Past Praying For

by Aline Templeton

  He left the room and heard, with a sense of unreality, the crash of some piece of crockery hitting the back of the door he had just shut, then a wail and a tempest of frenzied sobbing from his wife.

  He put his hand to his brow and found that he was sweating. He felt completely, uncharacteristically, at a loss. What should he do now?

  Get out of the house until she calmed down, suggested itself as the only answer. It was probably the time of the month; she was often pretty touchy around then. She’d have a good cry, take a couple of aspirins, go to bed and feel better in the morning.

  The golf club came to mind as the obvious haven. He was not usually what is termed a ‘clubbable man’ but tonight the thought of male company was very attractive. There were women members too, of course – it performed the social function of a country club – but the ambience was distinctly masculine and the women tended to be unobtrusive. Just at the moment that was a very soothing thought.

  The fog was starting to close in and James drove with even more than his usual caution up the hill to the car park where there was already a good number of cars. The club, he surmised, would be providing a convenient excuse for people to catch up with the latest developments in the Stretton Noble crime wave. The local store, he had noticed when he passed earlier, appeared to be performing the same service for its different clientele.

  The hum of talk, as he entered the main bar, seemed to have a fevered pitch. Normally a local sensation would be greeted with a sort of discreet relish, but this tense atmosphere was something different. After all, it could be your home tonight. No wonder Laura was being – difficult.

  Patrick Bolton was there, eating on a stool up at the bar and chatting to Jonnie Marsden, a pleasant, quiet man with a business in Burdley. James went to join them.

  ‘Evening Jonnie, Patrick. Ready for another of those? My shout.’

  He bought the drinks and joined them, and only then noticed Piers McEvoy at the far end of the long bar, slotting back the Scotch as usual in a group of other men. There was a lot of noise down that end, as there always was when Piers was about. He was open-handed with his rounds, running up a tab which he paid off without question at the end of the evening. It assured him, James reflected cynically, of an audience at least of the more dedicated bar-flies, if no one else.

  Piers looked across from his conversation and made a beckoning gesture: James and Patrick both raised a hand in greeting, but made no move to join the other man. He turned back to the group about him with a shrug, and a moment later there was a loud gust of laughter.

  The conversation at James’s end of the bar was considerably quieter. He found himself mentioning, in general terms of course, Laura’s incomprehensible outburst, and found Patrick eager to talk about Suzanne. Evelyn, Jonnie’s wife, had wanted them to take turns at staying awake on fire-watch, and they all agreed that the situation was enough to get anyone going. Jonnie confessed to having gone out and bought three industrial-sized fire-extinguishers which were now looking entirely out of place in his small modern bungalow. The three men laughed comfortably, and Patrick ordered another round of drinks.

  It was, perhaps, half an hour later that James noticed Hayley Cutler come into the bar. She was by herself; she smiled perfunctorily and waved towards them, but did not come over. The bar was even busier now, but when next James looked she was talking to Piers, drawing him slightly apart.

  Piers, unmistakably, was not pleased, but he ordered drinks for them both and went to sit with her at a table in the far corner. James was intrigued now; it would not do to be caught staring, but out of the corner of his eye he was able to see that an acrimonious conversation was taking place. There were no raised voices, but Hayley was pressing some point, leaning forward and gesticulating, while Piers’s position in his chair – leaning well back from her with his arms crossed and a thunderous expression on his face – was as clearly repelling her submission as if James had been able to hear the short, contemptuous sentence which was his reply.

  Hayley drew back, her face turning an ugly muddy red, and for a moment did not move. Then she leaned forward, called him something which, probably fortunately, James could not hear, then got up and strode out, her eyes hard as flint and her jaw set as if it were cast in bronze.

  Piers glared at her departing back, his pale prominent eyes bulging even more in what looked like an effort not to shout at her. He took out his handkerchief and mopped his brow and the back of his neck with a pudgy hand that did not seem quite steady. He reached for the glass in front of him which still contained most of a double, and downed it in one. Then he got up and came over to James and Patrick.

