When the ambulance arrived, being loaded onto a stretcher was briefly agonising but then one of the ambulance people – a nice young woman – gave her an injection, which eased the pain but made it harder to answer questions. Questions. So many questions. How? When? Why? What? She could tell them nothing; her mind seemed to float free. And then, finally, there was oblivion and waking up with a dry mouth and a great weight on her right arm. And that woman police officer with more questions.
‘What did you see in the room?’ she persisted. ‘When you opened the door, what did you see?’
She was so tired. Opening her mouth to say yet again that she had seen nothing, she said instead, ‘The books. The books were out of the box.’
She saw the colour flood into the young woman’s face. ‘What books would those have been?’ she asked.
‘Our book,’ she mumbled. ‘World’s Wife.’
As she started to slide back into sleep, she thought she heard the young woman say something. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she said, ‘Oh, fuck!’
When she woke again, a cold morning light was seeping into the room and she lay, piecing together her recollections of the previous evening, remembering the vicious pain and afraid to move for fear of rousing a nagging ache into fury again. A nurse appeared, surveyed her, took her temperature, said, ‘Good’, asked if she needed a bed pan and disappeared. Later, they raised her into a sitting position, brought her a cup of tea – with milk in it, which she hated – and she gradually felt strong enough to assess her injuries. Her right arm was in plaster and she could feel a dressing of some sort on her forehead. Apart from that, she seemed to be able to move her legs all right and thought she was probably in one piece. She must look terrible, though. She looked down with distaste at the hospital gown she was wearing. If she was going to be staying here she would need her own night things – and a mirror and a comb and some makeup.
She looked round the room. There were four beds, one of them unoccupied and the other two containing supine, sleeping forms, so there was no one to see her except the nurses, and they, no doubt, had seen worse. Still, she must get hold of Lesley and ask her to bring things from her house before any visitors arrived. She turned her head cautiously to look at her bedside table. Had anyone picked up her handbag last night? It had been on the desk, hadn’t it? And the keys to the library were in it. Had anyone locked up? She didn’t want to lose that handbag, a good crocodile bag, bought years ago but she had looked after it well. To have all this trouble and lose the handbag would really be too much. Then she remembered there had been that policewoman here yesterday. So the police must have been to the library and they would surely have made it secure. She lay back on her pillows and tried to relax, but there was still the nightgown problem.
As it turned out, Lesley arrived in the late morning, unbidden. She came in with a bag, breathing rather hard. She was overweight, of course, Eva thought. She herself was rigorous about her diet and, at eighty, she weighed no more than she had done as a girl. She had tried to talk to Lesley about her weight but Lesley had simply laughed at her. ‘I’m a social worker, Eva,’ she had said. ‘We have to find our comfort where we can. For women in the caring professions it’s an occupational hazard. Sex would be better comfort but you can’t have sex in a ten-minute coffee break – well, not easily. You can eat two chocolate bars, though. I know. I’ve done it.’
Still, she was a comforting sight this morning, tipping the contents of a bag out onto the bed and saying, ‘I mustn’t stay long. It’s not visiting time yet, but I told them I was your social worker. How are you feeling? I won’t ask you what happened unless you want to tell me. Leave it till later if you like. How’s the pain? You look a bit pale but I’ve brought your war paint so that should help.’
She had brought two of Eva’s silk nightdresses, two pairs of knickers, her makeup bag, a toilet bag into which she had put her perfume spray as well as essentials, the book from beside her bed and a library book. ‘Lorna brought it round this morning,’ she said. ‘It was she who told me what had happened to you. The police had let her know. So the library’s closed while they crawl about looking for clues to your attacker but Lorna and Gina are determined to keep the book group going, so she’s got our next book. Notes on a Scandal – Zoë Heller – it was shortlisted for the Booker about ten years ago. Have you read it?’
‘I saw the film. With Judi Dench. I see everything with Judi Dench.’
