Past Praying For

by Aline Templeton

  Ruffling through the disorder of papers on his desk, he picked out his interview with Margaret Moon in hospital the previous day, grimacing in remembered frustration. Why were things never straightforward?

  Vezey had gone reluctantly; he did not like hospitals. He walked along the aseptic corridors feeling chilled, as always, by the contrast between their professional tone of relentless optimism and the miasma of human suffering.

  Miss Moon, however, was sitting up in bed when he arrived, looking, despite her ordeal, surprisingly calm and cheerful for someone whose eyes were still the colour of raw steak and whose voice was strained and clearly painful.

  He had promised he would keep it short and she was able, under his questioning, to describe the voices she had heard and the differences between them, though not, unfortunately, with any sense of recognition.

  ‘Well, I know now of course that they were the same person,’ she added carefully, ‘but it honestly didn’t occur to me at the time.’

  ‘Good.’ Vezey had made a particular note of that; it was the sole glimpse they had of the other persona and suggested a noticeable difference between them. It was, at least, a chink into which the lever of questioning could be inserted.

  ‘Now – she thought of phoning you when she was in this desperate state. Do you think this was purely because you were the vicar and could carry out this exorcism she wanted, or because she had some previous direct contact with you?’

  Margaret shut her eyes for a moment in concentrated thought, almost as if she were replaying the conversation in her head.

  ‘Well, it’s certainly someone I know – Dumbo said “Yes” when I asked her. But “direct contact”?’ She considered it, then said positively, ‘Nothing was said either way, I’m sure of that. But if you’re asking my impression…’

  He nodded. ‘Anything.’

  ‘It is my definite feeling that from the way she began the conversation she had been in recent contact. She didn’t say, “Is that the vicar?” or “Is it all right if I talk to you?” as most people would, she just started straight in.’

  ‘Right. So let’s start with your contacts on that day.’ Margaret coughed, with evident discomfort, and took a soothing drink from the glass at her bedside.

  ‘Yesterday there was Suzanne Bolton, of course. I spent a long time with her. A couple of her neighbours – I can’t remember the names – came in as I was leaving, and I exchanged a few words with them, and with Laura Ferrars earlier, on the way to Suzanne’s. Oh, and Elizabeth McEvoy at the church. Old Miss Christie was at church as well, I talked to her briefly – ’

  ‘Not relevant at the moment,’ he interrupted brusquely. ‘Save your voice. We’re sticking to the original profile meantime. Those women – close friends, aren’t they, all about the same age? And the American, Mrs Cutler, too? You weren’t speaking to her?’

  Margaret shook her head. ‘No. I passed her as she came back from jogging the day before, but she certainly hasn’t sought me out. But –’

  She broke off.

  ‘Go on,’ he urged.

  ‘Oh, nothing, really.’ She was clearly not in the habit of prevaricating, and colour began to show in her cheeks. She coughed again, making a business out of taking another sip from her glass, but he was not deceived.

  He hesitated. He did not want to upset her, not least for fear of incurring her brother’s wrath.

  He said, keeping his tone as light as possible, ‘Now, why do I feel there’s something you’re not telling me?’

  Over the rim of the glass, her eyes behind the spectacles were rounded in anguish, and she went pinker than ever.

  The penny dropped. ‘Oh, good grief,’ he said in exasperation. ‘We’re on sacred ground here – seal of the confessional, and all that, aren’t we?’

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ she said, but she would not meet his eyes.

  ‘A professional confidence, then? Do you know who’s doing this?’

  ‘Oh, no, no – nothing like that...’

  ‘But a useful piece of information, nonetheless. Oh, for goodness’ sake, Miss Moon, someone tried to kill you last night. Don’t you think, even if you feel that you have higher duties than your civic ones, that you might tell me from self-preservation?’

  ‘Least of all from that,’ she said coldly. Now she looked directly at him, eyes guarded and mouth firmly shut.

  He hammered his fist on his knee in frustration.

