Dark Corners: A Novel by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

floor brick. Suppose he went up in the lift and let himself into the flat – he had never done so in the past – and found Stacey in there, not as she had been in recent months, but a slim and beautiful ghost, waiting for him, waiting to accuse him of killing her.
    Don’t be a fool, he said to himself as he made his way out on to Chalk Farm Road, where the pubs were spilling out and noisy crowds sat at the tables on the pavement.

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    TOM MILSOM GOT off the number 98 bus at Marble Arch and, having walked a few yards to the top of Park Lane, hopped on to the 414. It was amazing how you could get on and off buses and on again all for free. Well, not really free; you’d paid for it in taxes all your life. But he wondered if there was any other capital city in the world where, so long as you were over sixty, you could ride on any bus without paying. He felt a surge of affection for his country, so cruelly maligned by many people. The words of the hymn came into his head, ‘I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above’, and tears pricked the back of his eyes, but they were tears of warmth and love.
    He went to the upper level. Most people of his age didn’t, but you saw so much from the top of a bus, especially when charging down the sloping part of Park Lane. He looked down at the Dorchester and Grosvenor House and the beautiful houses that remained, and there, walking along the pavement, was his next-door neighbour Mrs Grenville, holding the hand of a man who wasn’t her husband. Tom thought it should have been a woman observing this bit of scandal; gossip was wasted on him.
    It was three in the afternoon, and the bus was three-quarters empty as it made its way down into Knightsbridge. To his surprise, it stopped right outside Harrods. No use to him, he thought. He might as well stay on and go to the bus’s destination, Putney Bridge. There was bound to be another bus waiting there for him, one he had never been on before, never even heard of, and if it didn’t take him all the way home, it would take him somewhere he could pick up a number 98 or even a 6, which passed the end of Mamhead Drive.
     
    Carl was forcing himself to write three or four paragraphs every day, but now as he read his new pages, he admitted to himself that they weren’t very good. The prose was laboured, heavy, lifeless, the obvious result of pushing himself. But it’s about a philosopher, he thought, it’s bound not to have the witty lightness of
Death’s Door
. Perhaps he should look on his efforts as a practice run, a trial exercise to get himself back into novelist mode? He produced a few more lines and interrupted himself by remembering that today was the last of the month and tomorrow the first of July, rent day. Of course the rent wouldn’t come; it never now came the day before, though apologies sometimes did.
    So he wasn’t surprised when Dermot tapped at his door. Letting him in, he awaited the excuses. But there were no excuses, only smiles and the handover of a brown envelope.
    ‘What’s this, then?’
    ‘Your rent, Carl. What else?’
    ‘You never pay me the day before,’ said Carl, ‘or the day itself, come to that.’ He opened the envelope and took out the so-desirable purple notes. ‘Still, I’m not complaining.’
    ‘Look at it this way. It may be the first time, but it may also be the last.’
    ‘You don’t mean you’re leaving?’
    ‘Oh, no. No, no.’
    Dermot gave Carl another of his ghastly smiles, the yellow blotches on his teeth looking worse than usual. Carl noticed that a large pustule had appeared on his chin. He listened to him mounting the stairs, and then asked himself what that had meant. That stuff about Dermot’s payment being the last.
    It meant nothing, he told himself. Dermot thought he was being funny. Put it out of your head. It was nonsense.
    But that ‘no, no’ rang out and echoed in his head. He looked again at the contents of the envelope. Perhaps there were