Free A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell Page A

anyone could see and feel what the weather was and was going to be. She went downstairs and fetched herself jam sandwiches and a block of chocolate ice cream. At eight o’clock her favourite programme of the entire week was due to begin, a series about policemen in Los Angeles. It is hard to say why Eunice loved it so much. Certainly she confounded those analysts of escape channels who say that an audience must identify. Eunice couldn’t identify with the young police lieutenant or his twenty-year-old blonde girl friend or with the gangsters, tycoons, film stars, call girls, gamblers, and drunks, who abounded in each adventure. Perhaps it was the clipped harsh repartee she liked, the inevitable car chase and the indispensable shooting. It had irked her exceedingly to miss an episode as she had often done in the past, the Coverdales seeming deliberately to single out Friday as their entertaining night.
    There was no one to disturb her this time. She laid down her knitting the better to concentrate. It was going to be a good story tonight, she could tell that from the opening sequence, a corpse in the first two minutes and a car chase in the first five. The gunman’s car crashed, half mounting a lamppost. The car door opened, the gunman leapt out, across the street, firing his gun, dodging a policeman’s bullets, into the shelter of a porch, pulling a frightened girl in front of him as his shield, again taking aim.… Suddenly the sound faded and the picture began to dwindle, to shrink, as it was sucked into a spot in the centre ofthe screen like black water draining into a hole. The spot shone like a star, a tiny point of light that burned brightly and went out.
    Eunice switched it off, switched it on again. Nothing happened. She moved knobs on the front of it and even those knobs on the back they said you should never touch. Nothing happened. She opened the plug and checked that the wires were all where they ought to be. She took out the fuse and replaced it with one from her bedlamp.
    The screen remained blank, or rather, had become merely a mirror, reflecting her own dismayed face and the hot red sunset burning through a chink between the closed curtains.

8
    It never occurred to her to use the colour set in the morning room. She knew it was usable, but it was
theirs
. A curious feature of Eunice Parchman’s character was that, although she did not stop at murder or blackmail, she never in her life stole anything or even borrowed anything without its owner’s consent. Objects, like spheres of life, were appointed, predestined, to certain people. Eunice no more cared to see the order of things disturbed than George did.
    For a while she hoped that the set would right itself, start up as spontaneously as it had failed. But each time she switched it on it remained blank and silent. Of course she knew that when things went wrong you sent for the man to put them right. In Tooting you went round to the ironmonger’s or the electric people. But here? With only a phone and an indecipherable list of names and numbers, a useless incomprehensible directory?
    Saturday, Sunday, Monday. The milkman called and Geoff Baalham with the eggs. Ask them and have them tell her to look such and such a number up in the phone book? She was cruelly bored and frustrated. There were no neighbours to pass the time of day with, no busy street to watch, no buses or tea shops. She took down the curtains, washed and ironed them, washed paintwork, shampooed the carpets, anything to pass the slow, heavy, lumbering time.
    It was Eva Baalham, arriving on Wednesday, who discovered what had happened, simply as a result of asking Eunice if she had watched the big fight on the previous evening. And Eva onlyasked that for something to say, talking to Miss Parchman being a sticky business at the best of times.
    “Broke down?” said Eva. “I reckon you’ll have to have that seen to then. My cousin Meadows that keeps the electric shop in Sudbury, he’d do