by Sarah Dunant
The figure moved into the doorway. Through the crack all I could see was a dark blur. I started to shake, my brain slipping back a cog into the memory of dark country air and a man’s fist. I picked up the image and hurled it like a mental discus far, far away from me. I watched it spin and shimmer into the distance. Then I braced myself, ready to jump the instant the figure entered.
But before I had a chance the door was wrenched away from me, with a sharp brutal movement that left me exposed. I took the oily thing with me, lifting and flinging it in the direction of my attacker. It covered the face and much of the body, obscuring any vision long enough for me to deliver a savage kick to beneath the knee. A man’s voice yowled. I rammed him with the full force of my body weight and he went over, but not before a hand had shot out to take me with him.
I let out a banshee scream of anger as I came down on top of him, using the corner of my elbow as a sharpened mallet to smash into his chest somewhere under the rib cage. I heard him groan. “Ha …” I hit out again and I heard another yelp. But I wasn’t listening anymore. Or counting. The blood was up and singing in my ears, the sweet sound of heart and body pumping in unison. Don’t mess with me…. The words came howling through me from below, from a past dark with panic and pain.
“‘Anaa … Oh, Christ.”
Don’t mess with me … I come from a place where fear is its own muscle and fury an endless fuel.
“‘Annah. Stop … Hannah.”
Hannah. Me. I registered the name in the shout at the same time as an arm shot out to deflect a further blow. He used the leverage to pull me sideways and throw himself on top of me. He was heavy. Heavier than he looked. “Hannah,” he shouted again. “It’s me, Grant. It’s OK. You can stop.”
“I know it’s fucking you,” I said, as I smashed into him again, at the same time arching my back violently to throw him off. “I know. I know.” And as I said it, I realized I was screaming, too.
It took a while to stop, the message in the brain not the same as the one in the body. But when he pinned my arms down to the floor, suddenly it all went out of me. I felt it go, a great woosh sluicing through my system, almost like a rush of urine when you can’t hold it anymore. I fell back against the floor, feeling its hard wood against my back, gulping in air, looking up into his silhouetted face. “God, Hannah,” he said, half laughing, half coughing, “you’ve got some punch.”
The violence passed. It took us both a while to find our breath. The mood changed. The picture stilled. Slow mo—the biggest cinematic cliché in the book. You could almost hear the music. He relaxed his weight further onto his hands, his head coming fractionally closer to mine. Here we go. The bit in the movie where you kiss her. Come on, you know the rules.
Hard to know if it was the film buff or my body talking. I heard myself laugh. It was a mad sound. He frowned, his lips parted in a kind of bewilderment. “Hannah?” he asked quietly.
“I wouldn’t try it,” I said, louder than I intended. “I’d probably bite your tongue out.”
“What?” He laughed in astonishment.
God, was I in some trouble. Maybe Colin wasn’t so wrong about me after all. Maybe Joe had inflicted a more lasting damage than the eye. No time to think about that now. I shook my head frantically, looking to cover my nakedness with the plot. “I’ve found her,” I said, and it struck me later when I tried to remember the moment that I may have been crying, but I’m still not sure. “She’s in the bath. She slashed her wrists. There’s blood everywhere.”
And so it was only afterward, after he had helped me up and held on to me for the longest shortest time to check I was OK, that we both realized that the oily cape we were lying on was, in fact, a full-length PVC black raincoat.
Chapter 20
I called Olivia to tell her the good news when I finally got home early the next morning. She was groggy, but at the right end of the sleeping pill to hear the phone. She didn’t say a lot, but then I suppose there wasn’t that much to say.
It still took the lads from the lab to really get her off the hook, though. Just Rawlings’ way of being nasty to the end. I can’t tell you how threatened he had felt, finding Grant sitting in the car with a new partner. I had to take a bollocking for all the things I’d touched, even though I had worn gloves. But by then I had recovered and took it like a woman. After all, we both knew it wouldn’t affect the final outcome. As indeed it didn’t.
When the reports came in thirty-six hours later, they showed that while Olivia’s car and apartment were forensically spotless, bits of the inside of her husband were to be found all over Belinda Balliol: on her clothes, in her shower, on the mac, and in some tasty little stains on the upholstery of her car. Even more importantly her fingerprints were all over Maurice Marchant’s office.
According to the PM, she died around 3:00 that morning, having taken enough Nembutal to knock herself out a couple of hours before. The phone company’s records showed that she’d made a call to Marchant’s office earlier that evening and spoken for five minutes, while a neighbor who had been out walking his dog said that he had seen her car drive off at around 11:10. Her body showed signs of bruising around the upper arms, commensurate with a slight struggle.
It was her car that clinched it. The aging janitor turned out to have had the eyes of a cat. (And Grant the honesty of a weasel.) Not only had he seen a tall woman in a raincoat leaving the premises just before 12:30 A.M., but he’d also spotted a vehicle, driving away into the night as he ran out after it. Far too dark and too quick for anything as sophisticated as a whole registration number (although he thought he’d seen a Y), but he had once been a car mechanic, and he certainly recognized a newish Ford Fiesta when he saw one. Popular little woman’s car. Perfect for the about-town health farm manageress. Which was, of course, another reason why the police had been quite so full of themselves when it came to Olivia Marchant’s guilt, especially when they discovered her Fiesta’s number plate had a Y in it.
