The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

new. The road through the forest was much the same as it had been when he was young, but the old names seemed to have gone. Would anyone now have known what he meant by the Wake roundabout or the Epping New Road? Daphne drove them with ease and speed onto the M25 going anti-clockwise. He had expected her to change her shoes before getting into the car, but she still wore the high heels, her driving unimpeded.
    “What did you think of all that?” he said.
    “Pretty useless, I should think.” They passed smoothly throughthe Bell Common tunnel, heading for Waltham Abbey. “Your mother had just died, hadn’t she? I mean, while we were going to the tunnels. That must have been hard for you.”
    Michael hesitated. “Everyone thought she’d died. My father put it about that she had, but she hadn’t. She’d gone off with someone. A man, I mean. They’d had an awful marriage. I was only nine but I remember the way they screamed and shouted at each other like it was yesterday. My dad told me she wasn’t dead but I’d never see her again. It’s stayed with me, what he said, all these years. ‘She doesn’t want either of us,’ he said. ‘Just wants to see the back of us.’ ”
    “But you saw her again?”
    “No, I never did. I was left with my father. He had some sort of heart condition so he couldn’t go into the forces. He didn’t want me either. I was sent to live with my aunt Zoe. She wasn’t really my aunt but my dad’s cousin. Mind you, Zoe was a lovely woman, she was very good to me, and I was all right there with her. I loved her very much. Still do, she’s still alive.”
    Daphne nodded but said nothing for a while. They were passing into the sort of countryside Michael thought was probably Green Belt, the edge of Hertfordshire, and the signs were coming up for the A1. “Were they divorced, your parents?”
    “Grown-ups didn’t tell children things like that. Not then. Don’t you remember?”
    “I suppose I do. What became of your father?”
    “He’s in an old people’s home. A care home. I never lived with him after I went to Zoe. My parents must have divorced because he married again. I didn’t have a happy childhood up to the time we used to go into the tunnels, but I did after that, near perfect after that.”
    “I haven’t any children,” said Daphne. “Have you?”
    “Two. One of them is mostly in America and the other one is usually in Hong Kong.”
    There was nothing much to say to that unless “You must miss them” was something, but Daphne didn’t go in for truisms and clichés. She turned off the Hendon Way and took Fortune Green Road so that she could turn into Michael’s street, where he lived in a tall, narrow redbrick house.
    “This has been very nice of you, Daphne.”
    “It was on my way.”
    “Will you come in for a moment?”
    “I don’t think I will. Not this time. But now I know where you live. Doesn’t that sound ominous? I mean that now I know it, we can perhaps keep in touch.” She handed him a card identical to the one she had given Inspector Quell. “Good-bye, Michael.” She waited until he was in the house. Then she backed out of his garage drive and drove down the hill until she could turn into Hamilton Terrace. There, obliged to park the car in the street, she walked through the glass-roofed way and let herself into the house by the glossy-black front door. As she sometimes did when coming home, she stood in the wide hallway and, addressing her generous third husband, who had left her all he possessed, said to the walls and the staircase as she often did, “Thank you for everything, Martin.”
    Up the hill in Ingham Road, Michael was also paying a sort of tribute to a dead spouse. This necessitated climbing three quite steep flights of stairs but seldom made him short of breath. He was used to it and sure the stairs were good for his heart as he did it every day. Not to sleep in this bedroom that covered the whole third floor—it was years since