The Fallen Curtain by Ruth Rendell

friend’s place. I wish I’d gone there too!”
    They were evidently two of a kind. Well-suited, Della thought. Although it was nearly half past two in the morning, this seemed the best moment to have things out. She addressed Rosamund in her precise, schoolmistressy voice.
    “I think we’ll have to make other arrangements, Rosamund. Your ways aren’t my ways, and we don’t really get on, do we? You can stay here till you find somewhere else, but I’d like to start looking round straightaway.”
    “But what have I
done?
I haven’t made a noise or had my friends here. I haven’t even used your phone, not once. Honestly, Della, I’ve done my best to keep the place clean and tidy, and it’s nearly killed me!”
    “I’ve explained what I mean. We’re not the same kind of people.”
    “I’ll go on Saturday. I’ll go to my mother—it won’t be any worse, God knows—and then maybe Chris and I…”
    “You’d better go to bed now,” Della said coldly, but she couldn’t get any sleep herself. She was wondering how she had been such a bad judge of character, and wondering too what she was going to do about the rent. Find someone else, of course. An older woman perhaps, a widow or a middle-aged spinster….
    What she was determined not to do was reveal to Rosamund, at this late stage, her anxiety about the side gate. If anything remained to comfort her, it was the knowledge that Rosamund thought her strong, mature, and sensible. But notrevealing it brought her an almost unbearable agony. For Rosamund seemed to think the very sight of her would be an embarrassment to Della. Each evening she was gone from the flat before Della got home, and each time she had gone out leaving the side gate unbolted and the back door locked. Della had no way of knowing whether she would come in on the last bus or get a taxi or be seen home in the small hours by Chris. She didn’t know whether Chris lived near or far away, and now she wished she had listened more closely to Rosamund’s confidences and asked a few questions of her own. Instead, she had only thought with a shudder how nasty it must be to have to sleep with a man, and had wondered if she would ever bring herself to face the prospect.
    Each night she took the breadknife to bed with her, confirmed in her conviction that she wasn’t being unreasonable when one of the mouselike people whom she met in the hall told her the house next door had been broken into and its old woman occupant knocked on the head. Rosamund came in once at one, once at half past two, and once she didn’t come in at all. Della got great bags under her eyes and her skin looked grey. She fell asleep over her desk at work, while a brighteyed, vivacious Rosamund regaled her friends in the cloakroom about the joys of her relationship with Chris.
    But now there was only one more night to go….
    Rosamund had left a note to say she wouldn’t be home. She’d see Della on the following evening when she collected her cases to take them to her mother. But she’d left the side gate unbolted. Della seriously considered bolting it and then climbing back over it into the side entrance, but it was too high and smooth for her to climb and there wasn’t a ladder. Nothing for it but to begin her vigil with the cigarettes, the glass of water, the phone, and the breadknife. It ought to have been easier, this last night, just because it was the last. Instead, it was worse than any of the others. She lay in the dark, thinking of the old woman next door, of the house that was precisely the same as the one next door, and of the intruder who now knew the best and simplest way in. She tried to think ofsomething else, anything else, but the strongest instinct of all over-rode all her feeble attempts to concentrate on tomorrow, on work, on ambition, on the freedom and peace of tomorrow when that gate would be fastened for good, never again to be opened.
    Rosamund had said she wouldn’t be in. But you couldn’t rely on a