by Penny Kline
‘I agreed with most of it,’ I said a little sharply. ‘Some of the other people there seemed pretty sceptical, but nobody had a good alternative theory.’
He swung round to face me and it was as though it was the first time he had really looked at me.
‘I’ve been in Psychology for donkeys’ years, you know. You grow stale, cynical. It’s bad for the students.’
‘I didn’t mean you. I meant — ’
‘No, you’re perfectly right. Incidentally, your colleague, Martin — we bump into each other now and again. Somewhat disillusioned with clinical psychology, isn’t he?’
‘I think the job tends to wear you out.’
‘What job doesn’t?’ His chair looked unsteady and I was afraid it might tip over but presumably he knew its limitations.
‘You’re married I expect. Children?’
That threw me for a moment. ‘No, no I’m not married.’
He nodded vaguely. Did he want me to fill him in on my personal life? Perhaps he was wondering if I was going to start the research then give up half-way through having wasted several hours of his valuable time.
‘I’ll have plenty of time at the weekends,’ I said, ‘and I could probably come in one afternoon a week when I need to use the computer.’
He wasn’t listening. A pen in his inside pocket seemed to have leaked on to the lining of his jacket. He dabbed at it with a disintegrating tissue, then placed the pen on his desk, along with a collection of pencils, paperclips, and pieces of crumpled paper.
‘D’you know anyone in the Psychology Department?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘You clinical people stay well clear I expect. Can’t say I blame you. Where did you do your training?’
‘London.’
‘Miss it?’
‘Sometimes. Not often. I lived quite a long way out, couldn’t afford the rents near the centre.’
‘Who can?’ He picked up my proposal and handed it to me. ‘Frequent attenders — see what you can come up with. Try to describe your methodology in detail. Bit of a bore but worth it in the long run.’
He stood up and opened the door. I held out my hand but he didn’t seem to notice. He was staring down the corridor, where a student, dressed in black Lycra tights and a scarlet sweatshirt, was reaching up to pin something on to a noticeboard.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘What? Oh, that’s all right. Give me a ring if you need any help.’ And he disappeared back into his room and closed the door.
*
As soon as I stepped into my office the phone started ringing. I picked it up and a gruff North Country voice spoke immediately.
‘Oh, you’re there, are you? I tried earlier but you must have been having a long lunch hour.’
It was Fleur Peythieu. I recognized the voice at once. ‘Oh, hallo, how can I help?’
‘Look, I’m calling from a pay-phone in the student union and the noise here’s bloody deafening so you’ll have to speak up. The thing is, after you left I remembered something about this person I told you about, the one Karen was dead scared of.’
‘Oh, I see. Good.’ It was nearly a week since I had called round to see her. Surely she could have phoned before.
‘Still interested, are you?’
‘Yes, of course.’ In the background I could hear the sound of crockery, metal trays being slammed down on formica tables, laughter, chairs scraping on the ground.
‘She’d get herself right worked up about him. I’d never seen her in such a state.’
She was exaggerating her Lancashire accent on purpose, yelling into the phone as a way of registering her disapproval of the noise going on all round her.
‘It was definitely a man, was it? D’you mean she was frightened he was going to harm her?’
‘Not exactly. I couldn’t really say. She kept starting to tell me about it, then she’d give up before she’d said what she wanted to. She was like that. I never pushed her and if I had it wouldn’t have done a blind bit of good. Only once she let this name slip out.’
‘The man’s name?’
‘I’ve been thinking. Something beginning with D, I thought. A foreign name. Then I remembered, it weren’t foreign, it was Australian. Anyway, that’s all I can remember.’
‘Thanks, Fleur. Thanks very much. If the actual name comes back to you — ’
‘It won’t.’
‘No, well, anyway I’m grateful to you for taking the trouble to — ’
‘You think I don’t care,’ she said angrily.
‘No.’
‘Yes, you do, but we don’t all wear our hearts on our sleeves, you know.’
‘I understand.’
She laughed, a short bitter snort.
‘The money’s running out and I’ve no more change. Anyway, there’s nothing else to tell. See you.’
She didn’t mean she would see me. She meant her call had put an end to the matter and she hoped I wouldn’t bother her again.
I thought about Karen Plant, struggling to keep her job and her personal life under control. Overworking to escape from an unhappy love affair? I wished I had known her and I wished I had met Keith Merchant. I had nothing to go on, nothing the police would take seriously, but I was starting to think that Keith really might have confessed to a murder he had not committed. What a relief his confession must have been to the real killer. It had closed the case, there would be no more questions, he was safe, could almost convince himself it had never happened.
My next client wasn’t due for fifteen minutes. I went downstairs to look for Martin. I wanted to reassure him that everything was back to normal between us, that the incident in the pub wouldn’t make any difference.
