Make Death Love Me by Ruth Rendell Page A

Willesden and sat in it for what seemed like hours, watching the main road until there weren’t quite so many cars and buses going past. It hadn’t been hours at all, it was still only a quarter past seven. He had some idea where he was when he found himself careering uncertainly down Ladbroke Grove, and after that signs for south of the river began coming up. He would take it over one of the bridges and dump it in south London.
    He was scared stiff. He wished he had some way of knowing what was going on and how much the police had found out. The way to have found out was from Marty’s radio which the girl would have heard, and heard too that Groombridge was alive. Luckily, he’d managed to whisper to Marty not to switch it on. He was so thick, that one, you never knew what he’d do next.
    The manual gear shift was getting easier to handle. He tried breathing deeply to calm himself, and up to a point it worked. What he really ought to do was hide the car somewhere where it wouldn’t be found for weeks. He knew he was a conspicuous person, being six feet tall and with bright fair hair and regular features, not little and dark and ordinary like Marty. People wouldn’t be able to remember Marty but they’d remember him.
    He turned right out of Ladbroke Grove and drove down Holland Park Avenue to Shepherd’s Bush and along the Shepherd’s Bush Road, thus passing the Maharajah Hotel and forming one of the constituents of the noise that throbbed in Alan Groombridge’s sleeping brain. On to Hammersmith and over Putney Bridge. There were still about two gallons in the tank. In Wandsworth he put the car down an alley which was bounded by factory walls and where there was no one to see him. It was a relief to get out of it, though he knew he couldn’t just leave it there. He had grabbed a handful of notes out of the carrier. In these circumstances, Marty would have wanted a drink, but stress had made Nigel ravenously hungry. There was a Greek café just down the street. He went in and ordered himself a meal of kebab and taramosalata.
    He might just as easily have chosen the fish and chip place or the Hong Kong Dragon, but he chose the Greek café and it gave him an idea. Beginning on his kebab, Nigel glanced at a poster on the café wall, a coloured photograph of Heraklion. This reminded him that before he had worked round to the subject of a loan, he had listened with half an ear to his mother’s usual gossip about her friends. This had included the information that the Boltons were going off for a month to Heraklion. Wherever that might be, Nigel thought, Greece somewhere. Dr Bolton, now retired, and his Greek wife, whom he was supposed to (or had once been supposed to) call Uncle Bob and Auntie Helena, lived in a house near Epping Forest. He had been there once, about seven years before, and now he recalled that Dr Bolton kept his car in a garage, a sort of shed really, at the bottom of his garden. An isolated sort of place. The car would now be in the airport car park, for his mother had said they were going last Saturday. Would the garage be locked? Nigel tried to remember if there had been a lock on the door and thought there hadn’t been, though he couldn’t be certain after so long. If there was and he couldn’t use the garage, he would push the car into one of the forest ponds. Thinking about the Boltons brought back to him that visit and how he, aged fourteen, had listened avidly to Dr Bolton’s account of a stolen car that had been dumped in a pond and not found for weeks.
    He left the café at nine and returned cautiously to the alley. The Ford Escort was still there and no other car was. He got quickly into the car and drove off, this time crossing the river by Wandsworth Bridge.
    It took him nearly an hour to get out to Woodford, and he had some very bad moments when a police car seemed to be following him after the lights at Blackhorse Road. But