by Morag Joss
‘I mean,’ she said, with insincere patience, ‘that I’ll be away. There’s a performance and live recording in Salzburg. In about ten days. So I’ll be away, do you see? So it makes sense for you to get settled in at the Sulis before that happens …’
Sara was still standing in the doorway with the cup of tea, determined to get her message across this time. Joyce had proved to be a mistress of elective deafness on the subject of her moving from Medlar Cottage. She would nod in apparent understanding and then immediately try to draw them away from the subject with blatant non sequiturs about anything: the weather, Pretzel, her appetite. Sara had made her tea, wishing it were hemlock, and marched upstairs determined that she would be made to get the point.
‘The house will be empty. And it’s been lovely having you but it was only for a while, wasn’t it? You’ll want to be getting on with things, I expect. I mean, you were going to need somewhere more permanent some time, remember, and this is a wonderful chance.’
‘But I could stay here and look after the place for you. Pretzel and me. A dog about the place, wouldn’t that be a help, now?’
‘You are too kind,’ Sara said, ‘but no, I’m not letting you spoil your plans for me.’ Before Joyce could reply that the only person with plans was Sara, she went on firmly, ‘You need to get yourself properly settled in and used to things. You’ll love Dr Golightly.’ As she handed Joyce her cup and saucer she looked doubtfully at her yellowish eyes, remembering Stephen Golightly’s clear blue ones. ‘You will. He’s very kindly agreed to give you the nice little apartment that the last therap—resident musician had. And he understands that you need to take things very gently and get your own playing going again, and he wants you to think of it as your opportunity too, to get really well again.’
Even as she spoke a little dance started up inside Sara’s head, celebrating the end of all the dishonest little euphemisms that now tripped out of her mouth, like ‘really well’ for ‘sober’ and ‘properly settled in’ for ‘well and truly off my hands’. The greatest dishonesty of all, that she had spent half an hour in Dr Golightly’s beautiful consulting room discussing with him how desperately Joyce needed help and that he had agreed out of pure kindness to take Joyce on or rather in, would remain her secret. The arrangement she had come to was that as well as board and lodging in the staff accommodation, Joyce would be paid a tiny amount of money, mainly for the sake of her pride, in return for leading her fellow patients in a little light music therapy and other, unspecified ‘helping out’. Dr Golightly had graciously blurred the divide between staff and patient that he was making in her case by describing the Sulis as ‘a mutually supportive, healing community which strives to respect each individual’s contribution and meet his or her needs’. So Joyce would get treatment for her drink problem even though she was broke? Sara had asked, preferring plain words. Dr Golightly had reassured her. He could not allow anyone resident at the clinic and in need of its resources to go without, and certainly not for the want of money. He would consider that simply unethical. Waving aside Sara’s offer to pay, he had proposed that he would devise and supervise Joyce’s regime personally. Sara smiled, recalling how he had then explained to her that he was not a specialist in alcoholism but would apply the naturopathic principles of the clinic and that these might be tough but should prove effective. His face as he spoke, so serious and apologetic, had betrayed that he had no idea that at that moment she had been thinking how easily she could have kissed him for his unassuming compassion, if not for his blue eyes.
As Joyce sucked in her tea with a noise by this time as familiar to Sara as the wish to kill her which it now provoked, she thought happily that with Joyce gone she might also begin to look forward to Andrew being less deliberately preoccupied with the Takahashi case. She failed to notice that perhaps ‘preoccupied’ too was a euphemism for what might be a symptom of cooling passion.
Joyce fished out a handkerchief. Sitting on the bed and looking round the spare room she asked, ‘So will I get a hand with my things, do you think? Will there be enough room for my things?’ She lifted her eyes to Sara’s. They were exactly like Pretzel’s: wary, longing, and full of a fatalistic anticipation that at any moment the petting and fussing could stop and she would be hauled back to the kennel.
Sara sat down on the bed and placed a hand on her arm. ‘Oh, of course you will. Of course we’ll make sure you’re comfortable and feeling at home.’
‘Pretzel too?’
