by Penny Kline
Owen sat up, swinging his legs to the floor. ‘Look, I’ve told you everything I know.’
‘But what did the hospital say?’
He shrugged. ‘You know what they’re like, giving out ambiguous, euphemistic statements, making the relatives feel worse than if they’d never asked.’
‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous, what else can they do in the circumstances? Does Terry know if Bill’s got any close relatives — apart from Ian that is? I think he mentioned a grandfather in Scotland. Ayr, he lives somewhere near Ayr.’
‘The police will sort out all that kind of thing. People who cycle round Bristol are mad. You know what it’s like when you’re stuck behind a bus, wondering whether there’s room to overtake, then a cycle comes up on your right… ’
With half an ear I listened to him, trying to convince me Bill had only himself to blame, as if that somehow made everything all right. I was wondering precisely where the accident had taken place, whether there were any witnesses. Had it really been an accident or had the same person who killed Maggie Hazeldean wanted to finish off the job and get rid of her husband as well?
When I interrupted Owen to tell him what was on my mind he gave a sarcastic snort. ‘Oh, come on, you said yourself the fire in Bishopston was probably a mistake, I mean as far as the intended victim was concerned. God knows how many road accidents take place in Bristol each day.’ ‘I thought you prided yourself on being such a fantastic statistician,’ I said angrily. ‘Both the Hazeldeans involved in fatal accidents during the same month?’
‘Bill’s not dead,’ said Owen. ‘Why d’you always have to think the worst? It’s time you gave up that job and started mixing with normal, ordinary people.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, I’m sick of the way you keep going on at me about my work. I don’t criticize you all the — ’
‘No, but you make it very clear what you think of cold, arrogant academics.’ ‘That’s not true. If I thought you were all like that we’d never be sitting here now, let alone having this ridiculous conversation.’ I moved towards the bed, snatched up the phone and started punching in Ian’s number. ‘Anyway, you’ve never met Bill so why should you care what’s happened to him?’
‘And you care so much?’
We glared at each other. Even before I opened my mouth I knew I was going to say something stupidly childish. ‘Anyway, if all you can think about is food you’ll find some eggs in the fridge, that have been there at least six weeks, plus two dried-up mushrooms and a mouldy shallot. Why not try making yourself a Spanish omelette?’ Slowly, methodically, he replaced his shoes, tied the laces in double knots, picked his coat up off the chair and left the flat.
Chapter Fourteen
Paddy had a cold. She apologized for spreading germs but said she had come anyway since psychologists were probably like doctors: they saw so many sick people they became immune.
‘Immune to what?’ I said.
She laughed. ‘Oh, I wasn’t trying to be clever. I’ll leave that to you.’
My first meeting with her had been on her terms. She had invited me into her house after the unpleasant incident with the speeding car. Now, here in my office, she felt at a disadvantage.
‘You must be wondering why I’ve come,’ she said, aiming a sodden tissue at the waste-paper basket, then pulling another from the box on my desk. ‘Oh, no, you think it’s because of Sibi. Sibi and her father and the arranged marriage.’
‘Is there one?’
She pulled a face. ‘Some hope. You’ve met Azim. Can you imagine him standing up to a girl like Sibi? I’ve told her a hundred times, if she’d let him have his say, let him feel he had some influence… ’ ‘But she won’t.’
‘Would you have done at that age?’ She stood up and removed the grey anorak she had refused to let me hang up for her when she arrived. ‘Now you’ll think I’m staying,’ she said. ‘Well, you may be right, but only if you can guarantee that what I tell you goes no further than these four walls.’
‘Of course.’
‘It may be “of course” to you, but what if someone told you they’d committed a murder, or they were selling drugs to schoolkids?’
I made no comment. She didn’t expect one.
‘Right,’ she said, pushing up her sleeves. ‘Begin at the beginning, shall I? Usually the best place.’
It was raining again. Droplets ran down the windows, looking as if they were on the inside of the glass, although the building wasn’t in that bad a condition. I asked Paddy if she would like me to draw the curtains.
