The Water's Lovely by Ruth Rendell Page A

says. You came with us but you didn’t come into the shop. You waited outside while Issy tried things on.” Heather shrugged, she said, “I was with you. It’s simpler that way, isn’t it?” And that was all. That was all she said and all she’s ever said. Theinspector with the bird name and the other one came and said there would be an inquest. They believed everything we said, the nice and sensible but distraught widow, her well-behaved teenage daughters. We said what we’d rehearsed saying.
    â€˜My mother and I knew we should tell the police the truth – what we both thought, that is – but we couldn’t. This was Heather, her daughter, my sister. My mother had lost her husband, a man she’d loved, at any rate when they were first married she’d loved him, but Heather was more important to her. Far more. We both understood by then why she had done it. My mother said she half knew, she guessed, about Guy and me. She had seen things. “You should have told me,” she said and she sounded very angry. I said nothing. What could I have said to his wife? She had considered separating herself from Guy but she hadn’t yet said a word to him and now it was too late. If she’d left him – or turned him out; it was her house after all – if she’d done that he’d be alive and Heather not guilty of anything. We never told anyone. We agonised over it, separately and together. We wept together. If it’s possible for grief and horror to turn someone’s brain, and all those old dramas and operas and whatever said it was, this turned my mother’s.’
    She stopped there. All this wasn’t necessary. He only had to know, if it ever came to this, the basics of what Heather had done. No need to tell him about the inquest and the verdict of accidental death, the bruises on Guy’s ankles dismissed as due to some other cause. No one but Guy, after all, had been in the house at the time. Beatrix had been out shopping with her two daughters. They had all returned home together.
    And Heather? How had she and her mother confronted Heather? The answer was that they hadn’t. Beatrix manifested signs of schizophrenia after a yearhad passed and slipped away into madness. Ismay never again mentioned the way Guy had died, already afraid that Heather might come out with it and tell her the truth. Much as she wanted to know, she was afraid of Heather telling her. She couldn’t imagine a situation in which she asked Heather straight out and Heather said, yes, she had. Yes, she’d drowned Guy. To save Ismay from being raped by Guy. Not so much from dislike, hatred even, but to save her beloved sister from her stepfather.
    And Heather seemed just the same afterwards as she had been before – but perhaps not quite the same. Calmer, quieter, steadier, the kind of person you would tell your fears to and know they would be safe with her and stay hidden. Not a gorgon, as Andrew described her, but a quiet, reposeful woman who seemed older than her years, the woman Edmund loved so much.

CHAPTER 7
    The temporary hiding place Ismay found for the tape was in the bottom of a ceramic pot under the dry roots of a cactus. The cactus had vicious thorns instead of prickles and putting the tape in there made her fingers bleed. She scratched them again two days later when she decided the hiding place wasn’t safe, moved it out and put it inside a case that had originally contained a cartridge of Indian classical music. It wasn’t long since she’d been mad about the sitar and the tabla but most of her collection was on CDs. This tape was Aashish Khan’s
Rainy Season Ragas
, which no one in this flat was remotely likely to want to listen to. She put it on the shelf where all the other tapes were, between Mozart’s Flute and Harp Concerto and the Spice Girls.
    Skipping home from work, Marion found Fowler in the flat. He was always losing