by Joan Smith
10
Loretta Padded Downstairs Into The kitchen next morning, her head aching and her eyes screwed up against the brilliant white light reflected at her by the cupboard doors. She pulled open a drawer and pushed aside antihistamines, seasickness pills and a tube of Savlon, stared in surprise at a packet of hypoallergenic condoms which she couldn’t remember buying, and finally located a strip of paracetamol tablets at the back. Swallowing the pills with the dregs of a carton of orange juice made her feel slightly sick, so she pulled out a chair and sat down, breathing in a curious amalgam of stale Chinese food and fresh coffee which made her feel worse. Foil containers covered the table, most of them nearly full and resembling an illustration in a cheap, garishly photographed cookery book. Next to her elbow slices of beef and green pepper curled up through congealed black-bean sauce; another tray, in which bean sprouts and an unidentifiable white vegetable cohabited in a glutinous mess, was virtually untouched.
“Yuk,” she said, wrinkling her nose, and began stuffing foil cartons into the white plastic bag supplied by the takeaway. When it was full she lifted the lid of the swing bin and dropped it inside, hoping the various sticky liquids would not leak. It was only when she returned to the table to remove her empty plate that she noticed a note in Bridget’s spiky handwriting, written on the back of an envelope and lying next to the warm coffee pot.
Loretta,
Sorry about last night. I meant to get up when you came in but I must have dropped off to sleep, those tablets are really powerful. Sorry about the food, I’ve left a tenner in the envelope to cover it. Also, I’ve borrowed your green jacket, I didn’t think you’d mind. The inquest’s at 10:30
Loretta glanced at her wrist but she was not wearing her watch.
and I’m meeting Sam at the coroner’s court. J. Tracey’s going to be there as well, he called last night just after you went out. So did your mother—didn’t sound important but she said could you ring her back. No other messages—see you later.
Much love, Bridget
Loretta peered into the envelope, saw a single ten-pound note, and lay back in her chair. She felt awful, a combination of too much to drink and indigestion, the result of eating immediately before going to bed and consuming a bottle of red wine as she did so. The meeting had dragged on till just before ten and she stopped at the Chinese in Walton Street on the way home, realizing belatedly as she walked through the door that she did not know whether to order food for Sam. The pay phone in the takeaway was out of order so she had no choice but to buy enough for three, making a complete guess at what Bridget and Sam might like. This was a mistake, for she arrived to find the house in darkness; only the presence of the cat, stretched out against the spare-room door when she tiptoed upstairs, suggested that Bridget was inside and fast asleep. She opened the door quietly, restraining the cat with her other hand, and heard Bridget’s even breathing; too tired to consider whether she was acting from consideration or cowardice, she left her to sleep and tiptoed back down the stairs to the kitchen, where an absurdly large Chinese feast awaited her.
Loretta yawned and put her hand up to cover her mouth, then moved zombielike to answer the phone.
“Mmm?” she yawned.
“Dr. Bennett?”
“No, sorry.”
“Is she there? Or would I get her at St. Frideswide’s? I think we have the number in our files.”
“No, not at college. Can I take a message?” She reached for the envelope with Bridget’s note on the back and prepared to write.
“This is Belinda Green at Barrington Properties, I rang yesterday about her house. The thing is, we’ve had an offer—”
“Oh, yes.” Loretta pictured herself taking down the message the previous afternoon, when she arrived back from London, and gave a guilty start as she realized she had not passed it on. “I’ll remind her as soon as she gets in,” she said, concealing her memory lapse.
“The thing is, it’s rather urgent. Professor Lai, that’s the gentleman who’s made the offer, he’s anxious to know whether it’s acceptable before he goes back to Newcastle. It is Friday . . .”
“Yes, I know.”
“And the other thing is, we’ve been picking up Dr. Bennett’s post and sending it to Thebes Farm, but I didn’t know if it was all right to go on doing that in the circumstances.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s all right,” Loretta assured her. Any letters posted today probably wouldn’t arrive until Monday, and she was hoping Bridget would return home over the weekend.
“If you’re sure.”