‘No, that’s all right, love,’ she said, misinterpreting my offer. ‘Nobody’ll be able to see me from down there, and what if they did? There’s no harm coming here, doesn’t mean you’re off your trolley. I was born in Bristol.’ She folded her arms to indicate she was finally getting started on the reason for her visit. ‘Then I met up with a bloke called Ken when I was nineteen and went to the Midlands with him six months later, against my parents’ wishes. They were right, of course, he was a horror, drank like a fish, slapped me about. So I left, but I stayed on in Coventry because of my job. In a building society, it was, with good prospects, as they say. Then I met Azim.’
She tried to blow her nose but it was too blocked up. ‘Sorry, did you say something?’
I shook my head. ‘You and Azim. Where did you meet?’
‘Where? Does it matter? Oh, sorry, you must think I’m suffering from paranoia. On the top deck of a bus. No, really. It was caught in a jam, took nearly an hour to travel a couple of miles.’
‘So you got into conversation.’
‘I dropped my purse and he picked it up. Like the good old days, eh? Only then it was a lace hanky or a silk glove.’ She was nervous, making an effort to sound as composed as possible, to keep a grip on herself. ‘I never married Ken. At least I’d that much sense. So there was no divorce or anything. Azim lived on his own, the rest of the family had returned to Pakistan. Later, after my dad died, we came back to Bristol, to be near Mum.’
‘She’s still alive?’
‘Oh, very much so. Lives just off the Bath Road, near that park-and-ride car park. Do you know it? They made a new roundabout but the traffic’s still a nightmare.’
Slowly, in her own time, she was working up to what she wanted to tell me, but it was making her so anxious she had to keep wiping the palms of her hands on her sleeves.
‘Racial abuse,’ she said suddenly. ‘It’s not the bad stuff, not the remarks made out loud. No, it’s more of a feeling you get, something you can’t put your finger on, but there just the same.’
‘Remarks about Azim?’ I was remembering how he had told me it was difficult for Paddy, being the only white member of the family.
‘All of us,’ she said. ‘Mostly me for marrying him. People say when there’s enough mixed marriages the nastiness will stop. Some hope. If you ask me there’ll always be scapegoats of one kind or another. Skin colour just makes it easier to pick someone out.’
‘There are organizations,’ I said, ‘people whose job it is to stop racial harassment, install panic buttons, put in video cameras.’ She gave a short bitter laugh. ‘That’s in blocks of flats, love. Besides I could deal with the rough stuff myself. Anyone tried to break a window, daub slogans on the door, they’d wish they’d never… ’ She broke off, picking up a paperback the previous client had insisted on lending to me, that was lying on my desk.
‘Living with Insomnia,’ she read. ‘Do a bit of everything do you? Must be people queuing up. No wonder you don’t advertise. By the way, that man you were looking for, I was thinking, I reckon Max could be the name of his girlfriend. Maxine? Those tattoos, they’re not usually the person’s own name.’
Of course. How stupid. ‘Do you know someone called Maxine? A girl who calls herself Max?’
‘Sorry, love. I’ve asked around but the people you saw could’ve come from another part of town.’
‘Then why would the man have been exercising his dog near here
? I’m sorry.’ I pulled myself up short. It was my job to make sure she stuck to her own problems, not found an escape route talking about mine. ‘You were telling me about your experience of racial prejudice. How does it affect the children? Sibi’s such a beautiful girl.’
She frowned and I wondered if I had said the wrong thing, implying that no one would insult someone who was so attractive. ‘My son’s a good-looker too.
Both the kids have turned out better than their parents.’
I glanced at the clock. Paddy saw me and sighed. ‘How much longer?’
‘Oh, don’t worry, there’s plenty of time.’ ‘That’s what I was afraid of.’ She managed a feeble smile. Then she stood up, dropped another tissue in the basket and walked across to the window. When she spoke she still had her back turned. ‘I was assaulted,’ she said softly. ‘Four months ago it was. Less than half a mile from the house. One Friday evening when I was coming back from visiting a friend.’ ‘I’m so sorry. I wish you’d told me before.’
‘When? When you came to the house? You wouldn’t have liked it. Everything in its place and a place for everything.’