‘Of course Pretzel too. He won’t be allowed downstairs where the kitchens and staffroom are, or the dining room or the patients’ bedrooms, of course …’ Sara decided that it would be too cruel at this stage to add the drawing room, swimming pool, lawns, terrace, formal garden and treatment rooms to the list of canine no-go areas.
‘They’re all very nice at the Sulis,’ she said. ‘I’ve explained all about you, and Dr Golightly’s right behind you. It’s a wonderful chance, Joyce. They really want to help.’
Joyce slurped more tea with a disapproving noise. ‘And who’s helping whom, I should like to know? I was tutor to the Egyptian royal family. And a professor of music.’
‘Well, yes! And they’re absolutely thrilled to be getting you, they really are. They know you’ve been away from teaching for a while and that’s fine. They want you to take it at your own pace.’ There she went again, swinging from sympathy when Joyce came over all abject, to the grossest flattery when her tattered ego demanded recognition for what she once had been. Joyce had succeeded in making her alcoholism as unmentionable to Sara as it was to herself and now Sara, unable to refer to the drinking or its consequences directly, felt a glimmer, perhaps, of the same shame at the concealment.
‘And I’ll be seeing you lots,’ she went on. ‘Almost every day, as I’ll be coming in to see James, anyway.’ Dr Golightly had made a special point of that. Patients did best when they were well supported by family and friends, and he would like to suggest that he saw Sara each time she visited so that they remained closely in touch over Joyce’s progress. Sara had thought this an utterly, tremendously sensible suggestion, and had simultaneously wondered what to wear when she next went.
A door banged downstairs. ‘Andrew,’ Sara said decisively, standing up. ‘Better see what he’s up to.’ She was glad of the interruption but not sure, judging the ill temper of the door’s bang, if she quite wanted it to be him. He had not taken it well last night when she had refused to leave Joyce alone for an evening, and had broken off their telephone call crossly before she had had time to explain that Joyce would not be around for much longer. And she was not feeling strong enough, she thought on the way downstairs, for the reproachful casting upwards of his eyes in the direction of Joyce’s room, the ostentatious moving of Joyce’s harmless things—her specs case or Daily Telegraph or handbag—from one place to another, or his pointed and laborious avoidance of any contact with Pretzel. He was in so many ways the complete opposite of Stephen Golightly.
In the kitchen Andrew glanced up from pouring himself a mug of tea from the stewed remains of Joyce’s pot. ‘Got the photographs back, the film that was in Mrs Takahashi’s camera,’ he said, and swallowed half of his tea. ‘This is cold.’
‘And?’
‘Don’t tell us a thing. A couple of snaps of Bath, but mostly they’re of the place she was staying, the garden at the Golightly place. Runner beans, sunflowers, peas. She was quite taken with the countryside. Pictures of bloody cornfields, half a dozen of them. Field after field, close-ups, maybe even the same field. Perhaps they don’t have organic smallholdings in Japan.’ He drained his mug. ‘Stewed as well. Doesn’t matter.’
Sara watched him with her arms folded, trying to prevent her unfavourable comparison of him with Stephen Golightly from outlasting the pleasure she felt just to see him. She did love those brown eyes. And she was deciding all over again that she loved Andrew too, for trying not to let the expression in them betray his frustration, and even more for his being so hopeless a
t it. It was hard to love him sometimes but she did, even though he was so obsessed with this case he had not even asked how she was, or what was happening with Joyce.
‘So, how are you?’ he said. ‘How’s Baba Yaga? Found her a nice little house on stilts yet?’
‘Joyce is leaving. I’ve found her a place to stay and a job,’ Sara said, turning to the sink to empty the teapot. ‘If you’re at all interested.’ A moment later the pot was nearly knocked from her hand by Andrew’s arms, which had appeared round her and were hugging her so fiercely she squealed. He was clasping her so tightly she could barely laugh.
‘Oh thank God for that,’ he growled in her ear, kissing her as he spoke, his voice sending shivers through her. ‘You star, you bloody wonderful star. God, Sara, we’ll be on our own, our own. Oh, I can hardly wait …’ She turned and prevented him from saying more with her mouth.
