And now for my next trick.
Antonia Fraser
THE ROTTVVEILER by Ruth Rendell Hutchinson, £16.99, pp. 384, ISBN 0091799465 1 t may sound an odd comparison but a visit to Alan Ayckbourn's latest black comedy Sugar Daddies at Scarborough, coupled with reading Ruth Rendell's latest psychological thriller The Rottweiler, convinced me that these two utterly compelling writers have a lot in common. There is the coincidence that both give 1964 in Who's Who as an official starting date (From Doon With Death in the case of Ruth Rendell, Mr Whatnot as his London debut for Ayckbourn). And that of course means that both are coming up for some kind of 40th anniversary next year. But the similarity is based not so much on longevity or on the mass of work as sheer fertility of invention. 'And now for my next trick ...' might be the motto of both writers.
The Rottweiler is centred on Inez Ferry, the widow of an actor. She owns an antique shop in Marylebone, the sort of place where a stuffed jaguar stands in the corner:
Inez thought it said a lot about the world we lived in that to most people when you said 'jaguar. they took it to mean a car not an animal. This one, black and about the size of a very large dog, had once been a jungle creature someone's grandfather, a big game hunter, had shot ...
Someone had brought it into the shop the day before and offered it to Inez at first for ten pounds, then for nothing because it was so embarrassing, 'worse than being seen in a fur coat'.
Since her husband's death Inez has taken in tenants to supplement her income. This is the territory Patrick Hamilton explored so well in Slaves of Solitude, the wartime experiences of a quiet spinster in an equivalent lodginghouse of the time. But Hamilton's book did not have the thriller element which Rendell supplies.
The various characters involved including Inez herself are, like Hamilton's, brilliantly drawn. There is beautiful blackhaired Zeinab Sharif who works in the shop and comes from — according to her story — an extremely wealthy background with a house in Eaton Square, but when the police ask her for her home address replies rebelliously, 'I don't know what you want that for. It's none of it nothing to do with me. I haven't been strangling girls with silver chains.'
Zeinab is up to no good and Inez reflects (rather like the reader);
The girl was certainly hiding something. Did everyone she knew — always excepting Will, her sister in Highgate, and a few friends — practise deception? Jeremy Quick probably, Zeinab and Freddy certainly. Ludmilla with her variable accent and her claim of Russian descent, very likely. How about Rowley Woodhouse...?
Gradually it emerges that one of this pseudo-community could have been involved in a series of local murders. There is a homicidal maniac around — nicknamed The Rottweiler by the optimistic press on the basis of a bite on the girl's neck, subsequently found to have been made by her boyfriend — and a shadowy figure of indeterminate sex is reported fleeing the scene. The tension among them all begins to rise, a situation Rendell knows so well how to evoke.
It is at this point that Rendell produces this year's trick with a great flourish, taking this reader at least completely by surprise. One third of the way through the book, we are suddenly confronted with the identity of the murderer (although his or her motivation must wait for the denouement). X, having just received a visit from the police who decide that X is so evidently guiltless that there will be no need to interview him or her again, goes to the drawer under the table: 'a black and gold keyring with a Scottie dog in onyx suspended from it, a silver cigarette lighter with the initials NN on it in red stones and a pair of silver hoop earrings set with tiny brilliants' are carefully lifted out. These, we are well aware, are the little personalised items that the murderer has removed from the victims. Henceforward we are in something like a Hitchcock movie where we can see the perils of the situation, but the wretched Marylebone inhabitants can't.
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