The Bridesmaid by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

and yellow alpine plants.
    Surveying this tumbled spread of flowers, sheltered to some extent by the branches of the pink tree with its rose-coloured blossoms, stood a small statue in marble. Philip couldn’t see it very clearly, it was too far away, but something in its attitude seemed familiar, the angle of its slightly upraised face, the outstretched right hand holding a bunch of flowers, the feet that, though planted firmly on the ground, yet seemed to be dancing.
    He wished very much that he could get a closer look at it. Then he realised that he could. The binoculars were here on the windowsill. He took them out of their case and raised them to his eyes. A certain amount of adjustment was needed before he could see clearly—and then, suddenly, the vision they afforded him was amazing. They were excellent glasses. He could see the little statue as if it were no more than a metre away from him. He could see her eyes and her lovely mouth and the waves in her hair, the diagonal weave in the fillet which bound it, the almond curves of her fingernails, and the details of the flowers, their stamens and petals, in the sheaf she carried.
    And he could see too the green stain that travelled from the side of her neck to where her robe covered her breasts, and the tiny chip out of her left earlobe. He had made that chip himself when he was ten and a stone fired from his catapult had clipped the side of her head. His father had taken away the catapult, and docked his pocket money for three weeks. It was Flora. Not a look-alike or a copy, but Flora herself. As Fee had pointed out, she wasn’t one of those mass-produced plaster ornaments to be seen in their dozens of every motorway junction garden centre. She was unique. He remembered, rather incongruously, what Cheryl had said of her while talking to Arnham about their father. She was the Farnese Flora, who was traditionally associated with may blossom.
    Philip replaced the binoculars in their case, put away his measure and his notebook, and went downstairs. Some clients you had to search for, cough, knock on doors to summon them. Mrs. Ripple wasn’t of that sort but alert, spry, hawk-eyed. She was a middle-aged woman of great spirit and vigour, very sharp tongued and, he suspected, critical. She had a shiny, sore-looking face and a lot of dark hair with threads of grey in it like fuse wire.
    “I’ll be in touch when the layout is completed,” he said to her, “and then you’ll see me again when work commences.”
    It was the way they were taught to speak to customers at Roseberry Lawn. Philip had never actually heard a human being snort, but that was the kind of sound Mrs. Ripple made. “When’s that going to be?” she said. “Sometime next year?”
    There had been a delay about sending her their brochures, Roy said, adding that he didn’t think she was likely to forget it. Philip assured her, with as radiant a smile as he could manage, that he hoped it would be no more than four weeks at the outside. She said nothing in reply, left him to open the front door and close it after him. Philip got into his car, a three-month-old blue Opel Kadett, thinking as he sometimes did that it was the only nice thing he possessed, though he didn’t really possess it—it belonged to Roseberry Lawn.
    Instead of driving back the way he had come, he took the first left-hand turning and then turned left again. This brought him out into the street where the row of houses must be whose rears faced the back of Mrs. Ripple’s. They looked very different from this aspect. He hadn’t counted precisely where in the row the house with the statue in its garden came, but he knew it must be fourth or fifth from the block of flats with green pantiled roof. It was also the only one without additions. And here it was, this must be it, between the house with the window in its roof and the house with the two garages. Philip drove past slowly. It was gone five, his day was over, so he wasn’t wasting