Trial by Fire

by Frances Fyfield

  Caution the man: advise him of his legal rights. Fetch Amanda to make notes, and start the tape. Let us continue after all these interruptions, please. We were doing so well before.

  `Mrs Blundell? I knew her because her daughter had been at my school. She asked me to give extra English lessons to Evelyn with a view to taking exams early, some such thing. I was skint as usual, so I agreed. Went on for a year. I started having an affair with Mrs Blundell. Why? I don't know why: I was lonely and bored, she was nine years older; it was flattering at first, me with the rich capitalist wifey. We went out for drinks last summer, lay on a blanket sometimes in Bluebell Wood, sometimes at my place. She liked my place, she said, shades of Bohemia.

  Liked poetry, mad about sex.

  Anyway, I had to cool it last spring. It was never that much fun, and then I met Christine, finished everything else. But it dragged on, you know, and she frightened me with all her intensity. Yes, we did meet at The Crown; her husband, you see, wouldn't be seen dead in there. Oh, God, what a thing to say, and yes, we were there the other night . . .'

  Then there was coughing and spluttering, pause for cigarette before continuing. Bailey noticed sadly the crushed packet of Gauloises taken from the top pocket damp with sweat, remembered Bowles's pathetic offering: two Gauloise stubs and a half-full packet apparently abandoned on one side of the clearing. He leaned across and lit the wavering end of a crooked cigarette for his prisoner, listened with his face straight inside the lines of his skin.

  `We walked from The Crown over the field and into the far side of the wood — been that way before, very overgrown. A little clearing, don't quite know where. She was frantic, terrible. She loved me, she said; I was her life. She loved me more than anyone or anything.

  What about your husband, your daughter? I kept saying, but she only screamed, "There's no one else but you, no one; neither of them care for me." But they do, I kept saying, of course they do. She would tell her husband all about us, then tell Christine all I had never told Christine. She and I would run away. It was madness, all of it. She was full of ideas, places, prospects, showing me money in her handbag, escape routes, all realistic, convincing plans to Yvonne, who'd never had to earn a crust, but not to me. I didn't want to say, "Don't be so bloody stupid; nobody escapes that easy even if I loved you back, which I bloody well don't, never really have. Just a bit of fun that has got out of hand. “I couldn't say, "I think you're a silly cow." I gave her a cigarette to calm her. She pulled on it twice, threw it away, didn't like them, really.

  Started all over again.

  Ì was sick, turned away a few steps, smoked my own. Christ, I thought, this is terrible, worse than I expected. I wanted to go home. Then she began to cry. I kept my back turned, hoping she'd stop, until I heard a series of movements, frantic movements. I couldn't believe it: she was tearing her clothes off. She always wore quality clothes — dull, smooth, expensive lines — and she was tearing them off as if they were poisonous, screaming between sobs. "You wanted me once; want me again. I'll show you how much you need me, more than that tart of yours."

  I dropped my cigarette, I remember, when she launched herself at me half naked, bare bosomed, skirt slipping down. She was trying to kiss me. I kept turning my face away, I don't know how many times, holding her off, disgusted. I felt I was fighting an amorous sow, and after a while she began to stop. She was quiet for a minute. Then she spat at me, as if she had suddenly understood. She let go of me, and I turned to face her. She was spitting fury, lashed out and raked her nails down my face, reaching for my eyes, taking me by surprise.

  It hurt like hell: I could feel blood on my face and I was very angry indeed. Can't quite remember what I did, but I know I hit her then, pulled back my arm, hit her with all my strength and sent her reeling to the ground, watched her lying there, weeping and moaning, exhausted by all that rage and hurt, while I kept feeling the blood on my face. Yes, I might have hit her with the stick; I can't remember. All right, then, with the stick, but only once.'

  Antony raised his eyes to the ceiling as if looking for inspiration in the fluorescent light, clearly embarrassed, but determined not to weaken his flow by voicing the apologies in his mind. There are elements of the actor in you, Bailey considered. Even now you half enjoy the telling of the story, you who so enjoy making others record their thoughts, maybe you are only pausing for effect. I can see you wooing this poor matron with all the power of poetry, unable to face her passion when she responded.

