Make Death Love Me Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Ruth Rendell bestsellers – from Arrow Books

  About the Author

  Make Death Love Me

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Ruth Rendell bestsellers

  – from Arrow Books

  INSPECTOR WEXFORD STORIES

  The Best Man to Die

  From Doon with Death

  A Guilty Thing Surprised

  Means of Evil and Other Stories

  Murder Being Once Done

  A New Lease of Death

  No More Dying Then

  Put on by Cunning

  Shake Hands Forever

  A Sleeping Life

  Some Lie and Some Die

  The Speaker of Mandarin

  An Unkindness of Ravens

  The Veiled One

  Wexford: An Omnibus

  Wolf to the Slaughter

  OTHER NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES

  Collected Short Stories

  A Demon in My View

  The Face of Trespass

  Fallen Curtain

  The Fever Tree and Other Stories

  Heartstones

  A Judgement in Stone

  The Killing Doll

  The Lake of Darkness

  Live Flesh

  Make Death Love Me

  Master of the Moor

  The New Girlfriend and Other Stories

  One Across, Two Down

  The Secret House of Death

  Talking to Strange Men

  To Fear a Painted Devil

  The Tree of Hands

  Vanity Dies Hard

  Ruth Rendell

  Classic British crime fiction is the best in the world—and Ruth Rendell is crime fiction at its very best. Ingenious and meticulous plots, subtle and penetrating characterizations, beguiling storylines and wry observations have all combined to put her at the very top of her craft.

  Her first novel, From Doon with Death, appeared in 1964, and since then her reputation and readership have grown steadily with each new book. She has now received eight major awards for her work: three Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America; the Crime Writers’ Gold Dagger Award for 1976’s best crime novel for A Demon in My View; the Arts Council National Book Award for Genre Fiction in 1981 for Lake of Darkness; the Crime Writers’ Silver Dagger Award for 1985’s best crime novel for The Tree of Hands; the Crime Writers’ Gold Dagger Award for 1986’s best crime novel for Live Flesh, and in 1987 the Crime Writers’ Gold Dagger Award for A Fatal Inversion, written under the name Barbara Vine.

  MAKE DEATH

  LOVE ME

  Ruth Rendell

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781407070827

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Arrow Books Limited

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

  An imprint of the Random Century Group

  London Melbourne Sydney Auckland

  Johannesburg and agencies throughout the world

  First published by Hutchinson 1979

  Arrow edition 1980

  Reprinted 1982, 1984, 1987, 1988,

  1989 (twice) and 1990 (twice)

  © Ruth Rendell 1979

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Courier International Ltd, Tiptree, Essex

  ISBN 0 09 922330 9

  To David Blass with love

  In writing this novel, I needed help on some aspects of banking and on firearms. By a lucky chance for me, John Ashard was able to advise me on both. I am very grateful to him.

  R.R.

  1

  Three thousand pounds lay on the desk in front of him. It was in thirty wads, mostly of fivers. He had taken it out of the safe when Joyce went off for lunch and spread it out to look at it, as he had been doing most days lately. He never took out more than three thousand, though there was twice that in the safe, because he had calculated that three thousand would be just the right sum to buy him one year’s freedom.

  With the kind of breathless excitement many people feel about sex – or so he supposed, he never had himself – he looked at the money and turned it over and handled it. Gently he handled it, and then roughly as if it belonged to him and he had lots more. He put two wads into each of his trouser pockets and walked up and down the little office. He got out his wallet with his own two pounds in it, and put in forty and folded it again and appreciated its new thickness. After that he counted out thirty-five pounds into an imaginary hand and mouthed, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, into an imaginary face, and knew he had gone too far in fantasy with that one as he felt himself blush.

  For he didn’t intend to steal the money. If three thousand pounds goes missing from a sub-branch in which there is only the clerk-in-charge (by courtesy, the manager) and a girl cashier, and the girl is there and the clerk isn’t, the Anglian-Victoria Bank will not have far to look for the culprit. Loyalty to the bank didn’t stop him taking it, but fear of being found out did. Anyway, he wasn’t going to get away or be free, he knew that. He might be only thirty-eight, but his thirty-eight was somehow much older than other people’s thirty-eights. It was too old for running away.

  He always stopped the fantasy when he blushed. The rush of shame told him he had overstepped the bounds, and this always happened when he had got himself playing a part in some dumb show or even actually said aloud things like, That was the deposit, I’ll send you the balance of five thousand, nine hundred in the morning. He stopped and thought what a state he had got himself into and how, with this absurd indulgence, he was even now breaking one of the bank’s sacred rules. For he shouldn’t be able to open the safe on his own, he shouldn’t know Joyce’s combination and she shouldn’t know his. He felt guilty most of the time in Joyce’s presence because she was as honest as the day, and had only told him the B List combination (he was on the A) when he glibly told her the rule was made to be broken and no one ever thought twice about breaking it.