  ‘Come on, you two,’ he said with a show of his customary jocular manner. ‘You’ve been tucked away at the fairies’ end of the bar all night – come and join the chaps!’

  Jonnie Marsden, a blameless family man, looked embarrassed and as Piers lingered drifted quietly away.

  ‘What about some bridge?’ Piers suggested. ‘I’m just in the mood to make a night of it.’

  Not for me,’ Patrick said, slipping off the bar stool. ‘I’m getting back.’

  ‘James, then?’

  James hesitated. He wouldn’t exactly choose to spend a long evening in Piers’s company, but then the prospect of returning home before Laura had gone to bed was unappealing, to say the least.

  ‘Well, just a few rubbers, then.’

  ‘Excellent fellow! Come and we’ll find another pair of like minds, and I’ll get the drinks in.’

  ***

  It was eleven thirty when Patrick went out into the car park, jingling his keys in his hand as he walked. The temptation had been served up to him on a platter, frilled and garnished by Piers’s obvious indifference to his nervous wife, left alone at home. Patrick should resist it, he knew that. But would he? He had heard mermaids singing, and like Eliot’s Prufrock he was doubtful. But in his heart, his trousers were rolled already, and his fingers sticky with peach juice.

  He started the engine and drove slowly from the car park. The fog was becoming smoggy, and the headlamps reflected back off the surrounding soupy grey. He dipped them; he could see the road in front more clearly now, but the damp dirty blanket closed in about the windows of the car in an echo of that isolation he had experienced this afternoon.

  Left or right at the bottom of the road? Left for home, a nightcap perhaps, and the late film on television, or right...?

  He clicked on the right-hand indicator. After all, he tried to convince himself, he was only paying a neighbourly call to see that Lizzie was all right, because her bastard of a husband didn’t care.

  The house looked quiet and peaceful enough. The children must be in bed, for the only room lights showing were behind the curtains in the drawing room. He parked his car in the road outside, walked up the path and rang the bell.

  When Elizabeth opened the door, she had been crying. She had wiped the tears away, tried to put on a public face, but the heavy swollen lids and the quiver at the corner of her delicate mouth gave her away.

  He had planned it all. He would say, cheerfully, ‘Just called in on the way back from the Club. Piers looked settled in for a long session, so I thought that I’d just check that you were OK.’

  But her pathetic attempt at a welcoming smile was his undoing.

  ‘Oh Lizzie, sweet Lizzie,’ he said, and held out his arms.

  She threw herself into them and clung to him as if he were the only solid rock in a sea of troubles that threatened to engulf her.

  They had done no more than talk, mostly, and they were sitting with comparative decorum on the sofa, with Lizzie’s hand lovingly imprisoned in Patrick’s clasp. They heard no warning sound, no footfall on the thick pile of the hall carpet: with a movement that was purest instinct, when the sitting-room door burst open they leaped guiltily, foolishly apart.

  There in the doorway stood Suzanne. She was in her nurse’s uniform, but some of the buttons were undone, and her hair was wild as if she had
been running her hands through the thick, strong curls.

  ‘Am I to be left with nothing, nothing?’ she cried. ‘I try, God knows I try. Sometimes I think I will kill myself, I try so hard. My son has grown away from me, I’m not strong enough even to do a single night’s work, and now it’s the oldest story in the book, my husband’s car parked outside the house of my best friend. It’s so banal it’s embarrassing. Couldn’t you come up with something just a fraction more interesting, Patrick? Or even something just slightly less devastatingly hurtful? Isn’t it enough that I’ve been stripped naked – am I to be flayed as well?’

  Her sudden intrusion, the sobbing, hysterical onslaught, seemed almost to have paralysed them. After a long moment Patrick struggled to his feet.

  ‘Suzanne, I know what this looks like, but –’

  ‘Oh, spare me the crap. It’s bad enough, God knows, without the lies and the clichés.’

