by Joan Smith
Audrey stood up. “What is there to talk about? It’s probably some ghastly domestic business, like Pauline White.” She looked grim as she took her car keys out of her bag. Loretta remembered the event she was referring to, although she had not known Audrey at the time. Bridget had told her the full story: one of Audrey’s patients, a single mother in her early twenties, had begun turning up at the surgery with fading bruises on her neck and throat and the occasional black eye. Audrey’s attempts to question her produced predictable excuses about bumping into doors and tripping over toys until, one February night, Pauline White’s body was found on wasteland behind her home. Her boyfriend, picked up by the police a few days later in Nottingham, admitted strangling her because he thought she was seeing another man. The case became something of a cause célèbre in Oxford when a smart barrister, putting up a defense of provocation, got the killer off with a six-year sentence for manslaughter.
“Go to bed,” Audrey added, zipping up her bag and swinging it onto her shoulder. “Loretta, can’t you find her a good book? You seem to have plenty.” She glanced over her shoulder at the dresser, where a couple of hardback novels and several paperbacks sat in untidy piles. “Something nice and relaxing,” she said, picking up a biography and studying the blurb on the back. “She’s had enough shocks for one day.”
“I’m hardly going to offer her The Silence of the Lambs,” Loretta said tartly.
“But Audrey.” Bridget ignored the interruption. “You can’t just—you actually saw the body. You talked to the police. So did you, Loretta. They must’ve said something about . . . well, they must’ve said something.”
Loretta began to explain, rather feebly she thought, that the red-haired Inspector had said very little about the murder—that they had discussed boating, and pubs on the canal.
Bridget dismissed her account of the interview with an angry wave of the hand: “You see—still trying to protect me. Pas devant les”—she struggled for the right word—“les enceintes. I’m pregnant, Loretta, not simple-minded.” She turned back to Audrey, who had opened the book and was examining the photographs in the middle. “This woman, no one’s said—I don’t even know whether she was young or old.”
“Mmm?” Audrey lifted her head and her expression darkened. “Bridget, you don’t seem to realize, a two-week-old corpse—”
“Two weeks? That’s how long she’s been dead?”
Audrey closed the book with a snap. “I’m a GP,” she said irritably, “not a pathologist. Most of the bodies I deal with are live ones, thank God. I’m only guessing.”
“But you said—”
Audrey rolled her eyes upwards. “It was a sort of shorthand. I was hoping to spare you the details. I only had a brief look myself, the smell was so appalling.” She hesitated, then began speaking rapidly in medical jargon. “If you must know, I did observe not only postmortem hypostasis but a pronounced degree of marbling—”
“Audrey, I’m not a doctor,” Bridget protested. “Not of medicine, anyway.”
Audrey gave her a look as if to say “you asked for this” and launched into a grisly account of the features of decomposition: “Post-mortem hypostasis is a condition caused by uncirculated blood draining down to the lowest part of the body. It floods the blood vessels, causing dark blotches which are sometimes mistaken, by the untrained eye, for bruises. It’s not uncommon for someone to ring the police and say they’ve found a badly beaten body when in fact it’s just post-mortem hypostasis and the person has actually died of natural causes.”
“But she didn’t, did she? Die of natural causes.”
Audrey said: “Not unless she took all her clothes off and beat herself about the head. I couldn’t see any obvious lacerations on the trunk but naturally I didn’t move her. The post-mortem will show whether she’d been sexually assaulted—if there’s semen present in the vagina it may be possible to use genetic fingerprinting—”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Loretta got up and began collecting their dirty plates. “Can’t we just drop it? I’m going to have nightmares if I hear much more of this.”
Bridget ignored her. “Was she—could you tell if she was killed there? In our barn?”
“That’s for the pathologist to establish. He’ll examine the body for leaves, grass, insects—anything that doesn’t seem to match the place where she was found. Of course, she may have been dragged some distance, or brought there by car . . . That seems most likely.”
