He had read somewhere that once, sixty or seventy years ago, an Act of Parliament was passed letting married women keep the money that was theirs. She didn’t even look after the child, took very little notice of it as far as he could see. Woody thought his wife could have done that and he said so, but he couldn’t stop it. He wasn’t invited.Ī woman came in to do the cleaning. She was always going to London to buy clothes, always having her hair done, going off for weekends to stay, she said, with girls she had been to school with and who were now married. He thought he owed it to himself to keep a close eye on his wife. Because he didn’t work, Woody was always at home. She was an only child, so it was her turn to inherit a parental legacy, and this time it was very much in excess of what Woody got. People died at a much younger age in the 1930s. His mother died and he inherited her house as well as a small amount of money. They were happy enough for a couple of years. Living together was not far short of a crime. There was enough money left to live on, but whether for the rest of his life he didn’t know. Woody, as his mother and his wife called him, as someone at school had first named him, hated work and decided never to do any more as long as he lived. It wasn’t a very large sum, but it was enough to buy a house on The Hill in Loughton, twelve miles from London but almost in the country. Anita’s father said he would stop her having the money her grandmother had left her, but in the event he was too tender-hearted to do so. He was twenty by then, so they got married. The boss’s daughter fell in love with him. He left school at fourteen – you could then – and went to work in a market garden, a slaughterhouse and finally a cosmetic factory. Before that, he received the compliments children necessarily get: ‘Beautiful baby’ and ‘Isn’t he lovely?’ His father was never there. A handsome boy, his mother called him, because she started praising his looks when he was five. Read on for an exclusive extract from the novel… When the bones of two severed hands are discovered in a box, an investigation into a long buried crime of passion begins – and a group of friends, who played together as children, begin to question their past. In all her novels, Ruth Rendell digs deep beneath the surface to investigate the secrets of the human psyche and The Girl Next Door is no exception. A new book by crime writing legend Ruth Rendell is always a cause for celebration! Never one to shy away from uncomfortable subject matter, in a recent review The Independent stated, ‘this book is extraordinarily courageous, a demonstration that fiction can take us where reportage dares not go.’

The girl next door book