‘The book’s better, I think. It’ll keep you occupied, anyway.’ She looked at the book she had brought from Eva’s bedroom. ‘Dorothy Sayers?’ she asked. ‘Haven’t you read them all?’
‘I have translated them all,’ Eva said. ‘But I like to reread. With a good book you can always find something new.’ She took the books. ‘I need my glasses,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know what they’ve done with my handbag.’
When Lesley found the bag in the bedside cupboard, Eva brightened immediately. ‘That is excellent,’ she said. ‘I have my glasses, my phone and my diary, and you have brought me the other necessities of life. Thank you.’
‘No problem. I’ll scoot off now. Gina’s coming to see you this afternoon.’
‘Ah,’ Eva said.
She and Lesley exchanged a look. ‘I’m sorry,’ Lesley said, ‘but I just had coffee with her and I couldn’t not tell her, could I?’
When Lesley had left, Eva said to the sleeping room, ‘Gina has many good qualities, but she is perhaps not the best person at a sickbed.’
She lay back and closed her eyes.
When Gina arrived in the early afternoon, she was carrying a bunch of snowdrops and a jam jar. ‘From my garden,’ she said. ‘I found them nestling there, blushing unseen, so I thought you might like them. They smell of snow. The jam jar is standing in for a vase.’
She sat down beside the bed and Eva was distressed, as she always was, by her appearance: the hair, so wild and unkempt; the clothes, so liberally scattered with dog hairs; the boots so suitable for the weather and so uncompromisingly flat. She was really quite an attractive woman with a good figure under that terrible anorak. What had possessed her to give up as she had, to surrender? She talked so much and still revealed so little. She was a puzzle.
She realised suddenly that as she was surveying Gina, she was being scrutinised in return. ‘You’re a wonder, Eva,’ Gina said. ‘You look positively glamorous. You’ve even put makeup on.’
‘Hardly glamorous,’ Eva protested, ‘not with this.’ She touched a finger to the dressing on her head.
‘Oh, I don’t know. It gives you a rather rakish air. You look gallant.’
She glanced round the room. One of the inhabitants of the other beds was still sleeping and the other was occupied with a cluster of noisy visitors. She leant forward. ‘You know what this means, don’t you?’ she said. ‘It looks as though you might have been right.’
‘Right?’
‘About a serial killer. Don’t you think you were intended to be the next victim?’
Eva looked at her. She was not a stupid woman but could she not see that this was not something she wanted to contemplate? It was all very well as a theory when you were sitting sharing a bottle of wine with friends, but, in reality, no. She could still feel it, the rush past her, the sheer physical force – and a smell, vaguely familiar and disturbing. All of that was enough without adding in murderous intent as well.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, brushing Gina away with a little flap of her hand, ‘I think I just disturbed something with the books.’
‘How disturbed something?’
Eva sighed. Did she really have to tell it again? ‘In the office. I went in because the light was on, and the books – the copies of The World’s Wife – were out of the box and on the floor. And then he rushed past me, I suppose, and I fell.’
‘You don’t think he hit you? What abou
t that bump on your head?’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘Well, it goes to show that the books are key to all this, doesn’t it? I told Paula so but she wouldn’t listen. How many books did you see?’
‘I don’t know. It was just a moment. They keep asking me.’ She closed her eyes; she was already exhausted and Gina had been in the room for no more than three minutes.
‘Was it a lot or just a few?’
‘A few – I think. Now, no more. No more.’
‘All right. All right. Sorry.’
There was a silence; Eva kept her eyes closed.
‘All the same,’ Gina said, ‘I do think they ought to have a policeman guarding this ward. I mean, you’ll probably start to remember more – about what he looked like, won’t you, and —’
‘No, my dear. I won’t. And I don’t want to talk about it any more. Thank you for the snowdrops.’
Would she take this as her dismissal, Eva wondered, squinting from beneath her lowered lids to assess her body language. She saw her stir in her chair and glance towards the door, which seemed hopeful, but then there were the sounds of someone coming in, someone who brought the cold of the outside world in just as her intruder had the previous evening. She kept her eyes closed.
