The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

he had done that—but to sit there for a while in one of the little pink armchairs and to check that the room was just as it should be, just as it had been when it was Vivien’s. Mrs. Bailey had been in to clean the house while he was in Loughton, and it was not unknown for her to disarrange things. The pictures, for instance, were sometimes left hanging not quite straight, the cut-glass scent bottles with their silver stoppers pushed too close together, and thebrooches and pins in the pink satin pincushion on the dressing table so replaced after the surface had been dusted as to overbalance on the edge and threaten to fall onto the carpet.
    He sometimes wondered what Mrs. Bailey thought of this idiosyncrasy of his, keeping Vivien’s bedroom as it had been when she was alive, but he didn’t really care. For some years now he had thought of himself as too old to bother with how the things he did looked to other people. What did it matter? He could do as he liked at his age. His children probably thought he was senile, but his children were hardly ever here, and when they were, they never went up to the third floor. He didn’t think about his father.

4
    C OLIN Q UELL HAD little interest in people, what they might think, how they might act in the future. If he had any opinion of those gathered in George and Maureen Batchelor’s living-room, it was to marvel that they had lived so long and apparently (with the exception of George) without handicap or disease.
    Quell proceeded with his inquiry on scientific fact alone and, during the week following his visit to Loughton, received various reports on what had been discovered as to the age and provenance of the hands.
    That one was a woman’s and the other a man’s he already knew. It seemed that the woman had been in her late twenties and the man a few years younger. They had not died at the scene but some distance away, perhaps a hundred yards, since the soil with which the hands were filled was clay rather than loam. This satisfactorily confirmed Quell’s view that the hands’ original burial site had been in those tunnels the old people remembered. It was no proof, but it made his theory most probable.
    As he read the report a second time—it came both on the Internet and as printed sheets of paper or hard copy—he thought once more, the way he had been thinking since he was first assigned to this case, that—well, who cared? These two hands that were beinginvestigated had lain in the clay for nearly seventy years. Someone no doubt long dead had killed the people whose hands they were and placed the hands in a biscuit tin for some unfathomable reason. Quell wasn’t shocked by this, he had seen too much of man’s iniquity to react in that way, but he was at the idea of the taxpayers’ money being wasted on an investigation. If nothing was discovered, so well and good, but if, after months of painstaking examination he found who had killed the two and buried their hands, Quell, recalling a smidgen of sixth-form college Latin, asked himself, Cui bono?

    A N INVITATION HAD come to Freya’s wedding, and it seemed to Alan that Rosemary could talk of nothing else. Like most men, he was not particularly interested in weddings, not even his granddaughter’s. No church or even town hall was mentioned on the pretty card, only the hotel by the river at Kew, where both Norrises assumed “the wedding breakfast,” as Rosemary called it, would take place.
    “I suppose the ceremony will be there as well,” said Alan.
    “I sincerely hope not.” Rosemary scrutinised the card again. “If it’s going to be one of those peculiar arrangements in a hotel lounge, I for one shan’t feel they’re married at all.”
    “It’s their choice. Nothing to do with us. I’ve heard of this place by the river. It’s supposed to be very pretty.”
    Rosemary said she had better get on with the dress she was making, this time for herself, and headed for her sewing room. Alan stopped her,