‘No, it’s not like that,’ I said defensively. ‘The reason I wanted you to come here… here, in my office, I can give you my full attention. The situation’s clearly defined. It’s for you.’
I wasn’t putting it very well, but was that such a bad thing? In a strange kind of way it put us on the same footing. We were both struggling to get things right.
‘It’s all right, love, I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘If we’d been at home I’d never have told you the half of it. No one knows what really happened, not even Azim.’
‘The police? Surely you reported it to the police?’
She sat down again and there were tears in her eyes. ‘How could I do that? Anyway, I wasn’t badly injured, just a bit shaken and a bruise on my neck. The bloke was over six foot tall and strong as they come.’
‘What happened?’
She stared at me for a few moments. ‘In the alleyway, next to the launderette. Pushing himself against me. Forcing my hand… ’
Outside in the street, or it could have been in the car park, someone was shouting. It was too far away to hear the words. Just a voice raised in anger, yelling a string of expletives, probably some incident with a car.
‘Just a bruise on my neck,’ Paddy repeated, ‘and where he’d caught hold of my arm. I wasn’t going to tell anyone but Sibi guessed something had happened. I said my purse had been snatched. She thought it was the man who sleeps on a bench outside the library.’
‘Why did she think that?’
Paddy shrugged. ‘I suppose he was the first one came to mind. Dirty, smelly clothes, thick beard, bottle of cider. You know how we get people labelled in our heads.’ She gritted her teeth, then let her jaw relax. ‘The bloke that sexually assaulted me was quite well dressed, in a suit with a collar and tie. I remember walking towards him without turning a hair. I was even planning to say hello, make an effort to be friendly. After all he was in his early twenties and wouldn’t be interested in an old boiler like me.’ She glanced at my face. ‘Stupid wasn’t I? How naive can you get?’
‘We can’t spend our whole lives assuming every man we pass is going to jump on us.’
‘No, I s’pose not.’ Her tissue was clenched in her fist. ‘The thing is, there’s something I didn’t tell the family, didn’t tell anyone till now. Sibi and Rupal — how would they feel? I told them it was a small bloke, small but wiry, with thin sandy hair. Well, how would you feel if you were part white, part Asian and a black man had assaulted your Mum?’
‘I’m so sorry.’
She looked up and her eyes were wet with tears. ‘Shall I tell you the worst thing of all? I didn’t see his face, couldn’t bring myself to look at him properly, but when I managed to break free… I started running and I was shouting. Not out loud, not so anyone could hear, but it was there inside my head. Bastard, I was shouting. Bloody black bastard!’
Whenever I met someone like Paddy, someone I had come across away from the office, rather like a client who had been referred by a doctor or some other agency, I was struck by the tiny proportion of people we saw, relative to the number of people with serious problems. The media had been going through one of its regular phases of knocking psychologists, psychotherapists, counsellors, the so-called helping professions. Didn’t they do more harm than good? Wasn’t it better in the good old days when people talked things over with their friends? But Paddy’s experience demonstrated that it wasn’t that simple. In a situation like hers, talking to someone who was neither a friend nor a member of the family was infinitely preferable. All the same, it was only after she and I had got to know each other a little that she had felt sufficiently confident to make an appointment.
I remembered my brief conversation with Azim at the petrol station. He had urged me to visit Paddy, to try to encourage her to talk. Did he know more than Paddy realized? Had he guessed the reason for her reluctance to call in the police?
Heather buzzed me, asking if she should put a call through. From Grace Curtis. I groaned inwardly, but told her to go ahead.
‘This won’t take a moment, Anna.’ Grace sounded elated. ‘I just wanted to let you know Bill’s out of danger.’
‘Oh, thank God for that.’
‘It was a nasty head wound but there’s no fracture and the only other painful injuries are a broken collar bone and a painful gash where the skin was scraped off his shoulder.’
‘How’s Ian?’
‘Oh, he’s fine. Relieved now he knows Bill will soon be home. They’re keeping him in for observation, just to be on the safe side, probably until the end of the week.’
‘You don’t know any more about how it happened?’
