He sat there, seemingly startled at the sudden word that had come from him. And then, swallowing fiercely, he brought out a few other words.
‘No. She didn’t.’
‘She didn’t what?’ Handy Andy snapped out.
Anselm seemed to take courage.
‘Miss Mackintosh did not do what she said she did,’ he announced. ‘She did not wade across the river to kill Bubbles Xingara. She couldn’t have done. There was so little water in the Leven that morning you could have crossed it in a single stride.’
Chapter Twelve
Handy Andy, the man who had arrested poor, wretched Prudence Mackintosh and brought her in, tied to his chariot wheels, to make her statement confessing to Bubbles Xingara’s murder, was quick to round on her.
‘You lied to us. You no more murdered Bubbles than you flew to the moon. There’s such an offence as wasting police time, you know. You could go to prison for that, if you’re so keen on putting yourself behind bars.’
It went on for about a quarter of an hour, pound, pound, pound.
Harriet let it happen. Prudence Mackintosh deserved some punishment after all. Anderson could be let do his worst, or best. Before long he would have Prudence Mackintosh admitting in her own words that she had never crossed the trickling Leven and killed Bubbles. Perhaps she would even say out aloud that she had felt she ought to be held guilty of killing the girl she saw as having betrayed her love. Confessors confessed for reasonless reasons like that.
So I can allow myself to think about the man on my other side, sitting still there in seemingly sullen silence, not even chewing at a pencil.
What about Anselm? What do I feel about him now?
And it is feeling. Oh, yes, it’s that. Am I feeling again that I can love him? Did I really ever feel that his failures could somehow make him into a person I did not love? Was that last defeat out at Grainham Hall the one thing that might, in an instant, have hurled me out of love? Was it like all those years ago hearing John’s surname was the slightly ridiculous Piddock and it so nearly being love’s death-blow?
But how do I really know what I feel? Christ, if this were simply a matter of working out by logic what must have happened when one villain killed another, it’d cause me no trouble at all.
But feelings ... Feelings. And, worst of all, feelings of love. They’re a marsh, a wild wide stretch of ominous, over-vivid green. Not a single safe foothold.
No, stop this. Stop it. For God’s sake, I’m a detective. I’m sitting in an interview room opposite a woman I was on the point of allowing to be charged with murder. I must pay her attention. I must pay attention to Handy Andy. Probably making almost as crass a mistake in questioning that poor deluded woman the way he is now as he did when he arrested her.
She almost shook herself into awareness.
And saw at once, looming up, a possible serious flaw in considering Prudence Mackintosh innocent. That javelin she had spoken of with such conviction. Of course, she had spoken with equal conviction of wading across the Leven. Damn it, I was a fool not to have spotted that at the moment she said it. Didn’t I look down at the river that first morning while Bubbles’ body was lying under that sun-glaring blue tent? I took in then how small a trickle of water was flowing, little more than would float a paper boat. I should have remembered.
But the javelin. The moment Prudence Mackintosh said the word what I saw once more was that single, circular wound in Bubbles’ throat. Circular and, as Professor Polk implied, so clean that only microscopic analysis would reveal any tiny traces of anything transferred to it. So, if Prudence Mackintosh’s confession was all in her mind, how could she have known the fatal wound was such as a javelin would make?
But, if love-racked Miss Mackintosh didn’t thrust a real javelin into Bubbles’ throat, who did? If she didn’t deliver that blow, how did she know it was a javelin that made that wound? We’ve told no one. No one. Not a single bloody journalist. I’m certain of that. It’s why I’ve been keeping the media at bay.
So can Anselm be wrong after all?
She swivelled round and looked at him. He was sitting there, silent as if he had been turned into a wooden carving.
What is he thinking? That his sudden last-minute triumph is not what it seemed? But how can it be wrong? Prudence Mackintosh said she waded. She made a point of it. But the Leven was truly that day only the smallest of trickles.
