Talking to Strange Men
Read Talking to Strange Men Online
Authors: Ruth Rendell
Contents
Safe houses and secret message drops, double crosses and defections â 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.
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.
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
The Fallen Curtain
Means of Evil
The Fever Tree
The New Girl Friend
The Copper Peacock
Blood Lines
Piranha to Scurfy
Heartstones
The Thief
Ruth Rendell's Suffolk
Ruth Rendell's Anthology of the Murderous Mind
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
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
Ruth Rendell
FOR DON
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 northâsouth 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 AhmanâSuleiman 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:
âIt will bite.'
âThanks for telling me,' he said.
The man in the turban wiped his thumb along the strip of putty. âIt has bitten me twice and my wife once.' Gathering up his tools, he unlocked the right-hand door of the double doors. âDevil!' 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.