Talking to Strange Men by Ruth Rendell

home they had all read books or magazines at mealtimes if they had wanted to and it hadn’t seemed anti-social or rude. At home – John realized the phrase he had used. Wasn’t this home then? Wasn’t this the very same house? Home is where the people you love are, he thought, the people who love you.
    He opened
The Other Side of Silence
and read the opening lines. ‘The snow lay thick on the steps and the snowflakes driven by the wind looked black in the headlights of the cars.’ Almost mechanically, because he did it with every book he started, he began placing the alphabet against the letters. Not in the book itself, of course, but in his notebook, using a pencil. He took a mouthful of egg on toast. A would be T, B would be H, C would be E, DS, EN, FO, GW, HL. . . . It was going to work out – or was it?
    The first word in the coded message he had copied from the pillar at cats’ green when he saw the very tall young man was HCRKTABIE. If you used the first lines of
The Other Side of Silence
, that came out as LEVIATHAN. Well, ‘Leviathan’ was a word or at any rate a name. ‘To Basilisk’, it continued. There followed ‘Take Sterns Childers.’ John had a vague idea ‘childers’ might be old-fashioned or dialectEnglish for children. ‘Take Sterns Childers’ didn’t seem to mean anything.
    Never mind. He had more coded messages in the notebook, including the one he had found last night. Feeling disproportionately excited, he began matching letters in this message against letters in those first lines. The results were more comprehensible. The second message when deciphered read: ‘Leviathan to Basilisk and Unicorn. Fifty-three Ruxeter Road stays as safe house.’ He tried other messages, those picked up in January and February but here he could not break the code. Nevertheless, John had that feeling common to all humanity in his sort of situation. He had triumphed and now he wanted to tell someone about it. The person he would best liked to tell was Jennifer. He got as far as the phone and dialling the first three digits of Colin’s number instead, and then he put the receiver back, asking himself if he wanted to share this with anyone. A more satisfactory thing might be to go to fifty-three Ruxeter Road and see what those people meant by a ‘safe house’.
    By now it was dark outside but how much did that matter? It might be better in the dark. He could go up there on the Honda. Across Alexandra Bridge, he thought, and up Nevin Street which after a time became Ruxeter Road. He got into his motorcycle leathers, black and heavier than Jennifer’s soft blue jacket.
    As he turned into Berne Road he felt the sting of a raindrop on his face. He would regret this adventure if the rain came on like it had last night, he thought. Adventure it was, though. He wondered what he was getting himself into. Nothing presumably that he couldn’t pull out of again. There had been a lot in the papers and on television lately about drugs and it sometimes seemed to John as if everybody except himself had taken drugs at some time or other. To hear them and read about them you’d think the whole nation was permanently stupefied by dope and crack. What if these people he had got on to were involved with drugs? What if that was what they were up to and why they needed this code and these messages? They might be drug dealers and drug pushers, what was called a narcotics ring.
    The wind had dropped and the river lay calm and flat witha dark oily surface. At the other end of the bridge the street narrowed, passing under the cathedral walls, then between tall office blocks, widening into Nevin Square where behind green lawns and a fountain that never played after six p.m. stood the city hall. The clock on St Stephen’s Cathedral struck an uncounted number of strokes. There were few people about, few cars. On the pedestal of the statue of Lysander