had asked had been, “Have you got any shit?” How did he know what that meant? He had been curious, he had asked a man in the pub, who had told him.
Describe the man. Which man? The one who asked him for the hashish. Guy had said he couldn’t, he couldn’t remember. Eventually he came up with a vague outline of a thin man, pale, with longish, fairish hair. The name of the pub? The time? Whose party was it? What time did he leave? On and on it went. At midnight they let him go home. He never heard from them again.
Poppy Vasari, however, returned a few days later. She said she wouldn’t come in, thanks. (He hadn’t asked her.) She’d stay on the doorstep because he might do her a mischief if she was alone with him in there. That made him laugh. As if he would even touch someone so repulsive! The smell was still there, ingrained in her clothes probably. He stood holding the door and laughing at her, it was all so ridiculous.
“You murdered Con,” she said, “so why not me? It wouldn’t make any difference to you. You’re evil.”
He was forcing himself to keep on laughing, it didn’t come naturally. If he shut the door she would only keep banging on it until he opened it again.
“You’re safe from the law,” she said, “but you’re not safe from your peers.”
“What d’you mean, peers?” he’d said, getting a sort of picture of the House of Lords.
“I’m telling everyone I know about you, everyone. And I’m telling everyone Con knew. I’m telling them the truth, that Con may have died from bee-stings but he only got stung because of the drug you gave him. You murdered him by giving him a lethal drug and that’s what I’m determined everyone’s going to know. I’ve started at home. Now I’m going to start here. I’m going to find your friends and tell them. I’m going to knock on every door in this street and tell people what you did.”
The trouble with doing that sort of thing, at least in Britain, is that the recipients of statements of this kind, delivered like that, think the messenger is mad. He or she is a “poor soul” who ought to be put away, ought never to have been let out, needs looking after, is best ignored, forgotten, and, as for the information thus relayed, no one gives it credence. No doubt the neighbours in Scarsdale Mews did think Poppy Vasari mad if she carried out her threat—Guy didn’t look to see—and perhaps she was temporarily a little mad. I mean (thought Guy), imagine it, the TV chat-show chap coming to his door and getting an earful of “I think you ought to know that the man who lives at number seven killed my friend with drugs.”
It didn’t even worry him much. If she thought these people were his friends, she was making a big mistake. He had never been matey with the neighbours. An invitation from one set of them to drop in for a Christmas drink he had refused. In the ensuing days he was a bit wary with them, but everyone went on just as they had been before, either saying “Good morning” or “Hi” or not saying anything. As he thought, they hadn’t listened. But that was a far cry from Poppy Vasari telling someone she knew personally, someone she worked with, especially when she had calmed down a bit. It was a far cry from her telling someone
who knew him, who recognized his name.
Rachel Lingard.
It was within a fortnight of the Con Mulvanney inquest that he and Leonora were going away on holiday together. Nothing of importance came out at the inquest. His name, thank God, wasn’t mentioned. Poppy Vasari got a reprimand from the coroner for sitting by and doing nothing while Con Mulvanney took a prohibited substance, a dangerous hallucinogen. She was specially to blame in the light of her training and the job she had been doing, from which, the coroner was pleased to inform the court, she had resigned. The verdict was accidental death. But Rachel must have been busy because in the middle of the following week, when he and Leonora met in Cambridge Circus—he was taking her to the theatre to
Les Miserables
—she told him she wasn’t coming to Greece.
She wasn’t abashed about it, she wasn’t awkward. There was no question of saying to him that she hated telling him, that she felt awful. She came straight out with it.
“I can’t come, I’m sorry.”
He was appalled, he protested. Was it the cost that was worrying her? Was it because he would have to pay for both of them?
The shock of it made him careless and he uttered the phrase she hated and he had promised himself not to use. “I won’t even notice an amount like that.”
It always made her wince. “It’s that, and other things. I can’t. Don’t ask me to explain, it would be painful to explain. Let’s just forget it—can we?”
Once he thought it was the money and perhaps—unpleasant notion—she might feel she’d
have
to sleep with him if he’d paid, so it was better not to go. Now he knew differently. Rachel had told her about Con Mulvanney.
She lived with Rachel, Rachel was always there, poisoning her mind, influencing her against him. He would like to kill Rachel.