“Absolutely. And I’ll get her to ring you the moment she gets in.”
This seemed to satisfy the estate agent, who put the phone down. Loretta yawned again, picked up the kettle and held it under the cold tap. She had not consciously thought about what day it was until Belinda Green jogged her memory: now she remembered that she was going to the opera that evening with Christopher Cisar.
“Oh, God.” Loretta turned off the tap and leaned against the sink, dismayed by the prospect of being trapped in a theater seat for three hours. Joe Lunderius had mocked her for what he called her “greatest hits” approach to opera, and it was true that she preferred listening to a tape of highlights from Mozart or Rossini to sitting through a live, unabridged performance. In her present hungover state, it even seemed possible that she might fall asleep; Loretta put down the kettle and put a hand up to her face, imagining she could feel tiny lines forming around her eyes. Her hair, too, was visibly suffering, hanging limply about her face as it did when she was coming down with a cold. For a moment she toyed with the idea of using this as an excuse to cry off and her hand went to the phone, dropping away when she realized she would have to look up the CES number in the phone book. The company’s offices were on Osney Island, Bridget talked about them often enough, but Loretta remembered the directory was upstairs and gave up.
She pushed herself away from the sink with a little grunt of irritation, saw the Guardian lying on a chair and leaned forward to pick it up. It was open at an inside page and her eye was caught by a small headline in News in Brief. “Oxford Murder: Police in New Appeal,” she read, followed by a couple of paragraphs which reported that detectives leading the inquiry into the murder at Thebes Farm were still trying to establish the victim’s movements after getting off the plane at Heathrow. “Someone, somewhere, must have seen this young woman,” a spokeswoman was reported to have said, and the story went on to repeat details of the date, time and number of her flight to England and what she was believed to have been wearing. A final, one-paragraph sentence made Loretta’s eyebrows shoot up: the police had, it seemed, spent the previous day digging up the drains at Thebes Farm in a final, fruitless attempt to locate the murder weapon.
Loretta put the paper down, shocked by the police’s single-minded concentration on Bridget and Sam’s house. The place must now be in an even worse mess, and she wondered whether there was any obligation on the police to tidy up afterwards. The phone sounded again and she picked it up, hoping it wasn’t her mother demanding to know why Loretta had not yet returned her call of the previous evening.
“Loretta?” Not her mother but John Tracey, brusque and businesslike against a noisy, echoing background. “Listen, love, I’m calling from the coroner’s court and I can’t talk long. We’re on our way back to your place and I wanted to make sure you were in. I don’t suppose you have a fax machine?”
“A fax machine?”
“Or a modem? OK, in that case you’ll just have to—” He broke off and his voice grew faint, just loud enough for her to make out that he was arguing with someone who also wanted to use the phone. “Sorry, love. Listen, if the library rings before I arrive, can you just take down anything they’ve got? They know what I’m after. See you in about ten minutes.”
“Wait,” Loretta protested, “what’s all this about?” but Tracey had already gone. She remained where she was for a moment, surprised by the brevity of the inquest, until a glance dow
n at her bare wrist reminded her of her state of undress. Ten minutes, Tracey had said, and even allowing for traffic delays she had barely time to wash her face and get dressed before he arrived. Her headache cranked itself up a notch and she cast an anguished glance around the kitchen before hurrying into the dining room and throwing open the French windows to clear the sickly smell of food. Then she ran upstairs, pulling her T-shirt over her head as she went and narrowly missing the cat, who had stationed himself watchfully on the next-to-top step. A moment later she was in the shower, holding her head back from the stream of water to keep her hair dry and rekindling an old resentment against John Tracey for using her as an unpaid secretary.
“Slow down, I’m taking this down by hand. The what of November did you say? Twenty-second. And this is 1988? Hold on.” Tracey took the receiver from his ear and turned to glare at Bridget and Loretta. “Can you two keep your voices down? I can’t hear a thing she’s saying.” He waited until they’d fallen silent and swiveled back to his notebook, which was on the worktop next to the phone. “OK, go on,” he said, pen poised.