But there’s this: Prudence was once a games mistress at Grainham Hall. Almost certainly she would know about any javelins there. If they actually had them. No, wait. One thing clear: victim of her obsession with Bubbles, she would have read every column-inch about her in every paper she had got hold of. And, yes — I must get this checked and double-checked — I do seem to remember that in the early days some of the papers at least made great play with the wound. It sharpened up the story beautifully for them, the life-full body with its delicate skin (all except the palm of the right hand, which none of them ever mentioned: I’d have remembered) and the savage wound that pierced it.
Harriet thrust herself forward.
‘One moment, DI,’ she said to Anderson. ‘There’s something I want to know. Miss Mackintosh, tell me, is javelin-throwing one of the sports taught at Grainham?’
The tears halted. A half-concealed sniff.
‘Of course it is. I taught it to the girls myself. For two years running I was English Girls champion.’
So my doubts not as valid as I had begun to think. And — another thing — Prudence Mackintosh would know, if anybody did, just what sort of a hole in the ground a javelin makes. So she could have worked out that a javelin had to be the weapon used, and incorporated one in the confession she felt driven to make. The confession that was her substitute-killing of the girl who had rejected her love.
‘Miss Mackintosh, one more thing. You spoke about a javelin. Now, if all you told us originally was not what happened, how did you come to tell us Bubbles was attacked with a javelin?’
‘But — But she must have been. Don’t you in the police even know that? What else could have made the wound I read about?’
Yes, the final doubt settled. But wait. Something more. Now, thanks to Miss Mackintosh, it looks as if, paradoxically, we have a strong idea what the mysterious weapon was. All but certainly a javelin.
But, if it is, where did it come from?
Answer plain, if dispiriting. From anywhere. From anywhere in the whole of bloody Britain. Or even at a pinch from abroad. Taken to use that early morning at Adam and Eve House, and then, since it wasn’t found in all the searches round the house, almost certainly cleaned to the point where there were no visible signs of blood and quite likely put back in place. Useless to make any hunt for it then. Only when Bubbles’ murderer is under questioning, perhaps in this very room, will we possibly lay hands on the weapon and find, with a good deal of luck, those microscopic traces that can be presented as evidence.
*
Prudence Mackintosh was released at nine. Handy Andy, tasked with making doubly sure the confession he had extracted was indeed a tissue of imaginings, had reported that a call to Grainham Hall School had confirmed there were in the pavilion six women’s-weight javelins and six men’s-weight, kept naturally under lock-and-key. None missing. Nor had any been, they could vouch for it, on June the twentieth. He had obtained, too, the rules-laid-down specifications for athletics javelins, 600-gram for women, 800-gram for men. Finally by simply consulting Professor Polk’s pathology report he had learnt that the diameter of the clean-cut, single-thrust wound was significantly larger than the maximum diameter of the javelin Prudence Mackintosh had claimed she had used.
‘Thank you, DI,’ Harriet said. ‘But you realize what this means?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Handy Andy replied, with no sign of remorse over that over-hasty arrest. ‘Means we’re up shit creek again.’
‘If you choose to put it that way, yes. But down in the Incident Room, as you well know, there are even at this time of the
evening, four or five officers still going through the computer records. One of them may, at any moment, come up with something that starts us off again. And there’s even something I want you to look into yourself. One thing Prudence Mackintosh said has lingered in my mind. She was denouncing anyone else who had had a hand in Bubbles’ career, and she mentioned Bubbles’ American coach, a horrible Greek she called him. Now, what I want to know is this: if Peter Renshaw took over as coach, in what circumstances did this Cacoyannis leave? Prudence Mackintosh mentioned a row, a dispute, something like that. It could be there was some bad blood there. Maybe there’s nothing in it. But I want it looked into. So have another word with Peter Renshaw in the morning, right?’
‘Okay,’ Handy Andy said.
Once again she was tempted to come back with Okay what, DI? And once again, in the interests of harmony among the team, she let the ma’am go.
Handy Andy sent off duty, to pursue no doubt some conquest or other, she still had work to do. Work that, she trusted, would absorb her enough for no thoughts to intrude about the aborted interview and how in the course of it Anselm Brent had run a switch-back in her mind from outcast lover to fully re-instated one.
