by Joan Smith
“Keep your voice down,” she hissed, playing for time. “They’re only one floor down, they’ll hear you.” She had introduced Tracey to Sam and then left him in earnest conversation with Bridget—something about a problem with the landscape gardeners and whether they should employ another firm—in the kitchen.
Tracey shook his head and felt in his jacket pocket. “This wasn’t my idea,” he said more quietly, drawing out a packet of Gitanes. “If you remember.”
“You’ve started smoking again?”
He put a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match and lit up. “It’s a stressful occupation, journalism.” He got up, looking for somewhere to discard the spent match, and Loretta watched him prowl the room with the familiar coiled energy of someone used to dodging bullets and having doors closed in his face. She had not yet got over her surprise at his outfit, a cream linen suit which marked a startling break with his long-standing attachment to the fashion of the 1960s, and she felt an unexpected pang of nostalgia for his crumpled old denim and corduroys.
“In my study,” she said shortly, seeing he was about to toss the match into the empty grate. “You’ll find an ashtray on top of the filing cabinet.” He strolled to the other end of the room, glancing from side to side with the professional interest of a reporter, and it occurred to her that his prematurely gray hair had been a blessing in disguise. While other middle-aged men had to live with creeping signs of physical decay, Tracey had done his aging early and had the knack of remaining a slightly more lined version of his youthful self.
“I don’t let it get above ten a day,” he remarked, picking up the ashtray and dropping the match into it.
Loretta moved towards him, not quite into the study but close enough to speak in a low voice. “Do they know about us?” she said, as near as she dared get to the question she really wanted to ask.
He blew out smoke. “Are they expecting me to report back, is that what you mean? Well, Chief Superintendent, I passed on your suspicions to my ex-wife as requested and she broke down and confessed . . . You’ve accused me of a lot of things, Loretta, but this is the first time you’ve accused me of being a copper’s nark. Don’t you remember Roderick Benson?”
“Roderick—yes.” Benson was a small-time south London crook, wrongly convicted of murder, whose case Tracey had successfully taken up on his return from Cyprus.
She slumped against the doorframe, lifting her head to look at the hinge impressions, still visible through several coats of paint, which marked the point from which big old wooden doors had once hung. “I don’t know what to say,” she admitted at last, pushing her hair back from her face. “I mean, she hasn’t confided in me. Whatever she was doing that day, though, I’m sure it hasn’t anything to do with . . . this.”
Tracey stubbed out his cigarette and leaned back against the filing cabinet. He said reasonably: “You’ve got to admit it doesn’t look good. There they are, trying to piece together where everyone was on the day the victim arrived in England, and Bridget gives the vaguest possible account of herself and claims to have lost her diary. Would you write it off as sheer coincidence?”
She made an impatient gesture. “Has Sam told them what he was doing that Thursday?”
Tracey raised his eyebrows, picking up the antagonism in her voice. “Interesting point. His secretary was on holiday that week and he had a temp. She thinks he was in his office all day, but she’s as thick as two short planks and their offices are on opposite sides of the corridor. However,” he added, before she could speak, “this being the age of computers he’s got a much better alibi than some dozy girl. Ever heard of an audit trail?”
Loretta shook her head.
“It’s basically a security measure.” Tracey moved to her desk, lifted the lid of her laptop and switched it on. “It tells you who’s used the computer and what for—very useful if you think someone’s trying to get into files they’re not authorized to see. Industrial espionage and so on In this case the audit trail has him logging on just before ten and staying on virtually all day. Neat little machine you’ve got here—what software do you use?”
“Word something? I can’t remember. But how does it, the computer, know it was Sam? Couldn’t he have left it on, hypothetically I mean, and someone else was actually doing the work?”
Tracey snapped off the blue screen. “No, because they use a repeat authentication process. You have to put your password in at regular intervals, and they use a handshaking system in case someone discovers your password.”
“A what?”
“I don’t know the technical details, but each time you put in your password it asks you a series of questions—anything from the name of your dog to your wife’s star sign. If someone else was standing in for him, he’d have to be very fully briefed—an accomplice, in fact.”
“Oh,” Loretta said quickly, “I never really thought . . . Presumably it only matters till they find out when she was killed? I mean, as soon as they find someone who saw her alive after Thursday—”
“If someone saw her after Thursday. The sightings they’ve had so far are either vague or unlikely—”
“Sightings? You mean people have come forward?”