There was a touch on her shoulder that she identified as a nurse’s touch. ‘Eva,’ a voice said, ‘there’s a policeman here to see you.’
‘It won’t take a minute, Mrs Majoros,’ a young male voice said. ‘I just need your fingerprints.’
She opened her eyes. A uniformed policeman was unpacking things from a case and Gina was being steered away to the foot of the bed by the nurse.
‘Special treatment for you,’ the young man said. ‘We usually call people in to the station for this but in the circumstances…’
She opened her eyes but remained passive, allowing her fingers to be placed on the inky pad, pressing down, having the ink inadequately swabbed from her fingertips with a chemical wipe.
Gina, she saw, was avidly attentive. ‘This is to do with last night, is it?’ Gina asked.
The young man looked evasive. ‘It’s for purposes of elimination,’ he said. ‘Just routine.’
‘Well, will you be taking anyone else’s?’
‘I really couldn’t say.’
He left. Eva closed her eyes. She heard Gina hesitating and then heard her leave. She counted to a hundred and opened her eyes. When she felt strong enough, she reached out for the copy of Notes on a Scandal which Lesley had left on her bed. She looked at the front cover, which carried pictures from the film, and then turned the book over to look at the blurb on the back. Judi Dench had been perfect as Barbara, she thought, because she did normality so well. It took a while before she let you see how mad she was. But the other woman – a woman like that having an affair with a boy, an uncouth boy, not even beautiful – it was impossible to believe in her, she had found. Perhaps the book would explain her, she thought, when she felt strong enough to start it.
Chapter Thirteen
THE ENGLISH PATIENT
Thursday 20th February 2014
This has not been a good day. I have behaved badly. I have reverted to the self I hoped to leave behind when I fled from Marlbury. I shed my life there like a wrinkled, scabby old skin, and I intended to emerge pure and free. I suppose it was sin that I hoped to purge myself of, though I didn’t think so at the time. I was confident that I already scored rather low on the deadly sins league table. I have never been slothful; if anything, I have irritated people with my bustling energy. In the greed area – gluttony and avarice – I think I do pretty well; I don’t have cravings, either for food or for anything else, really. Lust? Well, back in the day, perhaps, but not for quite a long time now. Which leaves envy, pride and anger. Envy I disclaim – I’m too proud to be envious of anyone else – but pride and anger were woven into the old skin I planned to leave behind, and I thought I could shed them with it. Free of work and family, I would surely have nothing to make me angry, and the old clothes, the salon-deprived hair and the cliff-top hovel would be quite enough to signify the death of pride, wouldn’t they?
Well, it seems not. It seems that anger and pride, unlike beauty, are more than skin-deep, and they drove me, this morning, to bully Lesley into arranging a visit to Farid, and this afternoon, under the pretext of making a compassionate hospital visit, to bully an eighty-year-old woman with a broken arm and a head injury. Anger and pride. Despite fifteen years and a post-divorce affair which gave me some considerable delight, I am still angry enough with Andrew for his desertion to refuse to do the sensible, humane, altruistic thing and ask him to help Farid. And the pride is in there, too, of course. The hair and the clothes and the hovel are just a blind; I still think I’m twenty times smarter than everyone else and believe that I can cut through the tangle of this case with my laser brain while the police are still tying their shoelaces.
And so, even by my lax standards, I behaved badly. I could see from the moment I walked into the ward that Eva didn’t want me there, but did I deposit my snowdrops and melt away? No. I stayed. I stayed and I questioned and I probed and I nagged, and it was only the advent of PC Plod that winkled me out of there. And now I am back home in the late afternoon gloom with my spirit liberally draped in chagrin, but with my mind still rampant with questions.