  ‘So tonight, when someone else dies because you haven’t pointed me in the right direction, you will feel quite justified because you kept a promise of silence to someone who had no moral right to ask it of you?’

  She bit her lip, and emboldened he went on.

  ‘It’s a question of time, you see. Your brother says – and I don’t need to tell you that he’s very astute – that this one’s going to strike again. I need every short-cut I can find, if we’re to get there first.’

  ‘Oh, I know all that. I’m not stupid,’ she croaked impatiently. ‘But you’re asking something I can’t do.’

  She sat back against her pillows, battered perhaps, but still sturdily unyielding. He wondered if anyone had ever felt driven to shake her until her teeth rattled in her head, but that was hardly a productive thought.

  He ran his hand through his hair in a gesture of impatience. ‘Look –’ he began forcefully, then stopped. There was no chance of bludgeoning his way through. He would have to try another tack.

  ‘Supposing,’ he said carefully, ‘supposing I suggested to you the direction in which I am planning to move. Would you feel capable, without compromising your integrity, of telling me whether, in the light of this information which you cannot give me, I am wasting my time?’

  She considered what he had said. Then, ‘Yes,’ she said positively.

  He gave a sigh of relief. ‘Thank God for that. Right.’ He ran his hand across his chin in thought.

  ‘These four – Bolton, Ferrars, McEvoy, Cutler. Do you consider that is a line worth following up?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, not happily but without hesitation.

  He rose. ‘Thank you: I hope I haven’t tired you too much.’

  It was infuriating that she wouldn’t give him the information direct, he thought as he scanned his notes again, but at least he had prised out confirmation for the area he had defined. He hadn’t time for detail at the moment anyway.

  The other notes he had dug out related to his interviews with the women they had discussed. These had not been easy. He had taken along with him the chirpy WDC Boyd, who at the end of the gruelling round had said forthrightly, ‘Thank goodness that’s over. Right bunch of neurotics they are, and with nice homes and lots of money, what have they got to be neurotic about, I should like to know?’

  Vezey’s lips twitched. ‘That’s what we would all like to know, Jackie. It was rather what I thought the interviews were about.’

  ‘Oh.’ For a moment she took it as a rebuff, then recognized it as one of Sir’s rare jokes, and grinned.

  The enterprise had been, he acknowledged, a fishing expedition as much as anything else. He had wanted a good look at the four women he had placed in the frame: surely the one who made last night’s frantic phone-call must be showing visible signs of strain?

  Well, if she was one of the four, she certainly was. Each of them in her own way was showing signs of severe strain, which left him back at square one.

  They had gone to the Briar Patch first. It was his second interview with Hayley Cutler, of course; he had been abrupt with her before, and had no time to waste if he were to get round the rest of the women today, so she had in a sense the right to be irritated, snapping his head off when he asked if she had suffered any particularly traumatic stress in her childhood.

  ‘Stress?’ she had spat at him. ‘Stress? Shee-it, my childhood was nothing but stress. You want I should fill you in on a couple of calm periods?’

  ‘Or could we, maybe, talk about what’s happening right now, instead of in the dist
ant past?’

  He had had more than he could take of that sort of attitude. Too many people had been bending his ear with their views on the inadequacy of the police investigation, so he had stalled her with promises of another visit, and left.

  Laura Ferrars, so icily cool that she looked as if she might splinter into pieces at any moment, had denied any stress at all. She contrived to imply that people like her had, as they were entitled to expect, perfectly satisfactory childhoods, and that such a question was grossly impertinent. It was an obvious defence mechanism, but there wasn’t a lot he could do to get behind it.

  With Elizabeth McEvoy he had been forced to proceed much more gently. Whenever he had appeared, she had begged to be reassured that the police wouldn’t let it happen again.

  ‘It’s the children,’ she had said, her eyes brimming. ‘I’m so frightened for the children.’

  One of them was ill, a little girl who came trailing into the room sniffling and coughing pitifully, and demanding to be taken on her mother’s knee.

