What Men Say

by Joan Smith

  “Sit down, Dr. Lawson.” The policewoman gestured vaguely towards the chairs and waited for Loretta to move. “Please,” she added, pulling one out herself.

  After a slight hesitation Loretta said, “OK,” and let her carpetbag slide to the floor. She perched on the edge of a chair, hardly aware how uncomfortable it was, and faced the Inspector across the table. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Queen,” said the policewoman. “Stella Queen. And this is DC Blady.”

  Loretta nodded, feeling slightly less at a disadvantage. “OK,” she said again, “are you going to tell me what this is about?”

  Instead of answering, Inspector Queen patted the pockets of her suit jacket and frowned. “My cigarettes . . .”

  Blady produced a gold packet and she took one, looking interrogatively at Loretta. Loretta shook her head and she returned the packet to its owner, leaning sideways as he struck a match and lit her cigarette. She leaned back in her chair, visibly relaxing as she inhaled, and was silent for a moment.

  “Just one thing,” she said unexpectedly, “before we start. Why did you change your flight from Paris, Dr. Lawson? I gather you weren’t expected home till tomorrow?”

  The room was airless, without windows, and Loretta could feel the smoke insinuating itself into her hair. She put a hand up and touched it, as though she could protect it from the pollution. “Just a work thing,” she said cautiously, not wanting to admit the real reason. “Bridget’s asked me to stand in for her next term, while she’s on maternity leave, and there isn’t much time to fix it up. I said I’d come back early if I could.”

  To her surprise, Inspector Queen was immediately alert. “So you’ve fixed up to see Dr. Bennett? When? Tomorrow?”

  Loretta felt a ripple of alarm. “Why? Has something happened to Bridget?”

  “Such as, Dr. Lawson?”

  Loretta moved anxiously in her chair, feeling the metal surround quiver under her weight. “I’ve no idea, it was you who said—why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

  There was a distant rumble, the sound of a widebodied jet taking off. Inspector Queen stubbed out her cigarette on a cheap tin ashtray which already held several butts and looked directly at Loretta. “Bridget Bennett has been missing since lunchtime yesterday,” she said calmly. “I have half a dozen officers checking with her friends and colleagues—”

  “What?”

  “—but so far we’ve drawn a complete blank. She seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth, which isn’t all that easy for a pregnant woman. If you have any information about her whereabouts, any idea at all where she might be, you should tell us now. I have a WPC stationed outside your house—”

  “Outside my house?”

  Inspector Queen said revealingly: “We couldn’t get in because your neighbor’s visiting her sister in High Wycombe and her son’s a bit—not all there. He says he doesn’t know where she keeps your key.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Loretta interrupted. “Who says—what makes you think Bridget’s missing?”

  Inspector Queen glanced sideways at her companion. An unspoken message passed between them and he said casually: “Mr. Becker admits they had a row yesterday lunchtime. He says she went off in her car, she didn’t say where she was going, and no one’s heard from her since.”

  Loretta appealed to the Inspector: “Sam reported her missing? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Not exactly,” Inspector Queen hesitated for quite a long time. “Dr. Lawson, I have to tell you that at ten thirty this morning I went to Mr. Becker’s office on Osney Island and arrested him on suspicion of murder.”

  “Murder.” Loretta shook her head disbelievingly, her own suspicions about Sam the previous evening shrivelling like punctured balloons. She said, putting off the moment when she had to admit she knew perfectly well where Bridget was: “I don’t like him, I’m not going to pretend I do, but I’m sure he wouldn’t harm Bridget.”

  “No one’s accused him of harming his wife, Dr. Lawson. Mr. Becker is being held on suspicion of murdering Paula Wolf.”

  “Paula Wolf?”

  They stared at each other in mutual incomprehension. Loretta felt an urge to laugh, a horrible reflex she had experienced once before after a minor car accident in Banbury Road. She cried out: “What? I don’t understand.”

  A tray stood on the table between them, with a jug of water and two scratched plastic glasses. Inspector Queen pushed it towards Loretta, asking rather nervously whether she wanted a drink. Loretta waved it away, unaware that the color had drained from her face and she was hyperventilating. “It was in the Guardian this morning,” she protested. “I read it on the plane. You’ve already charged someone; it gave his name and everything.”

