Free Talking to Strange Men by Ruth Rendell Page B

up to tell him the call was for him. Mungo thought someone must be ill, even dying, for his people actually to phone him at school. He got up quickly, starting in the direction of the housemaster’s flat.
    A shrill whisper: ‘The phone in the common room!’
    â€˜I don’t believe it.’
    The whisperer shrugged.
    â€˜Who is it, for God’s sake?’ Mungo said.
    â€˜They wouldn’t say. They sounded scared shitless.’
    Half a dozen men were sitting round the TV but they weren’t looking at it. They were all looking at the receiver of the phone, lying there resting on the pay box. When it rang it must have shaken them more than the fire bell would have, Mungo thought. He’d never forget picking up that receiver, quite mystified, and a squeaky kid’s voice that hadn’t even started breaking said:
    â€˜I’m called Charles Mabledene. I want to come over.’
    â€˜You what?’ Mungo wasn’t as on the ball then as he had become later.
    â€˜I want to defect. I could bring you something good. I could bring you Guy Parker’s code book.’
    Remembering it nine months later, Mungo smiled to himself. He was passing Mabledene’s now, the big garage that had the Volvo concession on the western side of Rostock, though the family lived ten miles out in one of the villages. Charles had found a new drop for them, in a tree on the vacant lot next to his father’s car wash. It might be wise not to keep on too long with the flyover one, especially remembering the watcher he had seen or thought he had seen last time he was down here.
    This was only the second light evening. At midnight on Saturday the clocks had gone forward. It wasn’t cold but mild and damp, visibility poor, giving to this deserted place an air of mystery. Moisture lay on the flight of stone steps that ran down to the embankment and yellow light from the pub windows made it gleam. Mungo went up the steps from the river, crossing the place where that girl had been strangled, up Bread Lane this time, the steepish hill that wound between high brick walls with broken glass on top. Easter Monday and the flyover seemed to shake under the weight of traffic, cars going northwards tonight, returning from holiday resorts. But underneath all was still, shadowed, undisturbed. Mungo saw the king cat’s eyes, points of green fire, before his fur was visible. He crossed the road and put out his hand but the animal twisted away and slid under one of the stunted bushes.
    A folded piece of paper in a plastic envelope was taped inside the central upright, fixed there at the level of Mungo’s chin, which would just about be head height for Basilisk. It came away very easily, Mungo thought, almost too easily. The tape peeled off as if it had already been unstuck once since Basilisk put it there.
    I wonder if I am imagining things, Mungo said to himself as he put the message into his pocket.

8
    JOHN CREEVEY WAS sixteen when he first noticed his sister was ugly. She must have been eleven. He was doing his homework – writing an essay about the War of the Spanish Succession, funny how you remember these things – when she came into the living room to tell him something about a cake. A birthday cake, that was it, so it must have been her eleventh birthday. She came to tell him tea was ready in the dining room and her cake was on the table with its eleven candles. He looked up and seemed for some reason to see her face for the first time. Perhaps it was because she surprised him, he hadn’t heard her come in. He saw her bulging forehead that seemed to overhang her eyebrows, her cheeks as round as apples, her snub nose and sickle mouth. She was ugly and he had never noticed it before.
    He loved Cherry and she loved him. In their family they all loved each other, they were happy, they were content with each other’s company. Perhaps appearances didn’t matter much to them. For himself John