  Stifling his irritation he had made meaningless comforting noises. A distressed subject was no use to him, but even once she was calmer he had no reward for his patience. Questioned about her childhood, she was vague, more concerned with the child on her lap; it had been, she seemed to think, much as others were.

  Mrs Bolton, the last on their list, had been by turns lachrymose, belligerent and downright obstructive. No, she had not had a particularly happy childhood, but it wasn’t something she was prepared to discuss. She had terminated the conversation firmly with a ringing denunciation of the police as amateur psychologists.

  All of them, without exception, had looked at him as if it were he who was mad when he asked if any of them had noticed any friend who spoke oddly or differently at times.

  No, it had not been a successful series of interviews. All it had established was that all of them were reluctant in one way or another to go into detail about their childhoods.

  Perhaps anyone would be; he sure as hell wouldn’t care to have someone raking through his memories of that uncomfortable part of his life.

  And getting information from other sources on that sort of subject was seriously delicate; he’d have to be pretty sure of his ground before ‘Enery started getting more phone-calls complaining about harassment.

  He groaned, and reached for another half-pound of paper from the table at his side.

  ***

  It was, thought Patrick, as if Suzanne had suddenly gone stone-deaf, or he had lost his voice. Or perhaps it was more like dreaming, when you talked and talked at people but found you were inaudible and invisible too.

  ‘We have to send him away,’ she repeated. ‘We have to get Ben out of here. If we don’t, we could be signing his death warrant. We have to live with this – this nightmare, but he doesn’t. Would your parents take him, do you think? I know they’re not very fit, but surely they wouldn’t mind when it’s a matter of life and death?’

  He tried again. ‘Suzanne, please! Look, I’ve fitted another three smoke-detectors, and it wasn’t easy. I had to go to that shop over at Darnham before I found one that hadn’t been completely cleaned out. And there’s the security lighting. The place lights up like Harrods’ frontage now every time a cat so much as tiptoes across the garden.’

  ‘Would your parents have him, do you think?’

  He sighed, running his hand helplessly through his hair.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose they would. But Ben won’t want to leave his friends, and with the best will in the world my parents would find it hard to amuse him. They lead a very quiet life since Father’s coronary, as you well know. And as I said before, I think you’re simply over-reacting.’

  ‘That’s settled, then. Will you phone them or shall I?’

  Patrick conceded defeat. ‘I’d better do it,’ he said grimly. ‘Mother’s bound to get into a flap, and I can’t think you would be the person to calm her down.’

  He wasn’t either, as it transpired. His mother, a highly-strung lady now under continual tension about her husband’s health, reacted badly to the suggestion that only Ben should be fleeing. She wanted her own son removed to safety with almost as much insistence as Suzanne had shown, and Patrick found that telling himself she meant well and had had a difficult time lately didn’t stop him feeling irritated, it merely made him feel guilty for wanting to yell at her at the top of his voice. Perhaps he too was more strained than he was allowing himself to admit; everywhere you went these days, people seemed to be twitching.

  He had felt tired before he even set off on the two-hour drive, beside a sullen Ben, who had protested to his mother but found that he too seemed to be dream-talking. Having to leave Tigger behind had been the worst part.

  ‘But if it’s so dangerous, it’s dangerous for Tigger too! And he’s only small, perhaps Granny wouldn’t notice him much. I don’t want anything to happen to Tigger,’ he had wailed.

  Perhaps it wasn’t entirely tactful to be so worried about Tigger when he obviously had no qualms about leaving Suzanne; her lips tightened and she remained implacable as she swiftly packed a depressingly large suitcase for him.

  ‘He won’t be away that long,’ Patrick protested. ‘The police will pick someone up any minute. You could hardly move for policemen in the village last night, apparently.’

  But she had ignored that, like everything else.

  Patrick deposited Ben at his parents’ house, had a cup of tea and did his best to reassure his mother, then extricated himself from her still-anxious clutches for the long dreary drive home, with nothing to take his mind off his problems.