“Don’t get excited, these things take days to sift through and they mostly come to nothing. She seems to have been a complete stranger in this country, and so far no one’s come forward to say she booked into my hotel for two nights. All they’ve had is people who think they may have served her in a shop and the usual bunch of loonies.” He swiveled her desk chair round and sat on it with his back to the desk, swinging gently from side to side. “The other question is, how far do you go, chasing red herrings, when someone’s behaving suspiciously right under your nose? The cops almost never fit up people they think are innocent,” he added conversationally, leaning back and picking up a post-card lying on her desk. He examined the image, an illustration from a fifteenth-century edition of the Roman de la Rose, without much interest and turned it over to read the message on the back. Discovering it was blank, he tossed it to one side and added: “Most miscarriages of justice, the famous ones, you’ll find cops to this day who think they’re guilty. The most they’ll admit is that someone in CID may have improved the evidence.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“I’m not defending them, Loretta.” He swung the chair through ninety degrees to get a better view of her desk and drew a literary journal towards him, tapping the cover with his fingers. “This rag still going?” He scanned the list of contents, casting Loretta an amused glance as he reached her article, “The Importance of Being George: Transsexual Pseudonyms from George Eliot to George Egerton.” The journal was printed on flimsy paper, all the impoverished editorial board could afford, and he rustled noisily through it until he reached Loretta’s pages. He read for a moment, raising his eyebrows over her theories on literary gender-bending, and dropped it back on her desk. “What worries me,” he said, as if he’d only just remembered what they had been discussing, “is you being mixed up in all this. I know you’re her friend but there are limits.”
The door into the other end of the room opened and they heard Bridget’s voice: “Loretta?”
She looked at Tracey, appealing for help with her eyes, but he merely shrugged.
“In here,” she called, glaring at Tracey, and Bridget advanced into the drawing room until she could see into the study.
“Sorry,” she said, seeming to sense that she had arrived at an awkward moment, and attempted to make a joke of the interruption: “It’s just that I am eating for two these days and I am rather hungry.”
“What time is it?” Loretta looked down at her watch.
“Five past eight. I mean, we can just as well go out, Sam and I—”
“God, no. All I’ve got to do is cook the pasta.”
Tracey said: “Can’t it wait till I’ve had a look at this video? It’s all set up.” Seeing Bridget’s face, he added: “This isn’t one of my whims, in fact
it affects you as much as it does me.”
“What?” Bridget looked unconvinced and Loretta cringed at the speed at which aggression flared between them. She dropped her head into her hand, a gesture Bridget must have seen because a moment later Loretta heard her say: “Oh, all right. Just a minute while I get Sam.”
Loretta listened to Bridget’s rather heavy step on the stairs and then said urgently to Tracey: “God, John, I wish you’d told me earlier. I didn’t know what to say to her.”
He looked grim. “Say nothing. Let’s have a look at this video and at least we’ll have something to talk about over dinner. Hi,” he added with false bonhomie as Bridget returned with Sam. Gesturing towards a sofa, he added: “Sit yourselves down.”
Bridget closed the door behind her and joined Sam, giving his hand an anxious squeeze. His face was blank, stony almost, and Loretta guessed he had not welcomed this further delay in eating.
“Let me get some more wine,” she suggested, catching sight of her empty glass and thinking she needed another drink to cope with the frigid atmosphere in the room. Tracey lifted his head from the television controls and gave her a cross look but she ignored him and ran downstairs to open another bottle of Chianti.
“Ready?” Tracey demanded as she came back into the room. Loretta nodded, refilled her own glass and left the bottle on the table for the others to help them-selves. Curling up on the sofa under the window, well away from Bridget and Sam, she thought of all the things she would rather be doing this evening—marking essays, finishing the mediocre novel she had promised to write about for the TLS, even the pile of ironing on top of the washing machine in the downstairs bathroom.
Tracey pressed a button and a blizzard of dots filled the TV screen. It was rapidly replaced by a clock face, white graphics on a black background and a second hand gliding smoothly up to the hour. Loretta heard a familiar theme tune, a series of plangent notes played on an electric guitar, and recognized a montage of film clips as the opening sequence of a current-affairs program on Channel Four: the Pope waving from a balcony, a motorcade speeding along a Washington avenue, the late Ayatollah Khomeini raising his arm in front of an adoring crowd in Tehran. Suddenly the screen went black, and three words appeared in shimmering silver: CRIMINALS FOR CHRIST?
“The Imitators of Christ,” a woman’s voice began, classless and authoritative, “are the descendants of a group of deeply religious German immigrants who came to live in America in the 1870s. They settled in fertile farming country in Ohio”—the screen now showed a horse-drawn cart moving across the land at sunset, an animated version of a Hopper painting—“about twenty-five miles from the nearest town. Their descendants stubbornly resist modern inventions like the motor car, the television and the telephone, and their dress has remained largely unchanged for a century. They take their name from a famous devotional work from the fifteenth century, The Imitation of Christ, and try to follow the precepts laid down by its author, the German monk Thomas à Kempis.” Shots of horses being unhitched from the wagon and led into a stableyard, women in long dresses and modestly covered heads emerging from clapboard houses to greet their menfolk.
“Yet try as they might,” the commentary continued, “the elders of this isolated, inward-looking community have not been able to insulate themselves entirely from the outside world. In the last five years, a new militancy has grown up among younger members of the sect, who accuse their parents and grandparents of having become complacent—in their words, spiritually flabby.”
On screen, a group of young people gathered in the dusk, holding aloft flaming torches as they filed along a path towards a large barn. “In accordance with the wave of religious fundamentalism sweeping America, they have adopted a stricter—some would say fanatical—moral code, demanding that the community take a more active part in carrying out the teachings of Christ as outlined by Thomas à Kempis and by the Bible. To this end, they have embarked on a series of increasingly violent actions which have split this small community and which now threaten its very existence. In tonight’s Open Eye, we look at the young Americans who have become Criminals for Christ.”