  The Inspector’s mouth tightened and her eyes focused on a point somewhere beyond Loretta’s right shoulder. She said without emotion, as though reading from a prepared statement: “David John Coombes has been charged with one offense of attempted murder arising out of an incident on the A34 in 1989. Further charges are imminent, but he is no longer a suspect in the inquiry into the death of Paula Wolf.”

  “He isn’t? You mean she didn’t get into his van?”

  “She did, but he says he lost his nerve. All the other attacks were at night and he picked on women who’d broken down. He always parked far enough away so they couldn’t get his registration number. He says he made some excuse and dropped her off, though he may have tried something on and she got away. Something must’ve happened, because she was in such a hurry she left her bag behind.” She held out her hand for the cigarettes, slid one out of the packet and waited for Blady to light it, her eyes not leaving Loretta’s face. “To get back to Dr. Bennett, we don’t—we have no reason to believe she’s in any danger.”

  The words should have been reassuring but Loretta sensed an undercurrent, an unspoken “but” which would shortly render them meaningless. She waited and eventually the Inspector added, through a cloud of smoke: “Mr. Becker has actually been quite frank with us, he’s admitted knowing Miss Wolf in America and . . .” She hesitated, thrown off course by Loretta’s sharp intake of breath. “And that he had, um, an intimate relationship with her.”

  “Intimate relationship? You mean an affair?”

  Inspector Queen pushed back her chair and crossed her legs. “Of sorts; according to Mr. Becker it didn’t last very long. If it hadn’t been for the phone numbers—”

  “What phone numbers?”

  “In her—well, it’s not really a diary, there are dates but she seems to have used it mainly to copy out bits of the Bible. Her brother had it with him when he arrived this morning. My—the officer who was here to meet him recognized Mr. Becker’s number straight away, the CES number, that is. They found it in her bedroom, with her clothes and stuff, but naturally they had to ask God before they decided to show it to us.” She looked cross for a second, the shadow of her irritation with the Imitators of Christ clouding her face. “Otherwise there was nothing to link them. Mr. Wolf says she turned up out of the blue at Christmas, she didn’t say where she’d been when she got out of jail—never mentioned Mr. Becker or anything about the clinic.”

  “The clinic?”

  Inspector Queen finished her second cigarette, leaned forward to stub it out and glanced at her watch. “To cut a long story short,” she said briskly, “Miss Wolf used to work at a clinic near Boston, one of those posh private places you read about. You know, Liz Taylor’s always in and out of them.”

  Loretta remembered a newspaper photograph of a very overweight Elizabeth Taylor arriving by car at the Betty Ford Clinic. “What on earth was Sam doing there?”

  “Not the same one. This one’s got a funny name, Mount Minnows . . . Mr. Becker’s a bit vague about why he was there, but it seems to have been something to do with a computer virus.”

  Loretta was astonished. “You can’t catch a computer virus.”

  “I didn’t say y
ou could. This company he worked for in Boston, apparently they sacked someone and he got his own back by messing up the computer. Mr. Becker says it took him months to sort out, he was working evenings and weekends—I don’t know enough about it to give you chapter and verse. Anyway, when he finished he booked himself into this Mount Minnows place for a rest, met Miss Wolf and—” A phone rang in the inner room and she turned her head. “Get that, will you, Blady?”

  He nodded, levered himself away from the wall and disappeared into the inner room.

  Loretta said: “But why did she follow him to England? And it’s hardly a motive for killing someone, an old girlfriend turning up. Bridget’s hardly . . . we’re not talking about a couple of sixteen-year-olds.”

  Inspector Queen’s face closed up and she said awkwardly: “Mr. Becker hasn’t confessed to killing her, Dr. Lawson.”