Indeed, so convinced was Rawlings they’d got the right murderer that he showed little interest in investigating Olivia’s alternative story, at least until forensics told him any different. So it was Grant who took the files home that night from Castle Dean, and Grant who found Belinda Balliol interesting enough to call at her place of work. Mr. Aziakis, of course, had been expecting him. Not only did he tell him all about her body work and how she hadn’t been there since Monday night, but also, under Grant’s questioning, revealed that for the last six months or so she’d been driving to work regularly in a Ford Fiesta.
From there it was just a question of using police shortcuts to put an address to a telephone number and to get hold of the letting agency. The house had been on a year’s lease, six months’ rent paid in advance. The lease had begun in November, which was the month in which Maurice had given her the push and which, by further coincidence, was also when Belinda Balliol had bought the year-old Ford Fiesta, whose registration number began CYR…. And all on a croupier’s salary? It didn’t take a genius to work out that someone had given Belinda a helping hand. But was it a payoff or blackmail? Either way, according to her current bank statements, she needed more money. Because not only was the bank getting worried, so was the letting agency. They had already sent a letter threatening her with a notice of quittal if payment wasn’t forthcoming. The police found it at the back of a drawer in the study. It perhaps goes without saying that nowhere in the house, the car, or her bag was there any sign of any ticket or travel document for Mexico.
And the sleeping pills? Well, they came from a doctor she had seen seven weeks before, complaining of nerves and insomnia. When pushed further, she had talked of personal problems. He had assumed a matter of the heart and prescribed her only ten, just in case. She must have used them sparingly.
Now all the bits were in place, I checked them against the fantasy of my car journey. It wasn’t a bad fit. Except maybe the fact that she had used her precious savings to fund the sabotage. That seemed a little prof
ligate, though she’d obviously thought it worth the money. But then given the payoff six months before, she was probably right. At least it showed the Marchants that she meant business. It must, then, have given her the fright of her life when I turned up out of the blue asking questions. Maybe she thought he—or even worse they—had put me on to her. Either way she had little time to think about it. When Marchant called, she must have been more than ready. I saw her at her cupboard, picking out the right clothes, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, making up that lovely new face so she might prove irresistible to an old lover. She’d already gone out of her way to show how suitable she could be. Nice house. Same car. Maybe she had been trying to turn herself into Olivia so he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Apart from the rings around her rival’s neck. And the ones Olivia had hooped around his soul.
But it hadn’t worked. We were back in that consulting room in the middle of the night. Except now there was no one to tell us what had gone on. The silence of death. Nothing quite like it. According to the pathologist’s report, the woman who had killed him must have been either pretty strong or pretty angry. The first blow had severed an artery. I watched the blood spurt out all over that gorgeous cream sweater. Maybe he had told her there was no more money and she had just lost her temper.
I thought of Joe, and the violence I had found in myself once the right button had been pressed. But violence is one thing. Mutilation another. She must have loved him a lot to hate him so much. I had said as much to Grant, as we sat together in the car waiting for the sirens to roll in.
He shrugged. “I don’t know, Hannah. You should have seen as many corpses as I have. You’d be amazed by what people can do to each other in that moment, then not remember a thing about it afterward. Defense mechanism, I suppose. Particularly for women. Anyway, what is it they say? Hell hath no fury …?”
And I smiled, because that was one of Frank’s favorite quotations, too. A case of the sentiment fitting in with prejudice.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. It’s just for a moment there I’d almost forgotten you were a policeman.”
Which brought us to the aftermath and what happens when the fury dies away. But there even the forensic boys couldn’t help, couldn’t turn the facts into feelings. I thought about her leaving the building, shaken and shaking, her bloody clothes encased in Olivia’s long black mac. That would have been a bonus, finding something to cover the mess she was in. Did she realize how it might look: a tall woman in the same coat, driving away in the same make of car? Maybe there had been some method to her madness after all. The possibility of setting up her rival and watching the whole family implode. Except she decided not to stay around to enjoy the show.
I imagined her, a young desperate woman, the adrenaline long gone, arriving home reeking of her lover, only this time the smell of blood rather than sex. I saw her push her way into the bathroom, strip off and fling herself into the shower, leaving that vicious little pile of clothes behind her. But there are some things that hot water can’t wash off. Just as there are some words that don’t burn, despite the ashes. I saw the towel on the floor and the indentation on the bedcover, the empty glass of whisky and the pills. Maybe she had thought that she’d find some peace in sleep, only to realize that sleep would mean dreams, and that in the end it would be easier to choose that other tunnel of forgetfulness. Just a question of not being able to live with what you have done.
