Talking to Strange Men by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

herself from Peter . . .
    John tried to think of the weekend ahead. He tried to think of Cherry, to remember her, and of Mark who had been engaged to her. It was time he saw old Mark, someone had told him he had moved back here. Why not find out where Mark lived and suggest they meet for a drink? He could go round to Colin’s tomorrow and maybe take in a visit to his aunt’s, have Sunday lunch there. He stood by the window, looking out into the street he had looked on to since he was a small child. It was hard for him to imagine any other outlook from a window where one lived, anything but the pairs of houses opposite, the monkey puzzle pine in front of the fourth house on the left that he had seen planted when he was eight and which was now a large, ugly, ridiculous but somehow endearing tree. The pink prunus was shedding its petals and they lay like rosy snow, half-covering the scillas. She remembered about the narcissi in Hartlands Gardens and remembered he had first taken her there in April. She must mean this projected meeting as a reunion . . . Stop thinking about it, he said fiercely and aloud. On the seat of the armchair in the bay he had dropped the string bag full of books as, letter in hand, he had walked first ofall into this room. The two Le Carrés, the Philby book, a novel by Disraeli he didn’t think he would get round to reading, Rider Haggard’s
Allan’s Wife
as a substitute for the
King Solomon’s Mines
that wasn’t in.
    John realized that these days before he started on a book he always subjected the first and last lines to the code test. This got to mean he read the last line but he had never been one of those readers who cares about a surprise ending. He tested the six code words in the first message against the first lines of
The Honourable Schoolboy.
Nothing, the merest nonsense.
    There are literally millions of books they could have used, he told himself. You’ll never find the right one.

5
    MUNGO SAT UP in his room under the eaves looking at a document headed FTELO –
For the Eyes of Leviathan Only
. Between the end of last year’s spring term and the beginning of this one they had secured: advance information on three planning applications, discovered four instances of quite amazing police leaks, recovered fifteen ‘borrowed’ books, abstracted any number of architects’ plans, rearranged restaurant bookings, secured invitations to a number of official functions, and more or less reorganized to suit their own purposes the plans for the city’s annual festival of arts. Not to mention all kinds of rather more frivolous exercises. Since then though, during the past term, things had proceeded less satisfactorily. Undisputed success was a thing of the past.
    He was eating dry-roasted peanuts, having an idea they were better for him than chocolate. Nothing gave him spots or did anything to change his extreme gauntness but he sometimes wondered if it was all this eating between meals that helped him to grow so tall. He had some yogurt-coatedhazelnuts as well but these he was saving until after he came back.
    From his window he could make out the roof of his father’s surgery building. His mother was an anaesthetist at Hartland Mount Hospital, not a GP, though she sometimes helped out when one of the partners was sick or on holiday. There were three doctors in the practice besides Fergus Cameron. They worked from a listed building, one of the oldest in the city, that Mungo’s father had bought nearly twenty years before and now wanted to extend. He wanted to build a new waiting room and consulting rooms on to the back. A group from the city planning committee had already been to view the premises. If they agreed to building, listed building consent would almost certainly be given. Their decision depended almost exclusively on the advice given them by the city planning officer, a man called Blake, who was in some way related to Ivan