She wants to smell Jane’s hair and to be stroking it as she is stroking Angela’s just now. She needs to hear her infectious laugh just once more. It is more than she can bear not to lift the phone and just listen to Jane’s voice on the answer phone. And another thought occurs to her. She remembers the small of the night conversations that she and Jane shared about Jane’s desire to have a child, when Linda and she are eventually together. They talked about an arranged pregnancy. Perhaps the need for a child will mean that Jane will find a conventional male female relationship. She is in her thirties after all and she does not have much time left for that. Linda cannot think about Jane in a relationship with a man.
She is torturing herself. There is no other way to describe it. She is torturing herself in the vacuum of the wait to see what the press will do to them; in the vacuum of her marriage; in the vacuum of Jane’s absence.
Shaking herself out of her mood, her thoughts go to Susan and to the Ramsey business. She surmises that Susan’s main concern is bound to be her threatened career. Nothing will be more important to her than that. Ramsey has put that in jeopardy. Susan will now have to put all her energies into damage limitation and into saving her career at all costs. She should perhaps marry Bill as soon as she can, and get back to work and into the public eye the moment that her face repairs. She has a strong public following and the article might well not be believed. There still has to be a chance for Susan. There will be no chance, Linda doubts, if the public believes the ‘Sex Romp’ article. Despite herself, she again feels the resentment towards her friend for the plight they are now in. How could someone be so blinkered to the consequences of their actions as Susan has clearly been?
Suppressing these thoughts and the impulse to tell her friend just what she is feeling, she rings Susan when Angela heads off in response to Tina’s call to have some juice. They talk for a while about the aftermath of Susan’s visit last evening and about the difficult job Linda had in telling her children that she might be in the papers. Nothing will ever let Linda forget the look of incomprehension on Angela’s face at the idea that her mother would be talked badly of for having a friend like Jane. Kenny understood. He asked if his mother was having a relationship with Jane. He kind of crumbled in front of her as she said that she was. He crumbled more for the hurt to his father than over Linda’s love for Jane. He just looked at his father, saying nothing. It took both of them, Ken and Linda united momentarily, to reassure him that the family was not going to split up. It was painful, and still is, as she describes it to Susan. But Susan can only understand to a point. She does not have children or the depth of feeling that they engender. Susan is sympathetic but also matter of fact. Nothing can be said now in the papers that could hurt the children in the same way that it would if the whole thing came out of the blue. Linda sees the truth of this.
She changes the subject to ask what the impact of the article about Susan has been. She hears Susan take a long inward breath before telling her that Jonathon has been round and that her TV Company are backing her. But her tone is almost flippant when she says that she has lost Bill along the way.
“What?” Linda almost shouts, “You don’t mean he’s abandoned you?”
“Yes,” Susan comes back. Then she manages to recount what she elected to withhold the previous evening in the immediacy of the Pilar family crisis.
“Bill engaged a private detective to check Ramsey out. But this man Shand decided to check me out too. He found out about Alberto. Then he told Bill. And the rest, as they say, is history.”
All that Linda can mutter is that she is so sorry. But Susan has rallied – that is clear. She tells Linda about her drive to the coast and about her decision to move on from Bill; to accept her sexuality. Susan’s is a resilience born of defence, Linda knows that, and it is a resilience that she herself could never find in like circumstances.
Linda knows that now is neither the time nor the place but she asks anyway. She asks with kindness in her voice, kindness that is almost genuine.
“Susan, do you know why you are like this?”
There is a silence as if Susan is genuinely reflecting, and then she says, slowly,
“No. I truly don’t. Nothing dreadful ever happened to me, or anything like that. Maybe I just loved Dad too much.” She is laughing as she utters this last sentence.
“I doubt whether that’s it, Susan. You are hardly going through life seducing every man as your father, are you? But your father obviously had some significance or you would not have said that just now.”
But Susan has closed down. Linda changes the subject.
“Had you thought that you might hear something from Brenda Ramsey?”
“Oh God. No. I hadn’t thought about it at all.” Susan groans.
Forewarned is forearmed, they both agree, and they both also agree that it would be politic for Susan to have her answer phone on all the time for the foreseeable future.
Linda passes her day from there by managing the running of the house from her bed, ably assisted by Tina. Ken and Kenny return for supper but they keep themselves to themselves and Linda sinks into a deeper state of depression and foreboding than she has ever known. She determines that pain or no pain, she is going to get out of this bed at the earliest opportunity. That way, she will at least feel less trapped and powerless. As she puts her light out, uncomfortable after yet another day without exercise, she knows that all she has to look forward to is the arrival, along with their usual broadsheets, of the newly ordered tabloid. Only now as she drifts in and out of sleep does it occur to her to wonder where the paper got the story from about her and Jane. This keeps her thinking in the small hours. Only Jane, she, Susan and Ken know of their relationship. Well, Harry does as does Jane’s women friends, Jacky and Nicola. Hector obviously suspected when they came back from the dig and he clearly had a thing for Jane. But would any of these people have sufficient motive, let alone sufficient pure evil about them, to want to destroy them with the stroke of some prurient journalist’s pen? Surely not. But someone tipped off the press. Who was it? And is it connected in any way to the exposé of Susan? And what about the car attack? In the small hours, fear and paranoia are not too distant and Linda is afraid.