The day after the official reports came through, I got a letter from Olivia Marchant. It read:
There are no words with which I can thank you, Hannah. I think you probably saved my life. Now I have to learn to live it without him. If I had had your confidence and sense of self when I was your age, perhaps things could have been different. As it is, I must own it for what it is. The only thing I regret is that I never met her. It would help me to have known more about her. Detective Inspector Grant told me she was young, just twenty-eight years old. And when I asked him, he said she was beautiful. I would assume that Maurice had had something to do with that. When I try to imagine forgiving her, I think that maybe she couldn’t bear to lose him either.
YOURS IN GRATITUDE, OLIVIA MARCHANT
Nicely turned, I thought. And generous. In more ways than one. Tucked inside the envelope was a check for a thousand pounds. The amount didn’t surprise me. I was getting used to being overpaid. The real problem was how it didn’t make me feel any better. God, I hate this bit. I hate it when it’s all over, but you still feel as if it isn’t. What I needed was something to earth it, to let it go.
So I drove down to the Nag’s Head. Well, a promise is a promise and the money was already burning too many holes in my psyche. My windscreen washer was there at the traffic lights, sitting having a fag, a stack of the Big Issue next to his bucket and sponge. I rolled down the window and called him over. He gave me a grin and ran up with a copy.
“Hi, Hannah.”
“Hi.” I took it from him and in return handed him a fifty-pound note. He stared at it with stunned disbelief. “I used you in a bet,” I said. “They could afford to lose it. Have fun.”
I drove off before he could ask further.
In a dozen other circumstances it would have made a perfect end. But my malaise was too deep for a corny philanthropic gesture to cure, and anyway we all know this isn’t really the end. For some time now this has been a story of two marriages, two sets of infidelities in need of resolution, and only one of them had come to rest.
Two evenings ago Colin had taken his wife out to dinner in the country to try and patch up their relationship and prevent her from finding out the truth. I went home and waited for my sister to tell me about it.
Chapter 21
She took her time. Three days, to be exact. I sat through a long weekend, then finally I lost my patience and called home. It was early evening on the Kent-Sussex border and my mother had been out pruning the rosebushes. I think that was where I first encountered violence, in my mother’s gardening. Her and her shears. The plants used to tremble as they heard her opening the shed doors. I could see her now, hair caught up in an old-fashioned roll, wisps escaping as she pulled off the gardening gloves to pick up the phone.
We talked weather and saucepans and my father’s angina. Then she told me all about the lovely visit they’d had from Kate and the family, and how they had gone home the day before and what a marvelous man Colin was, the way he worked so hard and cared so much for his family. I suppose every girl sets out to make herself in the image of what her mother isn’t, but in my case you can probably appreciate now that it was a matter of survival. I put the phone down, got out my stash, and rolled myself a joint.
And so it was that I was not entirely in control of all my faculties when half an hour later the doorbell rang. I looked out of my open window to see Kate standing below on the doorstep, a bottle of champagne in one hand, a potted plant in the other, and no kids hanging round her skirts. No doubt they were at home with Daddy playing happy families. I took a few deep breaths of fresh air and went downstairs to greet her.
She looked a little guilty, no doubt about that. But she also looked happier. Younger even. Reconciliation: cheaper than a face-lift. But was it less painful? She smiled at me. How mean was I going to be to her?
“Kate, what a surprise. Mum must be baby-sitting.” Very mean was the answer to that question.
“No. We’re home.”
“We?”
“Yes. We all came back together last night.”
“I see,” I said and held out my hand. “And those are for me.”
When I was little, I could be so cruel to her; even though she was the elder, I was always the one who could make her cry. Once I told her a ghost story that had her sobbing with fright. I felt guilty about it later, but it didn’t stop me then.
I took the bottle and the plant. “Thank you. You don’t mind if I don’t invite you in. Only I’m quite tired.”
“Hannah …”
>
“Don’t worry, Kate. You don’t have to say anything,” I said firmly. “It’s got nothing to do with me, remember.”
She looked at me for a moment. I smiled. I thought I did quite a good job, but then we’re talking Kate here. She sighed, then put out her hand and took the champagne back. I was so surprised that I let it go. “It’s not a present, Hannah,” she said quietly. “It was a way of getting you to speak to me. If you don’t want to talk, you can’t have it.”
“What?”
“You heard. You can keep the plant. Mum says it doesn’t need a lot of water, but you have to dead-head the old blossoms. Give me a ring when you’re not so tired.”
And she turned on her heel and walked down the path. Well, when I say I used to be the cruel one, I did, of course, have to learn it from someone. Some responses just take you right back to childhood. “All right,” I said. “But I still don’t think it’s fair.”
We sat around the table. It was good champagne. At least it was better than most of the stuff I’ve drunk, but then that wouldn’t be difficult. She had sniffed at the air a bit as she got out the glasses but didn’t say anything. In fact, she didn’t speak until the bubbly was poured and we were sitting down.
“You stoned?” she asked.
I laughed. “Not really. Your arrival seems to have sobered me up. How did you know?”
“How do you think?” She paused. “We were sitting in opposite seats last time.”
“What?”
“When I was here last. I was sitting there, with a cup of coffee. You were here.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so unhappy, you know. Or not that I can remember. You were so good to me. I can’t tell you how grateful I was that you were here.”