“It is isolated and we’re both at work most days. Even so—”
Audrey tutted. “Leave it to the police. For all we know it may turn out to have been a courting couple looking for somewhere to—”
“A courting couple?” Loretta, who had been listening reluctantly as she loaded the dishwasher, turned to Audrey in disbelief. “What sort of courting leads to . . . to that?” She imagined the dead woman, stripped of clothes and dignity, dumped in a corner of the barn; her killer, a shadowy male figure, sidling round the door with a bundle of blood-stained garments in his arms . . .
“How did he get in there in the first place?” she asked suddenly, the melodramatic imaginary scene giving way to the real memory of Sam struggling with a heavy padlock.
“We only locked it for the party,” Bridget said offhandedly.
“And you didn’t—you didn’t look inside?”
Bridget looked apologetic. “What for? It’s Sam who’s keen on those old ploughs and harrows or whatever they are. I’d bin them tomorrow.” She pulled a face. “Lucky escape, huh?”
“Not really,” said Audrey, “you wouldn’t have seen anything anyway. There’s a hole in the floor, about six feet by three—” She returned the book to the dresser and sketched a rectangle in the air with her hands.
“The sheep bath?” Bridget looked surprised. “You mean she was in the sheep bath?”
“I assumed it had some agricultural purpose. There were a couple of old doors on top of it, and one of those—a rusty thing with spikes. That’s why you didn’t smell anything, not till those boys pushed them aside.” She reached up and adjusted the velvet band which held her long fair hair off her forehead. “I really must go. Monday mornings are always the worst, the surgery’s full to bursting . . . When’s your next appointment at the John Radcliffe?”
“My—” Bridget looked blank for a moment. “Oh—Tuesday. Tuesday morning.”
“Let me know how it goes.” Audrey came round the table and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Ring if you’re at all worried. Goodnight, Loretta—don’t come up, I’ll see myself out.”
“Want any help with clearing up?” Bridget yawned and stretched as the sound of Audrey’s feet receded up the stairs.
“No, leave it. Most of it can go in the dishwasher.”
“If you’re sure.”
“Would you like a book? The new Anita Brookner’s over there.”
“Not tonight, thanks. That glass of wine’s made me sleepy again. Night, Loretta.”
They hugged each other, the first physical contact they had had for several weeks, and Loretta was surprised by the familiar angularity of her friend’s body. Bridget had always been thin, a slender size 10, and she had not put on much weight during her pregnancy—except, of course, in the obvious place. “Sleep well,” murmured Loretta, releasing her.
She tidied the kitchen, her own weariness manifesting itself in heavy limbs and a lack of concentration which allowed a glass to slip from her hand onto the black-and-white tiles, where it split into several large fragments. She collected up the jagged pieces, holding each one carefully between her thumb and forefinger, and was looking for something to wrap them in when the phone rang. She picked it up without thinking and was immediately startled out of her zombielike state by the faint, unearthly echo of a satellite link.
“Loretta? Is that you?”
“Who is this?”
“Geoffrey—Geoffrey Simmons.”
“Geoffrey? Where are you calling from?”
“San Francis
co. Didn’t Bridget tell you I was over here for the summer?”
“Yes—yes, of course.” Geoffrey Simmons was a historian, an old flame of Bridget’s whom she had unsuccessfully tried to pass on to Loretta. She kept Loretta abreast of his career in a slightly reproachful way, as if to remind her of what she was missing; Loretta now recalled that he was engaged in a research project at Berkeley, collaborating with an American who had written a controversial book on the history of madness.
“Is it true they’ve found a stiff in Bridget’s garden?”
“What?”
“IS IT TRUE—”
“I heard you the first time.” Loretta held the phone away from her, protecting herself from Geoffrey’s booming voice; she did not know whether she was more astonished by his flippancy or the speed with which he had been informed of events half a world away. The north Oxford grapevine was justly famous, a highly efficient conduit of gossip about academic feuds and amorous liaisons, but she had no idea it extended across continents. “How did you find out?”
“News travels fast,” Geoffrey said evasively. “Is she there? I finally got through to what’s his name, her husband, his phone’s been engaged for hours, and he said to ring you.”
“She’s just gone to bed.”
