Table Of ContentLIVE FLESH
by
RUTH RENDELL
ARROW BOOKS
For Don
Arrow Books Limited 62~65 Chandos Place, London WC2N 4NW
An imprint of Century Hutchinson Limited London Melbourne Sydney
Auckland Johannesburg and agencies throughout the world
First published by Century Hutchinson 1986 Arrow edition 1986
C) Kingsmarkham Enterprises 1986
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the
publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Anchor Brendon Limited, Tiptree, Essex
ISBN 0 09 950270 4
The gun was a replica. Spenser told Fleetwood he was ninety-nine per cent sure
of that. Fleetwood knew what that meant, that he was really about forty-nine per
cent sure, but he didn’t attach much weight to what Spenser said anyway. For his
own part he didn’t believe the gun was real. Rapists don’t have real guns.
A replica does just as well as a means of frightening.
The window that the girl had broken was a square empty hole. Once since
Fleetwood arrived had the man with the gun appeared at it. He had come in
answer to Fleetwood’s summons but had said nothing, only standing there for
perhaps thirty seconds, holding the gun in both hands. He was young, about
Fleetwood’s own age, with long dark hair, really long, down on his shoulders, as
was the prevailing fashion. He wore dark glasses. For half a minute he stood
there and then he turned abruptly round and disappeared into the shadows of the
room. The girl Fleetwood hadn’t seen, and for all he knew she might be dead.
He sat on a garden wall on the opposite side of the street, looking up at the
house. His own car and the police van were parked at the kerb.
Two of the uniformed men had succeeded in clearing away the crowd which had
gathered and keeping it back with an improvised barrier.
Even though it had now begun to rain, dispersing the crowd altogether would
have been an impossible task. Front doors stood open all the way down the street
with women on the doorsteps, waiting for something to happen. It was one of
them who, hearing the window break and the girl scream, had dialled 9-9-9.
A district that was neither Kensal Rise nor West Kilburn nor Brondesbury, a
blurred area, on the borders of nowhere
in particular. Fleetwood had never really been there before, had only driven
through. The street was called Solent Gardens, long and straight and flat, with
terraces of twostorey houses facing one another, some Victorian, some much
later, from the nineteen twenties and thirties. The house with the broken window,
number 62 Solent Gardens, was one of these newer houses, the end of a terrace
of eight, red brick and pebble dashing, red pantiles on the roof, black and white
paintwork, a pale blue front door. All the houses had gardens at the back and
gardens at the front with lonicera or privet hedges and bits of lawn, and most of
them had low brick or stone walls in front of the hedges. Fleetwood, sitting on a
wall in the rain, began to wonder what he should do next.
None of the rapist’s victims had mentioned a gun, so it would seem as if the
replica had been recently acquired. Two of them - there had been five, or at any
rate five who had come forward - had been able to describe him: tall, slim,
twenty-seven or twenty-eight, olive skin, dark longish hair, dark eyes and very
black eyebrows. A foreigner?
Oriental? Greek? Perhaps, but perhaps just an Englishman with dark-skinned
forbears. One of the girls had been badly hurt, for she had fought him, but he had
used no weapon on her, only his hands.
Fleetwood got up and walked up to the front door of number 63 opposite to
have another talk with Mrs Stead, who had called the police. Mrs Stead had
fetched out a kitchen stool to sit on and put on her winter coat.
She had already told him that the girl’s name was Rosemary Stanley and that she
lived with her parents but they were away. It had been at five minutes to eight in
the morning, one and a half hours ago, when Rosemary Stanley had broken the
window and screamed.
Fleetwood asked if Mrs Stead had seen her.
‘He dragged her away before I got the chance.’
‘We can’t know that,’ Fleetwood said. ‘I suppose she goes out to work? I
mean, when things are normal?’
‘Yes, but she never leaves the house before nine. Ten past as often as not. I
can tell you what happened, I’ve
6
worked it all out. He rang the doorbell and she went down in her nightie to
answer it and he said he’d come to read the electric meter-they’re due for this
quarter, he’d know that - and she took him upstairs and he had a go at her, but in
the nick of time she bashed the window out and uttered her desperate cry for
help. That’s the way it’s got to be.’
Fleetwood didn’t think so. For one thing the electricity meter wouldn’t be
upstairs. All the houses in this part of the street were the same and Mrs Stead’s
meter was just inside the front door. Alone in the house on a dark winter
morning, Rosemary Stanley would hardly have opened the door to a caller. She
would have leaned out of the window to check on him first.
