Talking to Strange Men Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ruth Rendell

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  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

  Part Two

  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

  Part Three

  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

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Five

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Safe houses and secret message drops, double crosses and defections – it sounds like the stuff of sophisticated espionage, but the agents are only schoolboys engaged in harmless play.

  But John Creevey doesn’t know this. To him, the messages he decodes with painstaking care are the communications of dangerous and evil men, and as he comes face to face with the fact of his beloved wife Jennifer’s defection, he begins to see a way to get back at the man she left him for.

  And soon the schoolboys are playing more than just a game.

  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.

  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

  The Ruth Rendell Omnibus

  The Second Ruth Rendell Omnibus

  The Third Ruth Rendell Omnibus

  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

  CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS

  From Doon 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

  Babes in the Wood

  End in Tears

  NOVELS

  To Fear a Painted Devil

  Vanity Dies Hard

  The Secret House of Death

  The Face of Trespass

  A Demon in My View

  A Judgment 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 & Eve and Pinch Me

  The Rottweiler

  Thirteen Steps Down

  Talking to Strange Men

  Ruth Rendell

  FOR DON

  PART ONE

  1

  HE WAS CROSSING the bridge over the river from the western bank to the east. The bridge, for some forgotten reason to do with the Second World War, was called Rostock. It was a suspension bridge, painted a dull dark red, with walkways on either side. Up river three more bridges, Alexandra and St Stephen’s and Randolph, gleamed with lights, both stationary and in motion, and the water beneath them looked black and glittering from the mass of lights reflected in its moving swelling surface. But when Mungo looked southwards all this illumination soon came to an end and there were no more bridges, only warehouses and cranes looming out of the dusk and the beginnings of a dark grey countryside. It was six-thirty in the evening, March, but already growing dark. A horizon of high hills could still be made out against a faintly paler sky. He was on the southern walkway of the bridge, alone, the lamp-lit wall between him and the deep water shoulder-high to deter suicides.

  This evening the river gave off a strong smell. It was a smell of oil and fish and something sour and rotting. The dark grey mottled stones, granite perhaps, of which the embankment on the eastern side was composed had a greasy look. The water lapped against the stones, against the fringe of weed that was green by day. Mungo came off the bridge by the pedestrian stairs and began to walk along the embankment towards the Beckgate Steps.

  There was no one about. Hardly anyone lived down here in the south-east. Sometimes a fisherman was to be seen sitting on the granite quayside but not at this hour. The squares of light that fell on to the broad shallow flight of steps were from the Beckgate pub, from the saloon where two people could be seen standing at the bar. That single lighted room, bright and snug, those companionable drinkers, served only to point out by contrast the sombre dreariness of the
place, the absence of humanity, of any living creature, any green thing.

  Years ago, before he was born, a girl had been murdered here. They had found her body on the steps, lying on the broad space or landing between the two flights. Mungo, at the age of eight, had been told of it by some older child, the spot pointed out, a search instituted for bloodstains. He had joined in, awed, aghast, not finding out till later that there would have been no blood, that she had been strangled. And much later a vague shame had afflicted him that he had played games here, made a mockery of that awful thing, playing murderers, none of them wanting to be her, but all vying for the role of manic slavering pursuer.

  The real killer of the real girl had never been found. It was sometimes said that in a spot where some dreadful thing had taken place, a kind of unceasing vibration from these events caused a later haunting. As a small child Mungo had been afraid of that, brave when near this place in the company of Ian, say, or Angus, avoiding it fearfully when on his own. But he could have counted on his fingers the number of times he had mounted or descended these steps. They led nowhere he normally wished to go to and they ran down only to the river. His usual route to the flyover drop was by way of Albatross Street, and now, instead of taking Bread Lane, he made a prudent little detour, though there was no one to see him, he was nearly sure of that.

