‘No.’ Her fingers continued to shred the paper handkerchief. ‘I liked him, then.’
‘They say you have to kiss a lot of frogs to meet a prince.’
‘Pardon?’ Sally smiled to hide a sigh, reminding herself not to get clever.
‘I mean, we all have to experiment, don’t we?’ How condescending she sounded.
The girl’s answering smile was wan in the extreme. They were not doing well and Sally felt as if she was wading through mud, not because of lies, but in pursuit of the words to frame the truth. Here was a plump girl, shivering slightly in the heat, preternaturally docile, although she had not been like that when the man she had liked took a deep-throat kiss as an open invitation to full-scale intercourse on the front seats of his van. She had fought like a cat, broken a window, all useful evidence, although it hadn’t stopped him.
‘Did he do anything else at first, apart from kiss you and you kiss him back?’
Another long hesitation.
‘Put his hands … That’s when I started to try and stop him.’
‘Why? If you liked him?’
‘’Cos I wanted him to take me home. That’s what he said. And it’s all my fault, isn’t it?’
She was crying steadily now, tears as plump as her hands. Sally moved the box of tissues nearer.
‘Because I shouldn’t have gone with him, should I? I shouldn’t have fancied him at all.’
Sally gestured to her colleague to continue the good work and went into the kitchen. The slats of light which came through the Rape House blinds had begun to make her dizzy, but this girl had not wanted sunshine, she could only talk at all in the semi-dark.
The light in the kitchen was gloriously intense, reminding her of a tempting outside world and her own tired eyes. Brigid Connor had liked the kitchen, despite the view of a neglected backyard, or said she did, with her twittering politeness. She had even uttered thanks for a disgusting cup of soup; a charming lady, anxious to oblige, unlike the eighteen-year-old outside, who simply wanted to forget. Mrs Connor was so keen to please, so off-the-wall and, it had to be faced, so stupid, she would, and did, say anything as long as it received a smile, a nod of approval, or an invitation to continue in the same vapid vein. Didn’t do so much talking at home, she volunteered; Aemon hated a chatterbox. She liked to take two baths a day, keep herself fragrant. She might have been in the bath when the man came to the door, but then again, she might not. He had no hair, that man. Your husband, Brigid? No, the man with the gorgeous eyes. At which point, Brigid would put her palms over her own eyes, as if the sight of his had blinded her, and then remove the hands after a minute as if she was playing a game of peekaboo with a baby. They should all have been in a play-pen together. Nervous exhaustion, Sally concluded; premature senility or a reversion to infancy. But, throughout it all, there was something horribly candid in her guileless face. There were throw-away lines, addressed to the kitchen window or her own tea mug. He did, you know; he sucked me wet and dry, he did; never touched me. Something had happened.
Sally filled the kettle automatically. The medical examination which Brigid had not resented, although informing the doctor there was nothing to see, revealed old bruises on buttocks, fresh bruises on wrists and ankles. They had not gone as far as arresting the husband; policy dictated otherwise. Surprisingly, Ryan had always concurred with this caution; don’t charge in without being sure; work out which of them has got a screw loose first. In this case, a husband yelling about issuing a summons against the Police Commissioner, with no trace of a stranger in the husband’s house. Her dressing-gown fibres apparent all over his suit, as they might be, but nobody had raped her.
Nor had the husband brought the chocolates and flowers which lay on the table. She was his wife, for heaven’s sake, and a good life she had too. She was perfectly capable of buying those things for herself. Chocolates and flowers, flowers and hearts. Something had happened, but Brigid Connor had gone back to her old man, and that was really that.
No hair, no name, but flowers and chocolates. And ice.
Phone Ryan. No, she couldn’t phone Ryan. Not now.
Nasty little ritual, this, although Todd rather relished it, everyone else around shuffled a bit, changing weight from foot to foot as if it was cold instead of so relentlessly hot.
Todd adopted the informal approach, only safe in front of witnesses, including the man’s miserable little brief ‘You know your rights, doncha? No need to say nothing, but silence ain’t always golden.’ Abandoning the strict wording also, handing him the sheet, which he received with a ghastly smile, like royalty receiving a perfectly repugnant gift and giving it to an aide. ‘You attempted to rape Shelley Pelmore in the vicinity of King’s Cross,’ Todd intoned, leaving out the date for the sake of brevity. ‘Got that? Anything to say?’