“Aged thirty-two and she was from where? Andover. She did?” He whistled. “Picked the wrong one there, didn’t he? No, I didn’t mean—” He held the phone away from him for a few seconds, muttering “Blimey” in a barely audible voice, then returned the receiver to his mouth. “What is this,” he said, “the Canary Wharf branch of SCUM?” Loretta’s eyes widened, picturing the slow-moving elderly men who had run the Sunday Herald library in the old days and wondering if they had all retired rather than move to Docklands.
“OK, OK,” said Tracey, backtracking fast. “I take all your points and if we could just get back to the story. You’re sure that’s the lot? Could you do me one more favor and fax it over to the Randolph? The Randolph Hotel in Oxford. I don’t know their fax number but if you ring the main switchboard . . . Yeah, hang on.” He turned to the cover of his notebook and read out the number. “Make sure you mark it urgent to me, because there are other hacks staying there and I don’t want it falling into the wrong hands. All right. Yes, all right, I’ll be on this number for a while if you—” The connection had obviously been cut at this point for Tracey banged the receiver back into its rest and said sarcastically: “Thanks, Sheila.” His annoyance had disappeared, however, by the time he turned back to Loretta with the tense, eager expression she knew to mean he was on the trail of a hot story.
“There’s going to be one hell of a row,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “Four attacks on women in, let’s see, two and a half years—since the autumn of eighty-eight. All on the same stretch of road, and the cops haven’t said a word.”
“But what’s it got to do with”—Loretta waved her hand, feeling a superstitious reluctance to use the word “murder” in Bridget’s presence—“with, you know, Thebes Farm?”
“Hah,” Tracey exclaimed with deep satisfaction. “I’m coming to that. You should’ve been at the inquest.”
“It was extraordinary, Loretta,” Bridget confirmed, looking as elated, in her own way, as Tracey. “I mean, I was half expecting—” She stopped, glancing nervously at him.
“What happened?” Loretta demanded.
Tracey said: “Shall I?” and Bridget nodded.
“OK, the first thing is, the brother’s supposed to show up and he doesn’t.”
Loretta raised her eyebrows, thoroughly confused.
“So the cops are hopping mad—two of them were at Heathrow to meet his plane this morning and he wasn’t on it. There’s no message, nothing, and it’s the middle of the night in Ohio. These people, the Copycats, they aren’t on the phone so they have to wake up the local cops and get them to go out there at first light. Anyway, he’s just explained all this through gritted teeth, Superintendent Dibden, when the coroner says, ‘In that case can we turn to the day she arrived in Britain—what progress have you made tracing her movements?’ Etcetera etcetera. And he says—what he says is they have new evidence which links her disappearance with a series of attacks on women on the A34.”
“The A34? But the coach from Heathrow to Oxford goes on the M25 and the M40. Even if she hired a car it’s a long way round. And presumably the first thing they did was check with Avis?”
“Ah, well,” said Tracey, making the most of telling the story. “It turns out they’ve got a witness—two, in fact. Someone rang on Tuesday, as soon as her description was in the papers, to say he’d seen her getting into a van at some roundabout just north of Newbury, but they didn’t believe him for the reasons you’ve just been saying . . . Until yesterday evening, that is, when this woman got in touch. You know that tunnel you go through when you’re leaving the airport? Goes up to the M4? She says she saw her, the Wolf girl, hanging about there trying to get a lift, so she stopped and asked her where she was going. She said she was hitching to Oxford; this woman tried to tell her how dangerous it was but she wouldn’t listen. In the end she, the driver, told her to hop in and she’d take her as far as Newbury. She’d hired a car to go to Bristol, apparently, so she had to go along the M4. She was going to come off the motorway and drop her at the bus station but there was a lot of traffic and by the time she got to Newbury she was running late. The roundabout’s a few miles north of town so the girl said, just drop me here. Unfortunately, it looks like she got straight into the van belonging to this bloke who—” Tracey drew his hand flat across his throat in a vivid but inaccurate illustration of his meaning.
“God,” said Loretta, putting herself in the woman driver’s place, “she must feel terrible.”
