Author(s): Ruth Rendell

Fiction

"Adam and Eve and Pinch Me went down to the river to bathe Adam and Eve were drowned. Who was saved?" This old nursery rhyme is a favorite of Jerry Leach (if that is the name he is using at the time), a handsome ne'er do well, who sponges off women. Five women, unknown to each other, are his willing victims. One he even married once and abandoned, while promising to marry another. But, with the cuel irony he would be the first to recognize in that nursery ryhme, Jerry, almost accidentally, becomes the victim of one of his female prey.