Why did I have this absurd compulsion to make everyone else feel all right? I was the same with Chris. She was the one who had been cool, almost hostile, yet I was the one who felt guilty. I decided to call round again and try to sort things out between us. Thursday straight after work would be best, while Rosie and Jack were at their Children’s Theatre Group. Chris and Barnaby and I could go for a walk. I would say very little, just listen, accept her anger, whether it was about the baby-sitting or whatever, say nothing about Bruce and certainly nothing about the murder of Karen Plant.
For once Martin was busy seeing a client. Heather obviously felt like a chat, but I made an excuse and went next door to the bathroom, where I put down the lid on the lavatory seat and sat leaning against the cold cistern. On the back of the door someone had scratched a drawing of a pin man with a trilby hat and a gun in his hand. I wondered if one of my clients was responsible but couldn’t think of a likely candidate — apart from Rob and the drawing wasn’t up to his usual standard.
I thought about Jenny, sitting in her bedroom surrounded by her china animals. When had she learned to ‘escape into illness’? What would I have done in Val’s position? Treated her like a fragile flower or told her to pull herself together?
I began to wonder if my work with Jenny was doing more harm than good. Perhaps it just allowed her to continue to see herself as ‘a case’. On the other hand, any intervention led to some kind of change and Val seemed to think she was making progress of a sort. If she missed her next appointment I would write her a letter, try to reassure her, put no pressure but make it clear that she could come back and see me without fear of being criticized for staying away for nearly a fortnight.
I thought about Val and wondered if she had been on duty when Fleur Peythieu visited the counselling service. As far as I could tell Fleur had only been once, and then only to please other people. After that she had felt able to come to terms with her friend’s murder without the aid of professional helpers. I tried to picture Karen and Fleur sharing a flat together. From what I knew of Fleur it seemed a highly unlikely friendship. On the other hand, I knew next to nothing about Karen Plant and my image of her could be quite wrong, a combination of false impressions — from the newspaper, from Bruce, David, Diane Easby.
> It was several days since Diane had been in touch. In fact no official appointment had been made, although that wouldn’t stop her from coming to see me if something cropped up. Another visit from the Social Services, a row with her husband, or a set to with the Gas or Electricity Board.
I was doing it again, escaping into worrying about my clients when I should have been trying to sort out my own life. It was time I took the initiative with David, issued some kind of ultimatum, made a time limit for myself, just as I had advised poor Mrs Hillman to do. She and I had so much in common. We burned with anger, yet another emotion — fear — was even stronger. What were we both so afraid of? Being alone? Giving up an illusion? But Mrs Hillman was fifteen, getting on for twenty, years older than I was. She had some excuse for clinging on, whereas I was beginning to despise myself.
I stood up, ran ice-cold water in the basin and splashed it on my face and neck. Then I pulled out the plug and watched it slowly gurgle down the hole.
Wiping the face of my watch, which was covered with droplets of water, I realized that it was already past the hour. I drew in several deep breaths, then strode down the corridor to collect my next client, Mr Gooch, an elderly man with sexual problems which he liked to describe in minute detail. After that a woman in her thirties, who had been referred for help with her obsessive compulsion to rid her house of hidden germs, but was now starting to come to terms with her real anxieties.
*
Later, as I drove past the flat looking for somewhere to park, my anger returned. An ancient pink Chevrolet, parked half on the pavement, had taken most of the space in front of my house and the one next door. I cursed it, made an awkward three-point turn and drove back down the road, turning into the cul-de-sac and stopping opposite the graveyard. A dilapidated sign said parking in front of the entrance was strictly forbidden but none of the local residents took any notice. The main gates were covered in straggly creeper. Nobody had opened them for years or taken a car — let alone a hearse — up the narrow gravel driveway.
While I was leaning over the back seat to reach for a book on psychosomatic illness that I had brought home with me I saw a movement behind the trees. Branches swaying in the wind. But there was no wind. Then I saw them, two figures, one tall, the other much smaller, her face barely visible because of the anorak hood drawn up tight.
Sitting perfectly still I watched them as they stood staring at something, not speaking to each other, just looking straight ahead. Then the taller of the two bent down and seemed to be touching something on the ground.
After several more minutes they turned and started walking back towards me.
My instinct was to jump out of the car and confront them. What was Rob doing hanging around near my flat yet again? But the graveyard was not my territory. He had as much right as anyone else to walk among the stones, reading the inscriptions with their quaint sentimental messages. Wasn’t that just what David and I had liked to do, on warm summer evenings, on our way back from the pub?
‘Asleep at last in Jesus.’
‘The sailor home from the Sea.’
And the one that David liked best of all, a quotation from a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose,
With my lost saints — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and if God choose I shall but love thee better after death.
It was the kind of thing that brought tears to David’s eyes and it had been one of the reasons I had fallen in love with him. Now …
The two figures were drawing nearer. I stayed put in the car, pretending to search for something in the glove compartment but watching them out of the corner of my eye. They walked side by side but with several feet between them. When they reached the iron gates they paused. Rob whispered something to the girl and she pushed back her hood and ran her fingers through her short brown hair. Perhaps I had known who she was as soon as I saw her in the distance. But watching her standing there under the street-lamp with Rob still came as a shock. More than that, she was doing something I had never seen her do before. Her body was perfectly still and her face expressionless. Silently, the tears were streaming down her cheeks.