  He was seriously worried about Suzanne. She was behaving as if she were heading for some sort of breakdown, but supposing she – they – did manage to hold things together, what was their future? Even after this awful business had been cleared up, was there the slightest chance they could return to the sort of loving relationship they had once had? It all seemed a very long time ago now: he had practically forgotten what the girl he had fallen in love with had been like. She was certainly unrecognizable in the hard, bitter shrew he seemed to be married to now.

  There had been so many quarrels, so many hurtful words hurled in temper. People might talk about saying in anger things you didn’t mean; in his now-extensive experience of the state, you meant them all right. It was just that in a saner moment you would realize that they should never be said. Once spoken the words might be withdrawn – perhaps – but they would be entered indelibly in the black book of resentment that every unhappy couple keeps as meticulously as a ledger: occasion, date and reciprocal insult.

  And that was an attitude that fed on itself and grew until it smothered love and changed the tone of everyday life. Could they change it back? Did he – and this was the shameful heart of the matter – even want to change it?

  About him the traffic was slow. There was a hold-up on the motorway with roadworks, and when he fiddled impatiently with the radio, looking for distraction, all he could find were tired-sounding carols and dogged, desperate good cheer. He snapped it off and sat drumming his fingers on the wheel.

  Outside, it was cold and grey, with a hint that fog might descend later, and as he inched along the windows began to steam up. Within his personal mental cocoon he felt detached from reality, insulated briefly from the problems behind and the pressures ahead, both imposed and self-induced.

  He had made a genuine effort to put her out of his mind. It was disloyal, it was pointless, it was wrong. But here, in this strange little pocket of disconnected time, he permitted himself to pretend it didn’t count. Just till the traffic moved off, he promised himself. Just these few minutes of the dangerous indulgence of thinking about her.

  Lizzie. Elizabeth. He murmured the name luxuriously aloud, and her face swam up before his eyes, her face as he had seen it across the unromantic plastic of the table in the supermarket café: her lips quivering and the tears spilling over from her sea-grey eyes, so soft, so vulnerable.
All he had wanted to do was to take her in his arms and protect her from the world, and in particular from her slob of a husband. Patrick liked to think that he was as civilized as the next man, and it shocked him to discover that at some deep and primitive level what he wanted to do was punch that smug, freckled face until the man screamed for mercy.

  It was a very long time since Suzanne had made him feel like a man instead of a peculiarly inept and irritating child.

  The traffic was picking up speed now. He changed gear and accelerated. He changed gear mentally as well. There was, as he had told himself a thousand times, no point in torturing himself with thoughts of Lizzie. Like most over-indulgences, you paid with later pain. They were both trapped; by duty, by children and by long habit. He didn’t even know if she thought of him in any way other than as a kind friend. Like the lanes of the motorway running ahead under the sweep of the headlights, the future looked grey, dreary and featureless.

  Home at last, he parked the car in the driveway behind Suzanne’s hired replacement, outside the ruined garage. It was six o’clock; a wasted Saturday. As he got out of the car, three of the new security lights came on, making him jump.

  As if that were an awaited signal, the front door swung open and Suzanne stood there, wearing her coat and carrying the hold-all she always took to hospital with her.

  ‘Oh, there you are, Patrick! You’re terribly late – I expected you ages ago.’

  Put on the defensive, he said, ‘Well, the motorway was horrendous. And I could hardly just dump Ben on the doorstep and get back in the car, you know. But what –’

  She cut across him. ‘You’ll have to move the car. I can’t think why you didn’t park it in the road, as usual. There’s no way I can get mine out with yours there.’

  ‘You’re surely not going to the hospital!’

  In the harsh light he could see her high colour. Her eyes were hard and bright and she was clasping her bag so tightly that her knuckles gleamed white.

  He strove for tact. ‘You’re still very tired and shocked. I thought you’d warned them you wouldn’t be back for a day or two? You really don’t look well enough to cope with a night-shift.’