02 A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell (as Barbara Vine)

Author:Ruth Rendell (as Barbara Vine) [Rendell, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

ON HER SKIN WAS a fine tracery of bluish marks, like the downy feathers of a little bird a cat has plucked. They were all over the tops of her thighs and the iliac crest and faintly on the flat stomach. More than feathers, they looked like silk where, through stretching, the weft has been compressed to expose the warp. One day they would fade and bleach white, but that had not yet happened and they would never go away entirely. Rufus had twice made love to Zosie before he saw the marks, once in the back of the van and once in the bed in the Centaur Room (erstwhile scene of placid slumbrous nights enjoyed by Lewis and Beryl Verne-Smith), but it was not until the third night that he actually looked at her naked body. She lay waiting for him like a sacrificial victim, and though she was silent her whole attitude, supine, receptive, patient, uttered to him: I will do anything you want, I am yours—or not, I know I must pay for my board and lodging and for sanctuary and this is one way I know how to do that.

It was scarcely provocative. Rufus, however, did not much care about this, but about what the marks signified he did, and as he stood there he thought about what involvement might mean and about his future career and the risks he was taking—had indeed already taken—and instead of getting into bed with Zosie he took a pillow from the bed and one of the blankets he had long discarded and dumped on the floor, and departed for the terrace.

That was before she stole the silver bracelet, for that was what she had done a few days before Shiva and Vivien came. While they were in the back of the shop in Friar Street selling the fish knives and the sauceboats Zosie had helped herself to the bracelet from a display table of jewelry. Because she looked somewhat disreputable in the pillowcase, she had bought jeans and a T-shirt with the tenner she nicked out of Adam’s pocket, taken the bracelet to a dealer in Gainsborough Street, and sold it for forty pounds.

Of course it was all of a piece, all understandable. Rufus had watched it, wondering what Zosie would do next. It had been a case history for him and he had even thought of writing it up. The pattern of the stealing had been so interesting, not meaningless kleptomania any of it, but calculated thieving of salable goods or edible items. The food had been produced so proudly to be stowed in the back of Goblander as any henchman of Robin Hood might have robbed for the poor.

Until the incident of the little boy, of course. And that, or something very like it, might have been predicted. Well, something very like it had happened.

A woman of mystery, he had called her. Zosie as woman was an almost laughable concept. She was a child. And yet of course she was not; she was in some ways older than any of them.

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