by Joan Smith
“It’s cold, I was just going to make some more.”
Bridget pushed back her chair, gesturing to Loretta to stay in her seat. “I feel like a new woman this morning. Where d’you think the papers came from? You were out of coffee so I went to that little shop in Walton Street, they didn’t have much of a selection but it’s better than nothing.” She turned on the cold tap and held the kettle under it, adding rather archly: “Your other guest didn’t complain, at any rate.”
Loretta’s eyes widened and she steeled herself for a barrage of questions about herself and Christopher. “Gosh,” she said carelessly, “you must’ve been up for hours. He’d arranged to play squash at nine, that’s why he went off so early. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“He?” Bridget turned off the tap, a startled look on her face. “I’m talking about a sulky young woman who borrowed ten quid off me for a taxi. Hang on,” she added, a new note entering her voice, “you don’t mean . . . you and Christopher? Well, well.” She shook coffee grounds into the cafetiere, showering them onto the worktop below, and returned to the table with an eager grin on her face. “Come on,” she said, sitting down and folding her arms, “I want to hear all about it.”
Loretta ignored her. “Did she—Caroline whatever-her-name-is. Did she say where she was going?”
Bridget shook her head, not much interested.
“I don’t suppose she left an address?”
“No. What is this, Loretta? Isn’t she a friend of yours?”
Loretta closed her eyes in an attempt to remember where Caroline said she lived. She remembered leading the way into the house, Caroline just behind her and Christopher bringing up the rear . . .
“Dorset,” she said in a puzzled voice, realizing that she could not recall, or Caroline had not told her, the name of the town or village. Ten pounds was hardly enough to get her all that way, especially after paying a taxi fare to the station. Another thought occurred to her and she got up and looked round for her bag. “Sorry, Bridget,” she added, locating it, “I’ll pay you back. Ten pounds, did you say?”
“Don’t worry about that. Who is she?”
Loretta took two five-pound notes from her purse. “Some girl who jumped off a boat in the middle of the night and landed in my garden. I suppose it counts as date rape, not that he managed it, of course, since she escaped.”
“Date rape? In a boat?”
Bridget made it sound as though she did not know what young people were coming to.
“Christopher thought they’d been doing cocaine, she was very anxious I shouldn’t call the police.”
“Quite right, they’d probably have arrested her at once if the way they treated me is anything to go by. No, I don’t want it,” she insisted, pushing Loretta’s money away. “I’ve been here all week and all I’ve given you is that measly tenner for the Chinese takeaway. You know,” she added, changing the subject as Loretta gave in and put the money away, “it’s been a real eye-opener, seeing their methods at first hand, the police. I mean, you always wonder why people confess to things they haven’t done, the Birmingham Six and that man in the Carl Bridgewater case, but when you’re actually in that little room and they ask you the same thing over and over again—”
Loretta exclaimed: “Surely she didn’t go off in that dress? I was going to lend her a skirt or something.”
“What dress? You’re babbling, Loretta. She had on a perfectly ordinary pair of jeans when I met her.”
“Jeans?” Loretta stared at Bridget for a moment, then turned to look at the half-open door into the bathroom. Hurrying across the kitchen, she kicked the soiled bath sheet out of her way and said incredulously: “She’s taken my jeans.”
“What?”
“She’s stolen my jeans,” Loretta repeated, coming back. “And my black T-shirt. They were with your stuff on the washing machine and now they’re gone.” She wheeled round and ran upstairs, leaving Bridget to gape after her.
In Loretta’s study the blind was still down and the floor strewn with bedding. Loretta clambered across the sofa cushions, her bare feet sinking into the duvet, and snatched the white dress from its resting place on her desk. It weighed less than she expected and she crushed it against her body, shaking the skirt until its many petticoats flared out and then settled against her legs. The boned bodice stood out from her chest and she thought that, elegant though it was, she would happily exchange it for her old Levi’s. She threw it over one arm, carried it downstairs to the kitchen and held it up in front of Bridget.
“She was wearing that?” the latter demanded. “In a boat?”
“Mmm. Thirteen hundred pounds, she said it cost.”