  It was an ugly unfrequented district. There were a lot of buildings which he thought of vaguely as docks or wharves, and streets on which stood featureless, obviously non-residential blocks, a whole floor of windows lit and showing cardboard crates inside; strange old brick edifices between them, narrow whitewashed factories sandwiched, rows of ancient cottages, used by day as workshops. Here, on concrete stems like huge attenuated plants with hanging heads, greenish-white lamps shed a radiance that was curiously bright and dull at the same time. It lay on roadway and walls like a coat of phosphorescent liquid, still wet.

  Above the main street, about five hundred metres from the end of Rostock Bridge, a flyover passed across, carrying a further line of traffic, this time that which was coming south from Alexandra, and bearing it towards the access road to the main north–south artery. This flyover had been built about twenty years before to relieve the pressure on the old city by-pass. They thought they had traffic in those days. They didn’t know what traffic was. So they had built the flyover with one carriageway only and in the mornings the cars passed over it from south to north and in the evenings from north to south. There was no room for a two-way flow. Of course there were always plans to build a new three- or four-lane flyover but nothing had yet come of this.

  The cars on the flyover made a sound like thunder above his head. Or perhaps like gunfire, he thought. He turned left into Albatross Street between a dark almost windowless block and a factory with Ahman–Suleiman in chrome capitals over its dirty front entrance. A man in a turban was replacing a pane of frosted glass in a window and a large yellowish ginger cat, having overturned and emptied a dustbin, was tearing apart a plastic bag full of rubbish. These two, the first living creatures apart from the two people in the pub he had seen since leaving the bridge, took absolutely no notice of each other. He liked cats, he liked the colony of feral cats that lived down here, and he said hallo to this one, holding out his hand. It turned briefly to give him a look of cold dislike and the man in the turban, surprisingly, said:

  ‘It will bite.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me,’ he said.

  The man in the turban wiped his thumb along the strip of putty. ‘It has bitten me twice and my wife once.’ Gathering up his tools, he unlocked the right-hand door of the double doors. ‘Devil!’ he said to the cat and banged the door behind him.

  The cat continued to behave as if no one had spoken, as if indeed no one was there. At the resounding slam the door made it did not even flinch. It was wrenching apart a chicken gizzard. Mungo was glad the man in the turban had gone in. There was no one to see him now, no one even to see which way he was going, except the cat which did not count.

  Ahead of him the flyover appeared once more, making its downward curve towards the approach road. All along its length it was supported on uprights, steel pillars that were not cylindrical but rather, in section, cruciform, each with four grooves indenting it from top to base. These pillars grew (so to speak) out of the pavements and ends of roads turned into cul-de-sacs and the backyards of warehouses but here, at this point, rose out of a triangle of grass that turned to wispy hay in summer but was now a cropped damp green, dotted about with small stunted bushes. The uprights did not exactly shake under the pressure of traffic but an illusion suggested they did. The roar overhead was like warfare in the sky.

  Few cars came along down here, especially after the factory workforces had left for home. But he looked to the right and left before he crossed the street just the same. As much as anything he was looking for a possible watcher. The dull bluish light made indigo shadows, broad and deep and with invisible depths. He looked up and felt rain on his face, a thin spray of drizzle only. The night was so dark so early because of cloud hanging in a bulging canopy. But down here the lights glittered, few and far between though they were, their slab-shaped bulb cases vague in the mist the rain made.

  There was no soul to be seen. And because it was constant, unvarying, the roar of the traffic was itself a kind of silence. He went across and stepped on to the grass which at once spotted the toes of his shoes with water drops. Under the shelter of the steel pillars he took the piece of paper out of his pocket. It was contained in an envelope he had made out of a small plastic bag, the kind you buy on a roll at a supermarket. Also in his pocket was a spool of transparent sticky tape.

  He managed to tear off a fifteen-centimetre strip, impatient because the first time it tore diagonally and stuck itself back on to the spool. Carefully, at a level some way beneath his own head height, for he was exceptionally tall, he secured the paper in its plastic envelope to the inside of one of the grooves of an upright, the right-hand one of the two central pillars, choosing the groove that was of all forty-eight the least visible from any external point. He stuck it in there with two strips of tape, pressing the tape against the smooth cold metal with the heel of his hand.