So it came as something of a shock — she even wondered if she was falling prey to some hallucination — when an hour or more later, going out to her car in the soft star-pricked darkness of the late July night, she saw a shape down at the far wall of the car park, a shape that had become embossed on her mind. Anselm’s broad-shouldered back in, as almost always even on a warm summer’s night, his heavy tweed jacket.
She stopped and looked more carefully.
Yes, he was sitting hunched unmovingly on the low wall, looking out into vacancy.
Leave him there? Or — Jesus, how I want to — go over and ask him whether he’s all right, what he’s doing out here at this time of night?
She walked across, footsteps all but noiseless on the blotchy tarmac.
Once standing beside him, unnoticed she believed, she could not stop herself reaching over and, putting her hand on the worn tweed of his jacket, giving the hunched shoulder beneath a slight affectionate pressure.
Anselm’s reaction came as a complete surprise. She felt his whole solid body shudder as if a charge of electricity had run through him.
And then she realized that her approach had not gone unnoticed. He had been aware of her. He must have been. Aware of the heat of her body as she stood at his shoulder, aware of her arm coming round him. So, when at last she had succumbed to the desire to give him that affectionate squeeze — affectionate, no, by God, more than that, more, more, more — his whole body, which she had thought of as slumped inertly, had reacted in that judder of tension released.
‘Anselm,’ she brought out past contracted vocal cords, ‘what is it? Why were you sitting here like this?’
‘It’s — It’s —’
He turned and looked up at her.
‘I — I — I let you down,’ he said. ‘I wanted to earn your — your respect. I — I wanted to give you back what you — what you’ve given me.’
And then suddenly he reached round and seized her free hand.
She felt, with a flood of pity and gushing-outwards love, the faint remains of ribby calluses — little tennis played since June — all across his palm.
Oh, God, she thought. He wants me. He’s known all along what I have felt for him. That’s what he means by wanting to earn my respect. He knows, and — and perhaps he loves me, too. And I love him. Oh, Anselm, Anselm, Anselm, Anselm.
They stayed there in the heavy summer darkness, her hand in his.
The minutes passed. The classic picture of two lovers under the stars remained.
Slowly her mind moved onwards. Everything is changed now, she told herself. While this, all this, was, as I thought, entirely within myself, nothing outside was affected. But now, now that the sexual link has been acknowledged, acknowledged by the roughness I can feel against the back of my hand, the cloud of sex, John’s overhanging cloud, has enveloped us, invaded us. We are within its influence. Our freedom of action, the little we had of it, has gone.
We must do as Eros impels us, what Aphrodite has ensnared me for.
Then a flicker of rebellion. No. No, John must be wrong. He’s been theorizing to the point where he can believe nothing else. He’s wrong. Yes, of course, Anselm and I have abruptly been betrayed into simply letting sexual impulses run from one of us to the other back and forth. But that’s a common enough happening, hardly more important than the twins’ joyful boasting about selling their sperm. Put a woman and a man together into any tightly confined situation — the terrible chestnut of the stuck lift — and it’s as likely as not they’ll experience some sexual interest in each other.
But is that really John’s hair-coiling Aphrodite? Can’t I, as the anti-drugs ads put it, Just Say No?
God, it would lift a clamping burden if I could. If I could say, or pretend, or convince myself, that what has just happened doesn’t really count. That it’s a feather, something that rests on us for a moment and is blown away. Then we’d be free of all the things Aphrodite’s thrall brings with it. Free of what John talked about once, about how people didn’t realize how the sexual attraction of male to female, or female to female, or male to male, permeated aspect after aspect of everyday life. Queen Elizabeth the First, and the fate of nations. All that.
And that’s what we — all three of us, actually — will escape from if I can just say to Anselm — if I can just call him DI, and say I’m doing no more at this moment than feel a passing lech towards a close subordinate whose handling of things I have come to admire. If I could cease to be so aware of feeling, feeling with this acuteness, the slight remains of those calluses against the skin of my hand.