Women in this district had been so frightened by tales of the rapist that not one
of them would set foot outside after dark, sleep alone in a house if she could help
it, or open a front door without a chain on it.
A local ironmonger told Fleetwood that there had been a boom in the sale of
door chains these past few weeks. Fleetwood thought it more likely the man with
the gun had forced an entry into the house and made his way to Rosemary
Stanley’s bedroom.
‘Could you do with a coffee, Inspector?’ said Mrs Stead.
‘Sergeant,’ Fleetwood corrected her. ‘No, thanks. Later maybe. Still, we must
hope there won’t be a later.’
He crossed the road. Behind the barrier the crowd waited patiently, standing in
the drizzle, coat collars turned up, hands in pockets. At the end of the street,
where it turned off the main roads one of the PCs was having an argument with a
driver who seemed to want to bring his lorry down here. Spenser had predicted
that the man with the gun would come out and give himself up when he saw
Fleetwood and the others; rapists were notorious cowards, that was a well-
known fact, and what did he have to gain by holding out? It hadn’t been like
that, though. Fleetwood thought it might be that the rapist.still believed he had a
chance of escape. If he was the rapist. They couldn’t be sure he was, and
Fleetwood was a stickler for accuracy, for fairness. A few minutes after the 9-9-9
call a girl called Heather Cole had come into the police station with a man called
John Parr, and Heather Cole had said an attack had been made on her in Queens
Park half an hour before. She was exercising her dog when a man had seized her
from behind, but she had screamed and Mr Parr had come and the man had run
off. Had escaped this way, Fleetwood thought, and entered 62 Solent Gardens for
refuge from pursuers rather than with the intention of raping Rosemary Stanley
because he had been baulked of Heather Cole. Or that was Fleetwood’s guess.
Fleetwood came the nearest he had yet been to the Stanley house, opening the
small ornate wrought-iron gate, crossing the square of wet bright-green grass,
making his way round the side. There was no sound from the interior. The
exposed side wall was sheer, without drainpipes or projections, with three small
windows only. At the back though, the kitchen had apparently been extended and
the roof of this extension, which was no more than eight feet from the ground,
could be reached by scaling the wall against which grew a sturdy thornless
climber-a wisteria probably, thought Fleetwood, who in his leisure hours was
fond of gardening.
Above this low roof a sash window stood open. Fleetwood was proved right.
He noted access to the garden from a lane at the back by a path of concrete slabs
leading past a concrete garage. If all else failed, he thought, he or someone could
always get into the house by climbing up the way the man with the gun had.
As he came round the front again, the voice shouted at him. It was a voice full
of fear but it was itself none the less frightening for that.
It was unexpected and it made Fleetwood jump. He realized he was nervous, he
was afraid, though he hadn’t thought of this before. He made himself walk, not
run, on to the front path. The man with the gun stood at the broken window, the
window from which he had now knocked out all the glass into the flowerbed
below, holding the gun in his right hand and the curtain back with his left.
‘Are you in charge here?’ he said to Fleetwood.
As if he were running some sort of show. Well, perhaps he was, and a
successful one to judge from the avidity of the audience, braving rain and cold.
At the sound of the voice a noise came from them, a crowd-sigh, a collective
murmur, not unlike wind in the treetops.
Fleetwood nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘So it’d be you I’d have to make terms with?’
‘No terms are going to be made.’
The man with the gun now appeared to consider this. He said, ‘What’s your
rank?’
‘I’m Detective Sergeant Fleetwood.’
Disappointment was apparent in the thin face, even though the eyes were
hidden. The man seemed to think he merited a chief inspector at least.
Perhaps I’d better tell Spenser his presence is required, thought Fleetwood. The
gun was pointing at him now. Fleetwood wasn’t going to put his hands up, of
course he wasn’t. This was Kensal Rise, not Los Angeles, though what real
difference that made he didn’t know. He looked into the black hole of the gun’s
mouth.
‘I want a promise I can come out of here and have half an hour to get away in.
I’ll take the girl with me and when the half-hour’s up I’ll send her back here in a
taxi. OK?’
‘You must be joking,’ said Fleetwood.
‘It’ll be no joke to her if you don’t give me that promise. You can see the gun,
can’t you?’
Fleetwood made no reply.
‘You can have an hour to decide.
Then I’ll use the gun on her.’
‘That will be murder. The inevitable sentence for murder is life
