Tree of Hands Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ruth Rendell

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Book Two

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Book Three

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Once when Benet was about fourteen she and her mother had been alone in a train carriage – and Mopsa had tried to stab her with a carving knife. It was some time since Benet had seen her mad mother. So when Mopsa arrived at the airport looking drab and colourless in a dowdy grey suit, Benet tried not to hate her. But then the tragic death of a child begins a chain of deception, kidnap and murder.

  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

  Not in the Flesh

  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

  The Water’s Lovely

  The Tree of Hands

  Ruth Rendell

  For Francesca, my godchild, with love

  Book One

  1

  ONCE, WHEN BENET was about fourteen, they had been in a train together, alone in the carriage, and Mopsa had tried to stab her with a carving knife. Threatened her with it, rather. Benet had been wondering why her mother had brought such a large handbag with her, a red one that didn’t go with the clothes she was wearing. Mopsa had shouted and laughed and said wild things and then she had put the knife back in her bag. But Benet had been very frightened by then. She lost her head and pulled the emergency handle that Mopsa called the ‘communication cord’. The train stopped and there had been trouble for everyone involved and her father had been angry and grimly sad.

  She had more or less forgotten it. The memory of it came back quite vividly while she was waiting for Mopsa at Heathrow. Though she had seen Mopsa many times since then, had lived under the same roof with her and seen how she could change, it was the scarved, shawled, streamered figure with its fleece of shaggy hair that she watched for as she waited behind the barrier among the tour guides with their placards, the anxious Indians, the businessmen’s wives. James wanted to come out of the pushchair, he couldn’t see down there and he wasn’t feeling well. Benet picked him up and set him on her hip with her arm round him.

  It ought to have been exciting, waiting here. There was something dramatic about the emergence of the first people from behind the wall that hid Customs, almost as if they had escaped into freedom. Benet remembered once meeting Edward here and how wonderful that first sight of him had been. All those people streaming through, all unknown, all strangers, and then Edward, so positively and absolutely Edward that it was as if her were in colour and all the rest in black and white. Waiting for Mopsa wasn’t like that. Waiting for Edward, if such a thing were conceivable, wouldn’t be like that now. There was no one in her world that waiting for would be like that except James, and she couldn’t see any reason why she and James should be separated. Not for years and years anyway. She dug in her bag for a tissue and wiped his nose. Poor James. He was beautiful though, he always was, even if his face was wan and his nose pink.

  A couple came through, each pushing a tartan suitcase on wheels. The woman behind them held a small suitcase in one hand and a small holdall in the other. It would be hard to say which was carry-on baggage and which had been checked. The cases matched; they were of biscuit-coloured stuff you couldn’t tell was plastic or leather. She was a drab colourless washed-out woman. Her pale wandering eyes rested on Benet and recognized her. It was that way round – otherwise would Benet ever have known?

  Yet this was Mopsa. This was her mad mother who was kissing her, smiling and giving a dismissive wave of the hand when James, instead of responding to her, buried his face in Benet’s shoulder. This was Mopsa in a dowdy grey suit, a pink silk blouse with a gold pin at the collar, her
hair cut brusquely short and faded to tarnished silver.

  Benet put the cases on the pushchair, using it as a baggage trolley. She carried James who snuffled and stared, round-eyed, curious, at this new unknown grandmother. Mopsa had developed a brisk springy walk. Her carriage was erect, her head held high. In the past she had sometimes slouched, sometimes danced, swanned and swayed in her Isadora Duncan moods, but she had never walked briskly like an ordinary woman. Or perhaps she did when I was very young, thought Benet, trying to remember a girl-mother of twenty years before. It was too long ago. All she could recall now was how she had longed for a normal mother like other girls had and took for granted. Now when she was twenty-eight and it no longer mattered, it seemed she had one. She stopped herself staring. She asked after her father.

  ‘He’s fine. He sent his love.’

  ‘And you really like living in Spain?’

