The Keys to the Street Read online

  ALSO BY RUTH ENDELL

  Blood Lines

  The Crocodile Bird

  Going Wrong

  The Bridesmaid

  Talking to Strange Men

  Live Flesh

  The Tree of Hands

  The Killing Doll

  Master of the Moor

  The Lake of Darkness

  Make Death Love Me

  A Judgement in Stone

  A Demon in My View

  The Face of Trespass

  One Across, Two Down

  Vanity Dies Hard

  To Fear a Painted Devil

  CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS

  Simisola

  Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter

  The Veiled One

  An Unkindness of Ravens

  Speaker of Mandarin

  Death Notes

  A Sleeping Life

  Shake Hands for Ever

  From Doon with Death

  Some Lie and Some Die

  Murder Being Once Done

  No More Dying Then

  A Guilty Thing Surprised

  The Best Man to Die

  Wolf to the Slaughter

  Sins of the Fathers

  A New Lease on Death

  BY RUTH RENDELL WRITING AS BARBARA VINE

  The Brimstone Wedding

  No Night Is Too Long

  Anna’s Book

  King Solomon’s Carpet

  Gallowglass

  The House of Stairs

  A Fatal Inversion

  A Dark-Adapted Eye

  Copyright © 1996 by Kingsmarkham Enterprises, Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

  Random House, Inc. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland

  Originally published in Great Britain by Hutchinson Random House UK Ltd in 1996.

  CROWN is a trademark of Crown Publishers, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80114-2

  v3.1

  For Don

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  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

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  1

  Iron spikes surmount each of the gates into the park twenty-seven of them on some, eighteen or eleven on others. For the most part the park itself is surrounded by thorn hedges, but thousands of feet of spiked railings still remain. Some of these spikes are blunted, as on those enclosing the gardens of Gloucester Gate, some are ornamented, and some take a bend in the middle. On the tall railings outside one of the villas the spikes have clawlike protuberances, six on each, curved and sharp as talons. A certain terrace has spikes on pillars, splaying out and blossoming like thorn trees. If you started counting spikes in the region of the park and its surroundings you could reach millions. They go well with the Georgian architecture.

  By night the park is closed to people. Of the living creatures that remain within its confines, most are zoo animals and waterfowl. The spiked gates open every morning of the year at six and close every evening at dusk, which is at four-thirty in winter but not until nine-thirty in May. Its 464 acres of land fill a circle. Inside the ring of streets that surrounds it lies another ring and within this, widely separated, the equilateral triangle of the London Zoo, the lake with its three arms and four islands, and around the ornamental gardens a road that on the map looks like a wheel with two projecting spokes.

  The park is deserted by night. That is, the intention is that it should be deserted. The park police patrol between dusk and dawn, paying special attention to the restaurant areas that make likely shelters and to the park residences, the villas, the expensive properties, and Winfield House, where the American ambassador lives. No vagrant could sleep undisturbed under the lee of the pavilions or the bandstand, but the police cannot search everywhere every night. The canal bank remains as a place of concealment amid the wide green spaces and, in summer, the long grass under the trees.

  To the north of the park, beyond the zoo and Albert Road, lie Primrose Hill and St. John’s Wood; here are St. John’s Wood church, Lords Cricket Ground, and, turning south eastward, the Central London Mosque. Park Road runs down toward Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes by way of the London Business School and St. Cyprian’s Church, Anglo-Catholic, white and gold inside and scented with incense. The Marylebone Road, the Planetarium, Madame Tussaud’s waxworks—most popular of all London’s tourist attractions, more visited than the Tower and Buckingham Palace—the Royal Academy of Music, Park Crescent and Park Square with their secret gardens and the tunnel passing under the road that links them. And so the park is encircled, here by Albany Street, running from Great Portland Street station due north, as straight as a Roman road, to meet Albert Road and Gloucester Avenue. The streets of Primrose Hill form a shape like a tennis racket and Gloucester Avenue is its handle. There are railings everywhere, their spikes straight and pointed, twisted at a right angle or ornate and blunted.

  • • •

  Albany Street is not leafy and sequestered like almost every other in the vicinity of the park, but wide, gray, without trees. Barracks fill much of one side, but beyond the other side of it lie the grandest and most lavish of the terraces, Cambridge, Chester, and Cumberland, with their colonnades, their pediments, their statuary, and their wealthy occupants. Beyond the other side the area quickly becomes less respectable, though it has a long way to go before sinking to the level of Somers Town between Euston and St. Pancras stations. From one of these streets, near St. James’s Gardens, a young man was walking across Munster Square, heading for Albany Street.

