A Detective in Love

by H. R. F. Keating

  But at last, when her capering steps had brought her to within a few feet of her staidly waiting Volvo, she brought herself to a halt, stood for a moment stock-still, took in a long, deep breath and, shaking her head, as if to fling the nonsense into the night like a dog emerging from water, got in and drove carefully off towards Birchester and home.

  Yes, she thought sober now, what I’ve been caught up by, what we’ve been caught up by, Anselm and I, is absolutely John’s Aphrodite embrace. It’s not in any way snatching, eyes-open, at half an hour’s sexual excitement or even half a month’s. It is a significant part of my life. Of Anselm’s life.

  John, the very thought of him pushed at once an urgent question into her mind. Am I going to tell him what has happened? I could, of course. Didn’t he tell me all about his affair in New Delhi? And that was certainly something more than any casual encounter with a whore in Brazil. Was it on a par with what has happened between Anselm and myself? Well, to be honest, yes, it was. What John and that Indian lady experienced for those few months is what Anselm and I are experiencing now.

  With the Volvo humming through the dark towards the faint dome of light on the horizon that was Birchester, she nevertheless found an unaccountable reluctance to be as open with John as he had been with her when he had come back from saving the mighty Majestic some enormous sum in India. She tried to work out why.

  But by the time she had reached the outskirts of the city and needed to pay more attention to her driving she had still reached no conclusion. Was it because what she felt for Anselm was something more than she had ever felt for John? Was it not just love but a yet more slavish submission to the power of sexual attraction? Was it a grand passion, one of those affairs, more common in novels than in life — or, she asked herself, less acknowledged in life than in the safety of fiction? — that bring happy ruin to those who are in its grip.

  No answer as she parked outside the house. No answer as she strode up the path to the door. No answer as she put her keys in the locks, turned them, pushed the door wide and called out, ‘It’s me.’

  But, no sooner had she declined John’s offer to cook her an omelette — a canteen meal taken at her desk still heavily with her — and accepted the drink he poured for her, than, almost against her will, she said something in response to a casual question that she knew might well lead into the sort of conversation in which a confession could take its natural place.

  ‘Well, we had a fine demonstration today of how, as you like to think, the sexual cloud can send a shrivelling lightning-bolt into the most unexpected of places.’

  ‘Oh, yes? Can it be after all that you’re coming round to agreeing with one of my theories?’

  She laughed.

  ‘You may well think so when I tell you how the quiet life of a retired games-mistress at Grainham Hall School has just collapsed all round her. She would be — I won’t tell you her name — the last person anybody would think of in terms of sex, one of nature’s spinsters, podgy face, muscular frame, make-up of any sort seen as appallingly frivolous.’

  ‘Oh, I’d have my reservations about not thinking in terms of sex for anybody whatsoever. But go on.’

  ‘Right. She rang us up with a long garbled out-pouring, more or less implying she had killed Bubbles Xingara, and, though what she said had many of the marks of the compulsive confessor, there were things in it that led me to send —’

  She came to a full stop.

  To send Anselm Brent? Should I say that?

  ‘I’m sorry, sudden thought about something else. Where was I? Ah, yes. So I sent one of the Greater Birchester Police officers, a DI called Anderson, to talk to her, and he was so impressed with what she said about her motive that he arrested her on the spot. Then when we had questioned her for some time and were convinced by what she had said about being in love with Bubbles ever since she had been a star pupil at Grainham Hall, and were on the point of actually charging her, another of the DIs, a fellow called —’

  Again she broke off.

  No, Anselm’s name must not be said aloud. It’ll bring ruin. One day perhaps I’ll embrace that, embrace ruin. But not yet. Not yet.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter who. The thing is that, just when we thought we’d heard exactly how Bubbles had been killed — with, of all things, an athletics javelin — a fundamental inconsistency came up in what she’d said about the actual circumstances. And it turned out to be a wholly imaginary murder. After a bit of setting her straight, she eventually agreed she hadn’t done anything. Now, doesn’t that just tell you what the power of — would you call that the work of Aphrodite? — what it can do.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ John said. ‘Yes, I’d call that the coils of Aphrodite all right, though I dare say the poor lady had never even kissed little Bubbles, much less taken her to bed. But, you’re right, the oppressive cloud, it weighs on everybody more or less, and Eros shoots out of it and Aphrodite follows sometimes in his wake.’