  “He hasn’t? But you said—”

  “As his lawyer pointed out, he does have an alibi for that Thursday afternoon—unlike your friend Dr. Bennett. He admits hiding the body in the barn, he’s not denying that, but he claims he only did it to . . . he says he was protecting his wife.” She ignored Loretta’s outraged exclamation and hurried on: “Mr. Becker says he got home at the usual time that evening and there they were in the dining room, Dr. Bennett and Miss Wolf—her body, that is. Someone was coming to supper and he couldn’t think what else to do, he never intended to leave the body in the sheep bath—”

  “Stop! This is ridiculous.”

  Inspector Queen looked slightly affronted. “He does say it was self-defense—Miss Wolf attacked Dr. Bennett, there was a struggle and Miss Wolf fell and hit her head on the corner of the mantelpiece. If you remember, it’s stone—”

  Loretta gasped: “He’s saying they fought over him? That pathetic male fantasy?”

  “I assume the thought uppermost in Dr. Bennett’s mind would have been to protect her baby,” Inspector Queen said reprovingly. “According to her brother, Miss Wolf was in a very emotional state before she left, he’d been trying to get her to see a doctor. When she just disappeared like that he was half convinced she’d gone off and killed herself. He thinks it’s highly unlikely she knew Mr. Becker was married. Or, more to the point, that his wife was pregnant.”

  “What do you mean, more to the point?”

  “We knew from the post-mortem that Miss Wolf had recently given birth—had a baby. Till this morning we had no idea who the father was, or that the child was stillborn.”

  “Stillborn,” Loretta breathed.

  Inspector Queen rattled on: “Mr. Becker swears he didn’t know he’d got Miss Wolf pregnant; he only slept with her two or three times and he assumed she was on the pill. Especially with her working in the clinic.”

  Loretta closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair, pressing hard against the metal crosspiece. She heard a door open, Blady saying “ma’am” in an excited voice, and the scrape of the Inspector’s chair as she went to join him. A moment later Loretta opened her eyes and saw Blady watching her, his hand rising to his mouth with what she took to be another cigarette until she realized it was actually a stick of chewing gum.

  “Dr. Lawson?” Inspector Queen returned from the inner room, closing the connecting door behind her. “Where and when are you supposed to be seeing Dr. Bennett?”

  “Um, I said I’d ring her when I got back.”

  “Does your answering machine have a remote-control device?”

  “What?”

  Inspector Queen made an impatient sound. “One of those things that sends a tone down the phone line. In case Dr. Bennett has left a message for you.”

  “No.” The lie was automatic, even though the device was in the bag at Loretta’s feet. “I mean, I haven’t got it with me.”

  “Pity. Now about your luggage. If you tell Blady what it looks like, he’ll collect it on the way to the car.”

  Loretta looked down at her watch. “The coach—”

  “Sorry, but I need to listen to your answering machine.” The Inspector hesitated. “Look, Dr. Lawson, I’ve just been talking to one of the forensic team I sent to St. Frideswide’s College. There was a bit of argybargy, the porter wouldn’t let them into Dr. Bennett’s room till he’d spoken to the warden, but I won’t bother you with all that. The point is, there was a cassette tape in her desk—a Madonna tape, is that right, Blady?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Like a Prayer.”

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s what it’s called, ma’am.”

  “Oh.” She frowned and turned back to Loretta.

  “Anyway, the point is, Paula Wolf’s fingerprints are all over it, Dr. Lawson.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Inspector Queen ignored her. “She’s got a cassette player in her car, hasn’t she? I expect she listens to it on her way to work.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “We thought it was suspicious, both cars being so clean inside, hers and Mr. Becker’s. He said it was a special offer at the garage they use, a good clean inside and out when you have it serviced, but the manager says you have to pay extra. Fortunately for us this tape got moved from Dr. Bennett’s car before—she must’ve taken it to work without realizing Miss Wolf had picked it up.”

  She waited a moment, watching Loretta’s face as she assimilated this information, then said: “Dr. Lawson, if you’re ready? We’re wasting time.”

  Loretta got up, reaching automatically for her bag and gripping the handle more tightly when Blady moved to take it from her. Inspector Queen was already at the door, holding it open, and as soon as Loretta passed through into the arrivals lounge the two detectives formed up on either side of her as though she was under arrest. They were waved through passport control, attracting curious looks from passengers whose flights had arrived in the three-quarters of an hour since Loretta was extracted from the Paris queue. In the baggage reclaim area, the number of her flight was still up on a board, overlooking a creaking carousel on which two pieces of luggage, a scruffy holdall and a musical-instrument case, circled endlessly.

