Free Dark Corners: A Novel by Ruth Rendell Page B

no one to confide in. There was only Nicola, and perhaps even she wouldn’t speak to him.
    He walked through Church Street market, where the traders were dismantling the stalls. Further up on Lisson Grove, the man with the antique shop was removing his chairs and tables from the pavement and closing up for the night.
    By now it was early evening, and once off the main streets, few people were about. Carl turned down the street by the fish and chip shop. Nicola knew, he said to himself. She was the only one other than Dermot who knew; she had heard his account of what had happened, she
knew
. Surely now she would be over her initial shock and horror and would be able to give him some sympathy, tell him what to do.
    The Victorian terraced house where she lived was one of a long row, and must have been ugly and shabby even when it was first built. It looked empty, as if all the girls were out somewhere; with friends, maybe, or boyfriends, having coffee or a drink or at the cinema. Nicola wouldn’t be there, he accepted this, but one of the others might know where she was. He rang the bell, the top bell for the top floor, then rang it again.
    The window above him opened and Nicola put her head out.
    ‘Let me in, Nic. Please.’
    She smiled her beautiful Nicola smile. ‘I’m coming down.’
    It wasn’t all right, it couldn’t be that, but it was better. He knew it was better when, as soon as she had let him in and closed the front door, she took him in her arms and hugged him tightly. He felt like a small child whose mother had been cross with him for some misdemeanour, but had now forgiven him and loved him again as she used to.
     
    They went to bed. It was Judy’s bedroom, which Nicola was sharing as a temporary measure. It had one tiny window offering what Nicola described rather sardonically as ‘a magnificent view of the Marylebone Road’. The bed was a single, with a camp bed beside it. They slept, and when they woke up, Nicola produced a bottle of port she had bought at a fete in the village where she had spent the previous weekend.
    ‘It’s not me giving Stacey the stuff, is it?’ Carl said. ‘It’s selling it. That’s the problem you’ve got with it.’
    Nicola agreed. ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if you hadn’t sold it. What’s Dermot going to do? Or what do you think he’s going to do?’
    He told her about the rent. The newspapers, maybe the police, Stacey’s relatives. ‘He calls them “her loved ones”.’
    They heard the front door close and a set of footsteps on the stairs.
    ‘We’d better get up and go,’ Nicola said.
    So she was coming home with him. For a moment Carl was almost happy. Out in the street, she asked him again what he thought Dermot was going to do.
    ‘Would it be so bad if he did go to Stacey’s relatives, or even the newspapers? You keep saying that giving her the pills wasn’t against the law.’
    ‘Having sex with your friend’s wife isn’t against the law, but you still don’t want it known.’
    ‘But let’s say you tell Dermot you want the rent and he says OK, you can have it, and the consequence is that he starts telling people – newspapers, police, whatever. Can’t you face up to it? The police caution you – isn’t that the worst that can happen? You just tell everyone it’s not against the law, and in time it’ll blow over.’
    Carl was silent. Then he said very slowly, ‘I know it’s not against the law, but the national press – the print media, don’t they call it that? – will get hold of it from the
Ham and High
and the
Paddington Express
and they will say exactly what they like about me. I guess the broadsheets like the
Guardian
and the
Independent
may not be that interested – or they may be, but not in a loud screaming headline way. That’ll be for the
Sun
and the
Mail
. And they’ll run great big headlines in – oh, I don’t know, seventy- or eighty-point typeface, and they can do it because all their readers will want to know