  He heard her let herself in by the back way, and he put the money in a drawer. Joyce wouldn’t go to the safe because there was five hundred pounds in her till and few customers came into the Anglian-Victoria at Childon on a Wednesday afternoon. All twelve shops closed at one and didn’t open again till nine-thirty
in the morning.

  Joyce called him Mr Groombridge instead of Alan. She did this because she was twenty and he was thirty-eight. The intention was not to show respect, which would never have occurred to her, but to make plain the enormous gulf of years which yawned between them. She was one of those people who see a positive achievement in being young, as if youth were a plum job which they have got hold of on their own initiative. But she was kind to her elders, in a tolerant way.

  ‘It’s lovely out, Mr Groombridge. It’s like spring.’

  ‘It is spring,’ said Alan.

  ‘You know what I mean.’ Joyce always said that if anyone attempted to point out that she spoke in clichés. ‘Shall I make you a coffee?’

  ‘No thanks, Joyce. Better open the doors. It’s just on two.’

  The branch closed for lunch. There wasn’t enough custom to warrant its staying open. Joyce unlocked the heavy oak outer door and the inner glass door, turned the sign which said Till Closed to the other side which said Miss J. M. Culver, and went back to Alan. From his office, with the door ajar, you could see anyone who came in. Joyce had very long legs and a very large bust, but otherwise was nothing special to look at. She perched on the edge of the desk and began telling Alan about the lunch she had just had with her boy friend in the Childon Arms, and what the boy friend had said and about not having enough money to get married on.

  ‘We should have to go in with Mum, and it’s not right, is it, two women in a kitchen? Their ways aren’t our ways, you can’t get away from the generation gap. How old were you when you got married, Mr Groombridge?’

  He would have liked to say twenty-two or even twenty-four, but he couldn’t because she knew Christopher was grown-up. And, God knew, he didn’t want to make himself out older than he was. He told the truth, with shame. ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Now I think that’s too young for a man. It’s one thing for a girl but the man ought to be older. There are responsibilities to be faced up to in marriage. A man isn’t mature at eighteen.’

  ‘Most men are never mature.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Joyce. The outer door opened and she left him to his thoughts and the letter from Mrs Marjorie Perkins, asking for a hundred pounds to be transferred from her deposit to her current account.

  Joyce knew everyone who banked with them by his or her name. She chatted pleasantly with Mr Butler and then with Mrs Surridge. Alan opened the drawer and looked at the three thousand pounds. He could easily live for a year on that. He could have a room of his own and make friends of his own and buy books and records and go to theatres and eat when he liked and stay up all night if he wanted to. For a year. And then? When he could hear Joyce talking to Mr Wolford, the Childon butcher, about inflation, and how he must notice the difference from when he was young – he was about thirty-five – he took the money into the little room between his office and the back door where the safe was. Both combinations, the one he ought to know and the one he oughtn’t, were in his head. He spun the dials and the door opened and he put the money away, along with the other three thousand, the rest being in the tills.

  There came to him, as always, a sense of loss. He couldn’t have the money, of course, it would never be his, but he felt bereft when it was once again out of his hands. He was like a lover whose girl has gone from his arms to her own bed. Presently Pam phoned. She always did about this time to ask him what time he would be home – he was invariably home at the same time – to collect the groceries or Jillian from school. Joyce thought it was lovely, his wife phoning him every day ‘after all these years’.

  A few more people came into the bank. Alan went out there and turned the sign over the other till to Mr A. J. Groombridge and took a cheque from someone he vaguely recognized called, according to the cheque, P. Richardson.

  ‘How would you like the money?’

  ‘Five green ones and three portraits of the Duke of Wellington,’ said P. Richardson, a wag.

  Alan smiled as he was expected to. He would have liked to hit him over the head with the calculating machine, and now he remembered that last time P. Richardson had been in he had replied to that question by asking for Deutschmarks.

  No more shopkeepers today. They had all banked their takings and gone home. Joyce closed the doors at three-thirty, and the two of them balanced their tills and put the money back in the safe, and did all the other small meticulous tasks necessary for the honour and repute of the second smallest branch of the Anglian-Victoria in the British Isles. Joyce and he hung their coats in the cupboard in his office. Joyce put hers on and he put his on and Joyce put on more mascara, the only make-up she ever wore.

  ‘The evenings are drawing out,’ said Joyce.

