Ruth Rendell, Lady Rendell of Babergh, also known as Barbara Vine, who died aged 85 in 2015, was a literary phenomenon. From 1964, when Inspector Reginald Wexford first appeared in From Doon With Death, she wrote more than sixty novels, including police procedurals, standalone and psychological mysteries plus numerous books of short stories. Many of them were adapted for television or made into feature films.

The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell, is one of my TBRs, a book that’s been sitting on my bookshelves since 2016. It’s one of her later novels, a stand-alone book, first published in 2014, a year before her death.

Description from Amazon UK

Beneath the green meadows of Loughton, Essex, a dark network of tunnels has been dug. A group of children discover them. They play there. It becomes their place.

Seventy years on, the world has changed. Developers have altered the rural landscape. Friends from a half-remembered world have married, died, grown sick, moved – or disappeared.

Work on a new house called Warlock uncovers a long buried grisly secret: the bones of two severed hands are discovered in a box, and an investigation into a long-buried crime of passion begins.

The friends, who played together as children, begin to question their past. And a weary detective, more concerned with current crimes, must investigate a case of murder.

The book begins just before the second world war when Woody killed his wife and her lover when he discovered they were having an affair. He then cut off their hands, a right hand and a left that they had held together, and put them in a biscuit tin, which he buried in a tunnel, where the local children played.

Time moves on to 1944. Ruth Rendell describes a garden where the neighbourhood children play:

The garden was not beautiful. It had no flowering trees, no roses, no perfumed herbs. Tunnels they called it at first. The word ‘qanat’, an impossible word, was found by Daphne Jones and adopted by the rest of them. It meant, apparently, a subterranean passage for carrying water, in some oriental language. They liked it because it started with a q without a u. Their schoolteachers had taught them that no word could ever start with q unless followed by u, so Daphne’s idea appealed to them and the tunnels became qanats. (pages 13 – 14)

Time moves on again and we meet up with the children as adults in their seventies, when the skeletal hands have been discovered. The qanats were actually the foundations of a house called Warlock in Loughton, twelve miles north of London and most of the children, are now still living in the area. When they read the newspaper report about the discovery of the hands they get together and reminisce about their childhood and playing in the tunnels, wondering whose hands had been buried.

This is when the book expands into a study of ageing as well as murder mystery:

As you get older, you forget names: those you studied with, lived next door to, the people who came to your wedding, your doctor, your accountant and those who cleaned your house. Of these people’s names you forget perhaps half, perhaps three quarters. Then whose names do you never forget, because they are incised on the rock of your memory? Your lovers (unless you have been promiscuous and there are too many) and the children you went to your first school with. You remember their names unless senility steps in to scrape them off the rock face. (page 17)

It’s quite a long book, nearly 350 pages in a small font in my copy and Ruth Rendell takes time to describe these old friends’ lives and reveals their relationships, their loves and losses and those of their own children and grandchildren as well as their regrets, and bereavements. I felt I really got to know them as real people. Long buried secrets rise to the surface, and old passions are reignited.

From the beginning we know the identity of the murderer, Woody and that of his wife Anita, but not that of the man, whose hand had held Anita’s. At times I thought I’d worked out who it was but when his identity was revealed it wasn’t who I thought it was – it was more complicated than I’d realised. And who is ‘the girl next door‘? I did work that out correctly. It is in some places a bleak novel, and all the characters’ lives have changed by the end of the book. It’s a book that really gripped me and drew me on to find out more. And I really enjoyed how it shows the changes that have taken place in society from the 1930s onward.

I’ve read several of Ruth Rendell’s standalone books and I think this is one of her best. I’ve also read some of her Inspector Wexford books and those she wrote under the name of Barbara Vine.