Bridget whistled. “Some of my students have to live on that for six months.”
“What shall I do with it? It’s not exactly me.” Loretta wiggled her hips and the chiffon swayed.
“The Oxfam shop? Pity about the grass stains on the skirt.” Bridget’s hand hovered over the cafetiere, ready to plunge the top down, and she said: “The coffee’s made, if you’ve finished playing at Come Dancing.”
Loretta arranged the dress on her Lloyd Loom chair and took down two clean mugs.
“You still haven’t told me about you and Christopher,” Bridget said, and Loretta felt her cheeks grow warm as she took a bottle of milk from the fridge. “It must have gone spectacularly well if you actually let him stay the night.”
“There’s nothing much to tell,” Loretta lied, lining up the mugs on the table and avoiding Bridget’s eye.
“Come on. Where did you go to eat? I didn’t hear you come in so I assume you didn’t come straight back here after the opera and drag him upstairs.”
“Of course not.” Loretta poured out the coffee. “We went to North Parade, as a matter of fact, which turned out to be a bit of a mistake. Guess who walked in?”
Bridget narrowed her eyes. “Nelson Mandela? Prince Edward? How should I know?”
“John Tracey.”
“Uh-oh.”
“He was with some bloke from the Independent. He was absolutely furious, he just turned round and stormed out.”
“How did you explain that to Christopher?”
“I didn’t, he was very calm about the whole thing.”
“He can afford to be, he’s bigger than your dearly beloved. It’s a bit awkward, though.”
“Is it?”
“Well, yes. Presumably we won’t get any more inside information.” Bridget picked up the Sun and pointed to its front page. “I haven’t read every single word of every paper,” she went on, “but they’re so excited about the rapist angle that there’s nothing about that woman, Denise something, the one Tracey was trying to get hold of yesterday.”
“If he did, I’m sure it’ll be in the paper tomorrow.”
Bridget looked doubtful. “It’s not die same, though, is it? And we still don’t know how she ended up in my garden. I mean, did he just drive around with the body in his van till he saw our house? We get the Independent on Sunday, not the Sunday Herald; I suppose one of us’ll have to go out in the morning.”
“You’re still planning to go home, then?”
“Mmm.” Bridget sipped her coffee and added a little more milk. “I’ll give Sam a ring in a minute, see how Mrs. Crossley is getting on with the clearing-up. Her daughter was going to help her, the married one from Kidlington, so it shouldn’t take all day. What are you doing?” She smiled slyly. “Seeing Christopher?”
“No.” Loretta shook her head. “I’m going to Paris on Monday, I’ve got a few things to sort out before I go—”
“Paris? On your birthday? What for?”
Loretta looked sheepish. “You know—the Fern Sap editorial collective meeting, it’s always in August. I’m going to stay on for another day as I haven’t had a holiday this year—go to the Louvre, that sort of thing.”
“You are good, Loretta, the way you never miss a meeting. I saw your piece in the last one, about pseudonyms, I thought it was
very clever. By the way”—she leaned forward, studying her mug of coffee as though there was something unusually interesting about it—“have you thought any more about what I was saying? About standing in while I’m on maternity leave?”
“Yes, actually.” Loretta remembered Bernard Shilling’s plans for her own department, and her need to make contacts elsewhere. “If you really think the English faculty will agree to it . . .”
Bridget lifted her head and grinned. “Course they will. I’ll wave your Edith Wharton book about, show them a few of your articles. I’ll get on to it on Monday, make a few phone calls, it’ll be all fixed up by the time you get back.” A cloud crossed her face, and Loretta wondered whether it was because she realized this was a rash promise. “When do you get back, by the way?”
“Thursday.”
“OK, give me a ring. I’ll even print my Frankenstein paper out for you.” She threw back her head and laughed, her momentary doubt apparently dispelled. “It’ll be just like old times,” she added, and Loretta did not point out that she and Bridget had never actually worked together.
The phone sounded and Loretta got up to answer it. “Yes,” she said, turning to look at Bridget, “she’s here and we’re both well. Do you want to speak to her?”
