Collected Stories
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Ruth Rendell
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgement
The Fallen Curtain
The Fallen Curtain
People Don’t Do Such Things
A Bad Heart
You Can’t Be Too Careful
The Double
The Venus Fly Trap
The Clinging Woman
The Vinegar Mother
The Fall of a Coin
Almost Human
Divided We Stand
Means of Evil
Means of Evil
Old Wives’ Tales
Ginger and the Kingsmarkham Chalk Circle
Achilles Heel
When the Wedding Was Over
The Fever Tree
The Fever Tree
The Dreadful Day of Judgement
A Glowing Future
An Outside Interest
A Case of Coincidence
Thornapple
May and June
A Needle for the Devil
Front Seat
Paintbox Place
The Wrong Category
Copyright
About the Book
Three classic Ruth Rendell stories: Means of Evil, The Fallen Curtain and The Fever Tree.
Ruth Rendell is unequalled in her ability to weave stories that challenge our preconceptions and prejudices. From Wexford and Burden’s investigation of a wife’s apparent suicide, with all the evidence pointing to the husband in Means of Evil to the unsettling psychology behind a man’s friendship with a boy in The Fallen Curtain and the paranoia that plagues two people out of love, terrified of being rejected in The Fever Tree.
About the Author
Since her first novel, From Doon with Death, published in 1964, Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writer’s Association Gold Dagger for 1976’s best crime novel with A Demon In My View, and the Arts Council National Book Award, genre fiction, for The Lake of Darkness in 1980.
In 1985 Ruth Rendell received the Silver Dagger for The Tree of Hands, and in 1987, writing as Barbara Vine, won her third Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for A Dark-Adapted Eye.
She won the Gold Dagger for Live Flesh in 1986, for King Solomon’s Carpet in 1991 and, as Barbara Vine, a Gold Dagger in 1987 for A Fatal Inversion.
Ruth Rendell won the Sunday Times Literary Award in 1990, and in 1991 she was awarded the Crime Writer’s Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding contributions to the genre. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 was made a Life Peer.
Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages and are also published to great acclaim in the United States.
Ruth Rendell has a son and two grandsons, and lives in London
ALSO BY RUTH RENDELL
OMNIBUSES
COLLECTED SHORT STORIES
WEXFORD: AN OMNIBUS
THE SECOND WEXFORD OMNIBUS
THE THIRD WEXFORD OMNIBUS
THE FOURTH WEXFORD OMNIBUS
THE FIFTH WEXFORD OMNIBUS
THREE CASES FOR CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD
THE RUTH RENDELL OMNIBUS
THE SECOND RUTH RENDELL OMNIBUS
THE THIRD RUTH RENDELL OMNIBUS
CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS
FROM DOOM WITH DEATH
A NEW LEASE OF DEATH
WOLF TO THE SLAUGHTER
THE BEST MAN TO DIE
A GUILTY THING SURPRISED
NO MORE DYING THEN
MURDER BEING ONCE DONE
SOME LIE AND SOME DIE
SHAKE HANDS FOR EVER
A SLEEPING LIFE
PUT ON BY CUNNING
THE SPEAKER OF MANDARIN
AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS
THE VEILED ONE
KISSING THE GUNNER’S DAUGHTER
SIMISOLA
ROAD RAGE
HARM DONE
THE BABES IN THE WOOD
END IN TEARS
NOT IN THE FLESH
THE MONSTER IN THE BOX
SHORT STORIES
THE FALLEN CURTAIN
MEANS OF EVIL
THE FEVER TREE
THE NEW GIRL FRIEND
THE COPPER PEACOCK
BLOOD LINES
PIRANHA TO SCURFY
NOVELLAS
HEARTSTONES
THE THIEF
NON-FICTION
RUTH RENDELL’S SUFFOLK
RUTH RENDELL’S ANTHOLOGY OF THE MURDEROUS MIND
NOVELS
TO FEAR A PAINTED DEVIL
VANITY DIES HARD
THE SECRET HOUSE OF DEATH
ONE ACROSS, TWO DOWN
THE FACE OF TRESPASS
A DEMON IN MY VIEW
A JUDGEMENT IN STONE
MAKE DEATH LOVE ME
THE LAKE OF DARKNESS
MASTER OF THE MOOR
THE KILLING DOLL
THE TREE OF HANDS
LIVE FLESH
TALKING TO STRANGE MEN
THE BRIDESMAID
GOING WRONG
THE CROCODILE BIRD
THE KEYS TO THE STREET
A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES
ADAM AND EVE AND PINCH ME
THE ROTTWEILER
THIRTEEN STEPS DOWN
THE WATER’S LOVELY
PORTOBELLO
Collected Stories
Ruth Rendell
For John Foster White
Acknowledgement
All these stories – with the exception of People Don’t Do Such Things, The Vinegar Mother and Divided We Stand – were first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
The Fallen Curtain
The Fallen Curtain
THE INCIDENT HAPPENED in the spring after his sixth birthday. His mother always referred to it as ‘that dreadful evening’, and always is no exaggeration. She talked about it a lot, especially when he did well at anything, which was often as he was good at school and at passing exams.