  Sometimes. She thought for a half-second. Was he saying you could be exempt from those enwrapping tresses? And, more, that somehow some people are safe from Eros’ thunderbolts?

  ‘Weighs on more or less everybody? More or less? Is the great theoretician of the sexual impulse rowing back a bit now?’

  John grinned.

  ‘Of course I am. You can’t really have thought what I said applied to absolutely everyone. No, look at it this way. Belief in God. Almost everyone all over the world believes in God, or at least in a band of gods. But here and there you can find the odd genuine atheist, someone exempt. As I see it, just as there’s a looming cloud of sexuality there’s a cloud of belief in God. Or, perhaps a cloud isn’t the best image. Let’s say, more simply, that in the human mind, whether it’s in Britain or America or India or anywhere, there’s a built-in tendency, a very strong tendency, to believe in a Deity. We need to. Almost all of us, even if in the ordinary way we hardly think of it. But it’s there, and in moments of, say, real distress or, worse, danger we pray. Moments of great joy, too.’

  ‘You’re right. Yes, we do. Even avowed unbelievers. Like you, you old heathen.’

  John smiled, with, she thought, a tiny touch of complacency.

  ‘And the same thing,’ he said, ‘applies to the sexual impulse. It’s in our minds, fixed there, whether we like it or not. A part of them. A part of each one of us. All right, the occasional, very occasional I think, individual is free from it. But everyone else has got it embedded in them, and from time to time it exercises its power. It goes spreading like the fine roots of an immense tree into every cranny in the earth below. Right down to the depths of your sad games-mistress.’

  Right down into me, Harriet thought. Into me and into nice, cheerful, fundamentally innocent Detective Inspector Brent, quiet stalwart of the Leven Vale Police.

  But can I, after all, possibly enrol myself among the few exceptions, the genuine sex-atheists? Of course I can’t. How, if I was one, did I come to marry John? To bear him twin sons? To make love with him as happily as we did, say, on that June morning just after he’d got back from Brazil? As we have often since?

  But does this mean that I’ve got to tell him, here and now, that the impulse has spread down to the finest roots in myself, and in Anselm?

  I don’t know why, but I can’t. Not now. Not at this very moment.

  ‘Well, I’ve had quite a day, and I ought to be over in Levenham promptly tomorrow. So ...’

  John looked at her.

  ‘Off to Bedfordshire?’

  ‘And, I’m sorry to say, Sleepfordshire. Straight away. I’m bushed.’

  *

  It was not Sleepfordshire straight away every night, however, nor every early-waking morning, as the weeks went by and the hunt for Bubbles Xingara’s murderer dragged on. But neither was it arriving with Anselm at John’s simple generative act, precautions or no precautions.

  Harriet found a hundred reasons to put off the moment. And Anselm, in the car on the way to see some witness, pulled over
to the verge in some quiet spot, for all that his desire was frequently demonstrably evident, was too much Handy Andy’s Saintie to press her.

  For one thing, she found she had decided that until she had told John the truth she was somehow debarred from making a total break. And am I really going to wreck my career, she asked herself almost every day. I’m certainly not going to try and have my cake and eat it. To have Anselm as a hole-and-corner lover, in daily, hourly, danger of discovery — Hard Detective in Country Love Nest, the Daily Dirt headline — that would be beyond my strength.

  And, in my inmost heart, don’t I still want above everything the career I’ve given all my working life to? And it’s not just the career I want. I don’t, in fact, care one little bit if I never get to be a Chief Constable or yet higher, the first woman Inspector of Constabulary. But I do care to be someone who’s doing their share, more than their share even, to set what is right firmly on top of what is wrong.

