by John Harvey
Prior looked elsewhere. Wondered if she might get up and leave. “Come on,” Leonard had said. “A quick drink before you go home. Just one. What have you got to lose?”
The music was low in the background, lacing everything together, the same persistent rhythm, the beat. No words. Something electronic. A synthesizer? She didn’t know. How could she? The last time she had consciously listened to music, it had been to whom? Fine Young Cannibals? Simply Red?
“Here,” Leonard said, handing her a cold bottle of beer before flopping down beside her. “Wasn’t sure if you wanted a glass or not.”
Prior shook her head. “This is okay.”
“Then cheers.” Clinking his bottle against hers, he drank.
His leg touched hers.
“So, what do you think of the place?” he asked.
“It’s all right.” She was holding herself stiffly, fingers clenched.
“Not been here before?”
She shook her head.
“Look,” Leonard said, leaning in a little, “the other day. What I said, you know, about therapy. It was... I don’t know... it’s a bad habit of mine... one of many... saying the first thing that comes into my head.”
Prior looked back at him, unsmiling. She wasn’t going to make it any easier.
“Anyway, I’m sorry,” Leonard said. “I’ll try to button my tongue.” Taking another swig at his beer, he laughed. “Although, I’d have to say, speaking professionally now, you do seem to be wound a little tight.”
Prior was already on her feet. “Thanks for the drink,” she said, setting down the bottle, contents largely untouched.
Leonard shook his head and sighed. “Maureen, come on, sit back down.”
“No.”
“Wait then and I’ll come with you.”
“What for? Stay here, talk to your friends. Read another poem.”
Out in the street, she leaned back for a moment against the wall, hands pressing against the reassuring roughness of the brick.
Chapter 31
DOWLAND BROKE, SWEATING, FROM HIS HALF-SLEEPING, half-waking dream. The grimy sheet wrapped shroudlike around his hip and leg. The hairs on his belly slick and brittle with spunk. Spunk and sweat, the sweet stink of it rancid in the room. The curtains pulled across, closing out what little light there still was. He had lain down wanting to think of someone else—the policewoman perhaps, the one who had come there the week before, asking him all those questions about someone he didn’t know, about that time before at the hotel. Yes, hand sliding over his cock, think about her, that’s it, a pair of tits on her, no mistake. Something to get hold of, get your mouth round, bite into. That was it. Was it. Yes. But no, when he came, it wasn’t her at all. Her face lost in a blur of jism and need. Eve. That fat cow, Eve. Why the fuck was he thinking of her? All the fucking time of her. The way she’d turned on him. All the times she’d been with him before. Loving it. Letting him. Luring him on. Come on, come on, come on.
Christ!
Fuck!
No!
He flicked the spunk from his hand to where it lay now, cold, along the inside of his leg. Always, as he came, the memory of her scabby sprawling flesh against his hands, the choked and stuttering gasps as she gulped for air. Fear and pleading in her eyes.
Please...
Please...
Please...
Oh, yes. Not again. Again.
The skin on his cock beaten red and raw.
With a groan, Dowland pushed himself sideways off the bed. His throat was dry, the backs of his legs were numb. In the bathroom he drank water from the tap, wiped himself down with a scrap of flannel. Closed his eyes, and as he did so, he almost fell. One hand against the rim of the bath, the other against the wall. His head spun and slowly he lowered himself to the floor, forehead pressing against the smoothness of the porcelain. Smooth and cold.
Dowland’s eyes closed and, kneeling there, in supplication, he slept.
Five minutes.
Ten.
When he woke he was shivering and hurriedly he dressed.
Shirt and trousers. Socks. A coat hanging behind the door.
Old trainers: soft soles.
The picture of the Virgin Mary a little lopsided on the wall.
Dowland switched out the light, fingered his keys, locked the door. Outside it was dark enough.
Chapter 32
ANNA INGRAM LOOKED AT HERSELF IN THE MIRROR, THE way the velvet dress she was wearing clung to her hips, to say nothing of the amount of cleavage it revealed, and immediately had second thoughts. Dressing for Vincent was never easy: whether he was more likely to gush forth paeans of praise or condemn her for resembling the loosest woman this side of Nell Gwynn was as dependent on his whim as what she actually wore. But, given the sort of mood he’d been in after the previous day’s brunch, caution seemed the wise approach.
She redressed herself in a floor-length linen skirt and cream brocade blouse that buttoned up to the neck. Her hair she coiled into a neat chignon. A touch of lipstick, the merest hint of perfume, soft leather flat-heeled shoes, and she was ready.
The early evening traffic leaving the city had thinned out to reasonable proportions, and she drove with the windows partly open, car stereo turned up high. Puccini. The quartet at the end of the third act of La Bohéme. As she turned off along the narrow road leading to Vincent’s house, the voices rose and fell across the fields and intertwined.
Usually, when Vincent heard her approaching, he would come to the door and welcome her; sometimes, if he had enjoyed an especially good day, with a glass of wine in hand. But this evening, there was no sign.
His car was there, parked just off the drive; the front door was ajar.
“Vincent?”