She passed the phone across, mouthing, “Sam,” and sat down to look at the Guardian Weekend section. The cover consisted of a grainy black-and-white image of a burly man being led, handcuffed, from a dock and the coverlines promised a feature, inside, about a mass murderer who had killed and eaten his victims in Finland. Loretta hurriedly turned the pages past the gruesome details, also ignoring a profile of a South American novelist by an English publisher she had once met and disliked at a party, and arrived at Colin Spencer’s cookery column. She read with interest a recipe for spinach roulade, wondering whether to make it for supper that evening, and got up to find a piece of paper on which to make a shopping list.
“Listen,” Bridget said unexpectedly, putting the phone down, “Sam says they arrived late, something about Mrs. Crossley’s daughter having to give her husband a lift somewhere first, so why don’t I take you out to lunch? A birthday treat, as you’re not going to be here on Monday.”
“I was going to go to Sainsbury’s at Heyford Hill, but I suppose I could do it later.”
“Course you can—they’re open till six or something. Why don’t we go to the Feathers in Woodstock and sit outside? I’ll just finish packing, it won’t take me a minute. All right?”
Loretta smiled, touched by Bridget’s enthusiasm. “All right. I might even drop in at the Oxfam shop in Summertown on the way back.” She got up, went to the Lloyd Loom chair and gave the white dress a last twirl before putting it away in a large plastic bag.
12
There Had Been, Loretta Learned From the Sunday Herald the following morning, dramatic developments in what was now being described as the A34 murder inquiry. The story, under John Tracey’s byline, took up most of the front page; she walked slowly from the hall to her study, reading that the van used in the attacks was now believed to be darkish blue in color, probably an A- or B-reg Ford Transit. Alan Stocks, the 29-year-old motor mechanic who had seen Paula Wolf getting into it, recalled “distinctive” lettering on the side of the van; he, along with two of the surviving victims, had agreed to answer questions under hypnosis and the police were said to be “very excited” about the results, although they were being cagey about the precise details. All they would say was that they now had evidence that the Transit was being used to carry “hazardous loads,” a quote which prompted the insertion, at this point in the story, of a photograph of the rear doors of a lorry with its number plate blacked out and bearing a HAZCHEM sign, the standard indicator of the presence of toxic chemicals.
The story continued on page two, where Tracey had not been able to resist crowing over his success in obtaining an “exclusive” interview with Denise Stannion, who had spent Friday evening being “debriefed” by two Thames Valley detectives in Geneva. Loretta spread the paper out on her desk, surprised to learn that Tracey had flown to Switzerland the previous day. “Denise Stannion,” she read, swinging gently from side to side in her desk chair, “lives in a second-floor flat in Onex, an exclusive suburb of Geneva. Thirty-two-year-old Mrs. Stannion, who is British and works at the headquarters of an international trade union in the city, chain-smoked as she described her first sight of Paula Wolf, the young American who was soon to fall victim to the A34 killer.”
Loretta wrinkled her nose, disliking the style of the piece and thinking it bore all the hallmarks of having been written against a deadline. Tracey would have been smoking just as furiously as Denise Stannion, his consumption was heaviest when he was under pressure, and she pictured the two of them straining to see each other through a miasma of blue cigarette smoke. She read on:
“She was at the side of the road just before the underpass,” Mrs. Stannion told me, “where the road goes up to the M4. She was trying to wave down cars and my first thought was that she was in danger of being run over. I pulled in, wound down the window and asked what on earth she was doing. She asked me if I was going anywhere near Oxford and I said no, but there was a bus from the central bus station. She looked disappointed and started moving away from the car, so I called after her that it was dangerous to hitchhike on her own.”
Mrs. Stannion’s hand shook as she stubbed out one cigarette and lit another. “She ran behind the car and tried to flag down a lorry, which missed her by inches, it was almost as if she didn’t care what happened to her. I got out and ran after her, the traffic was swerving to avoid my car and I was afraid there’d be a crash. I grabbed her arm, shouted that I could take her most of the way and she got in the car.”