“Get her to give us a ring tomorrow, all right? You got a bit of paper?”
“No—yes.” Loretta found the envelope on which she’d written Bridget’s other messages and took down Geoffrey’s home and work numbers in case Bridget did not have them with her.
“What a downer, eh?” he said abruptly, switching tack. “How’s she taking it?”
“How would you feel if someone discovered a body at your house-warming party?”
“Well, it would depend—”
“Depend? What would it depend on?”
“Whether I knew her, for one thing. The corpse, that is.”
“Well, she doesn’t,” Loretta said flatly, then remembered that Bridget had not actually seen the dead woman. “At least—the thing is, Geoffrey, she’d been there a couple of weeks and—”
“All right, no need to go into details,” Geoffrey said hurriedly, displaying uncharacteristic squeamishness. His voice faded, was lost in the ether for several seconds, then returned at a volume which blasted her eardrum: “. . . went into City Lights last week and they had the paperback of your book by the till. They’re nuts on all that feminist lit-crit stuff over here—you should try and wangle a trip. You won’t believe this,” he chortled, “but they’ve actually got a radio program called ‘Women Hold Up Half the Sky.’”
“Don’t they?”
“Don’t they what?”
“Hold up half the sky.”
“Come on, Loretta.”
She smiled to herself. “I’m going to bed, Geoffrey. I’m sure Bridget’11 be touched by your concern.” The sarcasm was wasted on him, she thought as she put the phone down, but it made her feel better.
Upstairs a lavatory flushed and a moment later Loretta heard the bathroom door open and close quietly. At the far end of the dining room the cat flap rattled angrily, reminding her she had shut the cat out of the house several hours before at Audrey’s insistence. Audrey had stiffened at the sight of Bertie and announced she was violently allergic even to short-haired cats, leaving Loretta no choice but to banish him to the garden for the evening.
“All right, Bertie, I’m coming.” She went through the arch between the two rooms and bent to release the catch on the Perspex flap, standing back as the animal’s sleek head and shoulders pushed through the gap. He had a habit of twisting his head at this point, watching anxiously as the descending flap scraped the length of his wide gray tail.
“Are you hungry? I bet you’re hungry.” She bent to stroke him and he rubbed against her calves, letting out deep rumbles of appreciation. Loretta returned to the kitchen, the cat trotting expectantly behind her, and removed an open tin of Felix from the fridge. Recoiling from the smell, she scraped chunks of meat and jelly into his dish, dropped the empty can into the bin and put the food on the floor, where he began to eat greedily. She found a day-old newspaper and wrapped up the shards of glass, poured liquid detergent into the soap compartment of the dishwasher and turned the dial to a long, noisy program she used only at night.
“Coming?” she said to the cat, who had emptied his dish and retired to a chair to clean his muzzle. He paused at the sound of her voice and went into a crouch, watching her with unblinking yellow eyes as she went to the door to the stairs.
“Please yourself,” she said, reaching for the light switch.
The cat wailed, jumped down from the chair and shot past her, making as much noise as possible with his unsheathed claws on the stair carpet. Loretta smiled, turned out the light and followed him up to bed.
3
“Lift, Lift. You’re Not Waving Goodbye To Your mum, you know.” The dark-haired instructor loomed menacingly over Loretta as she lay on her back in a corner of the weights room. The woman—Karen, Kirsty, some name like that—was dressed from neck to ankle in a shiny red bodysuit which would have shown even a centimeter of excess fat, had there been one to see. She extended an imperious right hand. “Where’s your card?”
The three-pound weights Loretta had been clutching in her fists hit the floor with a clang. “Sorry,” she said, sitting up and feeling for her attendance card inside the elasticized neckline of her leotard. She had often wondered why it was impossible to buy a leotard with pockets, an oversight she mentioned as she drew out the wrinkled cardboard rectangle and passed it up.
Karen or Kirsty ignored her. “Oh, well, you haven’t been for two, no, three weeks.” She sounded scandalized. “I’d better come round with you, see what else you’re doing wrong.”