She stepped across the porch and into the large, low living room. Everything, as usual, was immaculately in place. A book had been allowed to rest on the arm of one of the chairs. In the kitchen, water dripped slowly from the tap. A plate and bowl stood draining beside the sink. A recipe book lay open on the kitchen table. Finocchio alla Parmigiana. Fennel and Parmesan gratin. The glass front of the oven was warm to the touch. The smell of cheese and garlic faint in the air.
Anna took down a glass and ran the tap until the water was truly cold; after she had turned it off as hard as she could, it continued to drip. A worn washer, she thought. Something Vincent will never fix himself. The water was cool, and for a moment she rested the glass against her forehead.
When she turned it was almost into Vincent’s arms, and she gasped and dropped the glass and it shattered into pieces on the quarry-tiled floor.
“Vincent! For God’s sake!”
“What?”
“What on earth are you doing, creeping up on me like that?”
“Creeping? I don’t think I was creeping.”
“I don’t know what else you’d call it.”
“Walking into my own house? My own kitchen? It’s permissible, I suppose?”
“Where have you been, anyway?”
“Just for a walk. A stroll across the fields. It’s quite a lovely evening, but perhaps you didn’t notice. Other things on your pretty little mind.”
“Vincent, don’t bloody patronize.”
“Is that what it was? More of a compliment, I’d have thought.”
“Stop talking such nonsense,” Anna said, “and don’t smirk. Let me get the dustpan and brush and sweep up all this broken glass.”
TEN MINUTES LATER THEY WERE SITTING IN THE LIVING room, each with a glass of wine. Blaine had set some piano music playing on the stereo: Joanna MacGregor sedately working her way through Byrd and Messiaen, Keith Jarrett’s cool interpretations of Handel. A light breeze stirred the curtains and a narrow light slanted across the floor.
“So,” Vincent said, “to what do I owe the honour? Monday nights, barring some special reason, we most usually attend to our separate lives.”
“If that’s what you want, I’ll leave.”
“No, no, that’
s not what I mean.”
“Are you sure? Because if it is, there are a score of things I could be doing...” She was halfway out of her chair.
“Anna, Anna. Stay. Sit down, please.”
Anna did as she was bid. Blaine began to talk about a meeting he was arranging with a Dutch printer he was considering using for a new book—a photographer from the Czech Republic whose work he’d seen a year ago, quite by chance. At this stage, the costs sounded reasonable, and if the quality could be maintained... well, he would have to see.
Anna countered with some gossip about comings and goings in the local arts world, most of which Blaine already knew. When he asked her about the progress of her next project—the contentiously titled “Artists’ Wives”—she made a face. “All anyone can talk about is the viability of attracting the right amount of sponsorship. Never mind the quality of the work, or that much of it hasn’t been adequately shown for years.”
“Verily,” Blaine said, “the Mammonites have taken over the world.”
“Amen to that!”
“Here,” Blaine said, rising to his feet. “Let me refresh your glass.”
“Why not?”
When he was leaning close to her, bottle in hand, he said, “Why did you come here tonight? Really?”
“I don’t know, I suppose I just took it into my head.”
“Anna, you’re like me. You don’t just do anything. Not without thought.”
A slight movement of the shoulders. “I was worried, I suppose.”
“About what? This new show of yours?”
“No.”
“Not about me?”
“When I left you yesterday, you seemed really down. Depressed. Angry, too.”
“And you were concerned?”
“Yes. Is that wrong?”
“On the contrary. It’s most considerate.” Smiling, he moved away. “But you needn’t have worried. All those people—it was more of a strain than usual, I suppose. And I was getting something of a migraine. I just needed to be alone. I’m sorry if I was rude.”
Anna glanced down at her wrist, remembering the force with which Vincent’s fingers had pressed against the skin. “The ex-policeman, Elder, he came to the Staithes show at the Castle...”
Blaine smiled. “A convert.”
“He asked me about the weekend that woman disappeared. The one who was found strangled.”
“What about it?”
“He asked me if I knew where you were.”
Blaine’s fingers tightened, almost imperceptibly, around the stem of his glass. “What did you say?”
“I told him you were in Dorset.”
“So I was.”
“With me.”
“What?”
“I told him we were there together.”
“What on earth for?”
“I don’t know. I just did. I did it without thinking, I suppose.”
“But you knew perfectly well I was there on my own.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Jesus!” Blaine put down his glass with a smack and began to pace the room.
“I could contact him, tell him I’d made a mistake.”
“No. That would only make things worse. It’s bad enough having him poking his nose into my affairs without giving him a reason to be more suspicious than he already is.”
“I could explain I was a little flustered, answering his questions. Tell him it is more usual for the two of us to go together and I spoke without thinking. An honest mistake.”
But Blaine was already shaking his head. “If he’s any kind of detective, he’ll know there’s no such thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Honest mistakes, slips of the tongue. In a sense, they’re like dreams. It’s when we say what we really mean. No, Anna, you told a lie about being with me in Dorset that weekend because, deep down, you’re as suspicious of me as Mr. Elder himself. And you thought I needed an alibi.”