  The Inspector said doubtfully: “Yours?”

  “No.”

  “You travel light.”

  Loretta spotted the phones, off to her right. “Can I make a phone call?”

  “Who to?”

  She walked on. “Doesn’t matter.” She had not really expected them to allow her to make a call unsupervised but she could feel panic rising, sweat staining the underarms of her shirt even though it was not a particularly warm evening.

  “Green channel here?”

  “Mmm,” she said, sleepwalking past a row of customs officials. She did not even notice that the Italian woman from her flight had been stopped and searched, her belongings spread out on a table like items in an extremely upmarket jumble sale. The woman lifted her head from repacking, recognized Loretta and muttered something sympathetic in Italian; Loretta ignored her, oblivious of anything but the fact that she was leading the police straight to Bridget.

  The Italian shrugged. “OK, please yourself, va fanculo” she muttered, and went back to folding a pair of peach satin cami-knickers.

  14

  “What Were You Doing In Paris? Holiday?”

  Loretta, who had been staring out of the car window at the familiar flat countryside between Christmas Common and Oxford, barely moved her head. “Conference,” she said, hoping the Inspector would take the hint.

  “In Paris? Where’s the Police Federation meeting this year, Blady? Scarborough?”

  He half turned from the front seat. “Don’t know. Sorry, ma’am.”

  Inspector Queen was silent for a moment but the approach of Oxford seemed to be making her nervous. She smoothed her skirt out over her knees and remarked: “I’ve often wondered what you do at these conferences, academics.”

  “Discuss things.”

  “But do you really do anything you couldn’t do on the phone? Presumably you’ve all got computers and fax machines these days. I mean, who
pays?”

  “I do.”

  “Not your college?”

  This was absurd enough to jerk Loretta out of the fearful speculation which had absorbed her for most of the journey from Heathrow. She imagined Bernard Shilling’s face if she put in an expenses claim for attending a meeting of the Fern Sap editorial collective and replied, more sharply than she intended: “No, certainly not.” The car sped past a motorway sign giving advance warning of Exit Eight, the turn-off for Oxford, and her heart responded with a fast, jerky beat which left her slightly out of breath.

  She reluctantly accepted that the cassette tape, with its incriminating fingerprints, belonged to Bridget. Sam was uninterested in pop music, he had never heard of k. d. lang and was politely bored when Loretta and Bridget reminisced one evening about bands they had seen in the early seventies—the Who, Led Zeppelin, Fairport Convention. In any case he had a portable CD player, Loretta had seen it at his flat in Norham Gardens, whereas Bridget quite often took her old Walkman to work. Loretta could easily picture her bumping down the cobbled street in front of St. Frideswide’s in her Astra, singing along with Madonna as she turned into the small college car park and pressing the “eject” button so she could take the tape with her. It was harder to imagine Paula Wolf in the front seat of Bridget’s car, fingering the plastic cassette case; Loretta’s idea of the dead woman was based on the drawing which had appeared in the Guardian, that two-dimensional image in which life was so obviously extinct.

  There were phones at intervals along the A34; Loretta had used one to ring Joe Lunderius just after Christmas when she was held up by road works on the way home from a two-day conference at Southampton University. Paula could have phoned Thebes Farm from there, after she got out of the blue van, although there was no obvious reason why she should have tried Sam’s home number rather than his office. Then it occurred to Loretta that Paula might have mixed up the two numbers; a foreigner, particularly one who had just had an unpleasant experience, would not necessarily recognize the slight difference between the two codes. If Paula was distressed, incoherent even, it might explain Bridget’s willingness to go and pick her up without fully understanding who she was, or her connection with Sam. Loretta had no sooner thought of this explanation than she recoiled from it, unconsciously lifting one of her hands in a gesture of rejection. She did not believe Sam’s version of events for a minute, it was a malicious fiction designed to deflect suspicion from the more obvious suspect, himself, and punish Bridget for her deceit over the baby.