The next half-hour took Loretta back to her school-days, to Wednesday afternoons in the gym with Miss Poulson, except that Gillingham Grammar had been equipped with a vaulting horse and climbing bars rather than the latest hi-tech exercise machines. She felt her-self regressing emotionally to adolescence, building up a stock of silent resentment as Karen urged her to work harder on her upper thighs or put more effort into her press-ups.
“Twenty-six, twenty-seven—come on, nearly there.”
Loretta ignored the exhortation and sank to the floor. Karen’s voice was higher and had a less refined accent than Miss Poulson’s but it had the same fanatic edge; Loretta rested her cheek gratefully on the soft surface of an exercise mat and inhaled the familiar combination of dust, sweat and foam rubber, trying to summon up a more detailed picture of her old teacher than the middle-aged woman with corrugated hair and a blue Aertex shirt who came to mind. Miss Poulson remained, however, a shadowy figure. Loretta opened her eyes and consoled herself that the gym was almost empty, which meant there were few witnesses to Karen’s ruthless exposure of her innate physical laziness.
“Well done” Karen beamed as Loretta braced her arms and heaved her torso off the ground three times in rapid succession. “You ought to try Jane’s flex’n’stretch class, it starts in twenty minutes, you’re much too tense.”
Loretta rolled over, dragged herself into a sitting position and examined an abrasion on her right shin, the result of her foot slipping on the rowing machine. “No thanks,” she said, picking off frayed skin round the edges of the bruise, “I haven’t got time this morning—ouch.” She scrambled to her feet and went to the door of the weights room, Karen pursuing her with a stream of unwanted advice.
“You don’t want to waste all that effort, you know. You’ve got to build it up, it’s no good coming every other week—”
“I know. Thanks.” Loretta cut the lecture short and closed the door quietly but firmly in Karen’s face. She came to the gym once or twice a month, usually when she was feeling particularly tired or stressed, and she had no time for the familiar spiel about the benefits of regular exercise. She had joined the previous November, seduced by an advert in the Oxford Times offering a free trial class, but she had quickly
recognized that her fantasy of thrice-weekly workouts and a body like Madonna was exactly that—a fantasy.
Bridget, who astonished Loretta by volunteering to join with her, had lost interest much sooner. Exercise was boring, she announced after a month in which she had tried just about every class on offer from beginners’ aerobics to jazz dance and the ungrammatical flex’n’stretch. Then she met Sam Becker at an early Christmas party and abandoned the gym altogether, telling Loretta with a demure smile that she needed all her energy for the best sex she’d ever had. Loretta returned from a dreary New Year’s Eve party at her sister’s house in Weybridge to find Bridget in even greater raptures over Sam, their amazing love life and the wonderful time they had spent together over Christmas. Going to the gym seemed tame by comparison, but Loretta suddenly had time on her hands; Bridget hardly seemed to notice that she had cancelled several long-standing engagements, or that their weekly trips to the cinema had been replaced by a perfunctory phone call.
Suddenly in February, her affair with Sam seemed to be over. She turned up in Southmoor Road wearing dark glasses and sniffling into a crumpled handkerchief, saying the break had taken place a week before and she still could not bear to talk about it. Instead she plunged into a hectic round of activity, accepting every party invitation that came along, signing up for French conversation classes at the Alliance Française in Polstead Road and begging Loretta to accompany her to a new dance class at the gym. Then, abruptly as he’d disappeared, Sam came back on the scene. Loretta could hardly believe her ears when, three or four weeks later, Bridget bought her dinner at Browns and announced that Sam had asked her to marry him; this revelation was soon followed by another, a telephone call in which Bridget gasped that she had just done a home pregnancy test and the result was positive. Unable to gauge from Bridget’s voice whether this was good news or bad, Loretta asked noncommittal questions which elicited that Bridget did not seem to know. She and Sam had talked about having a child, but nothing like as quickly; she had no idea how she was going to cope with getting married, moving house, editing a new edition of Clarissa and having a baby . . . She hadn’t even told him yet, she added—had rung Loretta first to get her own thoughts in order before she broke the news.