T
he barbecue at Danilo’s was operated by cooks in striped aprons and high white hats and the food served by waitresses dressed like eighteenth-century dairymaids. The barmen and barmaids were dressed like Hawaiian dancers. Fortunately, it was a warm evening. The garden of Danilo’s neo-Georgian house in Weybridge was enormous, planted here and there with imported, nearly mature, palm trees, which were doing all right this summer but might be less happy by next spring. His latest novelty was the fountain, installed in an ornamental pool on the lawn below the terrace. The fountain was floodlit this evening, pink rose-trees in pink pots stood round the marble coping and pink dye had been put into the water. Danilo explained to people admiring the effect that the natural-looking rocks were real rose quartz.
About a hundred people had come. Guy knew some of them slightly. Bob Joseph was there with his girl-friend and Bob’s ex-wife was there with her new husband, Danilo’s wicked old father with his third wife and Danilo’s brother, who had taken over the turf accountant’s business and now had a chain of betting shops. There were a lot of friends of Tanya’s in the rag trade and a lot of girls who looked like models but probably weren’t. Danilo and Tanya, though always talking about getting married “one day,” had not yet done so, in spite of having four children.
These four, intolerably spoilt in Guy’s opinion, instead of being in bed or supervised in some distant suitable place by their two nannies, ran about among the guests screaming, throwing food about, and splashing anyone who came within the line of fire with pink water from the fountain. They were dressed up to the nines, the two boys in striped trousers and monkey jackets with bow-ties, the girls in white organza with layers of petticoats, as if their parents were Italian peasants made good instead of cockney parvenus. The elder boy, Charles, but always known as Carlo, had got himself a Bellini, which, because this was Tanya’s party, had brandy in it as well as champagne and peach juice, and, surrounded by shrieking girls in hip-high miniskirts, was swigging it down and smacking his lips.
Fairy lights were strung among the palm trees, along with ultraviolet mosquito-repellent rings. A tape was playing music of the down-below-the-Rio-Grande type, thus fostering the illusion Danilo and Tanya liked to create that they really were of Latin origin. The garden smelt of burning oil and charred steak in spite of the patchouli-scented candles. Guy understood that he could never have brought Leonora here. She would call it vulgar, or worse, would laugh. Her idea of a party was fifteen people in a flat in Camden Town, drinking white wine and Perrier and talking about the environment. But giving up Danilo and Tanya for Leonora would be an endurable sacrifice.
The night sky was purple, starless, with a lemon-coloured sickle moon that must be real but looked as if Danilo had hung it up there when he dyed the fountain. A slight breeze moved the palm fronds. Guy had drunk one Bellini for form’s sake, then moved on to vodka. He could see Celeste enjoying herself dancing with Danilo’s next-door neighbour, a millionaire and former member of a highly successful sixties rock group. She had a bright red ankle-length skirt on and a black-and-gold tank top that left bare two inches of golden midriff. Her hair in those scores of gilt-tipped plaits was like the crest of some glorious tropic bird. The smallest of Danilo’s children, a little girl in bouncing white tutu, came running up to her and Celeste drew her into the dance, the three of them holding hands. Celeste loved children, he had seen signs before.
He was walking towards the bar for a vodka refill when a more than usually loud splash and shriek from the direction of the fountain made him look to his left. There, among a knot of guests brushing water-drops off their clothes—Carlo had been active at the fountain edge—was Robin Chisholm.
Guy fetched his drink, moved to a shadowy point of vantage where only scented candle-light penetrated. Robin was talking to Tanya, a man Guy didn’t know, and two string-thin bizarrely dressed women with hair like huge cumuli of candy-floss, lemon and strawberry, respectively. Tanya’s hair was not dissimilar, except that candy-floss does not come in ink flavour. Tanya was wearing a kind of camisole in gold lamé with black-and-gold-striped pleated trousers and high-heeled green shoes that she had probably put on by mistake and then forgotten to change. There was no sign of Maeve.
Robin looked as if he had stepped straight out of a musical set in Edwardian times. All that was lacking was the straw boater. He had taken to wearing his fair wavy hair parted in the middle. It looked very strange. His face was as youthful as ever, not simply youthful as that of a man of twenty-seven is, but like a boy’s ten years younger. His cheeks were rosy, his lips red as a girl’s. He had white flannels on and a striped blazer, seemed prosperous and immensely pleased with himself.