Tree of Hands
Authors: Ruth Rendell
Contents
Once when Benet was about fourteen she and her mother had been alone in a train carriage â and Mopsa had tried to stab her with a carving knife. It was some time since Benet had seen her mad mother. So when Mopsa arrived at the airport looking drab and colourless in a dowdy grey suit, Benet tried not to hate her. But then the tragic death of a child begins a chain of deception, kidnap and murder.
Since her first novel,
From Doon with Death
, published in 1964, Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writer's Association Gold Dagger for 1976's best crime novel with
A Demon In My View
, and the Arts Council National Book Award, genre fiction, for
The Lake of Darkness
in 1980.
In 1985 Ruth Rendell received the Silver Dagger for
The Tree of Hands
, and in 1987, writing as Barbara Vine, won her third Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for
A Dark-Adapted Eye
.
She won the Gold Dagger for
Live Flesh
in 1986, for
King Solomon's Carpet
in 1991 and, as Barbara Vine, a Gold Dagger in 1987 for
A Fatal Inversion
.
Ruth Rendell won the
Sunday Times
Literary Award in 1990, and in 1991 she was awarded the Crime Writer's Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding contributions to the genre. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 was made a Life Peer.
Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages and are also published to great acclaim in the United States.
Ruth Rendell has a son and two grandsons, and lives in London.
OMNIBUSES
Collected Short Stories
Wexford: An Omnibus
The Second Wexford Omnibus
The Third Wexford Omnibus
The Fourth Wexford Omnibus
The Fifth Wexford Omnibus
The Ruth Rendell Omnibus
The Second Ruth Rendell Omnibus
The Third Ruth Rendell Omnibus
SHORT STORIES
The Fallen Curtain
Means of Evil
The Fever Tree
The New Girl Friend
The Copper Peacock
Blood Lines
Piranha to Scurfy
NOVELLAS
Heartstones
The Thief
NON FICTION
Ruth Rendell's Suffolk
Ruth Rendell's Anthology Of the Murderous Mind
CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS
From Doon with Death
A New Lease of Death
Wolf to the Slaughter
The Best Man to Die
A Guilty Thing Surprised
No More Dying Then
Murder Being Once Done
Some Lie and Some Die
Shake Hands For Ever
A Sleeping Life
Put On by Cunning
The Speaker of Mandarin
An Unkindness of Ravens
The Veiled One
Kissing the Gunner's Daughter
Simisola
Road Rage
Harm Done
Babes in the Wood
End in Tears
Not in the Flesh
NOVELS
To Fear a Painted Devil
Vanity Dies Hard
The Secret House of Death
The Face of Trespass
A Demon in My View
A Judgment in Stone
Make Death Love Me
The Lake of Darkness
Master of the Moor
The Killing Doll
The Tree of Hands
Live Flesh
Talking to Strange Men
The Bridesmaid
Going Wrong
The Crocodile Bird
The Keys to the Street
A Sight for Sore Eyes
Adam & Eve and Pinch Me
The Rottweiler
Thirteen Steps Down
The Water's Lovely
Ruth Rendell
For Francesca, my godchild, with love
1
ONCE, WHEN BENET
was about fourteen, they had been in a train together, alone in the carriage, and Mopsa had tried to stab her with a carving knife. Threatened her with it, rather. Benet had been wondering why her mother had brought such a large handbag with her, a red one that didn't go with the clothes she was wearing. Mopsa had shouted and laughed and said wild things and then she had put the knife back in her bag. But Benet had been very frightened by then. She lost her head and pulled the emergency handle that Mopsa called the âcommunication cord'. The train stopped and there had been trouble for everyone involved and her father had been angry and grimly sad.
She had more or less forgotten it. The memory of it came back quite vividly while she was waiting for Mopsa at Heathrow. Though she had seen Mopsa many times since then, had lived under the same roof with her and seen how she could change, it was the scarved, shawled, streamered figure with its fleece of shaggy hair that she watched for as she waited behind the barrier among the tour guides with their placards, the anxious Indians, the businessmen's wives. James wanted to come out of the pushchair, he couldn't see down there and he wasn't feeling well. Benet picked him up and set him on her hip with her arm round him.
It ought to have been exciting, waiting here. There was something dramatic about the emergence of the first people from behind the wall that hid Customs, almost as if they had escaped into freedom. Benet remembered once meeting Edward here and how wonderful that first sight of him had been. All those people streaming through, all unknown, all
strangers, and then Edward, so positively and absolutely Edward that it was as if her were in colour and all the rest in black and white. Waiting for Mopsa wasn't like that. Waiting for Edward, if such a thing were conceivable, wouldn't be like that now. There was no one in her world that waiting for would be like that except James, and she couldn't see any reason why she and James should be separated. Not for years and years anyway. She dug in her bag for a tissue and wiped his nose. Poor James. He was beautiful though, he always was, even if his face was wan and his nose pink.