  Then there’s the daily grind of the case. I want to be the one who resolves it, the one who gets Bubbles’ murderer into court. And into prison after that. All right, I’ve scorned the media’s Hard Detective. But only because the name was given me by journalists wanting a catchy headline. To be a Hard Detective itself, that’s another matter ... It’s something to be proud of, and I am.

  So am I going to toss it all away? And, incidentally, bring Anselm’s decent career in Levenham to a nasty, sticky, media-smeared end?

  I may not be able to hold out against that. But I’m going to hold out as long as I can.

  And yet ... Yet. Yet.

  Yet I’m in love with Anselm Brent. And I can’t help it. I ought to be decisive, hard. I ought to take steps never to see him unless there are other people present. And I could contrive to do that. But I’m not going to. They mean too much to me, these occasional moments we get together. Alone in a world for two.

  Oh, God, dear Anselm. Still finding himself even in those moments sometimes calling me ma’am. And me not daring to point it out. Careful of him. Like a doting mother, for Christ’s sake. And I don’t want to be any sort of mother to him. I want and want and want to be his lover.

  And I don’t, not at this time. Not yet.

  What if some sharp-eyed cynic, like Handy Andy Anderson, happens to see us at the roadside somewhere when I’m holding him so hard to me I can feel the very beating of his heart? Or, what if Handy Andy — he’s had clues enough already — gets to guess in some other way, in any of our hundred betraying moments? Well, he can go to hell. I love Anselm Brent, and that’s what means most to me.

  Oh, God, why am I in such a tangle?

  *

  A knock at the door of her office, now mercifully cool as yet another of the rainstorms that had marked out August swept down.

  ‘Come.’

  It was Handy Andy, as if he had emerged from the mangled web of her thoughts.

  ‘Think I’ve got a bit of a lead, ma’am.’

  ‘We could do with one, DI. Take a seat. Mr Tarlington was on to me yesterday. Wants to cut back financially. So, unless we can show him there are active leads we’re following, you may find yourself back in Birchester working on small-time wages holdups. So what have you got?’

  ‘It’s that man Cacoyannis. You remember I didn’t really get anywhere talking to Peter Renshaw weeks ago when you tasked me with finding out how he actually got the push.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, DI.’

  ‘Well, it occurred to me yesterday I might still get the lowdown on that, not from Renshaw but from the lovely Fiona.’

  For a moment Harriet was inclined to say something sharp about the lovely Fiona. But she let the rebuke go unsaid.

  ‘And ... ?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘And yes, there was a row, a hell of a row, when Caco went. Seems he’d got to think he could do anything he liked with Bubbles. You know the way a tennis coach gets to have so much influence on all aspects of a player’s life, especially of course when the player’s a young girl, that they often feel they’re theirs for the taking? And with a little piece like Bubbles, who could blame anyone?’

  Yes, Harriet thought. John’s theory again. A whole life re-directed, or perhaps only potentially re-directed, by the power of Eros.

  ‘But Bubbles wasn’t the sort of person you could manoeuvre like that,’ she said, letting her much suppressed sharpness have free rein. ‘So, what actually happened?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, whatever the strength of it, Caco somehow came unstuck. Got booted out. Literally, I gathered. And Peter Renshaw took his place. I dare say in more ways than one.’

  ‘Any evidence for that, DI?’

  Something in her tone brought Handy Andy to a stop.

  ‘Well, no, ma’am. No. But I just thought ... Well, it’s quite likely, isn’t it?’

  A few weeks earlier Harriet would have stamped on that likely. But now she saw life through John’s eyes, felt his cloud of ubiquitous sexuality weighing down everywhere. So, she thought, yes, in theory Peter Renshaw might have attempted — yes, even while spending his nights in Fiona Diplock’s bed — to make his stepdaughter into his sexual plaything.

