The Lake of Darkness
Read The Lake of Darkness Online
Authors: Ruth Rendell
Ruth Rendell
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“Ruth Rendell is, unequivocally, the most brilliant mystery novelist of our time. Her stories are a lesson in a human nature as capable of the most exotic love as it is of the cruelest murder. She does not avert her gaze and magnificently triumphs in a style that is uniquely hers and mesmerizing.”
—Patricia Cornwell
“It’s no use trying to read Ruth Rendell’s mind. You can follow her logic, analyze her insights and puzzle out her plots. But she’ll always astonish you… with the emotional depth of her psychological mysteries.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Ruth Rendell is a master of the form.”
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The Washington Post Book World
“No one writes with more devastating accuracy about the world we live in and commit sin in today.… She is one of our most important novelists.”
—John Mortimer
“Undoubtedly one of the best writers of English mysteries and chiller—killer plots.”
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Los Angeles Times
“Rendell’s prose, the psychological verity of her dialogue and her attention to telling details carry us through a whirlwind of adventure in a pretty unpleasant society that just may be a microcosm of our own.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“If there were a craft guild for writers, I’d apprentice myself to Ruth Rendell.”
—Sue Grafton
“Rendell’s expert plotting will keep you up late turning the pages.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“The appeal of a Rendell novel is in the details and the human observations.… With an unerring sense of how to build a mystery, Rendell proves that time has done no harm to her reputation as one of the leading writers of modern crime fiction.”
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Houston Chronicle
“One of the best concoctors of plots since the early Agatha Christie.”
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Daily Telegraph
(London)
“No one can take you so totally into the recesses of the human mind as does Ruth Rendell.”
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The Christian Science Monitor
“Rendell’s vision of human behavior is intensely moral and often uncompromising. In an age of victimhood, this is as bracing as it is courageous.”
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Sunday Times
(London)
“The best mystery writer anywhere in the English-speaking world.”
—
The Boston Globe
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The Lake
of Darkness
Ruth Rendell is the recipient of three Edgar Awards, four Gold Daggers, the Commander of the British Empire Award, and the most prestigious Edgar of them all, the Grand Master Award. She lives in London.
AVAILABLE IN VINTAGE CRIME / BLACK LIZARD
A Demon in My View
The Fallen Curtain
Harm Done
A Judgement in Stone
Murder Being Once Done
No More Dying Then
One Across, Two Down
Shake Hands Forever
A Sleeping Life
Some Lie and Some Die
Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness
…
King Lear
Scorpio is metaphysics, putrefaction and death, regeneration, passion, lust and violence, insight and profundity; inheritance, loss, occultism, astrology, borrowing and lending, others… possessions. Scorpians are magicians, astrologers, alchemists, surgeons, bondsmen, and undertakers. The gem for Scorpio is the snakestone, the plant the cactus; eagles and wolves and scorpions are its creatures, its body part is the genitals, its weapon the Obligatory Pain, and its card in the Tarot is Death.
Finn shared his birthday, November 16, with the Emperor Tiberius. He had been told by a soothsayer, who was a friend of his mother’s whom she had met in the mental hospital, that he would live to a great age and die by violence.
On the morning of his birthday, his twenty-sixth, one of Kaiafas’ children came round with the money in a parcel. He knocked on Finn’s door. Someone downstairs must have let him into the house. They didn’t know it was his birthday, Finn realised that. It was just a coincidence. He undid the parcel and checked that it contained what it should contain—£2,500 in ten-pound notes. Now it had arrived he had better get on with things, he might as well start now.
It was too early to go up to Lena. She liked to sleep late in the mornings. Not that she would mind his waking her on his birthday; she would like it, she would expect it almost. But he wouldn’t just the same. He tucked the money safely away and went downstairs.
Finn was very tall and thin and pale. He was near to
being an albino but was saved by the watery grey colour that stained the pupils of his eyes. It was remarkable that eyes of such an insipid shade should be so piercing and so bright, like polished silver. His hair, when he was a child, had been white-blond but had now faded to the neutral greyish-beige of cardboard. He had a face that was quite ordinary and unmemorable, but this was not true of his eyes. Under a longish PVC jacket he wore blue denims, a checked Viyella shirt, a black-velvet waistcoat, and round his neck one of those scarves that Greek women wear, black and triangular and sewn along one side with small gold coins. He carried a tool box of laminated blue metal. Finn had a smallish head on a thin, delicate-looking neck and his wrists and ankles and feet were small, but his pale hands were almost preternaturally large with an extravagant span.
His van, a small, pale grey, plain van, was parked in front of the house in Lord Arthur Road. You might call it Kentish Town or Tufnell Park or Lower Holloway. There were some curious houses, mini-Gothic with step gables, fat Victorian red brick, great grey barns with too many bays for grace or comfort, and small, narrow, flat-fronted places, very old, and covered in a skin of pale green peeling plaster. Finn wasn’t interested in architecture, he could have lived just as easily in a cave or a hut as in his room. He unlocked the van and got in and drove up past Tufnell Park Station, up Dartmouth Park Hill towards the southernmost part of Hampstead Heath.