Showing her friends his swimming certificate or the prize he won for being top at geography: ‘When I think we might have lost Richard that dreadful evening! You have to believe there’s Someone watching over us, don’t you?’ Clasping him in her arms: ‘He might have been killed – or worse.’ (A remarkable statement, this one.) ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
Apparently, it bore talking about. ‘If I’d told him once, I’d told him fifty times never to talk to strangers or get into cars. But boys will be boys, and he forgot all that when the time came. He was given sweets, of course, and lured into this car.’ Whispers at this point, meaning glances in his direction. ‘Threats and suggestions – persuaded into goodness knows what – I’ll never know how we got him back alive.’
What Richard couldn’t understand was how his mother knew so much about it. She hadn’t been there. Only he and the Man had been there, and he couldn’t remember a thing about it. A curtain had fallen over that bit of his memory that held the details of that dreadful evening. He remembered only what had come immediately before it and immediately after.
They were living then in the South London suburb of Upfield, in a little terraced house in Petunia Street, he and his mother and his father. His mother had been over forty when he was born and he had no brothers or sisters. (‘That’s why we love you so much, Richard.’) He wasn’t allowed to play in the street with the other kids. (‘You want to keep yourself to yourself, dear.’) Round the corner in Lupin Street lived his gran, his father’s mother. Gran never came to their house, though he thought his father would have liked it if she had.
‘I wish you’d have my mother to tea on Sunday,’ he once heard his father say.
‘If that woman sets foot in this house, Stan, I go out of it.’
So gran never came to tea.
‘I hope I know what’s right, Stan, and I know better than to keep the boy away from his grandmother. You can have him round there once a week with you, so long as I don’t have to come in contact with her.’
That made three houses Richard was allowed into, his own, his gran’s, and the house next door in Petunia Street where the Wilsons lived with their Brenda and their John. Sometimes he played in their garden with John, though it wasn’t much fun as Brenda, who was much older, nearly sixteen, was always bullying them and stopping them getting dirty. He and John were in the same class at school, but his mother wouldn’t let him go to school alone with John, although it was only three streets away. She was very careful and nervous about him, was his mother, waiting outside the gates before school ended to walk him home with his hand tightly clasped in hers.
But once a week he didn’t go straight home. He looked forward to Wednesdays because Wednesday evening was the one he spent at gran’s, and because the time between his mother’s leaving him and his arrival at gran’s house was the only time he was ever free and by himself.
This was the way it was. His mother would meet him from school and they’d walk down Plumtree Grove to where Petunia Street started. Lupin Street turned off the Grove a bit further down, so his mother would see him across the road, waving and smiling encouragingly, till she’d seen him turn the corner into Lupin Street. Gran’s house was about a hundred yards down. That hundred yards was his free time, his alone time.
‘Mind you run all the way,’ his mother called after him.
But at the corner he always stopped running and began to dawdle, stopping to play with the cat that roamed about the bit of waste ground, or climbing on the pile of bricks the builders never came to build into anything. Sometimes, if she wasn’t too bad with her arthritis, gran would be waiting for him at her gate, and he didn’t mind having to forgo the cat and the climbing because it was so nice in gran’s house. Gran had a big TV set – unusually big for those days – and he’d watch it, eating chocolate, until his father knocked off at the factory and turned up for tea. Tea was lovely, fish and chips that gran didn’t fetch from the shop but cooked herself, cream meringues and chocolate eclairs, tinned peaches with evaporated milk, the lot washed down with fizzy lemonade. (‘It’s a disgrace the way your mother spoils that boy, Stan.’) They were supposed to be home by seven, but every week when it got round to seven, gran would remember there was a cowboy film coming up on TV and there’d be cocoa and biscuits and potato crisps to go with it. They’d be lucky to be home in Petunia Street before nine.