  The name everyone called him by was Hob, the three letters of which were the initials of his two given names and his surname. Apart from this, the feature that distinguished him from his contemporaries was the size of his head. His body was solid and thickset but his head still looked too big for it. When he reached fifty, if he ever did, his jowls would be down on his shoulders. His fair hair was cut an inch long all over his big head and gleamed in the yellowish chemical light. It was an unusual combination, that of fair hair and brown eyes. His eyes were a curious textured brown, like chocolate mousse, and the pupils were sometimes as big as a cat’s and sometimes the size of a full stop on a keyboard.

  Hob had a job to do, for which he had just been paid half his fee of fifty pounds. That is, he had been paid twenty-five pounds. This he intended to put with everything else—he had to buy what he needed before he could do anything at all. Often he wished he were a woman, because for women making money was quick and, as far as he could see, easy. One of the first things he remembered hearing from a grown-up—
it was an uncle, his mother’s boyfriend—was that every woman is sitting on a fortune.

  He was in a state. That was how he put it to himself, the phrase he always used for his present condition. One of his stepsisters had described her panic attacks to him and in her description he recognized his own state. But his was longer-lasting and somehow bigger. It took in the whole world. It made him afraid of everything he could see and hear and just as frightened of what he couldn’t see and of silence. As the state intensified, a huge bubble of fear like a glass ball enclosed him so that he wanted to beat and thrash at its curved walls. Sometimes he did, even out in the street like this, and people crossed the road to avoid this madman who punched at the empty air.

  The state had not yet reached this level. Nor did he yet have pain or nausea. But beyond walking to his destination, up this long, wide gray street where at present there were no people to avoid him or to stare, he could have done nothing, certainly not the job for which he had received half the fee. Walking became mechanical. Even in a state he sometimes thought he could have walked forever, on and on, over the dark lawns, the green peak, the hills of north London, to the fields and woods far beyond.

  But walking miles would be unnecessary. Gupta or Carl or Lew would be on the other side of the Cumberland Gate, where the Chinese trees were. He walked through the wells and alleys and up the slope at Cumberland Terrace. His shadow was a lumbering black cutout on wrinkled cobbles. Lights shone up on walls and behind cascades of leaves.

  The Outer Circle, so busy by day, was deserted at night and no single car was parked on its gleaming surface. The great terraces, palaces in woodland, slept heavily behind dark foliage, and though many of their eyes were shuttered, some were alive with orange light. Lamps were lit along the pavements as far as he could see in each direction. The spaces between them were filled with shiny darkness. He crossed the road. The Cumberland Gate was locked and had been for nearly three hours.

  The railing of which the gate was made was topped with iron spikes, eighteen on each gate. When he was well—the term he used for his condition when not in a state—he would have thought nothing of climbing the gate. Now he scrambled over it like an old man with an old man’s caution and fear of puncturing flesh and breaking bones. On the other side an expanse of half dark lay, gray lawn, pale paths, black trees, spindly black Chinese trees that made him think of scorpions.

  The police patrolled in cars, on foot, on bicycles, sometimes with dogs. It was a principle of his, and of Carl’s, that they cannot ever be everywhere. Mostly they were not where he was or Carl was. He walked into the trees. He meant not to make a sound but when a young scorpion leapt off its parent’s back and grew wings and turned into a pterodactyl—it was a pigeon flying from a treetop—he let out a cry of fear.

  A hand came from behind and went over his mouth. He wasn’t afraid, he knew who it was.

  Gupta said,

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I’m not well.”

  Even in the dark he could see Gupta’s bloody teeth when he spoke. They looked as if he’d been chomping on raw steak, but in fact it was betel he chewed. All the money Hob had was exchanged for what Gupta produced, a plastic bag holding a small block of something like a white pebble but rough and irregular, not smoothed by the sea. Not for the first time he thought of his strength and Gupta’s frailty and of the other white stones in the yogurt carton, enough to keep him well for a long time. But it was no use. Retribution would be swift. He’d carried out some of it for them, so he knew. They’d start by breaking his legs. He doubted if he would even get beyond the first thump of his fist into Gupta’s skinny belly.

  It was strange, he had stopped trying to understand it, the state was so awful, so why did he want to prolong it? He always did. That uncle—or one of them—would have said it was like banging your head against a wall, it was so good when you stopped. But that wasn’t quite how he felt; rather, as if the pain and the state, the panic and the total meaningless of everything, became pleasure when he knew he had the means of ending them. The state became almost enjoyable and he walked inside his glass bubble, rolling his head and mouthing something like a smile.