  He parked his car in a sort of courtyard, surrounded by Suffolk flint walls, at the bank’s rear. It was a pretty place with winter jasmine showing in great blazes of yellow over the top of the walls, and the bank was pretty too, being housed in a slicked-up L-shaped Tudor cottage. His car was not particularly pretty since it was a G registration Morris Eleven Hundred with a broken wing mirror he couldn’t afford to replace. He lived three miles away on a ten-year-old estate of houses, and the drive down country lanes took him only a few minutes.

  The estate was called Fitton’s Piece after a Marian Martyr who had been burnt in a field there in 1555. The Reverend Thomas Fitton would have been beatified if he had belonged to the other side, but all he got as an unremitting Protestant was fifty red boxes named after him. The houses in the four streets which composed the estate (Tudor Way, Martyr’s Mead, Fitton Close and – the builder ran out of inspiration – Hillcrest) had pantiled roofs and large flat windows and chimneys that were for effect, not use. All their occupants had bought their trees and shrubs from the same very conservative garden centre in Stantwich and swapped cuttings and seedlings, so that everyone had Lawson’s cypress and a laburnum and a kanzan, and most people a big clump of pampas grass. This gave the place a curious look of homogeneity and, because there were no boundary fences, as if the houses were not private homes but dwellings for the staff of some great demesne.

  Alan had bought his house at the end of not very hilly Hillcrest on a mortgage granted by the bank. The interest on this loan was low and fixed, and when he thought about his life one of the few things he considered he had to be thankful for was that he paid two-and-a-half per cent and not eleven like other people.

  His car had to remain on the drive because the garage, described as integral and taking up half the ground floor, had been converted into a bed-sit for Pam’s father. Pam came out and took the groceries. She was a pretty woman of thirty-seven who had had a job for only one year of her life and had lived in a country village for the whole of it. She wore a lot of make-up on her lips and silvery-blue stuff on her eyes. Every couple of hours she would disappear to apply a fresh layer of lipstick because when she was a girl it had been the fashion always to have shiny pink lips. On a shelf in the kitchen she kept a hand mirror and lipstick and pressed powder and a pot of eyeshadow. Her hair was permed. She wore skirts which came exactly to her knees, and her engagement ring above her wedding ring, and usually a charm bracelet. She looked about forty-five.

  She asked Alan if he had had a good day, and he said he had and what about her? She said, all right, and talked about the awful cost of living while she unpacked cornflakes and tins of soup. Pam usually talked about the cost of living for about a quarter of an hour after he got home. He went out into the garden to put off seeing his father-in-law for as long as possible, and looked at the snowdrops and the little red tulips which were exquisitely beautiful at this violet hour, and they gave him a strange little pain in his heart. He yearned after them, but for what? It was as if he were in love which he had never been. The trouble was that he had read too many books of a romantic or poetical nature, and often he wished he hadn’t.

  It got too cold to stay out there, so he went into the living room and sat down and read the paper. He didn’t want to, but it was the sort of
thing men did in the evenings. Sometimes he thought he had begotten his children because that also was the sort of thing men did in the evenings.

  After a while his father-in-law came in from his bed-sit. His name was Wilfred Summitt, and Alan and Pam called him Pop, and Christopher and Jillian called him Grandpop. Alan hated him more than any human being he had ever known and hoped he would soon die, but this was unlikely as he was only sixty-six and very healthy.

  Pop said, ‘Good evening to you,’ as if there were about fifteen other people there he didn’t know well enough to address. Alan said hallo without looking up and Pop sat down. Presently Pop punched his fist into the back of the paper to make Alan lower it.

  ‘You all right then, are you?’ Like the Psalmist, Wilfred Summitt was given to parallelism, so he said the same thing twice more, slightly re-phrasing it each time. ‘Doing OK, are you? Everything hunky-dory, is it?’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Alan, going back to the Stantwich Evening Press.

  ‘That’s good. That’s what I like to hear. Anything in the paper, is there?’

  Alan didn’t say anything. Pop came very close and read the back page. Turning his fat body almost to right angles, he read the stop press. His sight was magnificent. He said he saw there had been another one of those bank robberies, another cashier murdered, and there would be more, mark his words, up and down the country, all over the place, see if he wasn’t right, and all because they knew they could get away with it on account of knowing they wouldn’t get hanged.

  ‘It’s getting like Chicago, it’s getting like in America,’ said Pop. ‘I used to think working in a bank was a safe job, Pam used to think it was, but it’s a different story now, isn’t it? Makes me nervous you working in a bank, gets on my nerves. Something could happen to you any day, any old time you could get yourself shot like that chap in Glasgow, and then what’s going to happen to Pam? That’s what I think to myself, what’s going to happen to Pam?’

  Alan said his branch was much too small for bank robbers to bother with.