Free The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell

said, and then Uncle James, careless of being overheard, stood surveying the clay walls, the wooden boxes and the bricks that littered the place, and let out a loud peal of laughter.
    “I don’t think so,” he said, and Lewis understood exactly what he meant, he didn’t have to ask. The tunnels weren’t suitable for the plan he had in mind. Whatever use he had hoped for, they wouldn’t do. They were too dirty, too shabby ,to use a favourite word of Lewis’s mother’s. He knew that but not what that use might have been.
    “Come on then,” he had said. “Let’s go back.”
    But Uncle James had gone on ahead in the direction of the girls’ voices, and the two of them came into a big space where several candles were lit, and from the savoury smell, potatoes were baking in the old water tank. Lewis knew the potatoes came from Bill Johnson’s father, who grew them on his allotment in Stony Path. They would have been wrapped in clay and dropped in among the red-hot embers. Three girls were poking at them with sticks to test if they were ready. Now, looking back over all those years, Lewis tried to remember who the third one was, having no difficulty in recalling Rosemary Wharton and, of course, Daphne Jones, she of the height, as tall as any of the boys and with that cloak of long,dark hair. But who had the third one been? He would never know now. The nameless one turned to stare at Uncle James, but Daphne didn’t turn. Rosemary bent to try to fish something out of the tank and cried out as she burnt her hand. It was only a tiny scorch, the faintest touch of one of those clay-encased potatoes, but Rosemary began whimpering and Uncle James stepped forward to help if he could. Was she all right? Was there anything he could do?
    “She’ll live,” said Daphne, and then she did turn round, fixing him with all the brilliance of her large, dark brown eyes and compelling admiration for the perfect arcs of her black eyebrows. Did he remember that? he thought at four thirty in the morning. Or did it come later when, attending his mother’s funeral, he had walked past her outside St. Mary’s Church and she, without recognising him, had taken the arm of the man she was with and walked on.
    Uncle James hadn’t pressed his offer of help, it obviously wasn’t needed, and he and Lewis had gone back the way they had come. They crossed the fields and were halfway down Shelley Grove when Uncle James said, evidently forgetting that his companion was twelve and not twenty-five, “She’ll make havoc among the men when she’s a bit older.”
    Lewis didn’t know the meaning of havoc so said nothing, but he looked the word up in the dictionary when he got home and found it meant chaos, destruction, and devastation. The last thing he saw before he went back to sleep was the sight of one of their neighbours coming down Brook Path from St. Mary’s Church with a prayer book in her hand. Perhaps it was that prayer book or the woman’s disapproving glance that sent him back to sleep at last.

6
    T HE N ORRISES’ FLAT in the block on Traps Hill, though large and with spacious rooms, was not suitable for small children. The windows in the lounge (Alan hated this name for the drawing-room) almost filled one wall and gave onto a balcony. In fine weather these windows were open and there was no danger to adults; the railing on the balcony was an absolute safeguard against falling to the stone-paved terrace below. Not so for small children, who could have slipped through the spaces between the railings or dived underneath them. Fenella, Freya’s sister, had a son aged five and a daughter aged nearly three, and when with Fenella’s husband, Giles, they all came to visit on a Sunday afternoon, no matter how warm it was and how strongly the sun was shining, the windows had to remain closed.
    Only quite recently had Alan resented this. Until a few weeks ago he had gone along with the theory, widely believed, that any hardship grandparents must