Talking to Strange Men by Ruth Rendell Page B

two John doubted if he had come to the right place. But this was Ruxeter Road and Pentecost Villas were not separately numbered from the rest of the houses inthis long street. Carrying his crash helmet and visor, he walked back along Collingbourne Road to see if there might be a way in at the side but the long gardens of those grey houses were separated from the pavement by a high wall of yellow bricks unbroken by any gateway. When the wall came to an end he turned left along Fontaine Avenue. The gardens ended in a fence here and in the fence were five solid-looking gates. He could see this by the light from a series of street lamps on the opposite pavement, behind which instead of more houses was the green space called Fontaine Park. John couldn’t recall having been down here since he was about ten. He was alone in the street. As usual there was no one about, the only sign that people were in the vicinity, those inevitable parked cars.
    He tried the first gate in the fence but it was bolted as he had feared, and probably locked too. So was the next one. They all would be and that would be that. But because he had come all this way and must when he started out surely have intended to find out what this ‘safe house’ business was all about, he tried the third door. The latch yielded and it opened.
    John looked round. He looked to the right and the left and behind him but there was no one. He went into the garden and closed the gate. A wilderness met his eyes, a waste land of rough grass and sprawling shrubs, tree stumps and trees overgrown with rampant ivy. The back of the house seemed boarded up too where it wasn’t festooned with a cobweb-like creeper. As he approached it the shadow of the fence loomed up behind him, rising up the house, quelling the light, until by the time he reached it he and it were in darkness. He shouldn’t have come at night, or he should have brought a torch. But he had hardly expected something like this. What had he expected? He didn’t know.
    Down a shallow flight of steps he could just make out a door, the only door in the whole block surely that wasn’t boarded up. John had a feeling this door was painted green though he couldn’t in fact see what colour it was.
    As he went down the steps he thought, suppose the door is unlocked and I open it and go in and the whole place is a blaze of light and there are twelve men sitting at a round table and one of them gets up with a gun in his hand . . .?By the time he had thought that, he had tried the door and it yielded and he was inside. There was no light though and when he fumbled on the wall for a switch and found it and pressed it, nothing happened. It was deathly dark in there, as dark as a mine or a tomb. He didn’t even know if he was in some sort of a living room or in a kitchen. The strong smell was of mould. The dampness touched the skin of his face like cold rubber. He moved warily across a floor which had a slippery feel, realizing before he reached the far side of the room that it was hopeless. In the absence of light or access to any source of light, he could go no further.
    Anyway, there was no one here. More accustomed now to the darkness, he peered about him searching for what he thought those sort of people would leave behind them, empty bottles, cigarette stubs, half-smoked joints perhaps, though he doubted if he would recognize these. Pinned to one wall, to peeling wallpaper and squashy rotted plaster, was a sheet of paper that seemed to have writing on it. Impossible to read the writing here. He pulled it down, folded it and put it into his pocket, opened the door and went out the way he had come. Something about the garden, its desolation, its rough grass, its air of absolute neglect, reminded him of cats’ green. Only there were no cats, there was nothing alive.
    He felt curiously relieved to be out in Fontaine Avenue once more, the neat little park opposite, its hedges and trim trees lit