‘Fuck off, you piece of crap,’ Ryan said, before his solicitor could silence him. ‘And where the hell’s Bailey?’
‘’S all right,’ said Todd, turning a benign countenance on the small man who was clutching Ryan’s sleeve, judging from experience that unwise reactions often followed less-than-wise remarks. ‘I shan’t write that down. Hardly a response to the charge, is it?’
‘Where’s fucking Bailey, then?’ Ryan demanded, louder. ‘Where the fuck is he?’ The cloth of his second-best shirt was bunched in the lawyer’s fist.
‘He’s volunteered off the fucking case, is where, Mr Ryan. He wanted to go.’
Ryan reared back, pulling away. Controlled, sure, he had learnt control. He would not move; he knew he was powerless. He just wanted to look, for a minute, as if he was capable of butting his forehead down onto the bridge of Todd’s nose. Todd did not wait. One swift jab to the solar plexus with the full force of vengeance behind it. Ryan doubled and moaned, thumped back against the wall.
Everyone was looking at the yellow paint above his head, pretending they were not listening to his breathing. It was in no one’s interest to record either the aggression or the reaction. Sad, really. The defendant was not entirely reasonable; like everything else, it was all his own fault.
Police officers, so Bailey had often told Helen, commit the same crimes as other people since they are prone to the same temptations, although their rate of offending was considerably less. And people like me are appointed to investigate on a rota basis. You do not, cannot, train a young man into total self-control; no training course was going to rid him of testosterone or the desire for the things in shop windows he could not afford. He has to have power in order to be useful; it follows he will abuse it. There were plenty of occasions when you wanted the man to have the strength of a vicious young brute, so that he could survive other, less-inhibited vicious young brutes who did not care if he lived or died. You did not wish to see a piece of animated cardboard policing a riot, but what the public did want was the kind of paragon not generally born of woman, with a lion heart easily moved to aggression or compassion, but never to anger or dishonesty. The public wanted muscle power, intelligence and perfect self-control. Well, they could not have it.
Across the desk was today’s interviewee. He was older than most, ex-military, never learnt to control the cash requirements of the old wife and the new one, in deep trouble with money, making a false insurance claim. Not smart enough to get away with it. Following him would be the lad who bounced his torch back and forth across the head of a juvenile car thief. Bailey had more sympathy with him: that kind of crime had all the elements of rough justice. The sergeant with nowhere to go was claiming that he needed the money to pursue the course of true love, always an expensive commodity. I do not believe in the power of love, Bailey thought to himself. Dreadful things are done in the name of love, just as they are in the name of vengeance, and if anyone was ever again to say to him, I could not help it, when they talked about love, he was going to spit. Ryan haunted him. He went to take the phone call.
‘Mr Bailey, sir?’
‘Of course,’ he snapped, regretting the recoil in Sally Smy
the’s voice.
‘Sorry,’ he went on, trusting her with a confidence to make up for the rudeness, ‘but I’m interviewing a chap who is so riddled with self-pity I keep slipping through the holes and he’s getting on my nerves. What can I do for you?’
All this was slightly overhearty, so she hesitated.
‘You know what we were talking about when we met, about Ryan’s little black book? The no-hopers?’
He did remember, all too clearly. That had been haunting him, too. So much so that he had mentioned it to Ryan’s senior, and judging from the response of outraged laughter, wished he had not. She took silence as encouragement.
‘Well, I think I’ve got another. Some of the same features. Ice.’
‘I can’t remember us discussing the presence or absence of that.’
‘I can’t remember us having much of a meaningful conversation at all,’ she responded sharply, exasperation standing in good stead for confidence. ‘But I should like to talk to someone and there isn’t anyone else. No one who’ll listen.’
He weighed it up in his judicious way. Perhaps there was something to be said for leaving Ryan to the tender mercies of Todd and the rule of law.
‘I can’t be party to any plan to get Ryan off the hook,’ he said portentously.
