Going Wrong by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

Sanderstead Lane and back again. He turned down a side road and saw that a lane between high hedges ran along the backs of the houses. Their gardens had gates into it. He returned to the main road. Number 15, next door to and adjoining Tessa’s, looked empty. There were no curtains at the windows and an estate agent’s “For Sale” board was planted in the overgrown front garden.
    In the old days, if this had been his area of Kensal and Tessa Mandeville had been running a business and had defaulted on her fees to him for keeping the place intact and not broken apart, he’d have got in there (or someone working for him would have) and either had her roughed up a bit or the fittings made to look less like they’d just come from the Ideal Home Exhibition. Midday would have been the best time, when there weren’t many of her neighbours at home, but not on a Tuesday, a Wednesday, or a Thursday. Entry by that lane at the back, the chances were the door into it was never locked, even if it could be locked, then try the back door. If it wouldn’t open, knock, and when she came no games, no posing as a salesman, a market researcher or whatever, but the swift hand closing her mouth, her two hands held hard behind her. Quick march with her into the middle of the house, silence while what had to be done was done.
    Fantasies—or were they? He began the drive home. Tonight he was giving Danilo dinner. There came quite suddenly into that part of his mind that made pictures, that ran videos, a sight of Magnus Mandeville eyeing him at that birthday party. Looking at him above the straight tops of his half-glasses as a judge might look at the scum in the dock, puzzled, inquiring, shrewd, astonished, unrelenting. Magnus possibly had influence with Leonora. He was a lawyer, for God’s sake. Suppose he had had some inkling of his, Guy’s, activities, which were then still on the edge or over the edge of what was legal; would he have warned Leonora?
    Guy drew into the side of the road and parked the car. These small cameos were expanding into a picture, a panorama or group photograph, of that table on the evening of July 25. He couldn’t concentrate on the road. He had to stop. Where had it been, that dinner? Not a very distinguished place, not a great restaurant or famous hotel, not the kind of place he would want to celebrate some important event in his daughter’s life. But Guy could hardly bear to think of any possible daughter or possible son of his. It was too painful. He had had thoughts of this before and it seemed to tear open a wound somewhere inside him, it made him bleed. If he could know, actually know, that sometime he and Leonora would have children together, he thought he would die of happiness.
    The panorama opened in his mind. At that table there had been eleven people: Leonora herself at the head of it, with Anthony Chisholm sitting on her left and he. Guy, on her right. Leonora had been wearing a dark blue dress, plain, of some silken material, austere and rather too old for her. She looked beautiful, of course, that went without saying. She was wearing the necklace her father had given her, lapis in a silver setting from Georg Jensen, pretty but not expensive by Guy’s standards. Anthony was a good-looking man with a boyish face that would always have something of youth in it. Next to Anthony sat his own mother, an aged crone now dead, Leonora’s grandmother.
    On his own right sat a cousin of Leonora’s called Janice, who had later got married and gone to Australia, and next to her Robin Chisholm, with Rachel Lingard on his right. Maeve was not in the picture in any sense at that time, Leonora hadn’t met her. Old Mrs. Chisholm was sitting next to Magnus Mandeville, and next to him was Susannah, Anthony’s wife. Susannah was a nice-looking woman, very slender with sleek dark hair, no more than thirty-three or four at the time, who, Leonora said, hardly ever wore skirts or dresses and was, in fact, on that