He called for help. He phoned 911 and his own DI. It was a piece of luck for the man on the floor that Laf was at home, on a day off, for Sonovia, usually so calm and practical, was in the throes of full-blown, old-fashioned hysterics. What was needed now, more than the police, was an ambulance. It arrived within four minutes and the man who had come to give Minty an estimate for her shower was carried out on a stretcher. This was a routine, not a necessary, measure. Shock, more than his superficial wounds, had laid him low.
But the police knew now, Laf knew, who was responsible for the cinema death and that of Eileen Dring.
“You couldn’t really call them murders,” Laf said to Sonovia later that day, when she’d calmed down and they were having a shock-remedy drink. “Not really. She didn’t mean to harm real people. She didn’t know.”
“I just hope the doctors realize that. Thank the Lord, poor Pete’s going to be okay.”
“What made you ring her doorbell, Sonny? Some sixth sense?”
“Not at all, my deah. I couldn’t claim to have that. I was at the window and I saw her come home, which was most unexpected, and I thought I’ll just pop in and tell her Pete’s there in case it gives her a shock.”
“What did she come home for?”
“It breaks your heart, it really does. After the ambulance had been and gone I was dying for a drink of cold water and that stuff that comes out of the tap-well, you don’t know what it’s been through, do you? I looked in her fridge and there were her sandwiches, all nicely wrapped up and waiting for her to fetch them. It brought the tears to my eyes, Laf.” And Sonovia began to cry, sobbing against Laf’s shoulder.
“She’ll be all right,” he said. “It’ll be best for her this way,” though he was by no means sure of this, any more than he had been when they found Minty three hours before.
It was Sonovia who’d said where she might be found.
“Her auntie’s grave is in there.” It couldn’t be, but what was the point of showing the poor thing up as a liar now?
Daniel and his wife and child had come over by then, to be with Sonovia and comfort her. So Laf had gone out with the DI and a detective sergeant and two women officers to search for Minty. The afternoon had grown very warm, sultry and amber-colored, the air heavy and dusted with gold, as it sometimes is in September. They went into the cemetery by the western gate half an hour before it was due to close. The man selling flowers said he’d seen Minty hours ago, she’d come running, out of breath and shivering, but she’d bought more from him than ever before, and she was a regular customer. Chrysanthemums she’d had and Michaelmas daisies, pink and purple asters, and the most expensive things he had, white lilies and pink ones. He’d never have believed she could afford them…
It took only about ten minutes to find her. When they did she was fast asleep. She was lying curled up like a child amid bunches and bunches of fast-withering flowers, on the grave of someone called Maisie Julia Chepstow who’d died a hundred years before. No one knew why she’d picked that one. The only man who knew and could have told them was dead, his ashes in an alabaster urn, forgotten at the back of a dark cupboard.
About the author
Ruth Rendell is the author of Road Rage, The Keys to the Street, Bloodlines, Simisola, and The Crocodile Bird. She is the winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award. She is also the recipient of three Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America and four Gold Daggers from Great Britain’s Crime Writers Association. In 1997, she was named a life peer in the House of Lords. Ruth Rendell also writes mysteries under the name of Barbara Vine, of which A Dark Adapted Eye is the most famous. She lives in England.