But next morning there is still nothing in the press and apart from feeling tired, Linda feels better altogether. Everyone except Tina is out. It is towards ten o’clock when she sees the Police Inspector, with the woman sergeant at the driving wheel, pull into the drive in a black saloon. Tina shows them up as soon as she has checked that Linda will see them. She leaves them, saying that she is going into the garden and that Linda should just call from the window if she needs anything. Tina gives the police a very old fashioned look as if to say “don’t be upsetting my boss” as she leaves.
“Just a few more questions, if I may, Mrs Pilar,” Inspector Philips says. “Sorry to have to interview you in here.” His hand waves around the room as the policewoman quietly takes up a standing position near the door. The Inspector is, he advises her, double-checking all the possibilities.
“But I thought that Dave Ramsey had confessed?”
“He’s still helping us with our enquiries, Mrs Pilar. As you can appreciate, we don’t want to discount any other possibility.”
“But there must be forensic evidence, I take it? The car would have been damaged, surely?”
“Well, that’s just the question, Mrs Pilar. We have checked the car that Ramsey owns. It has no marks on it.”
Linda is listening now, her fears of the night coming momentarily back into focus. Is there still an attacker on the loose? Are the children safe? The Inspector looks at her closely. She looks back now at Inspector Philips - a tall, moustached man in his early forties, broad, good looking and every inch a policeman. She barely took account of him earlier when he interviewed her.
“I take it,” she said, “That you don’t know for sure who did this. Are you still sure that it was it deliberate?”
“That’s rig
ht, we don’t know yet whether Miss Blakely or you was the target, whether one of you was or whether both of you were. And, yes, we are still almost certain that it was deliberate. Can you tell us about your friendship with Doctor Gray?”
She is taken aback by the abruptness of the question. It was obviously meant to catch her off guard. But Linda is gathering her thoughts fast, not sure what Ken told the police about Jane and her.
“I work with her, of course. And we are friends. I was on holiday with her in Spain. It was recently, in fact. We stayed with Ken’s parents. The children, Ken and I go out there every year and Jane wanted to see the Pilgrims’ Route to Santiago. She came over to spend a few days with us all afterwards.”
“Do you know where she was last Friday evening, the night of the attack?”
The question is so predictable but it still shocks Linda. It makes her feel outraged and afraid all at once. She remains calm, giving the air that the question is reasonable but funny.
“Jane? You don’t think she had anything to do with this, do you? She is a friend of mine, for God’s sake. And of Susan, for that matter.”
“But she was back in the city?”
“Yes. Inspector, why ask me all this? Why not ask Jane? I’m sure that she can sort any doubts you might have.”
We already have questioned her,” he says, emphasising the word ‘have’.
The picture of Ken pointing Jane out to the police in the hospital comes back to Linda. The Inspector continues,
“She says that she had supper with two women friends. We have the names and addresses of the two friends”
The detective’s face is inscrutable.
“Do you know these two women, Mrs Pilar – Jacky Jones, and Nicola Grisham?”
Linda nods, seeing where the line of enquiry was going.
“Mrs Pilar, do you know anyone who could have wanted to harm you?”
“I don’t. No.”
“What about your husband? Is there any reason for him to be angry with you?”
Linda looks at the detective, steadies herself and says,
“Not to my knowledge, no.”
“Doctor Gray says that you and she are friendly. Were you on holiday with her in the Hebrides?”
“No. We were working together on a University archaeological dig. We were leading it.”
“I see. You returned together?”
“Yes.”
“You were in Spain together?”
“Yes.”
“Between the time when you returned from the Hebrides and when you went out to Spain were you at your own home all the time?”
She knows now that Ken has told the police something.
“You were alone with Doctor Gray for some days?” the policeman continues.
“Yes.”
“At her flat?”
“Yes.”
“Is there anything you can tell us, Mrs Pilar, about Jane Gray, and the circles she moves in?”
“I don’t think so, Inspector. Inspector, is she under some sort of suspicion here?”
“We are just making enquiries at this stage. We are trying to find out if there is anyone close to either of you, you or Miss Blakely, who could have done this.” He is watching her closely but she senses he is not going to take this line of questioning further - for now at least.
“What about Susan Blakely? Do you know of anyone, other than Ramsey, who might want to harm her?”
“No.”
His next question takes her by surprise again.
“Mrs Pilar. Are there any people in your life who could be angry with you and Jane?”
She feels dumbfounded.
“People I know?”
“Yes. Someone who might have known about your friendship with Jane and felt, shall we say, jealous or usurped?”
She gives Hector’s name, against her better judgment.
