The Secret House of Death by Ruth Rendell Page A

for something.’
    â€˜I’m all right.’ In fact, Susan had begun to feel dizzy and rather sick. Probably it was only nerves and the hothouse temperature in this room. She would be better at home.
    â€˜Now I hope your place is really warm,’ Doris twittered in the icy hall. ‘I know it usually is. The great thing with shock and all this upheaval is to keep in an even temperature.’ She hunched her shoulders and wrapped her arms around her chest. ‘An even temperature, that’s one thing my sister tut or always impressed on me.’
    For Susan’s neighbours the inquest had been a kind of demarcation. It was over and with it most of the excitement, the terror and the scandal. Those involved and those looking on had reached a point at which they must again take up the strings of their lives. Susan had found two dead bodies, but Susan couldn’t expect to be the centre of attraction, of sympathy and of comfort for ever.
    But for all that, it gave her a slight shock to realise that Doris wasn’t going to accompany her home. Mrs Dring had stayed with her last night, but she had said nothing about coming back. Quietly and as cheerfully as she could, Susan said good-bye to Doris and thanked her for lunch. Then she crossed the road, keeping her eyes averted from Braeside.
    Work is generally recommended as the remedy for most ills and Susan went straight to her typewriter and Miss Willingale’s manuscript. Her hands trembled and, although she flexed them and held them against the radiator, she found herself unable to type at all. Would she ever again be able to work in this house? It was so dreadfully like Braeside. With all her heart she wished she had minded her own business on Wednesday, even though that meant the discovery would have been Bob’s and not hers.
    Her first impression of it, her first sight of its interior, had left on her mind an image of a house of death and now her own, its facsimile, seemed contaminated. For the first time she wondered why she had ever stayed on here after her divorce. Like Braeside, it was a house where happy people had lived together and where that happiness had died away into misery. Now nothing remained of that happiness and there was nothing to replace it while these walls reflected back the sorrow they had seen.
    Susan heard Bob’s car come in but she couldn’t look up. Now that it was all over, she might have been able to comfort him. He had needed a counsellor for loneliness and here she was, alone. She knew she had neither the physical strength nor the will-power to go out and knock on his door. It was a cold ugly place, this corner of suburbia, where a young man and a young woman could live next door to each other in identical houses, two walls only between them, yet be so bound by reticence and by convention that they could not reach out to each other in common humanity.
    Many times she had cursed the daily arrival of Doris at teatime, but when Paul came in alone she missed her bitterly. A craving for company, stronger than she had felt for months, made her want to lie down and weep. A child of six, no matter how much beloved, is no company for a woman who feels as troubled and insecure as a child and Susan wondered if in her eyes he saw the same bewilderment, masked by a determined effort to make a brave show, as she saw in his.
    â€˜Roger Gibbs says Mrs North got shot by a man.’ Paul said it quite casually, stretching his white face into a broad manly smile. ‘And she was all over blood,’ he said, ‘and they had a trial like on the TV.’
    Susan smiled back at him and her smile was as matter-of-fact, as bravely reassuring as his. In a light even voice she embarked on a bowdlerised explanation.
    â€˜He says this man wanted to marry her and he couldn’t, so he shot her. Why did he? He couldn’t marry her when she was dead. Daddy didn’t shoot Elizabeth and he wanted to marry