A couple came through, each pushing a tartan suitcase on wheels. The woman behind them held a small suitcase in one hand and a small holdall in the other. It would be hard to say which was carry-on baggage and which had been checked. The cases matched; they were of biscuit-coloured stuff you couldn't tell was plastic or leather. She was a drab colourless washed-out woman. Her pale wandering eyes rested on Benet and recognized her. It was that way round â otherwise would Benet ever have known?
Yet this was Mopsa. This was her mad mother who was kissing her, smiling and giving a dismissive wave of the hand when James, instead of responding to her, buried his face in Benet's shoulder. This was Mopsa in a dowdy grey suit, a pink silk blouse with a gold pin at the collar, her hair cut brusquely short and faded to tarnished silver.
Benet put the cases on the pushchair, using it as a baggage trolley. She carried James who snuffled and stared, round-eyed, curious, at this new unknown grandmother. Mopsa had developed a brisk springy walk. Her carriage was erect, her head held high. In the past she had sometimes slouched, sometimes danced, swanned and swayed in her Isadora Duncan moods, but she had never walked briskly like an ordinary woman. Or perhaps she did when I was very young, thought Benet, trying to remember a girl-mother of twenty years before. It was too long ago. All she could recall now was how she had longed for a normal mother like other girls had and took for granted. Now
when she was twenty-eight and it no longer mattered, it seemed she had one. She stopped herself staring. She asked after her father.
âHe's fine. He sent his love.'
âAnd you really like living in Spain?'
âI don't say it hasn't its drawbacks but Dad hasn't had a sign of his asthma in three years. It keeps me fit too.' Mopsa smiled cheerfully as if her own illness had been no more than a kind of asthma. She talked like one of those neighbours in Edgware had talked. Like Mrs Fenton, Benet thought, like a middle-aged housewife. âI feel a fraud coming here for these tests,' Mopsa said. âThere's nothing wrong with me any more, I said, but they said it wouldn't do any harm and why not have a holiday? Well, I'm on holiday all the time really, aren't I? Are we going in the tube? It must be seven or eight years since I went in the tube.'
âI've brought the car,' said Benet.
In her teens, she used sometimes to say over and over to herself, I must not hate my mother. The injunction had not always been obeyed. And then she would say, But she's ill, she can't help it, she's mad. She had understood and forgiven but she had not wanted to be with her mother. When she went away to university, she had resolved that she would never go back and, except for short holidays, she never had. Her father had retired and her father and mother had bought themselves a little house near Marbella. Mopsa's face and the backs of her hands were tanned by the sunshine of southern Spain. Benet shifted James on to her other hip and he snivelled and clung to her.
âHe's got a nasty cold,' said Mopsa. âI wonder if you ought to have brought him out with a cold like that.'
âI'd no one to leave him with. You know I've just moved house.'
There was a baby seat in the back of the car in which James usually sat contentedly. Benet strapped him in and put Mopsa's cases in the boot. She would have been grateful if her mother had offered to sit in the back with James
but Mopsa was already in the passenger seat, her seatbelt fastened, her hands, in rather clumsy black leather gloves, folded in her lap. It didn't seem to occur to her even to talk to James. He was miserable in the back, sneezing sometimes and grizzling quietly. Benet talked to him as she drove, pointing out people and dogs and buildings, anything she thought might be interesting, but she soon became aware of Mopsa's resentment. Mopsa wanted to talk about her own troubles and her own hopes, about Spain and their house and about what she was going to do while in London. Something struck Benet that she had never thought of before, that one always assumes that when mental illness is cured or alleviated one will be left with a nice person, an unselfish, thoughtful, pleasant, sensible person. But of course this wasn't so. Why should it be? Underneath the psychosis there might be just as well be normal nastiness as normal niceness. Not that Mopsa was nasty, far from it. Perhaps what she meant was that Mopsa was, had been, used to be, mad â but when the madness lifted, it revealed a solipsist of a very high order, someone who believed the world to revolve around herself.
The house in Hampstead, in the Vale of Peace, still seemed an alien place to return to. It was only three days since Benet had moved in. Benet slid the car into the narrow lane between high banks which led into this hamlet on the edge of the Heath. For half her life, since the day she had come with friends to the fair that is always held on public holidays just off the Spaniards Road, she had dreamed of living here. Then, when it need not be fantasy any longer, when it was possible, she had planned for it. But Mopsa seemed never to have heard of this celebrated enclave, enbowered by chestnuts and sycamores and Monterey pines, where blue plaques honoured poets dead and gone, a painter, an impresario or two. That Shelley had sailed paper boats on the pond and Coleridge had begun, while sitting on a log on the green, another magical epic never to be completed, were items of literary lore that had never reached her. Getting out of the car, she eyed
Benet's tall and narrow Victorian villa with something like disappointment. What had she expected? An art deco palace in the Bishop's Avenue?