‘That isn’t the point,’ she said, more exasperated than ever. But it was, as far as Bailey was concerned. There was no other point.
You don’t care any more about the things you cannot change, Rose had taunted. Rose could taunt until the cows came home, and still remain an ally. That was the nature of friendship, or at least one of its many facets. If Helen had ever had recourse to much by way of family life since she had made the decision to ignore them in the manner they had ignored her for several years, she suspected she might have known more about how friendship equates to other states of being, such as sisterhood, brotherhood, parenthood. Her own background forced her to treasure her friends; she was glad, in many ways, to have been cast adrift. She hated the idea that the ones you loved had to be related by blood to give you the reason as well as all the obligations attached. Perhaps she was cold in her narrow little bones. I wouldn’t kill for anything except my handbag, she’d said to Rose.
There were not many friends: she was too picky, and even in the realm of friends, love had this random touch. In lieu of the family I secretly crave, Helen had once told Bailey, I would like my friends to have the following qualifications: I would like them to be courageous, but not necessarily brave; stubborn, doing the best they can with whatever they have been given; full of self-doubt but sure of self-worth; honourable, if not always, at least by inclination; the sort who neither screams nor whinges for help until they really need it and makes suffering the stuff of jokes.
To thine own self be true, he had said. And in the meantime Bailey had added, can they also be greedy, rapacious, dishonest, calculating? But of course. Nobody realizes, Helen had said, that you like people for what they are, which need not include conventional virtues, only the virtues you admire.
You said it, love. You like the people who are all the things you either are or want to be.
Am I cold?
No, just too analytical. I like you anyway.
She was sitting at her desk, crying with fury. There it was in the newspaper: the coroner’s report, all on paper, no life to it at all. Girl found dead, two months before. Sweet twenty-seven. Pregnant, alone, a demise from heart attack. Nothing to show; not found for two days. How could it happen: death without cause in one so young? And how was it that she herself, so coy with friendship, so careful about the making of demands, considered not at all before she phoned Anna Stirland. Was it possible, she wanted to ask, to die of a broken heart?
No, no, Anna Stirland told herself, I rarely tell anyone what I do, especially now. Being a nurse covers so many questions, shuts them up nicely. Tell a man you’re a midwife and he’ll run for cover; tell a woman you work at a family planning clinic and she’ll get you in a corner with anxious questions about her own thrombosis. Say you work in a hospital, they’ll assume accident and emergency, like on the telly, maybe show you a blister or two. On balance it was best to keep quiet about being a nurse. They all want dramatic stories. They always avoid the question of pay and why you once thought you had some kind of vocation until the whole bureaucratic, form-filling idiocy of the NHS knocks it out of you.
All right; now I dispense pills, rubbers and other forms of birth control and assist in simple abortions. I wish I was still a midwife, really; but you could be a midwife for twenty years and still not be able to buy your own house. You can, if you work in a bank or sell cars. Abortion and the avoidance of pregnancy paid better and that was a fact, which was why a skilled and dedicated midwife worked for a private death clinic. She wondered if she might have been less vulnerable, less a potential victim, if she had been doing what she was good at; if she wasn’t somehow defensive about what she did, since a person with such doubts about the nature of their work really did risk a kind of mental illness. Helen West had made her understand something, she said out loud as she walked round the park, namely that in her line of legal business there are no answers, no panaceas, no drugs which cure the problem. Anna had known that already, but she could not accept what he had done to her, even less what he might have done to others. Off his list, from the bowels of his computer and out of his notebooks, he would know exactly whom to choose for these little jokes. Because they, the patients, were like herself. They looked into his eyes and told him all their hopes and fears.
The park was the coolest place to be in the early evening. Not so much a park as a graveyard, sloping uphill away from the thunderous road into a canopy of old trees which left the grass, thin from constant shade, dappled with light. The gravestones were old, sticking up out of the ground round the church like gesturing fingers, the inscriptions long since worn away, making them little more than stumps of anonymous stone. There was no shame to sit up against them with a lunch-time sandwich. Few did; lying supine with a bottle of cider was more likely. It was not the kind of park which provided a landmark; not one of the perfect city parks which tourists in search of significant statuary would come to see. It was merely a green lung, always messy on the surface because of the leaves, slightly dusty because of the traffic; never entirely quiet. An old lags’ park, with sinister overtones, a collection of bottles littering the grass each morning. Over the slope, beyond the sunken church, stood the coroner’s court, prettily Victorian, and next to it, on more anonymous concrete lines, the mortuary. There were many reasons why the park was not to everyone’s taste.