Mrs. Stannion says her passenger was quiet and docile, readily admitting she had just missed a coach to Oxford and in any case couldn’t really afford the £7 single fare. Mrs. Stannion describes Ms. Wolf as “silent, morose almost” and was surprised when she took out a thick paperback book and began to read.
“I couldn’t see what it was until I asked her to look at the map on the backseat to see how close we were to the Newbury exit on the M4. Then she closed it and I saw it was the Bible. I’m not religious myself, but she was American and I’ve heard about all those TV evangelists in America, so I assumed she was born-again.”
This was confirmed when Mrs. Stannion asked Ms. Wolf why she was going to Oxford and she replied enigmatically: “To do God’s will.” Mrs. Stannion says that trying to engage her in further conversation was like “getting blood out of a stone” and Ms. Wolf soon returned to studying her Bible.
“The traffic was much heavier than I expected and I realized I was going to be late for a TUC meeting in Bristol,” Mrs. Stannion told me, close to tears. “I had intended to take her into Newbury, it’s two or three miles south of the M4, but when I saw how late it was I asked her if she’d mind me dropping her at the roundabout. Naturally, if I’d had any idea that other women had been attacked on that road I’d never have left her there.” Mrs. Stannion arrived at her meeting half an hour late, returned to Geneva two days later and knew nothing of Ms. Wolf’s death until she read about it in an English paper on Thursday evening.
The rest of the story was made up of bits and pieces, including the fact that Superintendent Dibden was “exasperated” about the nonappearance of Ms. Wolf’s brother at Heathrow on Friday morning. The reason for his failure to get on the flight was “a dispute within the strict religious sect of which he is a member”; Tracey explained that the Imitators of Christ opposed air travel except in the most dire emergency and had overruled Karl Wolf’s unilateral decision to come to England and make a formal identification of his sister. The matter would now be decided at a two-day “prayer vigil” involving the whole community over the weekend, and Tracey hinted that this behavior was testing Superintendent Dibden’s patience to the limit. Detectives from the Thames Valley force were ready to fly to Ohio, he said, if “communica
tion difficulties” continued. A final paragraph declared abruptly that a bundle of bloodstained clothing found in a foxhole near Thebes Farm during a police search on Thursday was still being examined by forensic scientists, but a connection with the A34 murder had been ruled out. There was a researcher’s byline in minute type at the bottom of the story and Loretta guessed it had been cobbled together in the office from various faxes sent by Tracey and last-minute calls to police headquarters in Kidlington.
Just how busy Tracey had been was revealed by a line in bold, awkwardly positioned after the name of the researcher. “Murder, Morals and the Media,” it proclaimed, and urged readers to turn to a feature on page seven. This splitting-up of single stories across several pages, which Loretta disliked, was a result of the Herald’s transition from broadsheet to tabloid, coinciding with its physical removal from Holborn to Docklands. She merely glanced at Tracey’s feature, an analysis of press reaction to the murder illustrated by a rag-out of tabloid headlines and a mugshot of Superintendent Dibden; it was written in a calmer, more ironic style, and described the way in which news stories were now “processed” to resemble popular fiction by tabloid journalists, sparing their readers the task of thinking for themselves. There was nothing in it that Loretta disagreed with, she could have written much of the article herself, but she found it hard to reconcile Tracey’s magisterial rebuke to the popular press with his own obsessive pursuit of what he described as “sexy” stories—a term which referred not to their content but to the almost sexual buzz he seemed to get out of chasing them.
Anyway, Loretta thought, turning the sadly shrunken pages of the Sunday Herald, Tracey was now technically a tabloid hack himself. She began reading an article by a member of the shadow cabinet, a nostalgic piece about the heyday of black-and-white films, then lifted her head, suddenly aware that the house was completely silent. Even Bertie had not come home, presumably because the warm weather had lured him into a longer than usual exploration of the canal bank. She shrugged off a little frisson of anxiety and reached for the phone, intending to ring Bridget and talk about Tracey’s article, then put the receiver back and withdrew her hand; it was Bridget and Sam’s first full day together since the discovery of the body a week ago—a week ago today—and she felt shy about interrupting them.