  Elizabeth found her voice. ‘Patrick only came in to see if I was all right, Suzanne. I was pathetic and stupid and burst into tears, and he was kind. It’s my fault; he’s done nothing.’

  ‘No,’ Patrick protested. ‘It wasn’t your fault, Lizzie. It was my choice to come here. And –’

  Suzanne stood watching them, white-faced, her eyes glittering as she followed these exchanges with turns of the head like the spectator at a curious tennis match. But suddenly she yelled, ‘Oh, it’s not Lizzie’s fault, of course. Nothing’s ever Lizzie’s fault. Dear, sweet, helpless Lizzie!’

  And then she was upon her, with a banshee scream. She had the advantage of surprise; taken unawares, Lizzie was still sitting at the end of the sofa which slid backwards under the impact of Suzanne’s weight. A little table toppled; a dainty Limoges snuffbox smashed on the parquet floor.

  Patrick grabbed Suzanne from behind, pulling her up and away and imprisoning her flailing arms, but not before she had raked her nails savagely down the side of Elizabeth’s face.

  Patrick gasped as he saw the scratches, now filling with blood. Suzanne, too, stopped struggling, as if the sight of what she had done had knocked the fight out of her.

  He was too shocked to feel anything except bewildered dismay.

  ‘Suzanne, are you out of your mind?’

  Her body sagged against him and he took the risk of releasing her from smothering restraint, while still holding himself ready to spring at any threatening movement.

  But she was quiet now. Suzanne looked from him to her handiwork on the other woman’s face, and her eyes fell. She walked away to the door calmly enough.

  When she reached it, she turned.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lizzie,’ she said, her voice sounding eerily normal. ‘It shouldn’t have been you, it should have been that bastard there. At least my nails are clean. Wash it with antiseptic and it’ll heal in a day or two.’

  She went out. Patrick, sick and shaken, made to take Lizzie in his arms again.

  ‘My darling, your poor face – ’

  Elizabeth was still sitting at the end of the sofa, pushed back as Suzanne had left it. Her eyes were wide, as if contemplating a horror too deep for tears. She was struggling desperately for control.

  ‘No, no, please. Don’t touch me, Patrick. Please, just go now.’

  ‘But Piers – how will you explain it? Will he be all right?’

  She drew a shuddering sigh, and got out a foolishly small handkerchief to dab ineffectively at the scratches.

  ‘Oh, Piers,’ she said, with a travesty of a smile. ‘No, I don’t suppose he will be. He won’t be pleased about the Limoges, apart from anything else. But I’ll cope. I’ll think of something. And it certainly won’t help if you’re here.’

  ‘No. No, I don’t suppose it will.’

  ‘I’m not worth all this, Patrick. And Suzanne needs you, you know she does.’

  He didn’t want to hear her say that. He would be the judge when it came to the question of her worth to him, but she was right about Suzanne, and Suzanne was his wife.

  Patrick looked with hopeless yearning at the woman he had been permitted to love for such a short time, at the disordered room, and worst of all at her disfigured face. He had done this to her, as surely as if he had used the nails on his own hand which had caressed her so lovingly before.

  ‘What will you do?’ Conceding her point, he was still reluctant to leave her.

  ‘I’ll go to bed. He won’t be back until after I’m asleep anyway. But go now, Patrick, please go.’

  She had been magnificent, but her voice was rising and even he could see that he was making matters worse rather than better. He took an irresolute step towards her, but her shrinking was obvious.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m going. I’m sorry, Lizzie, more sorry than I can possibly say. Don’t get up: I’ll see myself out.’

  With a heavy heart he left her, sitting on the sofa still, but now with her head bent so that the light of the table lamp fell on it, creating a nimbus out of her fair hair.

  12

  The streetlamps were pale fuzzy haloes of dead light tonight, and in the main road a car inching along was no more than a grey shape defined by the trapped beams of its futile headlights as they failed to penetrate the gloom.