  But, damn it, there’s been no sign of it. Nothing at all.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘what I want to know now is whether Cacoyannis was in this country around the time of Wimbledon. If we can be definite he was in America then — I suppose that’s where he works now — we can cross him off. But if not, then you were right to come to me with this, DI.’

  ‘Well, shouldn’t be too difficult to find out about him,’ Handy Andy said cheerfully. ‘I mean, if he was over here, it’d be for the tennis some way or another. A few inquiries at Wimbledon, or maybe elsewhere, down at Eastbourne, should do the trick.’

  She thought for a moment.

  A chance to get rid of this sex-fixated snoop for a couple of days or more?

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Go down there. To Wimbledon, or down to Eastbourne, and see what you can find out.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  The prospect of a run down to London and its flesh-pots bringing out, for once, the fully respectful ma’am.

  *

  Handy Andy took his time about his inquiries, pleading by phone that with Wimbledon, reverted now in rainy August to no more than an unusually large local tennis club, he was finding it hard to locate witnesses. But Harriet had plenty of other lines of inquiry to have followed up or to initiate, even if none of them looked on the face of it very hopeful. There were still a good many of the e-mails, faxes, letters and — mostly yukky — cards that had been sent to Bubbles to be subjected to the often time-consuming process of checking out. There was a former practice partner of hers in America, one Jo-Ann Parash, from whom she had parted not on the best of terms, according to Peter Renshaw, who appeared to have given up on the tennis world but had still to be located and alibied in case she had been in England at the crucial time. There was, too, an unsatisfactory report from one of the Birchester police stations about a man working on a roof in the city at the time of the murder who had — the details were unclear — failed to come to work on the day after the murder, or had left work the day before. That ought to be gone into. And no one had yet been able to trace Bubbles’ father, the little spoken of Pablo Xingara, long ago vanished into total obscurity, perhaps even into death.

  Plenty to be done. Plenty to see had been done. And any one of the tasks she gave out might be what in the end would lead to the person who had thrust into Bubbles’ throat that full-size javelin, wherever it had come from, wherever it was now.

  And, pushing insistently into her mind, there was Anselm.

  Each day her attitude towards him seemed to differ. On one day she would be determined, never mind the fact that she loved him, that if he swam into her head at some moment when she had ceased to concentrate on the matter in hand, whether it was allocating tasks to her team or the mundane events of daily life, brushing teeth, checking the fridge, getting petrol, she would thrust that image ou
t.

  The next day she might find herself deciding, from the moment she hauled herself out of bed, that she was going to contrive, at whatever cost, to see as much of him as she possibly could. To see him alone, even if it was for only five minutes while she knew no one was likely to come knocking at her office door.

  But, she would think then, there are those who do not need to knock, or who give the door the most perfunctory of taps. Handy Andy the prime example there, which made his prolonged London trip all the more of a blessing. But what if, when she was stroking Anselm’s cheek with the back of one finger as she loved to do, the door opened and Mr Tarlington, tight in his braided uniform, red ears sticking shootingly out, was standing there?

  But on the very worst days — or are they, she often asked, the very best? — she would defy all doubts, summon Mr Brent up to her office on the flimsiest of excuses, be ready standing there when he knocked, as he always did, to push him back against the door, banging it reverberatingly closed. Then she would seize him by both arms and kiss and kiss him for as long as breath held out.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was not until September the first that Handy Andy at last came in to report. But when he had told her what he had learnt she found herself thinking that every day of his prolonged stay away might have been worth it.

  ‘Yeah, took me some time to gather up the gossip. All the top players are far away now, pulling in the dollars up and down the States. But I did eventually find guys who had heard what was being said when they were here. Girls, too, natch. Amazing what you get to hear sometimes between the sheets.’

  Oh, yes, Harriet thought. Trust you to trick yourself into believing getting a girl into bed is the only way to learn anything from her. Still, I suppose that’s how you cope with the thunder-heavy cloud above you. Perhaps that’s the answer, too. Let Eros have his way. On any and every occasion. Only it isn’t. Going along with that will bring big trouble to you one day, Detective Inspector Anderson.