The Rottweiler (v5) Read online

  PRAISE FOR RUTH RENDELL

  “Unequivocally the most brilliant mystery writer of our time. Her stories are a lesson in a human nature as capable of the most exotic love as it is of the cruelest murder. She does not avert her gaze … she magnificently triumphs in a style that is uniquely hers and mesmerizing.”

  – Patricia Cornwell

  “Rendell’s clear, shapely prose casts the mesmerizing spell of the confessional.”

  – The New Yorker

  “Superior writing by one of the best in the world.”

  – Ottawa Citizen

  “Rendell writes with such elegance and restraint, with such a literate voice and an insightful mind, that she transcends the mystery genre and achieves something almost sublime.”

  – Los Angeles Times

  “One of the finest practitioners of her craft in the English-speaking world … Even with the crowded, competitive and fecund world of career mystery writers, Ruth Rendell is recognized as a phenomenon.”

  – The New York Times Book Review

  “Ruth Rendell is the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world.”

  – Time

  “British crime at its best can be found in the fiction of Ruth Rendell, for whom no superlative is sufficient.”

  – Chronicle-Herald (Halifax)

  “Ruth Rendell is surely one of the great novelists presently at work in our language…. She is a writer whose work should be read by anyone who either enjoys brilliant mystery or distinguished literature.”

  – Scott Turow

  ALSO BY RUTH RENDELL

  Adam and Eve and

  Pinch Me

  Piranha to Scurfy

  A Sight for Sore Eyes

  The Keys to the Street

  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

  The Babes in the Wood

  Harm Done

  Road Rage

  Simisola

  Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter

  The Veiled One

  An Unkindness of Ravens

  Speaker of Mandarin

  Death Notes

  A Sleeping Life

  Shake Hands Forever

  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 of Death

  From Doon with Death

  BY RUTH RENDELL WRITING AS BARBARA VINE

  The Blood Doctor

  Grasshopper

  The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy

  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

  For Jeanette Winterson

  with love

  CHAPTER 1

  The jaguar stood in a corner of the shop between a statue of some minor Greek deity and a jardinière. Inez thought it said a lot about the world we lived in that to most people when you said ‘jaguar’ they took it to mean a car and not an animal. This one, black and about the size of a very large dog, had once been a jungle creature someone’s grandfather, a big game hunter, had shot and had stuffed. The someone had brought it into the shop the day before and offered it to Inez at first for ten pounds, then for nothing. It was an embarrassment having it in the house, he said, worse than being seen in a fur coat.

  Inez only took it to get rid of him. The jaguar’s yellow glass eyes had seemed to look reproachfully at her. Sentimental nonsense, she said to herself. Who would buy it? She had thought it might seem more attractive at eight forty-five in the morning but it was just the same, its fur harsh to the touch, its limbs stiff and its expression baleful. She turned her back on it and in the little kitchen behind the shop put the kettle on for the tea she always made herself and always shared these days with Jeremy Quick from the top floor.

  Punctual as ever, he tapped on the inside door, and came in as she carried the tray back into the shop. ‘How are you today, Inez?’

  He, and he alone, pronounced her name in the Spanish way, Eeneth, and he had told her the Spanish in Spain, but not in South America, pronounced it like that because one of their kings had had a lisp and they copied him out of deference. That sounded like an apocryphal story to her but she was too polite to say so. She handed him his teacup with a sweetener tablet in the spoon. He always walked about, carrying it.

  ‘What on earth is that?’

  She had known he would ask. ‘A jaguar.’

  ‘Will anyone buy it?’

  ‘I expect it will join the ranks of the grey armchair and the Chelsea china clock that I’ll be left with until I die.’

  He patted the animal’s head. ‘Zeinab not in yet?’

  ‘Please. She says she has no concept of time. In that case, I said, if you’ve no concept of time, why aren’t you ever early?’

  He laughed. Inez thought, and not for the first time, that he was rather attractive. Too young for her, of course, or was he? Not perhaps in these days when opinions about that sort of thing were changing. He seemed no more than seven or eight years her junior. ‘I’d better be off. Sometimes I think I’m too aware of time.’ Carefully, he replaced his cup and saucer on the tray. ‘Apparently, there’s been another murder.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘It was on the news at eight. And not far from here. I must go.’

  Instead of expecting her to unlock the shop door and let him out, he went back the way he had come and out into Star Street by way of the tenants’ entrance. Inez didn’t know where he worked, somewhere on the northern outskirts of London, she thought, and what he did had something to do with computers. So many people did these days. He had a mother of whom he was fond and a girlfriend, his feelings for whom he never mentioned. Just once Inez had been invited up to his top-floor flat and admired the minimalist decor and his roof garden.

  At nine she opened the shop door and carried the bookstand out on to the pavement. The books that went in it were ancient paperbacks by forgotten authors but occasionally one would sell for 50p. Someone had parked a very dirty white van at the kerb. Inez read a notice stuck in the van’s window: Do not wash. Vehicle undergoing scientific dirt analysis. That made her laugh.

