Piranha to Scurfy by Ruth Rendell Page B

must have led him on, encouraged him. Now it was a crime,
his
crime. She read about it in the papers, saw about things called helplines on television, and counseling and specially trained women police officers. This was to avoid your being marked for life, traumatized, though you could never forget.
    That was true, that last part, though she had forgotten for weeks on end, months. And then, always, she had seen him again. It came of living in the country, in a small town, it came of her living there and his going on living there. Once she saw him in a shop, once out in the street; another time he got on a bus as she was getting off it. He always winked. He didn’t say anything, just looked at her and winked.
    Elsie had looked like Deanna Durbin. The resemblance was quite marked. They were about the same age, born in the same year. Jean remembered how they had talked about it, she and Elsie and Christine-Kathleen, as they left the cinema and the others walked with her to the bus stop. Elsie wanted to know what you had to do to get a screen test and the other girl said it would help to be in Hollywood, not Yorkshire. Both of them lived in town, a five minutes’ walk away, and Elsie said she could stay the night if she wanted. But there was no way of letting her parents know. Elsie’s had a phone but hers didn’t.
    Deanna Durbin was still alive, Jean had read somewhere. She wondered if she still looked like Elsie or if she had had her face lifted and her hair dyed and gone on diets. Elsie’s face was plump and soft, very wrinkled about the eyes, and her hair was white and thin. She smiled faintly in her sleep and gave a little snore. Jean moved her chair closer and took hold of Elsie’s hand. That made the smile come back, but Elsie didn’t wake.
    The Beast had come along in his car about ten minutes after the girls had gone and Jean was certain the bus wasn’t coming. It was the last bus, and she hadn’t known what to do. This had happened before—the driver just hadn’t turned up and had got the sack for it, but that hadn’t made the bus come. On that occasion she had gone to Elsie’s and Elsie’s mother had phoned her parents’ next-door neighbors. She thought that if she did that a second time and put Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings to all that trouble, her dad would probably stop her from going to the pictures ever again.
    It wasn’t dark. At midsummer it wouldn’t get dark till after ten. If it had been she mightn’t have gone with the Beast. Of course he didn’t seem like a Beast then but young, a boy really, and handsome and quite nice. And it was only five miles. Mr. Rawlings was always saying five miles was nothing, he used to walk five miles to school every day and five miles back. But she couldn’t face the walk and, besides, she wanted a ride in a car. It would only be the third time she had ever been in one. Still, she would have refused his offer if he hadn’t said what he had when she’d told him where she lived.
    “You’ll know the Rawlings then. Mrs. Rawlings is my sister.”
    It wasn’t true, but it sounded true. She got in beside him. The car wasn’t really his—it belonged to the man he worked for; he was a chauffeur—but she found that out a lot later.
    “Lovely evening,” he said. “You been gallivanting?”
    “I’ve been to the pictures,” she said.
    After a couple of miles he turned a little way down a lane and stopped the car outside a derelict cottage. It looked as if no one could possibly live there but he said he had to see someone, it would only take a minute, and she could come too. By now it was dusk but there were no lights on in the cottage. She remembered that he was Mrs. Rawlings’s brother. There must have been a good ten years between them, but that hadn’t bothered her. Her own sister was ten years older than she was.
    She followed him up the path, which was overgrown with weeds and brambles. Instead of going to the front door, he led her around the back, where old