To Fear a Painted Devil (22 page)

‘But it was only money, always money.’ He laughed harshly but quite sanely into Greenleaf’s face. ‘It’s all better now, all better. I am Antony still!’

‘B
ut why?’ Greenleaf asked again. ‘Why tell me so much?’ He felt angry, but his anger was a tiny spark in the fire of his other emotions: amazement, pity and a kind of grief. ‘You led me into this. You made me suspect.’ He spread his hands, then gripped the chair arms.

Marvell said calmly: ‘Naturally, I intended to get away with it at first.’ His face was a gentle blank. He might have been describing to the doctor his methods of pruning a fruit tree. ‘But when I knew that I had killed Patrick in vain, for nothing, I wanted—I suppose I wanted to salvage something from the waste. They say criminals are vain.’ With a kind of wonder he said: ‘I
am
a criminal. My God, I hadn’t thought of it like that before. I don’t think it was that sort of vanity. All the moves in the game, they seemed like a puzzle. I thought a doctor and only a doctor could solve it. That’s why I picked on you, Max.’

He made a little half-sketched movement towards Greenleaf as if he was going to touch him. Then he withdrew his hand.

‘I meant to try to get you interested. Then Nancy started it all off for me. I’ve always thought hatred was such an uncivilised thing, but I really hated Tamsin. When you suspected her I thought, to hell
with Tamsin!’ He raised his eyebrows and he smiled. ‘If it had come to it, perhaps … I don’t think I could have let her suffer for what I did.’

‘Didn’t you think what it would mean if I found out?’

Marvell moved to the fireplace and taking a match from the box on the mantelpiece struck it and dropped it among charred sheets of the manuscript. A single spiraling flame rose and illuminated his face.

‘Max,’ he said, ‘I had nothing to hope for. I’ve had a fine life, a good life. You know, I’ve always thought that was the true end of man, tilling the soil, husbanding the fruits of the soil, making wonderful things from a jar of honey, a basket of rose petals. In the evenings I wrote about the things of the past, I talked to people who remembered like me the days before taxes and death duties took away almost everything that made life for people like me a kind of—a kind of golden dream. Oh, I know it was a dream. I wasn’t a particularly useful member of society but I wasn’t a drag on society either. Just a drone watching the workers and waiting for the summer to end. My summer ended when Glide told me about this house. That’s what I meant when I said the bright day was done and I was for the dark.’ As the flame died he turned from the fireplace and clasping his hands behind his back looked down at Greenleaf.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ the doctor said. It was the phrase of despair, the sentence desperate people used to him from the other side of the consulting room table.

Marvell said practically: ‘There’s only one thing you can do, isn’t there? You can’t be a party to a felony. You’re not a priest hearing confession.’

‘I wish,’ Greenleaf said, a world of bitterness making his voice uneven, ‘I wish I’d kept to it when I said I didn’t want to hear.’

‘I shouldn’t have made you.’

‘For God’s sake!’ He jumped up and they faced each other in the circle of yellow light. ‘Stop playing God with me!’

‘Max, it’s all over. I’ll have a wash, I’ll put some things in a bag. Then we’ll go to the police together.’ As the doctor’s face clouded he said quickly, ‘You can stay with me if you like.’

‘I’ll wait for you. Not here though. In the garden. I’m not a policeman.’ How many times had he said that in the past weeks? Or had he in fact said it only to himself in a repetitive refrain that irritated his days and curled itself around his sleep?

Marvell hesitated. Something leaped into his eyes but all he said was: ‘Max … forgive me?’ Then when the doctor said nothing he picked up the lamp and carried it before him into the passage.

The garden was a paradise of sweet scents. At first Greenleaf was too bemused, too stunned for thoughts. He moved across the grass watching his own shadow going before him, black on the silvered grass. The great trees shivered and an owl flying high crossed the dappled face of the moon.

In the house behind him he could see the lamplight through a single window, the bathroom window. The rest of Marvell’s home was as dark and as still as if Glide had already bought it, as if it was waiting with a kind of squat resignation the coming of the men with the bulldozers. A year would elapse perhaps, only six months if the weather held Then another house would arise, the mock-Tudor phoenix of some
Nottingharn business man, on the ashes of the cottages Andreas Quercus had made when George I held court in London.