  It was going to be a fine day. The sky was a soft pale blue and the sun coming up behind the terraces of little houses and the tall corner shops with three floors above. It would have been nicer if the air had been fresh instead of reeking of diesel and emissions and green curry and the consequences of men relieving themselves against the hoardings in the small hours, but that was modern life. She said good morning to Mr Khoury who was (rather optimistically) lowering the canopy at the front of the jeweller’s next door.

  ‘Good morning, madam.’ His tone was gloomy and dour as ever.

  ‘I’ve got an earring that’s lost its what-d’you-call-it, its post,’ she said. ‘Can you get it repaired if I bring it in later?’

  ‘I shall see.’ He always said that, as if he was doing you a f
avour. On the other hand, he always did repair things.

  Zeinab, breathless, came running down Star Street. ‘Hi, Mr Khoury. Hi, Inez. Sorry I’m late. You know I’ve no concept of time.’

  Inez sighed. ‘So you always tell me.’

  Zeinab kept her job because, if Inez were honest with herself and she nearly always was, her assistant was a better saleswoman than she was. She could have sold an elephant gun to a conservationist, as Jeremy once said. Some of it was due to her looks, of course. Zeinab’s beauty was the reason so many men came in. Inez didn’t flatter herself, she’d plenty of confidence but she knew she’d seen better days, and though she’d been as good-looking as Zeinab once upon a time, it was inevitable that at fifty-five she couldn’t compete. She was far from the woman she had been when Martin first saw her twenty years before. No chap was going to cross the street to buy a ceramic egg or a Victorian candlestick from her.

  Zeinab looked like the female lead in one of those Bollywood movies. Her black hair came not just to her waist but to the tops of her slender thighs. In nothing but her hair to cover her she could have ridden a horse down Star Street with perfect propriety. Her face was as if someone had taken the best feature from the faces of half a dozen currently famous film stars and put them all together. When she smiled, if you were a man, your heart melted and your legs threatened to buckle. Her hands were like pale flowers on some tropical tree and her skin the texture of a lily petal touched by the setting sun. She always wore very short skirts and very high-heeled shoes, pure white T-shirts in summer and pure white fluffy sweaters in winter and a single diamond (or sparkling stone) in one perfect nostril.

  Her voice was less attractive, her accent not the endearing musical tones of upper-class Karachi but nearer Eliza Doolittle’s Lisson Grove cockney, which was odd considering her parents lived in Hampstead and, according to her, she was practically a princess. Today she was wearing a black leather skirt, opaque black tights and a sweater that looked like the pelt of an angora rabbit, white as snow and downy as a swan’s breast. She walked daintily about the shop, carrying her teacup in one hand and in the other a rainbow-coloured feather duster, flicking dust off silver cruets, ancient musical instruments, cigarette cases, thirties fruit brooches, Clarice Cliffe plates and the four-masted schooner in a bottle. Customers didn’t realise what a task it was keeping a place like this clean. Dust soon gave it a shabby look as if the shop was seldom patronised. She paused in front of the jaguar. ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘A customer gave it to me. After you’d gone yesterday.’

  ‘Gave it to you?’

  ‘I imagine he knew the poor thing wasn’t worth anything.’

  ‘There’s been another girl murdered,’ said Zeinab. ‘Down Boston.’ Anyone not in the know might have thought she was talking about Boston, Massachusetts, or even Boston, Lincs, but what she meant was Boston Place, NW1, which ran alongside Marylebone Station.

  ‘How many does that make?’

  ‘Three. I’ll get us an evening paper the minute they come in.’

  Inez, at the shop window, watched a car which was pulling into the kerb behind the white van. The bright turquoise Jaguar belonged to Morton Phibling who dropped in most mornings for the purpose of seeing Zeinab. No vacant meter was required as his driver sat in the car waiting for him and if a traffic warden appeared, was off circling round the block. Mr Khoury shook his head, holding on to his luxuriant beard with his right hand, and went back indoors.

  Morton Phibling got out of the Jaguar, read the notice in the back of the dirty van without a smile and swept into the shop, leaving the door ajar, his open camel hair coat billowing. He had never been known to utter any sort of greeting. ‘I see there’s another young lady been slaughtered.’

  ‘If you like to put it that way.’

  ‘I came in to feast my eyes on the moon of my delight.’

  ‘You always do,’ said Inez.

  Morton was something over sixty, short and squat with a head which must always have looked too big for his body, unless he had shrunk a lot. He wore glasses which were not quite shades but deeply tinted with a purple glaze. No beauty and not, as far as Inez could tell, particularly nice or amusing, he was very rich, had three homes and five more cars, all of them resprayed some bright colour, banana-yellow, orange, scarlet and Caribbean-lime. He was in love with Zeinab; there was no other word for it.

  Engaged in sticking a price label to the underside of a Wedgwood jug, Zeinab looked up and gave him one of her smiles.

  ‘How are you today, my darling?’

  ‘I’m OK, and don’t call me darling.’

  ‘That’s how I think of you. I think of you day and night, you know, Zeinab, at twilight and break of dawn.’