Just then Pretzel skeetered to his feet from underneath the table and tottered with wagging tail to the kitchen door. Unfortunately, since neither Sara nor Andrew was at that moment particularly receptive to the early warning, so it was that a minute later Andrew’s tongue was in Sara’s mouth, his penis in her left hand and the teapot in her right, when Joyce appeared in the doorway with her empty cup and asked, ‘Er, would there be a wee drop left in that, dear?’
CHAPTER 18
DETECTIVE SERGEANT BRIDGER strolled down Green Street and paused at the empty window of The Sausage Shop. He would not have described himself as a big sausage fan, least of all of the ones sold here. Chicken with lemongrass, duck with oregano, no thank you. Did they do sausages in Japan? For all Bridger knew they did origami with raw fish ones.
He turned from the window and looked across the street at the Snake and Ladder. The town was buzzing with people, it being Friday night. Platoons of girls, three or four abreast, were marching along Green Street with their arms linked, conducting raucous and hilarious conversations. Quiet, darkly dressed young men wandered behind with less obvious purpose. Bridger looked at his watch. He could go in for a pint, but he decided against. The Snake and Ladder had no atmosphere and anyway, he did not want to turn up at Manvers Street with beer on his breath. He did, however, want to make very sure that DCI Poole saw him there or, failing that, that he got to hear that he had been. No point going the extra mile if nobody who mattered got to know about it.
He had already established that they were nine hours ahead and that they worked Saturday mornings. So if he got down there now and put his face about a bit he could be on the phone by say, eleven. There was a good chance of speaking to the guy in the Police Department in Kobe, assuming they started at eight. There was a good chance that he would speak English as well as he emailed it. And a good chance, in the course of this and several more exchanges that he would engineer over the next few days, that he would be able to make a case to DCI Poole for going to Japan personally to pursue the investigation into Professor Takahashi. Well, it’d take a couple of days but a one-to-one with the authorities on the ground there’d be the quickest way through this, he’d suggest to Poole, sighing nonchalantly. Bloody long flight and the climate’s awful but it’d be worth it if it gets us our result I wouldn’t mind going … What’s wrong with the Japanese consulate in Bristol, Bridger? Use them, man, that’s what they’re there for, he would say. Ah, yes, the consular link’s been useful but investigating one of their own citizens isn’t their job at the end of the day etc. etc.
Indeed the consulate had been useful. It was thanks to the consulate that Bridger had found out, with the suspect’s cooperation, that Professor Takahashi had no previous convictions of any sort in his own country and that no complaint or charge had ever been made against him to the Japanese police. That had come as no surprise to Bridger. All the wife-beaters he had ever come across had been masters of intimidation and he assumed that this was a characteristic that crossed borders. What had been more of a surprise was the discovery that Takahashi, in his mid-fifties, had married his thirty-one-year-old wife in 1997. Bridger had taken heart at this because a little more digging would uncover, he was almost certain, not just an ugly divorce but a battered ex-wife. In that he had been wrong, of course. Bridger hugged himself. Just a simple thing like a copy of a marriage certificate had shown him that he had been wildly, blissfully wrong, because the first Mrs Takahashi was not divorced. She was dead.
Bridger could sniff a lead when it presented itself and there was something about this that cried out for further investigation. Why had Takahashi failed to mention that he had been married for only two years? Bridger would go cautiously, but he fully expected to find that the first wife was dead because her husband had killed her. Or maybe it was suicide, the final act of a desperate woman. He was a wife-beater. And if he was also a wife-killer, having got away with it once could he not, in another violent temper, have killed another wife?
