A Sight for Sore Eyes by Ruth Rendell

into the dining-room and banged the door. But he started laughing when he was inside. That night he slept like a log. Or like a Brex, they were all heavy sleepers, though he was sometimes the exception. The following evening he sawed the legs off the table and chopped them up, but not the table top. Late in the day, but not too late, he saw what a fine piece of mahogany it was. He took it carefully apart and stacked the boards against the wall. The chopped wood made a pile to occupy a space roughly the size the sideboard had been. The only way to get rid of it that came to mind was to take three or four pieces with him in a plastic carrier every time he left the house. Rather like someone disposing of a body, half a leg one day, a hand another, finally the head. Fortunately - he had never thought of it as being fortunate before - the place was awash with plastic bags. They filled the kitchen drawers and flopped out when you opened the cupboard under the sink. Keith got them from the Safeway when he bought his booze and he never took used ones back. Recycling in any shape or form had no place in his life-style. When Teddy went to get the tube to college he'd take some of those bits of leg with him in a bag and put them in a waste bin. As Kelly's grandma had predicted, the gin had cleaned the ring. Lumps of grey waxy substance, one with a hair embedded in it, floated on the surface of the liquid in the egg-cup. Teddy sniffed it with a shudder. He was preserving another virginity, that of never letting alcohol pass his lips. The ring sparkled in the morning light. Teddy wondered whose it had been before it came on to his mother's hand. Grandma Brex's? Surely not. More likely it was stolen, but he doubted if his father had ever had the courage to steal anything. Perhaps he was wrong and the ring was worthless, perhaps it had come out of a Christn-ias cracker. I-lie questioned if something so beautiful could be valueless. One day he would find a woman and give~ it to her.
    Chapter 8
    Soon after Richard and Julia were married the police asked Richard if he would let Francine attend an identity parade. 'She only saw his shoes and the top of his head,' Richard protested. 'If you think about it,' Detective Inspector Wallis said, 'I'm sure you'll agree that no one looking down from above ever just sees the top of someone's head and his shoes. There's going to be a lot more than that. His hands, for instance, the shape and size of him, his ears, his shoulders.' Julia thought the project very wrong. Francine, in her opinion, was disturbed enough already, a frightened, traumatised child. This might send her over the edge. It was their first disagreement, hers and Richard's. Richard won it, but that was the last struggle with Julia he was ever to win. She sighed and looked sad, saying, 'I hope we aren't talking about irreparable damage to Francine's already fragile personality.' They both went with her to the police station in Surrey where the identity parade was held. Because of the peculiar nature of the view Francine had had of the man on the doorstep, she was placed in a room where she could look down on the eight men in the lineup. The glass in the window was one-way so that she could see them but they could not see her. Or so the police told Richard. It looked like normal glass to Julia. 'They would say that, darling,' she said, 'to set our minds at rest.' In any case, Francine was unable to pick out the man. She could pick out four, she said the tops of their heads all looked like the top of the head she had seen, but no particular one. What happened to the men in the line-up none of them was told, but no one was arrested. 'But he's seen her, hasn't he?' said Julia. 'That was the point of the one-way glass,' Richard said, 'so that he couldn't see her.' Julia, who was nothing if not illogical, said, 'It doesn't matter, though, does it, if he saw her or not? The reality is that he knows who she is and he knows she's the only witness