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ said Inez.

  ‘I’m not ashamed of my love. I trumpet it from the housetops. By night in my bed I sought her whom my soul loveth. Rise up, my love, my fair one and come away.’ He always went on like this, though neither woman took any notice. ‘How splendid in the morning is the lily!’

  ‘D’you want a cup of tea?’ said Inez. She felt the need for a second cup; she wouldn’t have made it specially.

  ‘I don’t mind if I do. I’m taking you to dinner at Le Caprice tonight, darling. I hope you haven’t forgotten.’

  ‘Of course I haven’t forgotten, and don’t call me darling.’

  ‘I’ll call for you at home, shall I? Seven thirty do you?’

  ‘No, it won’t do me. How many times do I have to tell you that if you call for me at home my dad’ll go bonkers? You know what he did to my sister. D’you want him sticking a knife in me?’

  ‘But my attentions are honourable, my sweetheart. I am no longer married, I want to marry you, I respect you deeply.’

  ‘It don’t make no—I mean, it doesn’t make no difference,’ said Zeinab. ‘I’m not supposed to be alone with a bloke. Not ever. If my dad knew I was going to be alone with you in a restaurant he’d flip his lid.’

  ‘I should have liked to see your lovely home,’ said Morton Phibling wistfully. ‘It would be such a pleasure to see you in your proper setting.’ He lowered his voice, though Inez was out of earshot. ‘Instead of in this dump, like a gorgeous butterfly on a dungheap.’

  ‘Can’t be helped. I’ll meet you at Le whatsit.’

  In the little back kitchen, pouring boiling water on three teabags, Inez shivered at the thought of Zeinab’s terrible father. A year before Zeinab came to work at Star Antiques, he had nearly murdered her sister Nasreen for dishonouring his house by staying overnight in her boyfriend’s flat. ‘And they didn’t even do anything,’ said Zeinab. Nasreen hadn’t died, though he’d stabbed her five times in the chest. She’d been months recovering in hospital. Inez more or less believed it was true, though no doubt exaggerated, that her assistant risked death if she got herself any suitor except one approved of, and chaperoned by, her parents. She took the tea back into the shop. Morton Phibling, said Zeinab, had gone off down the road to buy them a Standard.

  ‘So we can read about the murder. Look what he’s given me this time.’

  Zeinab showed her a large lapel pin of two roses and a rosebud on a stem, nestling in a bed of blue satin.

  ‘Are those real diamonds?’

  ‘He always gives me real diamonds. Must be worth thousands. I promised to wear it tonight.’

  ‘That won’t be a hardship,’ said Inez. ‘But you mind how you go. Having that on show puts you in danger of being mugged. And you want to remember there’s a killer at large who’s well-known for stealing something off every girl he kills. Here he is, back.’

  But instead of Morton Phibling it was a middle-aged woman in search of a piece of Crown Derby for a birthday present. She had picked up a paperback on her way in, a Peter Cheyney with a picture of a strangled girl on its jacket. Appropriate, thought Inez, charging her 50p for it, and wrapping up a red, blue and gold porcelain plate. Morton came back and courteously held the door open for her. Zein
ab was still gloating over her diamond roses, looking like an angel contemplating some beatific vision, thought Morton.

  ‘I’m so glad you like it, darling.’

  ‘It still don’t—doesn’t—give you the right to call me darling. Let’s have a look at the paper, then.’

  She and Inez shared it. ‘It says it happened quite early last night, about nine,’ read Zeinab. ‘Somebody heard her scream but he didn’t do nothing, not for five minutes, when he saw this figure running away down past the station, a shadowy figure, it says, man or woman, he don’t know, only it was wearing trousers. Then he found her—they haven’t identified her yet—lying dead on the pavement, murdered. They don’t say how it was done only that her face was all blue. It would have been another of them garrottes. Nothing about a bite.’

  ‘That bite business is all nonsense,’ said Inez. ‘The first girl had a bite mark on her neck but they traced the DNA to her boyfriend. The things people do in the name of love! Of course they called him the Rottweiler and the name has stuck.’

  ‘Did he take anything of hers this time? Let me see.’ Zeinab scanned the story to its foot. ‘Wouldn’t know, I suppose, seeing they don’t know who she was. What was it he took the other times?’

  ‘A silver cigarette lighter with her initials in garnets from the first one,’ said Morton, showing his considerable knowledge of jewellery, ‘and a gold fob watch from the second.’

  ‘Nicole Nimms and Rebecca Milsom, they was called. I wonder what it’ll be off this one. Won’t never be a mobile, I reckon. All the bastards on the street nick mobiles, wouldn’t be like his trademark, would it?’

  ‘Now you be careful coming down to Le Caprice tonight, darling,’ said Morton, who seemed not to have noticed the jaguar. ‘I’ve a good mind to send a limo for you.’

  ‘If you do I won’t come,’ said Zeinab, ‘and you’ve called me darling again.’

  ‘Are you going to marry him?’ said Inez when he had gone. ‘He’s a bit old for you but he’s got a lot of money and he’s not so bad.’