It was nine-fifteen. He drove under the bridge at Gospel Oak Station, up into Savernake Road, which skirted Parliament Hill Fields, and on the corner of Modena Road he parked the van. From there he could keep the house Kaiafas owned under observation. He sat at the wheel, watching the three-storey house of plum-coloured brick.
The Frazers were the first to go out. They left together, arm in arm. Next came Mrs. Ionides, five minutes afterwards.
Finn didn’t care about them, they didn’t count. He wanted to be sure of Anne Blake, who quite often took a day off and had told Finn she “worked at home.”
However, she emerged from the front door at exactly nine-thirty and set off the way the others had for the station. As a trusted handyman Finn was in possession of a key to the house in Modena Road, and with this he let himself in. His entering as the agent or servant of the landlord was perfectly legitimate, though some of the things he intended to do there were not.
Kaiafas’ sister had the ground-floor flat and the Frazers the next one up. The Frazers had accepted £2,000 from Kaiafas and had agreed to move out at the end of the month. Mrs. lonides would do anything Kaiafas told her, and now he had told her she must go back to nurse their aged father in Nicosia. With vacant possession, the house would sell for sixty, maybe seventy thousand pounds. Kaiafas had asked estate agents about that, and he had watched prices rising and soaring as houses just like his had been sold. The one next door, identical to his, had fetched sixty in August. The house agent smiled and shook his head and said that had been vacant possession, though, hadn’t it? Kaiafas had told Finn all about it, that was how he knew.
He let himself into Mrs. Ionides’ hall and thence into her living room where one of the window sash cords had broken a day or so ago. He fitted a new sash cord, and then he went upstairs to see what could be done about the coping over the bay window that Mrs. Frazer said let water in. This occupied him till lunchtime.
He had brought his own lunch with him in an earthenware pot. Not for him the black tea and hamburgers and chips and eggs and processed peas of the workmen’s cafe. In the pot was fruit roughly cut up with bran and yoghurt. Finn ate a piece of dark brown bread and drank the contents of a half-pint can of pineapple juice. Pineapple was not only his favourite fruit but his favourite of all flavours.
After lunch he sat cross-legged on the carpet and began his daily session of meditation. Presently he felt himself levitate until he rose almost up to the ceiling from where he could look through the top of the Frazers’ window at the bright green escarpment of Hampstead Heath rising against a cold, sallow, faintly ruffled sky.
Meditation always refreshed him. He could feel a wonderful sensation of energy streaming down his arms and crackling like electricity out of his fingertips. His aura was probably very strong and bright, but he couldn’t see auras like Lena and Mrs. Gogarty could, so it was no good looking in the glass. He took his tool box and climbed the last remaining flight of stairs. Unlike the Frazers and Mrs. Ionides, Anne Blake had given no permission for Kaiafas or his agent or servant to enter her flat that day, but Kaiafas made a point of retaining a key. Finn unlocked Anne Blake’s front door, went in and closed it after him. The hall walls were papered in a William Morris design of king-cups and water hawthorn on a blue ground, and the carpet was hyacinth-blue Wilton. Anne Blake had been living there since before Kaiafas bought the house, ten or twelve years now, and she wouldn’t leave even for a bigger bribe than Kaiafas was giving the Frazers. She had told Kaiafas she wouldn’t leave for twenty thousand and he couldn’t make her. The law was on her side. He could have the flat, she said, over her dead body.
Finn smiled faintly in the dimness of the hall.
He opened the cupboard between the bathroom door and the door of the living room and took out a pair of lightweight aluminium steps. They were so light that a child could have lifted them above his head on one hand. Finn took them into the bathroom.
The bathroom was small, no more than eight feet by six, and over one end of the bath, in the ceiling, was a trapdoor into the loft. But for this trap-door, Finn would have had to choose some other method. He set up the steps and
then he went into the bedroom. Here was the same blue carpet, the walls painted silver-grey. There was no central heating in the house in Modena Road and each tenant had his or her own collection of gas and electric heating appliances. Anne Blake had an electric wall heater in her kitchen, a gas fire in her living room, a portable electric fire in her bedroom, and no heating at all in her bathroom. Finn plugged in the portable electric fire, switched it on, and when he saw the two parallel bar elements begin to glow, switched it off again and unplugged it.
He climbed the aluminium steps and pushed up the trapdoor, a torch in his left hand. The loft housed a water tank and a good deal of the sort of discarded equipment that has become unusable but cannot quite be called rubbish. Finn had been up there before, once when a pipe had frozen and once to get out on to the roof itself, and he had a fair idea of what he would find. He was observant and he had a good memory. He trod carefully on the joists, shining his torch, searching among the corded bundles of the
National Geographic
magazine, the ranks of glass jars, an aged Remington typewriter, rolls of carpet cut-offs, flatiron and trivet, chipped willow pattern dinner plates, until he found what he was looking for. An electric ring.