The light was still on. No shadow moved across it. I must leave him in peace, Greenleaf thought, for a few more minutes. He has lived alone, loving loneliness, and he may never be alone again.

Avoiding the orchard where the bees were, he walked in a circle around the lawn until he came once more to the back door. He went in slowly, feeling his way in the dark. His fingers touched the uneven walls, crept across the plates, the framed lithographs. At the bathroom door he stopped and listened. No sound came. Suddenly as he stood, looking down at the strip of light between door and floor, he thought of another house, another bathroom where Tamsin had showered her slim brown body while her lover gave to Patrick the sting that was his own individual brand of death.

He paced the narrow passage, sickness churning his belly and rising into his throat. When he could stand it no more he called, ‘Crispin!’ The silence was driving him into a panic. ‘Crispin! Crispin!’ He banged on the heavy old door with hands so numb and nerveless that they seemed no part of his tense body.

In a film or play he would have put his shoulder to that door and it would have yielded like cardboard, but he knew without trying how impossible it was for him to attempt to shift this two-inch thick chunk of oak. Instead he groped his way back, wondering what that noise was that pumped and throbbed in the darkness. When he reached the open air he realised that it was the beating of his own heart.

He had to make himself look through that lighted window, pulling his hands from his eyes as a man pulls back curtains on to an unwelcome day. The glass was old and twisted, the light poor but good enough to show him what he was afraid to see.

The bath was full of blood.

No, it couldn’t be—not all blood. There must be water, gallons of water, but it looked like blood, thin, scarlet and immobile. Marvell’s face rested above the water line—the blood line—and the withdrawing of life had also withdrawn age and the lines of age. So had the head looked on Salome’s silver platter.

Greenleaf heard someone sob. He almost looked round. Then he knew that it was he who had sobbed. He took off his jacket, struggling with it as a man struggles with clothes in a dream, and wrapped it around his fist and his arm. The window broke noisily. Greenleaf unlatched the casement and squeezed it over the sill.

Marvell was dead but warm and limp. He lifted the slack arms and saw first the slashes on the wrists, then the cut-throat razor lying beneath the translucent red water. Greenleaf knew no history but there came to him as he held the dead hands the memory of a lecture by the professor of Forensic Medicine. The Romans, he had said, took death in this way, letting out life into warm water. What had Marvell said? ‘I am Antony still’ and ‘Max, forgive me.’

Greenleaf touched nothing more although he would have liked to drain the bath and cover the body. He unlocked the door, carrying the lamp with him, and left Marvell in the darkness he had chosen.

Half-way across the living room he stopped and on an impulse unhooked from the walls the olive-coloured
plate with the twig and the apple. As it slid into his pocket he felt with fingers that had palpated human scars the bruise on the underside of the glazed fruit.

T
he wood with its insinuating branches was not for him to-night. He blew out the lamp and went home by Long Lane.

On Linchester the houses were still lit, the Gages’ noisy with gramophone music, the Gavestons’ glowing, its windows crossed and re-crossed by moving shadows. As he came to Shalom a taxi passed him, women waved, and Walter Miller’s face, brown as a conker, grinned at him from under a pink straw hat. Home to Linchester, home to autumn, home to the biggest sensation they had ever known.…

Bernice opened the door before he could get his key out.

‘Darling, you’re ill! What’s happened?’ she cried and she put her arms round him, holding him close.

‘Give me a kiss,’ he said, and when she had done so he lifted her arms from his neck and placed them gently at her sides. ‘I’ll tell you all about it,’ he said, ‘but not now. Now I have to telephone.’

LIVE FLESH

by
Ruth Rendell

When Victor Jenner is released from prison after ten years, he enters a strange new world where he must make a life for himself. But he’s much more interested in the past, especially the young policeman he blames for putting him in prison in the first place.

LIVE FLESH
by Ruth Rendell

Published by Ballantine Books
.
Available in bookstores everywhere
.