Anna Stirland liked it, from time to time, when it suited and therefore soothed a certain morbid turn of mind, or, in summer, provided such coolness when the streets shone with ill-tempered heat, but she could not see it as a trysting place. Unless you had come to frolic with the dead.
She hefted her shoulder bag, full of food she might or might not cook, but bought as a commitment to ordinary life, and made for the gates, surprised as she always was to notice how the sound of traffic grew so much louder away from the trees. She passed a girl, marching in the opposite direction, walking with an air of pretended purpose, the way a shy woman might walk into a pub to meet someone, not quite sure what to do with herself if he was not there, except stare ahead and around, as if preoccupied. Her face was vaguely familiar, so that Anna was tempted to nod at her. She saw so many youthful faces in the course of her job, she was never quite sure when she recognized a woman or girl, if work had been the context. Simply a girl, strikingly thin, patently anxious. There were times when Anna did not regret the passing of the first apologetic years of youth.
Shelley Pelmore came to a halt within sight of the coroner’s court and paused. She felt less self-conscious now there was no one to see her looking around. She stood with her hands on her hips, bag across her chest, long legs ending in heavy shoes, a contrast to her short skirt and loose cropped top, as fashion dictated. She flicke
d hair out of her eyes and stared at the stained-glass windows of the court. It would always be dark in there, she reckoned, on account of the trees; lights glowed inside, as if it was winter. The building held no fears, nor the concrete block adjacent; Shelley had no idea of the purpose of either and no curiosity. She would never voluntarily have gone for a walk, least of all in a park, but this slightly seedy area held some attraction. Sex alfresco had a great appeal, like doing something forbidden. Shelley Pelmore had never had to resort to sheds or the backs of cars; sex had never been clandestine. It had always been Derek, blessed by her bloody mother and, apart from the initial naughtiness, profoundly disappointing. There had never been anything faintly wicked about it. None of this palpitating tension, this sense of being out on a limb, this dreadful enticing fear. This desperation.
He never smelt of anything and he had the quiet footsteps of a cat. He could dance, too, this glamorous doctor. Shelley preferred to draw a veil over their first meeting, when she had talked her heart out, spitting out the particulars of her life for his edification, receiving back his sympathetic warmth. And then his hands on her, feeling gently, asking questions with his smooth fingertips, making her laugh, even as she lay with her legs wide apart and the cool instruments probing. An intimate examination was something she had first dreaded, and then dreamt about.
Maybe it was the relief at not being pregnant after all which made her bold. You ever go clubbing, Doc? Come on down and meet me and the girls. He was a little old for her, of course; it would not do to place him anywhere near her friend, the predatory manageress. She must keep him away from her. Shiny brown head under artificial lights, beautiful exciting eyes. But, oh yes, in the end he was too good not to share.
‘Hello.’
Behind her without a sound, arms on her shoulders. ‘Where have you been?’ she hissed.
‘Missing you,’ he said. ‘All the time.’ He was propelling her away from the court, towards the church where no one went. She stopped abruptly, thinking it was time to make a stand, to tell him she couldn’t go on like this. The world and its expectations were tearing her apart. She dreaded the morning, the afternoon, the evening and this time she really had to do something about the pregnancy, or she would be in prison for the whole of her life. Would he help her, please? Oh God, he owed her that. She turned on him, ready to be shrill, to embarrass him by screaming at him. But he stopped her. He held her head steady with one hand meshed in her hair, his mouth clamped on hers, the other hand briefly inside the loose top, squeezing a nipple, hard, then down beyond the waistband of the skirt, over the still-flat belly inside her knickers, one long finger making her gasp. People would see; with eyes squeezed shut, she could imagine a crowd gathering, watching a man’s hand snatch at her bush in broad daylight.
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