There was a reprise of the theme tune and Bridget said in a slightly sarcastic voice: “This is all very interesting but I’m not sure—”
“Shhh,” Tracey said rudely and, to Loretta’s surprise, Bridget fell silent.
The commentary resumed: “The actions began four years ago with a peaceful picket of a bookstore in a nearby town selling material which the young people considered an affront to the teaching of Christ. They attempted to persuade customers not to buy magazines featuring Madonna, for example, and they also denounced the work of self-professed atheists like Gore Vidal.” A disembodied hand began tossing magazines and novels into the center of the screen, flames playing about their edges. “Soon the young idealists, frustrated by the indifferent response to their efforts, resorted to direct action. They invaded the bookstore, took down any book or magazine they considered offensive, and made a large bonfire in the main street.” The magazines were now burning merrily but the image faded and was replaced by what looked like a shopfront. The camera zoomed in to the words lettered in decorative glass on the window and Loretta let out a cry of recognition.
“Shhh!” the others exclaimed in unison as the commentary continued: “Encouraged by the publicity given to the public book-burning, the young people turned their attention to another target: the two local banks. Imitating Christ’s expulsion of the money-lenders from the Temple, they launched a violent attack which earned them their nickname—”
“The Copycats,” Loretta and Bridget cried together, drowning out the commentary.
Tracey leaned forward and freeze-framed the screen, as smug as Loretta had ever seen him.
“The newsdesk secretary remembered seeing the film,” he explained modestly, sitting back on his heels. “By the time I got in she’d already rung up Channel Four and got the name of the company who made it.”
Sam leaned forward, picked up the wine and filled his glass. “This is the first time you’ve seen it, right? So you don’t know—I guess we’re all wondering the same thing, whether she’s in it.”
Tracey shook his head. “I talked to the bloke who produced the film and he doesn’t remember her. He said only one of them was there, one of the kids who were arrested, that is, and he kept well out of their way. Either that, or the elders warned him to lie low. They were very cagey about what happened to the others, apparently, and at least one of them was still in prison.”
“So that bit was true,” said Loretta, thinking back to that morning’s lurid headline. “But the rest—”
“Yes,” said Bridget in a belligerent voice, addressing Tracey, who was crouching on the floor by the television, waiting to restart the film. “How come they got it so wrong? There’s quite a difference between a bank robber and a religious loony who goes around chucking bricks through windows to protest about what’s it called? Usury?”
Tracey lowered himself onto the floor, sitting with his legs apart and feeling for his cigarettes. “They used a stringer in the States, they don’t have their own guy in New York anymore. The most likely thing is that the cops were sitting on the story and she got a second-hand version from someone who wasn’t officially on the case. Either that or she sent over a garbled version and it was tickled up in the office. All that stuff’s rewritten by the subs, you know.”
Bridget said: “Another illusion shattered.”
Tracey gave her a contemptuous look and Loretta, cross with them both, turned to Sam and said in a loud voice: “We still don’t know, of course, what she was doing in Oxford, unless there’s something about it later in the film. I suppose they might have followers over here but I haven’t heard of them. Not that it’s my subject,” she added, “Christian sects.”
“Oh.” Tracey sounded disappointed. “That’s precisely what I was about to ask you.” He flicked ash into the empty grate and addressed Bridget and Sam. “How about you
two? You know of any cults with American connections round here? I remember when I was at Ruskin they used to come round in twos wanting to know if you were saved—Jesus freaks, we called them.”
Loretta frowned. “Sure you’re not thinking of the Festival of Light? Cliff Richard and Dana? My best friend at school had a Cliff Richard phase and she went to those dreadful concerts.”
“Mormons,” Tracey said reminiscently, drawing on his cigarette, “we used to get them as well. You could always recognize them by their short hair.”
“It doesn’t go on so much these days,” Bridget said thoughtfully, forgetting her hostility to Tracey. “Though one of my students did get mixed up with those people who drive around in a bus. You remember,” she said, appealing to Loretta, “it was parked next to the Taylorian in St. Giles and two of them stopped us outside Boots. What are they called?”
Loretta remembered two rather aggressive young men in military fatigues who had tried to thrust religious pamphlets into her hands. “The Sons of God,” she said. “Are they American?”
“Sounds worth a look,” Tracey began but Sam interrupted: “I don’t see the connection here. These guys you’re talking about, they’re born-agains, right? These people”—he gestured toward the flickering TV screen—“these people sound more like the sects you get in places like Montana. They don’t exactly go out begging people to join. It’s, like, members only.”
Tracey shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette. “OK, but if there’s been a split . . . I mean, the whole point about the film is the kids have got pissed off. I know it’s a long shot, but has anyone got a better idea?” There was silence and he added: “So how do I go about getting in touch with these Sons of God?”
Loretta said, not very hopefully: “The telephone directory?”
Bridget frowned at her. “How about looking in Vade Mecuml I’m sure it lists religious groups, Christian societies, that sort of thing.”