  ‘I don’t say it hasn’t its drawbacks but Dad hasn’t had a sign of his asthma in three years. It keeps me fit too.’ Mopsa smiled cheerfully as if her own illness had been no more than a kind of asthma. She talked like one of those neighbours in Edgware had talked. Like Mrs Fenton, Benet thought, like a middle-aged housewife. ‘I feel a fraud coming here for these tests,’ Mopsa said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me any more, I said, but they said it wouldn’t do any harm and why not have a holiday? Well, I’m on holiday all the time really, aren’t I? Are we going in the tube? It must be seven or eight years since I went in the tube.’

  ‘I’ve brought the car,’ said Benet.

  In her teens, she used sometimes to say over and over to herself, I must not hate my mother. The injunction had not always been obeyed. And then she would say, But she’s ill, she can’t help it, she’s mad. She had understood and forgiven but she had not wanted to be with her mother. When she went away to university, she had resolved that she would never go back and, except for short holidays, she never had. Her father had retired and her father and mother had bought themselves a little house near Marbella. Mopsa’s face and the backs of her hands were tanned by the sunshine of southern Spain. Benet shifted James on to her other hip and he snivelled and clung to her.

  ‘He’s got a nasty cold,’ said Mopsa. ‘I wonder if you ought to have brought him out with a cold like that.’

  ‘I’d no one to leave him with. You know I’ve just moved house.’

  There was a baby seat in the back of the car in which James usually sat contentedly. Benet strapped him in and put Mopsa’s cases in the boot. She would have been grateful if her mother had offered to sit in the back with James but Mopsa was already in the passenger seat, her seatbelt fastened, her hands, in rather clumsy black leather gloves, folded in her lap. It didn’t seem to occur to her even to talk to James. He was miserable in the back, sneezing sometimes and grizzling quietly. Benet talked to him as she drove, pointing out people and dogs and buildings, anything she thought might be interesting, but she soon became aware of Mopsa’s resentment. Mopsa wanted to talk about her own troubles and her own hopes, about Spain and their house and about what she was going to do while in London. Something struck Benet that she had never thought of before, that one always assumes that when mental illness is cured or alleviated one will be left with a nice person, an unselfish, thoughtful, pleasant, sensible person. But of course this wasn’t so. Why should it be? Underneath the psychosis there might be just as well be normal nastiness as normal niceness. Not that Mopsa was nasty, far from it. Perhaps what she meant was that Mopsa was, had been, used to be, mad – but when the madness lifted, it revealed a solipsist of a very high order, someone who believed the world to revolve around herself.

  The house in Hampstead, in the Vale of Peace, still seemed an alien place to return to. It was only three days since Benet had moved in. Benet slid the car into the narrow lane between high banks which led into this hamlet on the edge of the Heath. For half her life, since the day she had come with friends to the fair that is always held on public holidays just off the Spaniards Road, she had dreamed of living here. Then, when it need not be fantasy any longer, when it was possible, she had planned for it. But Mopsa seemed never to have heard of this celebrated enclave, enbowered by chestnuts and sycamores and Monterey pines, where blue plaques honoured poets dead and gone, a painter, an impresario or two. That Shelley had sailed paper boats on the pond and Coleridge had begun, while sitting on a log on the green, another magical epic never to be completed, were items of literary lore that had never reached her. Getting out of the car, she eyed Benet’s tall and narrow Victorian villa with something like disappointment. What had she expected? An art deco palace in the Bishop’s Avenue?

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose you wanted anything too ambitious, just you and the baby on your own.’

  James wasn’t really a baby any more, Benet thought, unlocking the front door. He was a year and nine months old, saying a good many words, understanding more. He clambered up the flight of steps, happier now he was home, probably remembering the treasures awaiting him, the toys that littered the floor of the big basement–kitchen–playroom. Mopsa stepped over him to get to the door. Benet wondered how soon it would be before she began on his fatherless state. Or was she, in spite of the enormous improvement, not quite enough, never to be quite enough, of the conventional suburban middle-aged woman for this to weigh with her? Benet hardly expected to escape without a mention of Edward, the disadvantages of illegitimacy, the threat to a boy’s normalcy of growing up only with a mother. She ought to be glad, she told herself, that it was Mopsa who had come and not her father. He was still expressing shocked disbelief over James’s very existence.

