The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell Page A

did.”
    “Ah. I’m out on the balcony with a spotty cat.”
    “You took your time about calling me.”
    “I know. I was afraid. I must see you. Soon. Friday?”
    “Of course. I must see you too. In the afternoon whenever you can.”

    S POT SMELT THE smoke as he and Stanley turned the corner. Spot sat down on the pavement and howled. The fire appeared to be in one of the houses in Farm Mead, for by the look of it from the road, smoke was pouring out of the back windows and certainly from the front. A woman Stanley knew by sight came running out of the open front door with a frying pan in her hand. By this time he had called 999 for the fire brigade, as he still called it.
    Leaving Spot up the road, tied on a long lead to a pavement tree, Stanley asked the woman how it had happened. She put the frying pan down in a flowerbed.
    “I was frying chips,” she said, half-sobbing. “I love chips.”
    You could see that by the shape of her, thought Stanley. “Your smoke alarm didn’t go off?”
    “I’d taken it out. The noise made me jump every time it went off.”
    There was nothing to say except reproach, but anything that he might have said was cut off by the howling of sirens from the help that arrived. Firemen—they probably weren’t called that anymore—leapt out of their vehicles and rushed up the path with hoses and some sot of fire-extinguishing substance. The woman who loved chips tried to follow them but was sent back again, by which time Stanley had untied the dog and, because Spot refused to pass the house, set off in the opposite direction to take a roundabout route home.
    It was only the second fire Stanley had ever seen. During the war when he was a child, Loughton had been a surprisingly quiet place, though only about twelve miles outside central London. The East End had taken it badly, but the East End was nearer than that. He had seen pictures of the Blitz and films, though there was of course no available television. Children, such as Stanley and his brothers and sister, collected the chunks of twisted metal that were shrapnelfrom antiaircraft shells, they heard distant bombs falling and heard the big guns boom, enough to drive them all crowding into the air-raid shelter, but there was no fire as there appeared to be no incendiary bombs nearby. The fire he saw, the first fire as against this chip-pan one, was big; a conflagration, his father called it when they told him about it.
    It was December and it must have been 1944, for Stanley remembered it was the day after his birthday. He and George were walking home from Roding Road School, the secondary modern, where George had been a year and he had just started. Usually, they’d have walked home up Tycehurst Hill, but this time they took the Hill because George said, let’s see what’s happened to the qanats. It was after Mr. Winwood had turned them all out but not long after—weeks or months, he couldn’t remember. They saw the smoke rising up into the air behind the house called Anderby, the Winwoods’ house. It was coming from the back garden and they stood there staring.
    “Michael’s not there,” Stanley remembered George saying. “Mr. Winwood sent him away to his auntie,” and Stanley had said, “He’s always sending people away.”
    The fire took a sudden violent turn and flames came, roaring through the gap between Anderby and the Joneses’ fence. It had caught the shed that adjoined the fence and the summerhouse beyond, when the fire engines charged up the Hill, bawling with a far more strident howl than these two had made so many years later for the little frying-pan fire. As the men got out with their hoses and ran up the path, Mr. Winwood had come out and led them round the side of the house, no doubt the quickest way. But he came back, waving his arms about and shouting to Stanley and George.
    “Get off home, the pair of you. What the hell d’you think you’re doing gawping there?”
    People didn’t swear at children