Tracey was eager to finish his story. “The key thing is the van,” he went on, “because it seems to have been used in all the attacks. Including the one last Friday night—”
Bridget said: “It was in the Telegraph, remember? A woman who was attacked when her car broke down.”
Loretta nodded.
“The point being,” Tracey continued inexorably, “that the police have known about the attacks for a while but they didn’t issue a warning.” He held up his hands, palms upwards. “I mean, it’s one thing to say you don’t want to encourage copycat attacks, but if you go down that road you have to accept that you’re putting women at risk—women who might otherwise not use that stretch of road alone,” he finished confusingly. He began feeling in his pockets and Loretta said quickly: “Sorry, I offered you coffee. Could you switch the kettle on again, John?”
“Mmm? Oh yes, right.” Her attempt at diverting him from his search for cigarettes was successful, for he leaned across, pressed the switch at the back of the kettle and picked up his notebook. “All right if I use your phone? Don’t worry about the bill, I’ll get them to send you a check to cover it.” Before she could speak he’d picked up the phone and dialed three figures. “Hello? It’s a Geneva number—the name’s Stannion. S-T-A-N-N-I-O-N, Denise. Route de . . .” He hesitated, then spelt out a street name. “Route de L-O-E-X.” He waited a moment, drumming his fingers impatiently on the worktop, then began to write. “Do you happen to know the code for Geneva?” He added more figures, jiggled the rest and dialed again. “It’s an organization called Women Against Rape, I haven’t got their address—”
He looked questioningly at Loretta, who shook her head slightly and said: “Somewhere around King’s Cross, but I’m not sure.”
“That’ll be it.” He took down another number and prepared to dial again.
“What’s this Geneva number?” Loretta said in a low voice to Bridget; she was pretty sure Tracey would forget his promise and leave her to foot the bill.
“Answering machine, damn.” He stayed by the phone, clicking his tongue several times as a variety of expressions flitted across his face.
“She’s the one—the woman who gave her the lift,” Bridget whispered. “She works in Geneva, and apparently she didn’t see an English paper till last night.”
“Is Tony around?” Tracey was saying, his back to them again. “Yes, please.” He waited a moment, then said: “Tony?
You know these international unions based in Geneva—do you happen to know the name of the post office lot? Or the number? No, don’t worry, it’s not an industrial story at all, I just need to speak to someone there. Why do you ask?” Loretta, who was aware of the intense professional rivalry which existed between journalists on the Sunday Herald, permitted herself a little smile as Tracey said warily: “Denise Stannion, as a matter of fact. You do? What’s she like? The press office”—his tone changed—“well, that helps. All right if I mention your name? Listen, if I have any trouble getting hold of her I’ll ring you back. Thanks”—writing again—“I owe you a pint.”
Bridget said quietly: “Marvelous, isn’t it? The British journalist at work.”
“Mmm.” The kettle boiled and Loretta, who hadn’t had so much as a cup of tea for breakfast, got up to make coffee. “John,” she said, tapping him lightly on the shoulder as he waited for the Geneva number to ring.
“Hello?” He was off again. “Parlez-vous anglais? Thank God for that. The press office, please. Hello, is Denise Stannion there? Oh.” He looked at his watch. “What’s the time difference? And she’ll be back at one thirty, Swiss time? Yes, please. Would you ask her to ring John Tracey? Here’s my number.” To Loretta’s relief he gave the number of the Randolph Hotel, then rang off. “Damn,” he said, as though it was a matter of huge personal inconvenience, “I forgot they’re an hour ahead. Still, bloody early to be having your lunch.”
“This woman,” said Loretta, “what do you want to speak to her for?”
Tracey gave her a pitying look. “How long’s it take to drive from Heathrow Airport to Newbury? An hour at least, ninety minutes in heavy traffic, and they must have talked about something. I don’t know what this Stannion woman told the cops but I assume the girl said why she was here—to take part in an ice-dancing display or whatever.”
“Ice dancing?” Loretta looked up from plunging the lid of the cafetiere.