He set off across the street but his footsteps slowed as he entered the alleyway at the side of the Snake and Ladder. One globe light shone above the side entrance to the pub, the door which Mrs Takahashi must have used to enter the building because the pub itself had been closed until ten-thirty that morning. Until then only the side entrance had been left unlocked for deliveries and for the kitchen staff who had been on duty since seven. Bridger had established all that himself, early on. It was the kind of useless detail you had to go into, he thought huffily, as he walked out of the other end of the alley and past the Photo-Kwik shop, to satisfy the likes of DCI Poole. It never produced anything. Nor did the scanning and rescanning of security videos, although, he remembered with a smirk, they had not had too onerous a job there. The railway station’s system had been down that day, in fact had been down for several days, along with all the station clocks, and for the third time in a month. The tape at Bristol Templemeads where Takahashi claimed to have boarded a train at 11.32 had been recorded over before they had even asked to see it. The image quality on the only other tapes, from Bath Abbey environs and the Guildhall, had been so poor that even if Takahashi had been present in the grey moving soup recorded between eight and ten o’clock that morning, not even his own mother could have said so. Complete waste of time and talent. It took Bridger’s sort of applied intelligence to weasel out the kind of lead that he now had; the lead that was going to result not just in the suspect’s conviction here, but in the solving of another and as yet undiscovered murder on the other side of the world. Now that was proper police work.
PART 2
CHAPTER 19
PETRONELLA CROPPER SAT beside her husband in silence on the way to the Sulis, while Hugh drove and exuded neutrality, two things he was good at. Their over-familiarity with the journey meant that the countryside they were passing through inspired no comment from either of them, although Petronella still and almost unconsciously scanned any field with ponies in it to see if there might be a grey. It was a silly habit after all this time, but she always looked out for a grey pony like Millie who had simply not been there one holiday when she had come home from school. Petronella was rarely exact about dates in her past but she thought it was when she was about eleven, and the habit had begun then as a doomed but genuine search, for Millie had been sold. She had found it unbearable to think that she might unknowingly drive past her in a field somewhere. Suppose Millie saw her and she just drove past? Even now, years after Millie must have died of old age, the thought could still sometimes make her cry, and the habit of scouring fields of ponies to see if there was a grey had stuck, even though Petronella’s rational self knew that by now she was just looking for a pony like her beloved Millie. It was just a reflex thing, really.
She had never mentioned it to Hugh. She did not think she had even told him about Millie and, casting a look at him engrossed in his stolid piloting of the Range Rover through the Somerset lanes, she knew he would wonder what point she was making if she were suddenly to do so now. He seemed to accept without curiosity that she looked out of the passenger window when he drove her anywhere. Nor did he e
ver comment on how seldom she conversed in the car. She did not think she had ever explained that to him either (it was ghastly the way people go on about their childhoods) but as a child she had learned to associate cars with silence. There was a particular kind of silence that followed the cheery and insincere see-you-soons! because it never was soon. The yearning would begin the moment the car doors were slammed. The eventual end of the term that would just be starting lay too far in the future to hold any credibility for her whatsoever. There was so much to be got through first that she felt certain that the end would never come, yet the hopeless waiting for it began with the silence that would settle between herself and the hired driver within minutes of the start of the journey back to school. And although at the time she had believed that Mummy had had a terrible time with Daddy so that now she must not be selfish about boarding at school or jealous about letting Mummy have new friends, because of course Mummy deserved to have what she called Some Life Of My Own, she would also begin to hope as soon as her seat belt was fastened that next holidays (should they ever come) it would be just Mummy and her. Not that the holidays were exactly spoiled by a new boyfriend or husband. They went to lots of different places and it was lovely for Mummy, it was just the way they always assumed first claim on her mother’s attention. She was sure that if they didn’t do that then Mummy would have so much more time to give her. But Mummy had such exquisite manners she would always put them first. They were guests, after all.
It must be because she was pregnant again that she was wallowing in the past and that the recollection should be making her feel all blubby. Petronella couldn’t abide self-pity and of course it couldn’t have been all that bad. She wouldn’t have had Millie at all if it hadn’t been for that particular one’s generosity and it was nobody’s fault that he, and consequently Millie, had not lasted. How feeble of her to want to cry, but thank God the young were not here to see it. She had brought up Rupert and Miles not to be crybabies. That was so important, for their own sakes. She knew perfectly well that children who blub the minute they’re left at prep school really do cop it from the others, so she agreed with Hugh there. She had been jolly lucky. Really, it had made her more independent. Meanwhile she was once again, this time aged forty-one and accidentally pregnant, sitting in a car watching out for grey ponies and being driven somewhere she didn’t want to go.
