Free The Keys to the Street by Ruth Rendell

artificial shudder. The bag lady told him to fuck off and gave him instructions about the kind of sexual activity he and his dogs might mutually engage in. Bean thought it a pity that the cleaning up of London, begun some three years before, had not included purging the streets of dossers, beggars, and foul-mouthed slags.
    Before returning him to Mr. and Mrs. Barker-Pryce in St. Andrew’s Place, Bean took a photograph of Charlie the golden retriever. He was a handsome dog and made quite a picture standing there, head raised, tail up, in the sunshine. Charlie’s owner answered the door himself, cigar in hand. Mr. Barker-Pryce was a Member of Parliament for some London constituency and it was a wonder how he managed in the House of Commons chamber, having to go without his cigars for maybe a whole two hours. Bean and the borzoi proceeded on alone to Park Square. Here Bean used his key to let himself into the gardens in the center of the square.
    These gardens, nothing to look at from the street, a wire fence, a scrubby (but impenetrable) hedge, the tops of trees, are a park themselves when you get inside. They might be the grounds of some great country house with their green lawns, curved flowerbeds, tall trees and flowering shrubs, lovely in their peace and tranquillity. Bean never noticed the beauty but he liked the exclusivity. He liked anything that put him among an elite, permitted privileges and pleasures few might enjoy. Here was an opportunity for another shot, ared blaze of flowering shrub that might serve for someone’s Christmas card. The path to the Nursemaids’ Tunnel descends in a shallow sloping curve between brick walls to the portico, which is the tunnel entrance. It gave Bean a bit of a shock to find himself not alone in the tunnel. There was someone in there, far up ahead. He would have thought nothing of this if the figure had been on the move, striding toward him or away from him, but whoever it was was leaning against the wall on the left-hand side at the Park Crescent end, holding a bottle to his lips. A street sleeper. Another of Effie’s ilk. Like most people, Bean was afraid of the street people, and particularly afraid when with one in a confined space. He was a small man, far from young, and borzois, though large dogs, bred to hunt the wolf, are fine-boned and seldom aggressive.
    Bean could have turned back. He could have gone back and crossed the Marylebone Road at the lights by Regent’s Park tube station. But he didn’t want the man with the bottle to see this happen, to see him turn tail and of course understand perfectly why he had retreated. For he, Bean, was a man of power and if he turned he would have yielded power into the hands of this dirty reject, this piece of flotsam fit for nothing but a city’s sewers. He imagined broken drunken laughter echoing down the passage, reverberating off the damp walls.
    He hadn’t much money on him but he didn’t want to lose his camera. It was a Pentax and, like so much in Bean’s possession, had once belonged to Maurice Clitheroe. If he’d only thought of it five minutes before he could have slipped the camera inside his jacket.
    How had the man got in here? They were careful with their keys, the Crown Estates. In order to obtain one you had to be a resident of the Square or the Crescent, or the adjacent terraces and mewses. He touched the camera like someone fingering an amulet, and quickly drew his hand away. He walked on, somewhat more slowly than he would have done if the man with the bottle hadn’t been there, but not so slowly as to show his fear. The borzoi took its normal delicatesteps, loping on tiptoe, but very steady in its progress.
    The light at the end showed Bean a gaunt thin figure with long black hair and a beard stained blue. A momentary flashback took him sixty years into the past and a village school in Hampshire, the teacher telling them how in the distant past the inhabitants of these islands had painted their bodies