“Vincent, that’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?” He came toward her, a sardonic smile in his eyes. “I don’t think so.” Reaching out, he rested his hand above her heart. “I think somewhere here you believe I might be responsible. Guilty. And I’m touched that, under the circumstances, you think I should be saved.”
Bending his head toward hers, he pressed his cold lips to her mouth in a kiss.
ANNA HAD BOUGHT HER HOUSE IN MAPPERLEY PARK JUST before property prices went sky high and had clung to it ever since. In the early days, to help with the mortgage, she had taken in lodgers—usually friends of friends or people she had met through work—but now, most of the time, she lived in her late-Victorian pile, as she referred to it, by herself. Some of the rooms on the upper floor were rarely used, unless some distant cousin fetched up in the city unannounced or a down-at-heel artist, whose work she liked, was in dire need of temporary studio space and a bed.
Ten or twelve years ago it had been a largely prosperous middle-class area, a bastion between the seedier St. Ann’s on one side and Sherwood and Forest Fields on the other. But recently things had begun to change, and curb crawlers had become a more frequent sight, tracking the prostitutes who, at night, were taking over some of the streets as their own. In response to neighbourhood complaints, the police had begun clamping down for brief periods of time, stopping motorists and issuing warnings, making a show of noting down their registration. A week later the patrols were gone and the punters were back.
One of Anna’s friends, who had moved into the area at around the same time, had just announced that she and her family were selling and moving out. Anna had done her best to dissuade them, but with no joy.
“If you had a thirteen-year-old daughter who was constantly being leered at by men from cars, asked if she was looking for business and how much she charged, you’d be going, too.”
Anna thought she was probably right. She’d been trailed more than a few times herself, propositioned, too. It all lent to an atmosphere she grudgingly had to admit she liked less and less.
She arrived home from her visit to Vincent feeling distinctly off-key. He hadn’t been angry, not in the same way as the previous day after his conversation with Brian Warren at the brunch, but, more importantly, he hadn’t denied that her suspicions had any grounds.
Was she suspicious?
In her heart of hearts?
Her eyes closed for an instant as she remembered Blaine touching her, his hand fast across her breast... somewhere here you believe I might be responsible. Guilty. And I’m touched that, under the circumstances, you think I should be saved.
His kiss on her lips.
Suddenly she felt stifled; wanted air. Pulling on a coat, she went outside, slamming the heavy door at her back. In the short time she’d been inside, it had become dark. Patches of pavement showed up dull orange under the streetlights, with areas of deep shadow in between. Thick hedges and stone walls. Blackened trees.
Anna set off eastward, a route that took her quickly across two roads and then along a steep incline that rose toward the Woodborough Road. The houses here dwarfed her own: massive six- or eight-bedroom dwellings that had long since been converted into flats, each with long gardens that pushed them well back off the road.
A third of the way up she passed a woman walking slowly toward her close to the pavement edge, touting for business. As they were passing, the woman looked impassively into her face and then hastily away, and Anna realized she was little more than a girl. Seventeen? Eighteen at most. A pretty face, but pale with buried eyes.
Behind her, Anna heard a car slow almost to a halt before accelerating slowly away, and, instinctively, she quickened her pace.
She didn’t know whether she wanted to blank all thoughts of Blaine from her mind, or try to think rationally through what little she knew. What she felt. Despite what she’d said to Elder, she didn’t believe, if Claire Meecham had been in one of his classes, he would not, at the very least, have remembered her name. No matter how self-absorbed he migh
t be, he would have known that, surely? So why then deny it outright? Unless there was something there, something he wished to hide.
As she walked on, an image of the two of them, Blaine and this woman whom she had never seen, other than in a patchy newspaper photograph, formed clearly in her mind. The cottage in Dorset, high on a cliff overlooking the sea. A white bedroom flooded with light, white walls, white tasselled cover across the bed, the sound, rhythmic and repetitive, of the waves, his hand on her skin...
Anna jumped, startled by a sound at her back, and turned.
A shadow moving close against the wall.
A sheet of discarded newspaper lifting in the wind.
Far down the street, the muted headlights of a car.
She hesitated, uncertain whether to turn around or go on.
If she reached Woodborough Road there would be more traffic, more people; she set off again up the hill and only a short distance on heard behind her the fall of footsteps other than her own.
The skin at the backs of her legs froze cold.
Looking over her shoulder she saw something—someone—sliding from sight into the gateway to one of the gardens, an arched gap in the high stone wall.
Anna held her breath and waited.
Nothing happened. No sound.
“Hello? Is there anybody there?”
Her voice sounded flat and small.
She took a pace back down the hill. Another. Still nothing. The sound, faint, of someone’s breath, but was that her own?
One more step brought her level with the gateway, and as it did, a face materialized out of the dark.
Anna gasped and stumbled back, swung clumsily round and started to run. Not daring to stop, not daring to look round. Her arms flailed as she neared the point where the road levelled out and air choked raw from her lungs.
As she reached the corner a large shape loomed suddenly in front of her, and, even as she screamed, her arms were caught and held fast. She wriggled and kicked and screamed again.
“Anna? Anna, is that you?”
Recognizing Brian Warren’s face, she threw herself against him and sobbed.
