The Secret House of Death by Ruth Rendell

alone.’
    He didn’t know what to do. On the one hand, she was a widow, young, poor, her husband dead only days before. No decent man could abandon her. He had already abandoned the husband, and the husband had killed himself. But on the other hand, there was her outrageous behaviour, the clumsy seduction attempt. There was nothing cynical in concluding her offer of a meal was just eyewash. But was he justified in leaving her? He was a grown man, reasonably experienced; he could protect himself, and under the peculiar circumstances, do so with tact. Above all, he wondered why he need protect himself. Was she a nymphomaniac, or so unhinged by shock as to be on the edge of a mental breakdown? He wasn’t so vain as to suppose against all previous evidence to the contrary, that women were spontaneously and violently attracted to him. The wild notion that he might suddenly have developed an irresistible sex appeal crossed his mind to be immediately dismissed as fantastic.
    â€˜I don’t know, Magdalene,’ he said doubtfully. They passed the prison or barrack wall and they passed the lighted cinema. There was a long bus queue at the stop by the park. David heard himself let out a small sound, a gasp, a stifled exclamation. His hands went damp and slithered on the wheel. Bernard Heller stood at the tail of the queue, reading his evening paper.
    Of course, it wasn’t Bernard. This man was even bigger and heavier, his face more ox-like, less intelligent than Bernard’s. If David hadn’t already been jumpy and bewildered he would have known at once it was the twin brother, Carl who had borrowed the slide pojector. But they were uncannily alike. The resemblance made David feel a bit sick.
    He pulled the car in alongside the queue and Carl Heller lumbered into the back. Magdalene had gone rather pale. She introduced them snappily, her accent more pronounced.
    â€˜David’s going to have dinner with me, Carl.’ She added as if she had a part-share in the car and more than a part-share in David, ‘We’ll drop you off first.’
    â€˜I can’t stay for dinner, Magdalene,’ David said firmly. The presence of Bernard’s twin both discomfited him and gave him strength. Here were capable hands in which he could safely leave the girl. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know where you live.’
    Magdalene said something that sounded like Copenhagen Street and she had begun on a spate of directions when David felt a heavy hand, grotesquely like the comedy scene hand of the law, lower itself on to his shoulder and rest there.
    â€˜She’s in no fit state for company tonight, Mr Chadwick.’ The voice was more guttural than Bernard’s. There was more in that sentence than a polite way of telling someone he wasn’t wanted. David heard in it self-appointed ownership, pride, sorrow and—yes, perhaps jealousy. ‘I’ll look after her,’ Carl said. ‘That’s what my poor brother would have wanted. She’s had a bad day, but she’s got me.’
    David thought he had never heard anyone speak so ponderously, so slowly. The English was correct and idiomatic, yet it sounded like a still difficult foreign tongue. You would grow so bored, exasperated even, if you had to listen to this man talking for long.
    Magdalene had given up. She said no more until they reached Hengist House. Whatever she had been trying on, she had given it up.
    â€˜Thanks for the lift.’
    â€˜I’m glad I saw you,’ David said untruthfully. Carl’s face was Bernard’s, unbearably pathetic, dull with grief, and David heard himself say in a useless echo of his words to the dead man, ‘Look, if there’s anything I can do . . .’
    â€˜No one can do anything.’ The same answer, the same tone. Then Carl said, ‘Time will do it.’
    Magdalene lagged back. ‘Good night, then,’ David said. He watched Carl take her arm,