‘I’m afraid not. There were no witnesses and I’m not sure Bill had time to see what kind of car it was. Anyway, all’s well that end’s well. See you then, Anna, I expect we’re almost bound to bump into each other during the next few days.’
After she rang off I began wondering all over again why Bill had been cycling up by the Downs. People had strange ideas about keeping fit. Rushing about all day didn’t seem to count. Changing into a hideous leotard and jumping up and down at an expensive health club was supposed to work miracles. I thought about Bill’s remarks about the head teacher and how he seemed to resent having a woman above him. Was the cycling a way of getting rid of his frustration? And did his remarks reflect a general hostility towards successful women? Towards Maggie?
Nick was standing in the doorway, watching me deep in thought. ‘Now what?’ he said. ‘Still thinking about Jon Turle?’
‘What about him?’
He came in and closed the door. ‘His consulting room’s quite near my flat.’
‘Yes, I know. He’s not a friend of yours, is he? You didn’t say anything when Martin was slagging him off.’
‘No, not a friend, but I see him in the pub now and again. The night before last he was with a girl — sorry, a woman. Tall. Dark curly hair. They were having a row, looked as though they were, keeping their voices down but glaring at each other. Anyway, I don’t suppose it was anything. I would have mentioned it if you hadn’t said you were worried about his old client. That and the fact that he looked so bloody overwrought.’
Dark curly hair. But it couldn’t have been Rachel Bellinger, not unless she had met up with him to ask him to be kinder to Imogen. Or was it possible that the reason she was so worried about Imogen was because she herself had become involved with Jon?
‘This woman,’ I said, ‘about how old would she have been?’
Nick thought about it. ‘Hard to say. They were down the far end of the bar and the lighting in that place… Recognize the description, do you? I shouldn’t have said anything. Not fair spying on people.’ ‘No, I’m glad you did, but I can’t quite decide what I should do about Imogen.’ ‘Nothing. Do nothing. When I started to work I used to lose sleep over clients who threate
ned to top themselves. Then I realized that was exactly what they hoped I’d do.’
I sighed. ‘But the common belief, that people who threaten suicide never actually go ahead with it, is wrong.’
‘Yes, we all know that, but we still can’t keep track on people twenty-four hours a day. Do the best we can, have them admitted to hospital if it’s really serious.’ ‘If the psychiatrist on duty will have them.’
‘Exactly. This woman in the pub, as I say I couldn’t see her face properly, just got a quick impression when she turned to one side to reach for something off another table. The only thing I can remember for certain, she was wearing those heavy hoop earrings.’ He gave a slight shudder. ‘The kind that look like if someone gave them a yank they’d rip right through the flesh.’
As I was leaving the building Heather stopped me in the corridor. She looked stricken.
‘Oh, Anna, I feel dreadful. You were with a client and I completely forgot. There was another phone call earlier, just like before, at least I think it was the same person.’
‘The man with the distorted voice?’
‘Or woman. This time it sounded more like a woman, only the message was the same.’
‘Tell Anna to look for Rod.’
She nodded energetically. ‘Does it make any sense? Do be careful, I’m sure it’s something to do with that man with the dog.’
‘Kieran hasn’t heard anything?’
‘Kieran? Oh, yes, he was going to have a look round, wasn’t he, only I’m afraid he’s been rather busy these last few days, helping a friend clear a piece of waste land, for a playground for the children. It’s such a waste, he’s clever you know, in all kinds of ways, but he can’t find work that really suits him.’
‘That must be true for millions,’ I said, then, realizing it sounded rather unsympathetic, ‘I mean it’s depressing the way so many people have to do jobs far below their ability.’
She gave me a funny look. ‘You’re all right, Anna? I know the bite’s healing up OK but it must have left you a bit — ’
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I said, recalling my conversation with Paddy Jinnah and wondering how I could have felt so sorry for myself, just because a dog left a few tooth marks on my ankle. ‘If another anonymous call comes through try to persuade whoever it is to repeat the message. That way he may not manage to distort his voice so successfully. At the very least we may find out if he’s male or female.’