The first of these is Where is Alice? If the police want her fingerprints and can’t find her, will they start looking for her and should I tell them about her row with Simon? The other major question is whether Paula is getting the partners’ fingerprints as well, because they are still the real suspects in my mind. Of course she needs to know whose books she has actually got in that library box, but she needs to know who else has handled them, doesn’t she? She’ll have Farid’s, of course, and I assume she’ll have got Matt’s when they were going over Kelly’s flat. In my mind, I’ve ruled out Peter Harper and Don Dering, but there’s still Simon, who really needs looking at, it seems to me. And that takes us back to the question of what has happened to Alice. I would like to ring Paula and ask her but I feel that a more roundabout approach might be better, so I ring Lorna.
‘So they’ve taken the books away, finally,’ I say.
‘They have,’ she agrees.
‘And how many books were there in the box, actually?’ I ask.
‘Just the four, Gina. Mine, Dora’s, Kelly’s and Lily’s. Did you think they might have bred somehow in here?’
‘Well, books have disappeared so they could always reappear, couldn’t they?’
‘Maybe,’ she says.
There is something a bit off about Lorna’s tone this afternoon, a bit withholding. I begin to wonder if she has heard about my mistreatment of Eva. Could she have done?
‘I went to see Eva,’ I say.
‘You did,’ she says, and then, after a pause, ‘I spoke to her on the phone.’
Ah.
‘I think I may have been a bit bouncy for her,’ I say
‘Yes.’ She is sounding very Scottish – a bit Presbyterian, if you know what I mean. ‘Yes, I’m glad you realise that.’
I decide to move on.
‘Have you been asked to give your fingerprints?’ I ask.
‘I have. And you?’
‘They’ve got mine already – because I handled the book on the beach.’
‘Oh, yes. Well, I’m going in with Lesley tomorrow morning. Dora’s going separately; her father wants to take her.’
‘Right.’ I let a pause rest in the air and then I say, ‘I was wondering if you’d like me to come with you – you and Lesley. I mean, I know the ropes and so on – and I know where the police station is in Dover. It might help, don’t you think?’
I can hear the conviction leaking out of my question even as I utter it. Lorna is impeccably polite but very firm
.
‘Lesley and I are two grown women, you know,’ she says. ‘We really don’t need our hands held. And Lesley knows very well where the police station is, of course, having been a social worker in Dover. So, no need, Gina. No need.’
I say nothing, which surprises her, I think – as it does me, in fact. For a moment we both breathe into our phones. Then, ‘Was there a particular reason why you wanted to go to the police station with us? Apart, you know, from the drama?’ she asks.
Rumbled.
‘I was hoping I might bump into DI Powell,’ I say. ‘There are a couple of things I want to ask her and I thought it might be easier if —’
She interrupts. ‘I don’t think relying on bumping into someone is ever a good strategy really, is it? If you need to see her, better to make an appointment, don’t you think?’
She sounds like a kind teacher advising a wayward ffteen-year-old.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘OK.’
I don’t ring right away, however, I stall. I pick up the copy of Notes on a Scandal that Lorna has left for me and I flick through it, remembering how much I hated it when I read it before. Not that it’s a bad book; it’s a very clever book, but I found the insanity of Sheba’s obsession with the unsavoury teenage boy acutely painful and the inevitable trainwreck of her humiliation unbearable. I’m not sure I can bring myself to read it again. Certainly, I won’t while I’m in my current state of agitation.
I find a few more diversionary activities: I clear the draining board and put stuff away in cupboards, something I rarely do these days, preferring to bypass cupboards and use things straight from the draining board – sometimes straight from the washing-up bowl. I throw away some flowers, which Freda brought with her and which expired some time ago. I decide to wash the cat’s and the dog’s blankets and I even make a start on picking some burrs out of Ariel’s coat until she scratches me quite nastily and bolts through the cat flap. Caliban, thinking he might be next in line for grooming, has slunk upstairs and is cowering under my bed. Enough. I pick up the phone.
Drown My Books Page 13