So try? Try and perhaps succeed in avoiding untold complications, complications that could be the end of both our careers. A promising officer in a country force finding his career driven on to the rocks, and ... and the Hard Detective ruined as a softy.
‘Listen.’ No, I can’t say DI, and I won’t, won’t say Anselm. ‘Listen, you seem to be in some sort of trouble. Is it because over at Grainham Hall you made a mess of getting hold of that mixed-up, deluded woman? Or thoughts of what happened in Marseilles?’
Suddenly the hand holding her own was jerked away.
Was that it? Did what I said, the cold touch of sage advice, do it for me? Send him scuttling back to where he was before, a country detective inspector pleased to be working under a big-city detective superintendent with a reputation, the media-hailed Hard Detective? And no more than that? He’s hardly committed himself. That hand that reached over to mine, it could have been in error. A mistake in the dark.
But, no. No, it wasn’t. And for me it wasn’t just a shove from brooding Eros. No, it was Aphrodite, and it was Aphrodite for him. I know it. Aphrodite swirling round him the long inescapable tresses of her hair. Enfolding him, holding him. Capturing him. It was.
‘Yes, I was sitting here thinking about all that, Marseilles and the mess I made of things over at Grainham Hall. But I––’
‘No, listen. Who made a mess of things there? All right, you could have brought in Prudence Mackintosh more quickly. But look what happened when Anderson got hold of her. We damn nearly had a major scandal on our hands. And we would have done, only you were on the ball. I never noticed that discrepancy about the amount of water in the Leven, but you did. You did, and you saved our bacon. So you’ve nothing to be ashamed about, nothing at all.’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Why? What is this?’
‘I — I haven’t come up to your expectations. I’m not the sort of chap you should — you should, well, like. No, more. You should go for.’
The end of all evasion. Yes, now it was out. Now it had been said. Now Anselm had said it. Anselm, Anselm. Yes, he knows. He knows Aphrodite has entwined us together in the coils of her hair.
And what am I to reply? How am I to answer?
With a lie that he won’t believe? With a lie that’ll hurt him, hurt him deeply?
No.
‘Oh, my dear. My darling. That’s not so. All right, when it seemed you’d done badly at Grainham Hall, yes, I felt a momentary disappointment. But it was only momentary. A minute afterwards — or, well, certainly from the moment you spoke up in the interview room, my feelings for you were back to where they were when ... When, to tell you the simple truth, there by Bubbles’ body you showed me your hand with that thickened skin, looking so ugly and yet so — damn it, yes, so sweet. Then I wanted you, and I’ve wanted you from that moment on, though I’ve been stupid enough to try not to show it. Oh, Anselm, Anselm.’
Then her hand was grasped again.
And the kisses she had seen herself giving him that evening when the twins’ unexpected in-and-out-again visit had stopped her confessing all to John were hers to give.
Chapter Thirteen
No, I don’t think so, Harriet in the darkness of Levenham police station car park had said to Anselm. Two senior police officers, clothes thrust aside, making hasty and writhingly vigorous love on the gritty tarmac where any late-night passer-by might see them, it was not anything the Hard Detective could contemplate. Even the back seat of her car, waiting there on its own, had about it an aura of scrabbling come-and-go sexual contact that repelled her. And, equally, if a little better, a return to her top-floor office and locking themselves in there seemed still sordid.
One last long kiss, and Anselm walked off towards the house he shared with his widowed mother, his brother’s widow and her son, the future detective Jonathan. Harriet stood there until the last sound of his heavy brogues clunking away was lost in the quiet of the Levenham night.
She turned away at last and headed for the car. But then ... Then she found she was dancing. To music in her head, a bright swirling of joy under the stars above, she was dancing. Across the potholed asphalt of the parking lot she danced as if she were at a disco, on a stage even. I’m in love, I’m in love, the words sang out in silence. I’m in love and he loves me. He loves me. I’m in love.
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