  The house was not yet set to rights. Boxes and crates of still-unwrapped ornaments, kitchen utensils, china and glass and the unending hundreds of books were ranked along the hallway. Leaving for the airport, Benet had come from her task of setting books on the shelves she had had built in the room that would be her study, from attempting some sort of cataloguing system. Spread across the floor in all its sixteen foreign language editions lay her best-selling novel, the source of her affluence, of this house, The Marriage Knot. She closed the door to keep James from rampaging among the welter of paperbacks.

  Though James seemed even farther from rampaging than he had been in the car. Instead of doing what Benet had expected and rushing back to his newest toy, a xylophone with its octave painted in colours of the spectrum plus one in gold, he had taken himself to his small wicker chair and sat in it, sucking his thumb. His nose had begun to run, and when Benet picked him up, she could hear his breath moving in his chest. It wasn’t wheezing exactly, just a sound of his breath moving where there should be no sound. It was warm and cosy in the big basement room, and on a sunny day like this one, bright enough. Benet had had all the kitchen part-fitted with oak units and the floor carpeted in Florentine red and a big cupboard built for James’s toys.

  Mopsa, having deposited her cases on the bed in the room Benet had got ready for her, came downstairs quite jauntily and said, ‘Now I’ll take us all out for some lunch.’

  ‘I don’t think I ought to take him out again. He doesn’t seem very well. We can eat here. I meant to give you lunch here.’

  Mopsa showed her displeasure. ‘It isn’t cold even by my Spanish standards.’ She laughed, a metallic, rather cracked sound not unlike that made by striking the lowest key of the xylophone. ‘You must be a very devoted mother.’

  Benet made no answer. She too was amazed by what a devoted mother she had become. Of course she had meant to be that. In having James, in purposefully setting out as an unmarried woman to have a child, she had planned a perfect devotion, an ideal childhood, the best of love and of material things. She had not guessed how little she need have calculated, how absolutely committed to him she would be within a moment of his birth.

  She made lunch – soup, wholemeal bread, duck pâté and salad for her and Mopsa, scrambled eggs, fingers of toast and chocolate ice cream for James. Up at the other end of the room, in the window
seat with the little front garden and the stone garden wall rising up behind it, Mopsa sat reading the paperback she had brought with her on the plane. She hadn’t attempted to take James on to her knee. Benet repressed her indignation, told herself not even to feel it. James’s favourite lunch didn’t tempt him beyond a few mouthfuls.

  ‘He needs a good sleep,’ said Mopsa.

  Probably she was right, though Benet thought she said it more from a desire to be rid of him than for his own benefit. James’s bedroom was the room in the house she had seen to first, the only one without a still-unemptied crate in it. Benet put his favourite toy, a squashy tiger cub with dangling limbs, into his hands and laid him gently in the cot. James didn’t like being put down to sleep in the daytime and usually if this was attempted sat bolt upright at once, putting up importunate arms. This time he lay where he was put, clutching the tiger. His face was flushed as if he might be cutting those awaited back molars. Benet thought there couldn’t be much the matter with him. She had had him immunized against every possibly threatening disease. His chest had always been a bit troublesome when he had a cold. It growled now when he breathed in. She sat with him for five minutes until he slept.

  ‘I didn’t imagine you’d have all that much maternal feeling,’ Mopsa said. She had been up to the chaotic living room and found bottles that hadn’t yet been put away and poured herself some brandy. She had never been a hard drinker, never approached alcoholism, but she liked a drink and it sometimes affected her strangely. Benet remembered, from years back, her efforts and her father’s to deflect Mopsa from the sherry bottle. Mopsa smiled her vague silly smile, parted lips trembling. ‘It’s often the case that you don’t want them but you come to love them when they arrive.’

  ‘I did want James,’ said Benet, and to effect a change of subject, one she knew her mother would be happy to embark on, ‘Tell me about these tests you’re having done.’

  ‘They haven’t got the facilities to do them in Spain. I always did say there’s some enzyme or something that’s missing in me, that’s all it is, and now it looks as if they’re coming round to my way of thinking.’ Mopsa had for years denied that she was ill at all. It was others who were ill or malicious or lacking in understanding of her. But when realization that she was not normal was inescapable, when in lucid periods she looked back on nightmares, she had come to lay the blame not on psychosis but on a defect in her body’s chemistry.