She feels the eyes of the police officers on her as they stand up to leave. Ken is still nowhere in sight and is presumably still out with the children. Tina is now hovering in the open hall. Linda hears her coming upstairs as the police officers leave.
“If only Jane hadn’t come to see me in the hospital,” she curses to herself, horrified at the line of questioning that has just happened as a direct result of that.
“No,” she thinks, “The police would have been round to Jane’s flat anyway, asking exactly the same questions. Ken obviously told them enough to put suspicion onto her. The police are looking for motives and, yes,” Linda acknowledges to herself, “Ken would have a motive himself. But surely not - he has got what he wanted. Jane is out of the way and he has his wife back.”
The thought that Jane might have motive is simply one that she dismisses out of hand.
She was not about to put Ken’s name in the frame to the police. Things are bad enough without her husband thinking that she might have suspicions about him. With cold recognition, she realizes that if anyone would have motive, if she was indeed the intended victim, then it was both Ken as the betrayed husband, and Jane as the rejected lover. Thank God for Jane having the alibi of having supper with Jacky and Nicola - although Linda could not imagine that either of them relished a corroborating interview with police officers.
This is all beyond her wildest of probabilities of what could be the truth of the matter. But she can quite see what the police angle on all this is. How could the police know that Ken is a gentle man? He is a man who is just fighting to protect his children and his marriage. Isn’t he?
She has heard that men can react with almost incomprehensible outrage at the knowledge of a lesbian relationship between their partner and another woman. But Ken, Ken driving a car at her? No. Not possible. And Jane, a jilted lover, doing the driving? That is even less possible.
What scares her in the moments after the police call is the fact that the ideas are not so far removed from some of her free-floating fears of the night.
Susan runs up the stairs and into Linda’s room, just ten minutes after the police leave. She was trying to contact Linda but the answer phone was on and she could not get through.
She more or less confirms the new line that the police have just taken with Linda. She had a phone call herself from Inspector Philips just thirty minutes ago. They now think that there is every possibility that the car attacker was not Dave Ramsey. Their advice to Susan was to be on her guard until the perpetrator is identified.
The two women sit over coffee for an hour, twisting their minds to all the possibilities of who might want to harm them singly or together. There is no one possibility that makes more sense to them than that it was Ramsey. They conclude after all their debate that the police will undoubtedly find the evidence to support Ramsey’s confession. What other sensible explanation can there be?
The sound of Ken arriving home with the two children breaks off their deliberations. The family come into the room, Ken clearly not too pleased to see Susan here. Suddenly Ken is seeing even Susan as an unhealthy influence on his wife. But Linda is not about to brook any interference in her life like this. She makes it quite clear in front of Ken that she and Susan will be keeping in very close touch. She even finds herself provoking Ken by saying in a voice loud enough for him to hear from the next room that when she is mobile again she would not mind a day or two away in Paris or London with Susan. They intend to celebrate the end of a bad time.She doubts whether they will ever do this trip but at least for the moment it takes away the sense of being trapped. In that exchange, in fact, Linda determines to get herself on to crutches and out of this bedroom just as quickly as she can. If she and Kenny are going to hold on to their mother and son relationship, she needs to be up and putting energy into the talking that needs to be done. Pain or no pain in her leg, she is not about to just lie here and let her family disintegrate in front of her eyes. She has her own career to salvage in due course and a life to get on with. The war of silence between her and Ken has to stop and she is probably the stronger of the two in terms of making sur
e that happens.
As for the fears of the press and of whoever drove the car at them, she has to show whoever it was that she is made of sterner stuff than to break under their attacks.
In the evening, she insists on going downstairs, aided by Ken on one side and Tina on the other. She props herself in the kitchen and although little is said, somehow the presence of Linda in her own kitchen brings a normality back to the family atmosphere that has not been there since before they were all in Spain together. For a few hours she feels that life is as it has always been. At bedtime Ken brings his nightwear from the guest room and sleeps by her side. They do not make love nor does either of them want to.
CHAPTER 28
Dave Ramsey was not responsible for the car attack on Susan and Linda. The first he heard of it was on the Saturday at teatime, the evening after it happened, when the police came to the door. He was on his own - Brenda was as usual over at her parents. He was engaged once again in his academic studies.
They had not had radio or television on and Brenda had gone out mid morning to go over to see her parents and then on to the cinema. Dave listened to classical music all day, enjoying having it playing quietly in the background as he read.
The doorbell rang towards five o’clock on Saturday evening. Inspector Peter Philips introduced himself. Another plain clothed officer accompanied him. Dave had not the first idea why they were there and then checked immediately that Brenda was not hurt in any way. She had gone across the city in the car.
As Dave showed them into the sitting room the officers confirmed that this was not about Mrs Ramsey. They took up position, the Inspector opposite Dave in one easy chair and the junior officer standing by the door and off to Dave’s right.
“Reverend Ramsey, we are here about Susan Blakely.
“What about Susan Blakely?” was all he asked.
The Inspector scrutinised Dave’s face.
“You will have heard about Miss Blakely’s accident?”
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