  'What happened next, Mr Sumner?' A soft reminder. Bailey believed they were either near the end of the story or closer than ever to falsehood.

  Ì just stood there. Then I knelt down beside her, patted her. I told her I was sorry, but she should have listened, should have listened before. We had never been real, she and I, and it had always had to end. Go home, I told her, go home now, but she simply stayed as she was, absolutely inert apart from the crying, determined to be helpless. I was confused, irritated, if you want the truth. I could have — No, no, I didn't mean that.'

  `Could have killed her, were you going to say?' said Bailey mildly.

  `No, no, I didn't mean that at all.' Antony was angry at so obvious a ploy, Bailey angrier for the interruption. He had known far longer than he could remember how empty a gesture of intent was the threat or even the desire to kill, how different from the doing, how frequently relieved in the mere screaming of it. He had shouted these threats himself as a child to his mother, and he remembered more clearly how, in the depths of love for his wife, he had wished her death years before.

  Then as now he had been incapable of causing it. He had never actually inflicted blows on any woman. Perhaps the intention was provoked into action by the first step towards it. 'Go on, Mr Sumner. I'm not trying to trap you. Go on.'

  Antony lit another cigarette, hands unsteadier than before.

  Ì didn't know what to do. She was so bloody stupid, so helpless, making it worse for herself. She was often like that, like a spoiled child who would scream and scream until she was sick to make someone listen, then say, "Pick me up. I can't do it; you do it." So I just began to walk away, hesitating at first, looking back. I thought it would make her move but it didn't. I saw her from the footpath, huddled there half bloody naked, couldn't bear to see it, and started to run through the bushes, away from the footpath, then back until I came to the carpark on the far side. I walked all the way back round to The Crown, collected my car.

  Went home.'

  `Leaving your walking stick, by any chance, Mr Sumner?'

  He looked up in guilty surprise. 'Yes, ' he replied, 'leaving my stick.'

  Bailey gestured. Amanda Scott left the room, returned with the cane. 'This stick, Mr Sumner?'

  Instantly recognizable object even wrapped in polythene and decorated with a large label for passage to a dim laboratory with all other blood-marked objects.

  `Yes,' he said slowly, regarding the stick as he would a friend who had been transformed into enemy.

  `That's enough for now, I think,' said Bailey. Amanda Scott shuffled her sheets of paper in obvious disapproval.

  `Try to sleep, Mr Sumner. I'm afraid you must stay here.' Despite the pleas of your indignant lawyer who has already postponed all this, shouted advice, which you chose to ignore, interrupted to the extent that I barred him. No doubt we shall hear more of that. Never mind. No doubt, either, that dear Amanda was pleased to tell me the lawyer was called by Miss Summerfield at the behest of Miss West, your er, wife, sir. Well, well, they are friends, after all, but surely Helen knows me well enough to understand that I know by heart all that the Police and Criminal Evidence Act requires of me, including the fact that a man must be offered a lawyer as soon as he's offered a caution, and of course I did it.

  He grinned ruefully. Helen would also know there are some invitations that he, as well as custody officers, tended to make less audibly to a helpful witness than to a defendant. The rules were more malleable for a witness. Yawning and stretching, Bailey real
ized he needed his bed. It was three a.m., and for once he knew that he and Helen would not talk either this morning or tomorrow: there would be no time once he had turned back here for ten o'clock.

  Tomorrow, if they had raised that dentist and put a name to the corpse, he would be going for Antony Sumner's jugular, lawyers or no lawyers. He would ask Sumner, however politely, about his knife. About his shoes and his silly walking stick with the elephant head festooned with human hair.

  Somewhere in all of that, he and Helen would have to make time. Time was a thief in the night, one he knew well.

  By Sunday afternoon, Christine Summerfield was only weeping from time to time, and had noticed through the disfiguring filter of tears how dirty were the windows in her house. She wondered if the panes of glass in Antony's cottage were as grubby as usual, no doubt hiding the large uniforms who were taking apart the contents, finding God knows what apart from her own underwear and several dirty dishes. He had preferred lately to stay under her roof, enjoying all the obvious home comforts he had never secured for himself.

