“I said we’d come. Don’t say you’d forgotten?”
I had but I remembered then.
“If I phoned three times and got no answer, we’d come over.”
“Oh, yes. Yes.”
“You’ll have to come back with me now,” said my mother, “while your front door gets boarded up.”
So I picked up my handbag from the table and saw that I was right and my keys had gone. I went back with Fay while Malcolm and the policeman went off to try to find Andrew. Fay had seen him only the day before, when he had been well and happy but not willing to talk about me, though she had raised the subject. We each drank some whisky, I remembering this was the last thing I should be doing and pouring it away after the first sip. We wouldn’t sleep, we were sure of that, but Fay, who is more of an optimist than I am, kept saying that now the police knew about it, Andrew would be all right.
But he wasn’t. Summers and two other friends of Kevin Drake’s found him, in of all innocuous places, coming out of the Odeon cinema in the Fulham Road. James had been with him but wasn’t with him at that precise moment, having gone back to retrieve his mobile, which he thought had fallen down the back of the seat he had been sitting in. In the midst of a jostling crowd, hardly noticed, three knives went into Andrew’s chest and back.
MY ATTACKER, who turned out indeed to be Gary Summers, had had several hours’ start on us. It was several days before I knew what had happened. Summers had gone straight to Paultons Square, made his way into the block where James lived, and in the foyer checked the number of the flat from the postboxes. You were supposed to get the porter to call up to the flat for you, but Summers avoided the lift and went up the stairs. Finding no one at home in James’s flat, he turned away to come face-to-face with the girl who lived opposite. Yes, she had seen them go out, she knew them quite well, and James had told her they were going to the cinema. She even volunteered the information, unasked, that they’d be out of there by nine thirty and then they’d go and have a meal. She even told Summers the name of the restaurant they often ate at. As it happened, he wasn’t going to need that information.
It was in the newspapers and on TV, but three days later no arrests had been made. I couldn’t identify Summers, and the men that were with him remained anonymous. But it was, thank God, not murder but attempted murder. Andrew was operated on twice, lay in what hospitals (or maybe only the media) call “critical” condition for three days. Fay was with him most of the time, and I for quite a lot of it, but they wouldn’t allow poor James. What after all was James but a friend?
“I wish we’d had a civil partnership,” he said to me, “and then I could have counted as his next of kin.”
The knife thrusts had missed his heart, but one of them had destroyed his spleen. “Who needs a spleen?” he said when he was recovering. “I don’t even know what it does.”
Did he know I sat beside his bed along with Fay and, as soon as he was allowed to, James? I never asked, and when I knew he was himself again and sitting up and talking, I went into his room in fear and trembling, sure he would turn away and cover his face in the bedclothes. That didn’t happen. He was talking to Fay, saying (in typical Andrew fashion) that she would say the trial ought to be postponed for months whereas . . .
He looked up when I came in. Holding out his arms, he said, “Mind my wounds. Hi, Sis.”
© JERRY BAUER
RUTH RENDELL, writing here as Barbara Vine, has won three Edgar Awards, the highest accolade from Mystery Writers of America, as well as four Gold Daggers and a Diamond Dagger for outstanding contribution to the genre from England’s prestigious Crime Writers’ Association. Her remarkable career has spanned more than forty years, with more than sixty books published. A member of the House of Lords, she lives in London.
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COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER
ALSO BY RUTH RENDELL
To Fear a Painted Devil
Vanity Dies Hard
The Secret House of Death
One Across, Two Down
The Face of Trespass
A Demon in My View
Make Death Love Me
The Lake of Darkness
Master of the Moor
The Killing Doll
The Tree of Hands
Live Flesh
Talking to Strange Men
The Bridesmaid
Going Wrong
The Crocodile Bird
The Keys to the Street
A Sight for Sore Eyes
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
The Rottweiler
Thirteen Steps Down
The Water’s Lovely
Portobello
Tigerlily’s Orchids
The St. Zita Society
THE INSPECTOR WEXFORD SERIES
From Doon with Death
The Sins of the Fathers
Wolf to the Slaughter
The Best Man to Die
A Guilty Thing Surprised
No More Dying Then
Murder Being Once Done
Shake Hands Forever
A Sleeping Life
Death Notes
The Speaker of Mandarin
An Unkindness of Ravens
The Veiled One
Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter
Simisola
Road Rage
Harm Done
The Babes in the Wood
End in Tears
Not in the Flesh
The Monster in the Box
The Vault
BARBARA VINE NOVELS
A Dark-Adapted Eye
A Fatal Inversion
The House of Stairs
Gallowglass
King Solomon’s Carpet
Asta’s Book
No Night Is Too Long
The Brimstone Wedding
The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy
Grasshopper
The Blood Doctor
The Birthday Present
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