  The fog was growing denser, the yellowish polluted fog of the Thames Valley, thickening in eddies and swirls until it seemed almost viscous. It enfolded buildings, trees, figures, as if the air itself were becoming as solid as the objects it shrouded. PC Tom Compton was not as a rule a fanciful man, but as he trod his lonely beat he almost turned to see if a bow wave was forming as he breached the opacity ahead.

  Compton was not happy. He was accustomed to the comfort and security of a police car, dry and warm, with the familiar crackle of radio voices from headquarters and other nearby cars, and his partner for company in the slack times and support if things hotted up. Even when he had been on a foot patrol, there had always been two of them; tonight he was on his own, with not a soul about. Well, probably not. He glanced over his shoulder nervously.

  He was in radio contact, of course, but tonight the strategy was to cover the village with as many officers in as many places as possible, particularly now that visibility was reduced to only a few paces.

  And that idea was a loser for a start. There wasn’t an icecube’s chance in hell that he would see anything, unless he tripped over the fire-raiser – a woman, they seemed to think – squatting over the next blaze warming her hands. Someone could be within three feet of him, ahead or behind, and he wouldn’t even know.

  He shivered. As a mere PC he wasn’t, of course, privy to the discussions of the great men who flaunted a ‘D’ before the ‘C’ in their police title – PCs to them were a lower form of life – but the rumour was all round the station that the woman they were looking for was a nutter. It wasn’t a comfortable thought.

  Compton turned on to a back lane which ran behind some of the smarter houses, with the trees of the common dripping eerily on the other side. With sight being so little use to him his hearing seemed much more acute and he found himself becoming aware of all sorts of little sounds in that heavy greyness, muffled and distorted by the blanket of the fog. There were rustles too, and the snapping of twigs in among the light undergrowth and the bushes. Was that one of the foxes, scavengers of dustbins, which were so common here, or was it someone moving lightly and furtively among the trees? Perhaps it was an ordinary citizen perfectly legitimately taking his dog on its late-night walk. Perhaps it wasn’t.

  There was a thick fur of moisture on the pile of his clothes now, and it was condensing on his brows and eyelashes too. He knuckled his eyes as if that might restore clear vision and peered into the damp darkness, shining his torch which dazzled but shed no light. It was probably no more than imagination which made him think he sensed the stir of someone’s passing on the thickened air.

  ***

  Rod Vezey, when he reached Burdley, was high; high with a sort of nervous jubilation. He strode through the little police station, Moon and Smethurst
trotting in his wake, with such purposeful haste that he created a stir.

  ‘Well, well! Do you reckon Wonderboy has had a break-through, then?’ the constable manning the front desk asked the sergeant.

  He, dislodged from his office and grudgingly back on the desk too, sniffed.

  ‘About bloody time too, if you ask me,’ he said bitterly.

  In sublime indifference, the usurper shut behind him the door of his annexed territory and said, in an unconscious echo of the man outside, ‘Well, it’s about time we got a break, isn’t it? All I ask is that it hasn’t come too late. It’s an evil night out there.’

  He stood in the centre of the little room, frowning his concentration, then gave his orders.

  ‘Dave. Get across to headquarters with these bags now. Take it as quickly as you can – siren if you must – but for God’s sake don’t kill anyone, even yourself. I’ll phone ahead and get a print man waiting for you. That probably won’t tell us much, since I’d be astonished if our friend here has form, but we can’t get down to analysing the thing until fingerprints have finished with it. And once they’ve finished, I want full photocopies faxed here asap. We must be in a position to act first thing in the morning.’

  ‘OK, guy.’ Smethurst took the plastic bags and left.

  ‘Robert, I want you to sit down now and dredge up all you can remember of what the diary said. Write it down. I’m just going through to see if anything’s come in from the patrols. And switch on the kettle, would you?’

  Leaving Moon sitting down at the desk and reaching for paper, he went through to the other small office which had been transformed into a primitive ops room. Two PCs and a woman sergeant were running it, manning hastily-installed radio equipment and telephone lines. One man was talking quietly into the speaker of his headset, but they all looked up when Vezey entered.