  Christine contemplated telephoning Helen West, felt in her bones a spurt of loathing, which she recognized as unfair to both occupants of that household, and did not phone.

  Instead, she cleaned her windows. When Helen phoned her, the response was predictably swift, not actually rude, but not polite, either.

  Helen waited for Bailey to wake, both of them reassured by early morning affection.

  'Trust me, darling,' words accompanied by a swift hug before he took his long body out of bed.

  Ì do,' she had replied, smiling at him. 'I do, most of the time.'

  The sun was shining. Bario's pink and grey restaurant disgorged the last of the lunchtime trade into shiny cars parked on the green where mothers talked over prams and fathers pretended to teach cricket to sons, while the less endowed waited in vain for buses.

  One mile away, the carpark to Bluebell Wood was still closed by a tape, the fragile officialdom of which defied destruction, with PC Bowles thrilling the questioners with a brief account of the reason why. The body in the wood was gossip but subdued gossip, slightly irrelevant to any of them yet. Mr Blundell had not volunteered to others what he had volunteered to the police, or the gossip would have been sharper.

  Bailey had ensured that this particular husband was not left unaccompanied while he waited to see if he was a widower: a large constable remained in the Blundell kitchen, bored with reading newspapers, while upstairs, drunk and tranquillized, Mr Blundell slept audibly.

  Bailey should have organized a woman for the child, who was also upstairs. Evelyn Blundell had kept to her bedroom, as far as the constable knew, or she had declared her intention to do so before climbing nimbly from the window on to the outhouse roof, down to the ground, and away through a series of gardens and roads to the jungled garden of The Crown.

  Evelyn knew this secret route from her own house so well she could have managed it in her Sunday best, but today she wore T-shirt and jeans and, oddly enough, with such casual teenage attire, a pair of very bright, sparkling paste earrings.

  Even The Crown had attracted custom. Today's lunchtime fare had been vegetarian, Bernadette's new ploy to attract the discriminating Branston customer, Featherstones' best with an Irish flavour. The fact that most of the food remained uneaten in relation to the amount ordered only reflected the Featherstones' deafness to complaints. 'Aren't they all fools?' snorted Bernadette, dumping slabs of her grey bannock bread into a plastic sack. 'Don't know a good thing when they eat it.'

  For once, she and Harold were in accord, a temporary but regular Sunday afternoon peace, especially in summer, when Harold was mellowed by whisky and custom, content to sit in the kitchen discussing plans, believing in the success of their joint venture until his head began to throb and the worse temper resumed. Evening customers received short shrift in The Crown, but for now, all was sweetness and light.

  Àren't they all fools, then? You're right,' he was replying, pinching Bernadette's behind as she passed him, dropping litter on her way to the bin and ignoring it. 'But we'll show them, Bernie, won't we? I've another idea. Now we've got the place in shape, did you see all the people in here today? They're cottoning on at last. I'll set on the garden.

  Somewhere else for the buggers to go. Might even go back and do something about that garden bar. The summerhouse, I mean. Few enough places with this much ground around, you know.'

  Bernadette nodded vigorously but silently, content to keep the peace. Silence was always preferable on the subject of the summerhouse. Like Harold, she was aware that the most recent revamping of The Crown's bar had eaten up another segment of the inheritance misguidedly left Harold by a doting father, the same inheritance depleted year by year since they acquired the premises with the first chunk of it, abandoning their London jobs in the process, because of William, because of wanting a better life, because of all sorts of things they could not discuss, even now.

  Again like Harold, she was unaware that the same new decor — floral walls, heavy unmatched chintz curtains, checkerboard carpet, red upholstered seats with varied cushions —

  was a savage onslaught on the eye, almost psychologically disturbing to anyone who sat in it long enough. Helen and Bailey had counted sixteen different patterns in that room and wondered, with enormous, frankly snobbish amusement, how much expense had gone into the creation of such ghastly disharmony.

