Free The Bridesmaid by Ruth Rendell Page B

because he didn’t want Glenallan Close improved. Make it more attractive and Christine—and therefore himself—might be tempted to remain there for ever. On the other hand, it would have been a different story if Christine was Mrs. Arnham, living in Chigwell, and this house had been made over to him. He would have smartened it up then, all right.
    He opened the clothes cupboard and lifted Flora out. She was still wrapped in the blue plastic bag with the split in it for her face to show through. Philip untied the knot in the bag and pulled it off over her head. He stood her in the corner by the window. It was interesting that just having her there immediately improved the look of the room. Her white marble skin seemed to gleam in the grey, rain-filtered light. He wondered if it would be possible to remove the green stain that mantled her neck and breast. Her eyes looked beyond him and her face seemed alight with pagan wisdom.
    Arnham and his wife would have missed her as soon as they looked out into their garden. Probably the neighbour would have told them as soon as they returned about the thief he had seen carrying a log-shaped bundle, and they would have put two and two together. But Philip didn’t think they would connect the removal of Flora with him. If Arnham remembered him at all, it would be as he then was, a recent student, a newly recruited Roseberry Lawn trainee, who had presented a very different appearance from the man the neighbour would have described as short-haired and wearing a suit. Arnham might even be relieved at the loss of Flora, while perhaps superstitiously unwilling to get rid of her himself. He was wondering whether to try working on that stain with paint-stripping fluid or to talk to Cheryl first, when she spoke to him from outside on the landing. They never knocked at each other’s doors, but they didn’t walk into rooms uninvited, either.
    “Phil? Are you in there?”
    He hung his Moss Brothers clothes over the chair and pushed it in front of Flora to hide her. Opening the door, he found no one there, and then Cheryl came out of her room, dressed to go out in her usual uniform, the cowgirl hat in her hand. Her hair, done that morning in soft loose curls falling from a centre parting—bridesmaid’s coiffure—looked incongruous with the heavy black eye makeup and the green star she had drawn on one cheekbone.
    “Will you do me a favour?” she said.
    The inevitable reply to that one: “Depends what it is.”
    “Would you lend me five pounds?”
    “Cheryl,” he said, “I have to tell you I saw you in the Edgware Road on Wednesday. It was around six or six-thirty. You were crying and you were sort of staggering around.”
    She stared at him, her underlip protruding.
    “I couldn’t stop, I was stuck in the traffic. You looked like you were drunk. I’ve been thinking lately you might be on drugs, but you looked more as if you were drunk.”
    “I don’t drink,” she said. “Don’t you notice anything about people? Couldn’t you see I didn’t even drink that fizzy stuff at the wedding? A glass of wine is enough to knock me sideways.” She laid her hand on his arm. “Will you lend me five pounds? I’ll give it back to you tomorrow.”
    “It’s not the money,” he said, though of course up to a point it was. He had very little spare cash. “It’s not the money that’s the trouble. But what do you mean, I can have it back tomorrow? Tomorrow’s Sunday. How are you going to get money on a Sunday?” She was gazing at him, her eyes glaring with a kind of desperate intensity. “Cheryl, how do you get money? Where does it come from?”
    “You sound like a policeman,” she said. “Just like a policeman would question a person.”
    He said unhappily, “I think I’ve got a sort of right to ask you.”
    “I don’t. I’m over eighteen. I’m as much an adult as you are. I can vote.”
    “That’s got nothing to do with it.”
    “Please,” she said, “please just lend