Make Death Love Me by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

box?
    Marty handed over the money and said yes to everything. The mini-van was white and clean and, from the registration, only a year old. He drove it a few miles, parking outside a barber’s shop where he had his hair and beard cut off and his chin and upper lip closely shaved. He hadn’t really seen his own face for three years and he had forgotten what a small chin he had and what hollow cheeks. Depilation didn’t improve his appearance, though the barber insisted it did. At any rate, the Relyacar girl wouldn’t know him again. His own mother wouldn’t.
    There was something else he had to do or buy, but he couldn’t remember what it was, so he drove back to pick up Nigel. He went over Battersea Bridge and up through Kensington and Kensal Rise and Willesden to Cricklewood where Nigel was waiting for him in Chichele Road.
    â€˜Christ,’ said Nigel, ‘you look a real freak. You look like one of those Hare Krishna guys.’
    Marty was a good driver. He had driven for his living while Nigel’s experience consisted only in taking out his father’s automatic Triumph, and he had never driven a car with an ordinary manual gear shift. Nor did he know London particularly well, but that didn’t stop him ordering Marty to take the North Circular Road. Marty had already decided to do so. Still, he wasn’t going to be pushed around, not he, and to show off his knowledge he went by a much longer and tortuous route over Hampstead Heath and through Highgate and Tottenham and Walthamstow. Thus it was well after eleven before they were out of London and reaching Brentwood.
    When they were on the Chelmsford bypass, Nigel said, ‘The shooter’s OK and you’ve got your stocking. We can stuff the bread in this carrier. Let’s have a look at the gloves.’
    Marty swore. ‘I knew there was something.’
    Nigel was about to lay into him when he realized that all this time Marty had been driving the van with ungloved hands, and that he too had put his ungloved hands on the doors and the dashboard shelf and the window catches, so all he said was, ‘We’ll have to stop in Colchester and get gloves and we’ll have to wipe this vehicle over inside.’
    â€˜We can’t stop,’ said Marty. ‘It’s half-eleven now.’
    â€˜We have to, you stupid bastard. It wouldn’t be half-eleven if you hadn’t taken us all round the houses.’
    It is twenty-three miles from Chelmsford to Colchester, and Marty made it in twenty minutes, somewhat to the distress of the mini-van’s engine. But there is virtually no on-street parking in Colchester whose narrow twisty streets evince its reputation as England’s oldest recorded town. They had to go into a multi-storey car park, up to the third level, and then hunt for Woolworth’s.
    When the gloves were bought, woollen ones because cash was running short, they found they had nothing with which to wipe the interior of the van. Neither of them had handkerchiefs, so Nigel took off one of his socks. The rain, of which there had been no sign in London, was lashing down.
    â€˜It’s twenty past twelve,’ said Marty. ‘We’ll never make it. We’d better do it Wednesday instead.’
    â€˜Look, little brain,’ Nigel shouted, ‘don’t give me a hard time, d’you mind? How can we do it Wednesday? What’re we going to use for bread? Just drive the bugger and don’t give me grief all the goddamned time.’
    The narrower roads to Childon did not admit of driving at seventy miles an hour, but Marty, his hands in green knitted gloves, did make it. They put the van in the lane behind the bank, up against the flint wall. Nigel got out and came cautiously to the gap in the wall, and there he was rewarded.
    A middle-aged man, thin, paunchy, with greased-down hair, came out of the back door and got into the car that stood on the forecourt.
    Half an hour before,