Curtain call for Ruth Rendell

Ruth Rendell’s final novel, Dark Corners, is about how psychological necessity can drive perfectly ordinary people either to terrible deeds or to unwitting acts of great courage — and extraordinary things can happen quite by chance to anyone.

Carl, the central character, is a young man pleased with his life. He has written a novel that has been published, inherited his father’s small mews house in Maida Vale with its furniture and, significantly, a large supply of alternative remedies in the bathroom cabinet, and has a beautiful, kindly girlfriend called Nicola. He does not have a job, but he does have a tenant, Dermot, on the top floor who pays him £1,200 a month — enough for Carl to contemplate life as a writer. Dermot, a thin young man with uneven yellow teeth, works as a receptionist at a local veterinary practice. He has a manner that wrong-foots Carl without him knowing quite how.