Wexford 6 - No More Dying Then by Ruth Rendell Page A

could be, couldn’t there? Please, Mike!”
       Her nails dug into his wrists. “There’s always a chance . . .”
       “More than that, more than that! Smile at me, show me there’s a chance.” He smiled, almost desperately. She sprang up. “Stay there. I’m going to make coffee.”
       The evening was dying away. Soon it would be quite dark. He knew that he should go away now, follow her outside and say briskly, “Well, if you’re all right, I must be on my way.” Staying here was wrong, entirely overstepping the bounds of his duty. If she needed company it ought to be Mrs. Crantock or one of those strange friends of hers.
       He couldn’t go. It was impossible. What a hypocrite he was with his talk of self-discipline. Jean? he said, savouring her name experimentally. If Jean had been at home there would have been no staying, no need for control.
       She came back with the coffee and they drank it in the dusk. Soon he could hardly see her and yet some how he felt her presence more forcefully. In one way he wanted her to turn on the light, but at the same time he prayed that she wouldn’t and thus destroy the atmosphere, warm, dark and scented with her scent, a tension and yet a peace.
       She poured him more coffee and their hands touched. “Tell me about your wife,” she said.
       He had never told anyone. He wasn’t the kind of man to open his heart and relieve his soul. Grace had tried to draw him out. That idiot Camb had tried and, in a more subtle and tactful way, Wexford himself. And yet he would have liked to tell someone, if only the right listener could be found. This beautiful kind woman wasn’t the right listener. What would she with her strange past, her peculiar permissiveness, understand of his notions of monogamy, his one-woman life? How could he talk to her of his simple gentle Jean, her quiet existence and her abominable death?
       “It’s all over now,” he said shortly. “Best forgotten.” Too late he realised the impression his words had made.
       “Even if you haven’t been too happy,” she said, “you don’t just miss the person, you miss love.”
       He saw the truth of it. Even for him it was true. But love wasn’t quite the word. There was no love in those dreams of his and Jean never entered them. As if to deny his own thoughts, he said harshly, “They say you can find a substitute, but you can’t. I can’t”
       “Not a substitute. That’s the wrong word. But someone else for another way of love perhaps.”
       “I don’t know. I have to go now. Don’t put on the light.” Light would show her too much, his face after suppressed pain had worked on it, and worse than that, the hunger for her he could no longer hide. “Don’t put on the light!”
       “I wasn’t going to,” she said softly. “Come here.” It was a little light kiss on the cheek she gave him, such as a woman may give a man she has known for years, the husband of a friend perhaps, and, returning it, touching her cheek, he still meant to kiss her in the same way with a comradely reassurance. But he felt his heart beating and hers beside it as if he had two hearts of his own. Their mouths met and his long control broke.
       He kissed her with everything he had, crushing her in his arms and forcing her back against the wall, his tongue thrusting down into her mouth.
       When he let her go and moved away shivering, she stood still with her head bowed, saying nothing. He opened the front door and ran from her, not looking back.

Chapter 7

    Sunday, the morning of his lie-in. He had passed a horrible night, filled with dreams so disgusting that if he had read them in some work on psychology - the kind that Grace was always on about - he would have had no difficulty in believing they were the product of a diseased and perverted mind. Even thinking of them made him shudder with shame.
       If you lie wakeful in bed when it is already light you have to think. But of