The House of Stairs by Ruth Rendell Page B

account of all of it to Cosette. And she listened, she was interested, she seemed really to want to know. By that time Elsa and I together with Paula and Felicity’s sister had been amply regaled by Felicity on the subject of Silas’s games.
    Silas had two guns, a twelve-bore shotgun and a Colt revolver, which he claimed to have bought from a stall-holder in the Portobello Road market, a man who sold silver. He had a passion for guns, which was not easy to gratify in this country where to collect guns and have the appropriate license and so forth you have to be a respectable person with no criminal record and one who doesn’t mind visits from the police. Silas, of course, had no gun license. Felicity told us he used to play Russian roulette with the Colt and that was the least of his games.
    “They don’t kill themselves, those people, but they don’t care for their lives the way the rest of us do. They do reckless things, they tempt fate.” I thought she looked wistful, as if she rather hankered after being that kind of person herself. “You know how Carmen goes to the most dangerous places, sets herself out to get the dangerous men?” We didn’t know. I, at least, had never heard Carmen then, not even on records. “And at the end she doesn’t have to get herself killed, she can easily avoid it, but she’s too proud to avoid it and, anyway, what else is there for her?”
    Was Felicity saying Silas was like that? And if you take the analogy with Carmen as far as she took it, to the end of the last act, what was she implying?
    She said Silas liked to play firing squads. It was never quite clear whether she had been the partner in these games or had only heard of them. If she had been, I could understand she might not want the rather straitlaced High Anglican Esmond Thinnesse to know about it, and therefore could not risk telling us. What she did tell us was that Silas would get his woman, in this case presumably Bell, to gag him and tie him up, he having previously loaded one of the guns, the Colt or the shotgun. She wouldn’t be told which one was loaded. She was to choose one and shoot him as a member of a firing party might do. Of course neither Bell nor her predecessors were good shots; he had taught them the basics of handling a gun and that was all. Felicity said that after her affair with Silas came to an end she met him once with his arm in a sling and he said he had been shot. She concluded some woman had picked the right (or the wrong) gun, but the shot had gone a bit wide.
    He never shot animals or birds, that didn’t interest him, and he was a vegetarian. Another one of his games was to get his girls to shoot at a target with the aim of improving their marksmanship, and just as whoever it was—and I believe at least once it was Felicity herself—took aim and fired, he would dash across in front of the target. He liked the naked terror, the loss of control, the screams.
    “But was it something like this he had been doing that last time?” asked Cosette.
    “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows.”
    “This girl called Bell must know.”
    “If she does, I don’t think she’ll tell.”
    We walked across to the cottage, Esmond, Bell, and I, through the wind and darkness. Can it really have been so dark at four o’clock even in December? I remember it as dark and the shock I felt at seeing the cottage in darkness, at observing that Bell had left no lights on. She had not at any rate locked the front door but left it on the latch as the front door to Thornham Hall was always left. We went in and lights were switched on and there was Silas Sanger lying dead on the floor.
    I think it was at this point Esmond realized I was there. You see, no one had spoken a word since we came out of the Hall. Esmond realized and turned to me and said something about it not being right for me to be there, for me to see such things. But by then it was much too late. I had seen and Esmond had seen and he had