  If he headed for Chester Road and the Inner Circle he would be bound to encounter the police, so he turned back. But instead of climbing the Cumberland Gate once more, he kept close along the dark grass under the hedge, aware now that he was cold. The night was cold as nights in April are. The sweat that kept on breaking out on his face and chest dried cold and salty. He could taste the salt when he licked his dry upper lip.

  Soon, if the state were too long prolonged, trembling would start and the sick feeling and the great weakness as if he were aging years in as many minutes. It was a matter of striking the happy medium. Again he climbed a spiked railing, this time at the Gloucester Gate, and this time it was harder, he was an even older man with worse arthritis and more frightened bones.

  He got over the gate and waited at the lights at the top of Albany Street. Some seconds, a whole minute probably, passed before he understood that the lights had changed from red to green and back to red again. A solitary car stopped and waited. He went across, holding on to the wall of the bridge now, just another drunk to passersby, turning clumsily into Park Village East and pushing open the gate into the ruined garden.

  They were doing up the house that loomed above him in darkness. Its windows were gone, leaving black pits. The builders’ materials lay in heaps, timber, bricks, a ladder. He nearly blundered into a concrete mixer, a thing like a great pale zoo animal with heavy backside and tiny stupid head. Down the slope, black but with the gleam of water in its depths, lay the Grotto. He scrambled down, scratching his hands on brambles, trying to avoid the coils of barbed wire. There, at the bottom, his seat on the coping lit by a thin shaft from a lamp on the bridge, he shivered and hunched his body before feeling in the pocket of his jacket for his materials.

  They were kept in a red velvet drawstring bag, the kind of thing a box containing a ring or necklace is put into in a jeweler’s shop. He had found it in a waste bin in York Terrace, where the rubbish is of high quality. From the bag he took first another find, the metal rose from a galvanized iron watering can, then a tin lid that by chance—he had searched for quite a long time—exactly fitted over the rim of the rose, the screwtop from a vodka bottle with Purveyors to the Imperial Russian Court and the dates 1887–1917 printed on it in red. He pulled out a drinking straw still in its plastic wrapping he had helped himself to from the counter at the refreshment place near the Broad Walk, and a cigarette lighter.

  First he took the white crystalline substance he had bought from Gupta between finger and thumb. His hand was shaking but that didn’t matter, as all he had to do was crumble the substance up. He dropped it through the neck of the rose onto its perforated base. Then he screwed the vodka cap, into which he had bored two holes about a centimeter apart, onto the neck. He removed the drinking straw from its wrapping, cut it in half with nail scissors, and inserted the two halves to a length of about three centimeters into the holes. It was just light enough to see to do this, but he could have done it in pitch darkness.

  Having checked by feel that the straw halves were inserted to the correct length, very important this, he struck the cigarette lighter and set the flame to the perforations on which the rock rested. The second it caught he closed the lid over the base of the rose, took the straws into his mouth, and drew in a deep inhalation. At this, the first draw, he always made a noise. It was a sound of joy, of orgasmic happiness, but to others it would have seemed like a groan of despair.

  No one heard him. There was no one to hear. When educating him to work for them, Lew had told him jumbo took just ten seconds to reach the brain. He told him it would change him from one kind of person into another kind and he had been right. Hob grunted his satisfaction. A car passed along the bridge and the trees shook a little. The state began to recede like something evil in a dream being sucked away out of a door. It struggle
d as it went, but the door closed and clouds of warmth filled its space, and sweet singing and hope. He closed his eyes. Once, when he first used the watering can rose, he had simply turned it upside down and inhaled through the perforations, but he found you wasted a lot that way. Waste was a crime.

  After a while he removed the vodka cap from the neck of the rose, shook out the rose and the lid, put them back into the jewel bag, and threw the straws away into the bushes. He had begun to feel strong and immensely happy. That was just the start.

  Traffic was at its lightest, no heavy lorries or containers, only private cars. There are always some private cars. There are always people in Camden High Street, no matter what the hour. After midnight, for a while, London throbs softly but it still throbs. Chemical lamps color the darkness greenish-white and dull orange, and the traffic lights change from green to amber to red to amber again and to green silently and often to an empty street. At such a place, where the lights changed to no purpose to a deserted roadway, he crossed to Albert Road, to Parkway. When he was well he was a different person and he walked springily.