Master of the Moor by Ruth Rendell

Author:Ruth Rendell [Rendell, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-82951-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

11

The headlights lit up the whole bedroom and made twin rivers of light run down the walls. For a while a diesel engine throbbed, then died away, though the lights remained. Lyn, who had been lying awake, thought at once of the police. She looked at her watch and saw it was a little after five, the dawn coming. The two murders and the fact that Stephen had been questioned made her think it might be the police.

She got up and went to the window. An ambulance was parked outside the Simpsons’ house and as she watched her sister came out. She wasn’t carried out, she walked, holding on to Kevin’s arm, laughing with the driver. Her labour must have begun, Lyn thought, and she laid her hands gently over her own flat stomach in the thin nightdress.

Stephen slept. Lyn watched the ambulance turn round in the horseshoe at the top of Tace Way, then move off towards the village and Hilderbridge. The sun was coming up now, spreading a flush across the milky blue sky, promising another day of heat. She lay down for another hour beside Stephen, thinking about Joanne, thinking about herself. In February, sometime about the middle of February, and perhaps also at dawn, it would be she the ambulance came for, she who walked out to it on her husband’s arm. That part she couldn’t imagine. When she saw herself holding a man’s arm it was always Nick’s arm she held. After a while she got up, went downstairs to make tea and was immediately very sick.

Stephen took the news about Joanne impassively.

‘Talking of hospitals, darling, I think I’ll just pop in and see my grandmother after work. I’ve got the poor old dear on my conscience.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Lyn asked him.

He never did want her to, she didn’t know why. ‘Lord, no, what a drag for you and in all this heat. She wouldn’t know you anyway, darling. She mixes us all up.’

‘Just as you like.’

He wanted her to be there when he wanted her, not otherwise. He was capable of leaving her for hours on end, days, but she must be there waiting when he got back. She had to be his rock, his haven, his mother. These things she had never completely understood about Stephen until she had known Nick.

Perhaps it would change when they had a child in the house. Stephen ought to be a good father, to be good with a child, he was in many ways so much a child himself still. It was as if some part of him, when he was a boy, had stopped growing. But which part? Not his strong tall body. Not his active brain. Unless it was that curious undefined object that was mentioned in the Bible or you heard old people talk about, the soul.

The dark night had been closing in on Dadda, slowly but inexorably, for some days now. He had come to Tace Way for

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