‘Don’t blame me,’ said his mother, ‘if his school work suffers next day.’
That dreadful evening his mother left him as usual at the corner and saw him across the road. He could remember that, and remember too how he’d looked to see if gran was at her gate. When he’d made sure she wasn’t, he’d wandered on to the building site to cajole the cat out of the nest she’d made for herself among the rubble. It was late March, a fine afternoon and still broad daylight at four. He was stroking the cat, thinking how thin and bony she was and how some of gran’s fish and chips would do her good, when – what? What next? At this point the curtain came down. Three hours later it lifted, and he was in Plumtree Grove, walking along quite calmly (‘Running in terror with that Man after him’), when whom should he meet but Mrs Wilson’s Brenda out for the evening with her boy friend. Brenda had pointed at him, stared and shouted. She ran up to him and clutched him and squeezed him till he could hardly breathe. Was that what had frightened him into losing his memory? They said no. They said he’d been frightened before – (‘Terrified out of his life’) – and that Brenda’s grabbing him and the dreadful shriek his mother gave when she saw him had nothing to do with it.
Petunia Street was full of police cars and there was a crowd outside their house. Brenda hustled him in, shouting, ‘I’ve found him, I’ve found him!’ and there was his father all white in the face, talking to policemen, his mother half-dead on the sofa being given brandy, and – wonder of wonders – his gran there too. That had been one of the strangest things of that whole strange evening, that his gran had set foot in their house and his mother hadn’t gone out of it.
They all started asking him questions at once. Had he answered them? All that remained in his memory was his mother’s scream. That endured, that shattering sound, and the great open mouth from which it issued as she leapt upon him. Somehow, although he couldn’t have explained why, he connected that scream and her seizing him as if to swallow him up, with the descent of the curtain.
He was never allowed to be alone after that, not even to play with John in the Wilsons’ garden, and he was never allowed to forget those events he couldn’t remember. There was no question of going to gran’s even under supervision, for gran’s arthritis had got so bad they’d put her in the old people’s ward at Upfield Hospital. The Man was never found. A couple of years later a little girl from Plumtree Grove got taken away and murdered. They never found that Man either, but his mother was sure they were one and the same.
‘And it might have been our Richard. It doesn’t bear thinking of, that Man roaming the streets like a wild beast.’
‘What did he do to me, mum?’ asked Richard, trying.
‘If you don’t remember, so much the better. You want to forget all about it, put it right out of your life.’
If only she’d let him. ‘What did he do, dad?’
‘I don’t know, Rich. None of us knows, me nor the police nor your mum, for all she says. Women like to set themselves up as knowing all about things, but it’s my belief you never told her no more than you told us.’
She took him to school and fetched him home until he was twelve. The other kids teased him mercilessly. He wasn’t allowed to go to their houses or have any of them to his. (‘You never know who they know or what sort of connections they’ve got.’) His mother only stopped going everywhere with him when he got taller than she was, and anyone could see he was too big for any Man to attack.
Growing up brought no elucidation of that dreadful evening but it did bring, with adolescence, the knowledge of what might have happened. And as he came to understand that it wasn’t only threats and blows and stories of horror which the Man might have inflicted on him, he felt an alien in his own body or as if that body were covered with a slime which nothing could wash away. For there was no way of knowing now, nothing to do about it but wish his mother would leave the subject alone, avoid getting friendly with people and work hard at school.
He did very well there, for he was naturally intelligent and had no outside diversions. No one was surprised when he got to a good university, not Oxford or Cambridge but nearly as good – (‘Imagine, all that brainpower might have been wasted if that Man had had his way’) – where he began to read for a science degree. He was the first member of his family ever to go to college, and the only cloud in the sky was that his gran, as his father pointed out, wasn’t there to see his glory.
She had died in the hospital when he was fourteen and she’d left her house to his parents. They’d sold it and theirs and bought a much nicer, bigger one with a proper garden and a garage in a suburb some five miles further out from Upfield. The little bit of money she’d saved she left to Richard, to come to him when he was eighteen. It was just enough to buy a car, and when he came down from university for the Easter holidays, he bought a two-year-old Ford and took and passed his driving test.
‘That boy,’ said his mother, ‘passes every exam that comes his way. It’s like as if he couldn’t fail if he tried. But he’s got a guardian angel watching over him, has had ever since he was six.’ Her husband had admonished her for her too-excellent memory and now she referred only obliquely to that dreadful evening. ‘When you-know-what happened and he was spared.’