  Turning round once more to check if it was possible the drop had been observed, he thought he saw a movement on the far side of the road he had crossed to reach the green, at the opening to a narrow passage between the red-brick side of a deserted, no longer used, boarded-up church, and the stucco wall of a squat unidentifiable building with flat roof and metal-framed windows. These buildings lay in semi-darkness between two widely-spaced lamp stilts. He crossed the empty street, leaving behind and above him the steady roar, feeling the hair on the back of his neck prickle. They had been using this drop since Angus’s day. In fact, Angus had begun it, instituted it, out of that curious bravado or panache that made him long to infiltrate what were Moscow Centre’s preserves.

  And with all the rest he had handed it on: ‘Down below Rostock, Mungo, where the flyover dips down, there are twelve steel posts on a green. The post in the centre on the right, that’s the one that’s sacred.’

  Angus had used it a lot and Guy Parker had never known. Jealously appreciating the drop, Mungo had kept it as his private preserve, confined to himself and his best agents. Even his second-in-command was ignorant of it. As for Ivan Stern, he didn’t even begin to suspect. Unless . . . Mungo, keeping in shadow, crept along the front wall of the church, past the great sandstone arch in which the double doors were battened up, past a Victorian flying buttress, its bricks chipped where a truck had hit it, flattening himself against the shadowed stone, emerging suddenly into the alley. And seeing what the movement had been, had probably been: a sheet of black plastic, originally a rubbish sack, that someone had nailed up to cover a broken pane in a window on the stucco wall, a corner of which had worked free and flapped in the wind. He was aware then of the wind that had got up, blowing the rain into his face in spurts, sending to trundle and c
latter along the street with appalling noise, with a ringing hollow cacophony, an empty cuboid oilcan. Or had someone kicked it to make it clang and bounce like that?

  The oilcan was stilled now, the flap of plastic hanging immobile, everything motionless but for the pounding traffic, the roar. And even that was diminishing as the exodus of cars lessened, as the evening came on. It would seem therefore that there had been no one, that he had imagined it, imagined that he had seen not the corner of a shiny black sheet arbitrarily blown, but a man in a black oilskin jacket who for one second, one split second, had emerged from the dark of the passage to eye him and the copse of metal trees.

  He must have been mistaken but for a moment he considered returning to the sacred tree and removing the message from the long fissure in its trunk. If he did that it would mean he was saying it could never be used again, its life as a drop was over. And what of Basilisk coming for it, at some danger to himself, Basilisk whom he could think of no way of warning? Mungo knew himself to be over-imaginative, he did see things that weren’t there, or that other people said weren’t there.

  ‘A visionary, that’s what you are,’ Ian had said, ‘or else it’s schizophrenia.’

  On the other hand, he couldn’t ever remember seeing visions in this sort of situation before. But he would leave it. He would trust to common sense and experience, not to visions. One last look down the passage and then back past Ahman–Suleiman. The cat had gone, leaving grains from a bird’s crop and bones spread about the pavement. It was growing cold and the wind gusted round corners. Mungo knew he was not followed, he was positive there was no one to follow him, but he pursued a tortuous route homewards just the same, plunging into a network of little streets that gradually became residential, rows and rows of pre-First World War houses, corner shops, pollarded trees with swollen bulging amputations, cars parked nose to tail along the gutters.

  If there had been anyone he had shaken him off. Mungo was adept at losing a tail. Time was, soon after he became Director General, that Moscow Centre had put a tail on him steadily for weeks, months maybe. But he had always known, had known from the beginning. Others had had the luck to be trained by Angus but none, naturally, had been as close to this particular teacher as he. Mungo had gained much pleasure from eluding tails, had even, on one triumphant day, managed to lead Michael Stern – for Guy Parker’s successor had set his own brother on to him – into a disused warehouse where he succeeded in locking him in.