  Along with Harold, Bernadette thought it was beautiful, enough of the gypsy in her to adore dizzying colour, but when it came to Harold's other plans, she was less enthusiastic.

  There had been so many, after all. Upstairs there were two unfinished bedrooms, one half-done bathroom, the same state persisting for years while other projects began and ended and the paint peeled on the banisters. The garage next to the kitchen was full of junk that Harold collected from all over Essex: woodworking table of huge dimensions, rusty machinery, old telephone cable, three-legged chairs, bundle of mildewed towels, fire-damaged sheets, chipped crockery, a trough.

  Anything going free or almost free Harold, scavenger of the world, would have. It was a curious and useless economy in one so reckless with large sums and domestic provisions.

  These objects never surfaced again, once acquired and put away. If only he could bear to buy something new and use it. 'You're always wanting something for nothing,' Bernadette had yelled, rarely careful enough to avoid trampling on his dreams, but the mention of the summerhouse kept her quiet on a sunny afternoon that deserved a share of short-lived quietude.

  Quite simply, he had gone demented over the summerhouse plan; it was even worse than all Harold's other fancies. How long ago was it? Eight years since he had started digging like a child searching for Australia, convinced it was only six feet away. 'This is it, Bernadette. We'll double the trade by putting a bar in the garden. No one else has one of those,' and even then she could see it was cockeyed, the way his plans were in direct proportion to the enthusiasm with which he attacked them. Harold's plans were born drunk like the man himself: they had no place in a sober mind.

  The idea had been to buy a kind of prefabricated pavilion. 'Makes them think of cricket, don't you see? We'll have them playing bowls.' Even Bernadette could see the impossibility of playing bowls downhill. The pavilion was to be placed over a hole. 'We'll do this properly, Bernie darling: a bar has to have a cellar for the beer and the fine wines. The stuff the new rich in Branston and all over will be flocking for.' So, with a little help, Harold had dug the cellar, faced it in brick, then purchased from a brochure at enormous expense a funny-looking structure twenty feet long and ten feet wide to surround the aperture, and constructed inside it a kind of a bar.

  That was the trouble with Harold: he could do so much, was so clever with his hands and his brain, contemptuous of those with less, but he had a strange inability to complete any project, always discouraged by the failure of reality to correspond with the picture in his mind. There was the same trouble with the summ
erhouse bar: it had a squiffy character similar to that of Harold's mind, the mind of a man drinking out of a crooked brandy glass, wondering was it he or was it the glass who could not manage a straight line anywhere.

  The finished product had a cellar the size of a small room, far grander than the structure upstairs, which looked more like an old-fashioned bus shelter than the thing of elegance first intended. The whole beast was odd. 'Cheap' and 'nasty' were other words that came to mind, but 'odd' always came first.

  Harold could not hide his disappointment, nor could the customers who were privy to its progress hide their derision. Bernadette would always remember that she had not concealed hers. The summerhouse was comic, a silly little structure of ugly wood looking like a pimple at the end of the half-acre of wild lawn, a sort of but with windows listing slightly downhill. 'They'll think they've had a drink already as soon as they look at it,'

  Bernadette had yelled, and William, poor twelve-year-old William, who thought the summerhouse the nearest thing to paradise, had screamed and screamed in fury and rage.

  Harold, too, had translated the rage of frustration into action by dealing Bernadette a sharp backhander she had never forgotten, while William shrieked in the worst tantrum ever, kicked his mother, and began a course of conduct that became depressingly consistent and frightening. It was not the first of William's spectacular furies, only the most violent. After all of that, the summerhouse was scarcely mentioned, source of mutual shame and failure that it was.

  Bernadette hated it, never went near it; Harold, the same, reluctant to examine its obvious decay. He could not resist in the early days storing things there, the way he reacted to any available space in order to justify its existence. The bus shelter bar contained kerosene against power cuts — they had no heaters in which to utilize it, but the stuff had been cheap and Harold remembered rationing — a couple of old beds he could not bring himself to discard, and a broken chair or three, all rotting in there, like the fabric of the thing, sloping under the force of gravity, about to disappear in a cloud of guiltless smoke.