Free The Lake of Darkness by Ruth Rendell Page B

couldn’t use stairs. Footsteps passed across the bridge and went on towards Savernake Road. The rain had returned now to all the force of its former intensity. Finn stepped out into it and let it wash him clean.
    He also washed the hammer in the rain. Once back in the van, he stripped off his plastic tunic and rolled it up into a ball. Underneath he was perfectly clean and fairly dry. He replaced his hammer in the tool box and fastened the lid. The gas fire would still be on in Anne Blake’s flat, might very likely remain on all night, but it wouldn’t burn the house down.
    The problem was to get rid of the contents of the handbag, particularly the cheque-book and the credit cards. Finn drove home. It was still only seven, the rain falling steadily as if, having at last found a satisfactory rhythm, it meant to stick to it. Because of the rain he put the van away in the garage he rented in Somerset Grove, an old coach-house with bits of rotting harness still hanging on the walls.
    With Lena was Mrs. Gogarty, the friend who had predicted for Finn a violent death in old age. The two of them were intent upon the pendulum. A white-and-pink baby’s shawl with a scalloped edge had been thrown over the birdcage. Mrs. Gogarty was as fat as Lena was thin, with abundant hair dyed a stormy dark red.
    “Well, well,” said Finn, “you
are
cosy. Can I have a lend of a pair of scissors?”
    Lena, looking in the mauve dress and yards of stole like the appropriate one of the Three Fates, handed him the Woolworth scissors with which she picked and snipped at her daily finds.
    “He’s a lovely boy, your boy,” said Mrs. Gogarty, who made this remark every time the three of them met. “The picture of devotion.”
    Finn managed to palm his mother’s reading glasses off the top of a chest of drawers where they nestled among some half-burnt candles and incense sticks and pieces of abalone shell. He went down to his own room where he cut up the notes and the cheque-book and the credit cards into very small pieces. The tin from which he had eaten pineapple chunks at lunchtime was now quite dry inside. Finn put the pieces of paper and card into the empty tin and applied a match. It took several more matches to get it going and keep it going, but at last Anne Blake’s twenty-six pounds and her Westminster Bank cheque-book were reduced to a fine black ash. The American Express and Access cards were less destructible, but they too went black and emitted a strong chemical smell.
    Re-entering his mother’s room, Finn dropped the glasses and trod on them. This made Mrs. Gogarty scream out and jump up and down, jerking her arms, which was what she did whenever anything the slightest bit untoward happened. Lena was too much occupied in calming her down to say anything about the glasses; she diverted her with the pendulum as one diverts a child with a rattle.
    Finn promised to get the glasses repaired as soon as he could. He would go into the optician’s first thing tomorrow, he said. In the meantime, had she noticed the rain coming in over her gas stove? Better put a bowl there, and the first moment he got he’d, be out on that roof.
    “Devotion itself,” gasped Mrs. Gogarty.
    The pendulum rotated, widdershins and swiftly.

VII
    The snow, which had been falling for most of the afternoon, had changed to rain when Martin drove across the Archway Road and began searching for a place to park. Southwood Lane was hopeless and so was the narrow congested curve of Hillside Gardens. He finally left the car in one of the roads up behind Highgate Police Station and walked back to the crossroads, wondering if he might be too late to catch Bloomers open, although it was only ten to six.
    During the week-end he had asked himself several times why he should bother to call at the shop when he was sure it must have been the Bhavnani family who had sent those flowers. Anyway, did it matter particularly who had sent them? Of course, if he knew, he could write a