Chapter Twenty
The post cards had disappeared from the drawer in my kitchen table. So they had been from Rob after all. Not only had he sent the cards but he was also the intruder. Running into me at the refuse tip had alarmed him. After he had admitted hanging about outside my flat he had been afraid I might contact the police. But with the cards gone there would be no evidence of what had been going on. They would only have my word for it.
And another thing, how had he met up with Jenny and what kind of an influence would he be on such a vulnerable kind of girl? In a way it was none of my business. In another way, it was difficult to believe that their friendship had nothing to do with the fact that I had been seeing both of them. I wondered if it was because of Rob that Jenny had missed all those appointments. He had told her to stay away, that anything I did for her would cause her more harm than good, that, in any case, since I sent people away when the going got hard I would be certain to let her down sooner or later.
After they had left the graveyard I waited until they were out of sight then locked the car and went through the gap between the railings and the iron gates, trying to retrace their footsteps. It had not been difficult. Their shoes had flattened the long damp grass and I soon found the spot where they must have been standing.
I looked about for anything out of the ordinary, but there was nothing. Just the familiar cracked and crumbling stones, one with a cross leaning at an angle of forty-five degrees, another with its inscription entirely obliterated by bright green moss. Then I noticed what looked like a new stone. Small and white and spotlessly clean, not a typical gravestone, more like a painted breeze-block. There was nothing written on it but beside it someone had placed a white bowl of purple crocuses and a few tiny wilting snowdrops. I shivered a little, aware that I might be intruding on private grief. I remembered Jenny’s tears. Rob whispering in her ear. She had been showing him the improvised headstone and he had been comforting her. Had she put the stone there herself? Or perhaps Rob had carried it there for her and when I saw them they had come back with the vase of flowers.
Just before I left work a phone-call came through for me in reception. Chris, wanting me to call round.
‘You must have read my mind,’ I said.
This was not entirely true since I had forgotten my decision to have things out with her. Part of me wanted to go straight home, then set out again looking for Rob. Also, I would have liked it to be me who had offered to make things up between us, although it was possible that Chris wanted to see me for some entirely different reason.
‘I’ll be with you in about ten minutes,’ I said.
‘Yes, all right. If you come straight away, we could go for a walk before it gets dark.’
*
We strolled round the park, a different one from the park where Val Weir had introduced herself. The nearest open space to where Chris lived was more of a recreation ground, with swings and slides at one end, a few scruffy flowerbeds, and a large amount of muddy-looking grass surrounded by a concrete path. On a clear day if you climbed to the top of a grassy bank you could see the Brecon Beacons across the other side of the Severn Estuary. Today all that was visible was the haze of smoke hanging over the docks and the distant chimneys of the huge chemical works at Avonmouth.
We talked of this and that, putting off the moment when we would have to admit the real purpose of the walk. I had decided to let Chris raise the subject. Sometimes — she always said it laughingly — she accused me of talking to her like a psychologist. She didn’t mean it as a joke.
‘Well,’ she said at last, giving the buggy a push so it ran ahead of us, veering to the right until I was afraid it was going to tip over and deposit Barnaby on the path, ‘I suppose I shall have to apologize.’
; ‘It’s all right,’ I said, regretting the remark at once since it made it sound as though I was an innocent victim of her anger. ‘I mean, I know I’ve upset you in some way. Is it about the baby-sitting or — ’
‘Karen Plant,’ she said, ‘you think she and Bruce had something going.’
‘What? No, I don’t. I just needed some information about the murder — for a client.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep lying to me, treating me as though I’m half-witted. David knew about it, didn’t he?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know what he knew.’
‘What did he say? No, I’d rather hear it word for word.’
I turned to face her. ‘Actually David did mention something. Last week, when he gave me a lift in his car.’
‘You knew about it before last week.’
‘No I didn’t, and since he’d never mentioned it before I didn’t take much notice. You know what he’s like.’
‘Oh, it happened all right. Bruce was totally besotted. The only thing that prevented a full-blown affair was that she didn’t reciprocate.’
‘How d’you know? I mean … ’
‘Because he told me. Because he’s an even more hopeless liar than you are. Anyway, even if he didn’t actually go to bed with her what difference does it make?’
‘Quite a lot, I’d say.’
‘Sartre once said — ’
‘Sartre said a lot of things.’
‘Do stop interrupting all the time. Sartre thought love decreased every time you had sex with someone.’
‘Lust maybe, that’s not love.’
‘Isn’t it?’
I had a feeling there was something else she wanted to tell me but just at that moment Barnaby suddenly let out a piercing shriek. Bored with the walk and fiddling about with whatever he could reach, he had caught his finger in part of the buggy and couldn’t pull it free.
He wasn’t hurt but Chris had to undo the harness and lift him out. Then he refused to get back in again. Eventually, with the help of half a chocolate button in Chris’s coat pocket, we managed to calm him down.