Free Dark Corners: A Novel by Ruth Rendell Page A

to
Death’s Door
. If that wasn’t feasible, he could create a new detective, a woman, perhaps. He would begin by making a list of characters, looking up names online and finding new ones in the surname dictionary.
    But his heart wasn’t in it. All his heart could do was sink. He missed Nicola so much. Her old flatmates had found room for her. She was gone. And there was Dermot. Suppose he really did stay in the flat and never paid the rent again? Perhaps Carl could tell him to leave because he wanted to sell the house. But he knew this wouldn’t work. Dermot would refuse to go.
    There was another course to follow. Force him to pay the rent and leave him to do his worst. Dermot would no doubt tell this woman Yvonne Weatherspoon the tale of Carl’s ‘medicaments’ and the sale of the DNP to Stacey. And why should it stop there? Dermot might not lead an involved and widespread social life, but he met a lot of people. He talked (chatted, he would call it) to a host of pet-owners, for example. He would carry out his threat to go to that newspaper that sold widely in Hampstead and Highgate. He would say he had a story for them and go to their office to give an interview. He might even approach one of the tabloids, the
Sun
, say, or the
Mail
. Stacey was known to the public. It would be a juicy story: ‘Author Kills Actress’. Carl would never have a serious literary career again.
    He was making himself feel sick. He leaned over his desk, putting his head in his hands, but this did nothing to help. He ran, choking, into the kitchen and threw up into the sink.
    The footsteps behind him could only be Dermot’s. Carl kept his head bent, ran the cold tap, switched on the waste disposal unit, hoping the noise would drive his tenant away. It didn’t.
    ‘You’re not very well, are you?’ Dermot used his deeply concerned voice. To Carl it sounded as if he was enjoying himself. ‘Don’t you think you should see your doctor? I’ll come with you if you like.’
    ‘Go away. You’re ruining my life.’
    ‘No, no,’ said Dermot. ‘It’s you who’s doing that.’
    Carl drank some water from the tap. He wiped his mouth on the tea cloth.
    Dermot said, ‘I came down to ask you if you would like to go out for a drink. Maybe something to eat as well?’
    This was an instance when to respond with ‘Are you joking?’ was a genuine question.
    ‘No,’ Dermot said. ‘I thought it would be a good idea to get to know each other better.’
    Carl said, ‘I don’t want to know you better. I don’t want to know you at all. I want you out of my life. Now go away, please. Please go away.’
    When Dermot had gone, Carl sat down at the kitchen table, found Nicola’s mother’s number on his phone’s list of contacts and rang it. There was no answer. He remembered his own mother telling him that there was a time not so long ago when your name didn’t come up when you made a call. The person you called didn’t know who it was, so they had to answer. As things were now, Nicola might be sitting in her mother’s house, also in a kitchen for all he knew, and deliberately not answering because she could see ‘Carl’ on the screen. He thought, I don’t even know where her house is. Aylesbury, I think, but I don’t know the address.
    As he was leaving, the postman brought ten copies of Carl’s book. When he’d originally been shown the jacket design he hadn’t liked it, but had accepted the corpse and the blood and the weeping woman. It looked no better now under the bright-coloured glaze, and he dumped the box on the hall table and left it there. A moment in time that should have been glorious – the delivery of copies of his first published book – was just a disappointment, like everything else in his life.
    He decided to walk to Nicola’s flat in Ashmill Street, telling himself he’d nothing to lose if no one let him in. Things couldn’t be any worse than they already were. It occurred to him that he had no one to talk to,