by Joan Smith
Sam’s reaction, in the event, was unalloyed delight. He instantly accelerated their house-moving plans, taking Bridget on an exhausting tour of seven or eight addresses in and around Oxford each Saturday and Sunday until they settled on Thebes Farm. Money did not seem to be a problem—Loretta was astonished when Bridget showed her the details of a large detached house with a swimming pool in Rawlinson Road—and they signed a contract without even a hint of a buyer for Bridget’s solid but unexceptional semi. It had now been standing empty for several weeks and looked like remaining that way until there was a dramatic improvement in the housing market.
It was nearly half past nine when Loretta emerged from the gym and ran lightly down the stairs into Park End Street. She felt and looked much better after a hot shower, her hair hanging in damp curls to her shoulders and the grubby jeans she had worn earlier replaced by flowered leggings and a big white shirt. In the deli two doors down she bought fresh white bread, unsalted butter, quince jelly and, as an afterthought, margarine and the least unappetizing brand of muesli she could find. Bridget had been fast asleep when she left—at any rate, there were no sounds of movement in her room when Loretta listened at the door just before eight—but would presumably have woken by now and discovered the complete absence of bread and other essentials. Loretta put her change in her purse, came out of the deli and turned right past the old jam factory, striding towards a busy intersection until she remembered that the newsagent’s shop was in the opposite direction, back towards the railway station. The Guardian, which she had leafed through before leaving Southmoor Road, had dealt with the discovery of a body in a couple of paragraphs under News in Brief but she doubted whether the tabloids would have shown similar restraint.
She retraced her steps and pushed open the door of the shop, reacting with instant and almost comic dismay to the giant black type of the front pages. “Party Dons in Dead Blonde Probe,” she read, and “Nude Blonde: Cops Quiz Partygoers.” Underneath the latter, in smaller letters, a sub had inserted the imaginative but inaccurate strapline “Something Nasty in Oxford Woodshed.” Loretta drew closer and saw several very similar photos of police vans parked outside Thebes Farm; one enterprising photographer, quicker than the rest, had snapped a picture of a furious Stephen Kaplan getting into his car, hands thrown up to shield his face like a film star pursued by paparazzi- Even the Daily Mail and the Daily Express had considered the story worthy of frontpage treatment, although it was not the lead item in either paper.
Loretta breathed out heavily, her involuntary “hah” attracting the attention of a middle-aged shop assistant who had previously been immersed in a copy of Hello! Oblivious to the woman’s mildly curious gaze, Loretta seized a copy of each tabloid, balancing them on her left arm as though to avoid both physical and moral contamination. She completed her collection with one broadsheet, recalling her ex-husband’s frequently expressed opinion that page three of the Daily Telegraph was to violent crime what page three of the Sun was to scantily clad women. By this time the pile of newsprint had become unwieldy and she had to ask for a carrier bag, stuffing the papers inside the flimsy plastic and almost running out of the shop in her haste to reach the privacy of her car in the Worcester Street car park.
The first thing that struck her as she speed-read one paper after another, propping them against the steering wheel, was the sheer inventiveness of the journalists assigned to the story. Their reports contained no new information, other than a line in the Daily Telegraph about the post-mortem being conducted that morning by a Home Office pathologist whose name Loretta vaguely recognized. The tabloids got round this problem, as the policewoman had predicted, by exploiting the Inspector Morse angle, breaking up the text with mugshots of John Thaw and Kevin Whateley, the actors who played Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis. One paper had even roped in its TV columnist to list the “eerie parallels” between the discovery of the body at Thebes Farm and a recent Morse episode about a corpse in the potting shed in the fellows’ garden of a mythical Oxford college.
Loretta found some of these flights of fancy quite amusing, but her expression darkened when she discovered a reference on an inside page to an eighteen-month-old row between Bridget and another don over course content in the English faculty. The latter, who was famous in Oxford for his scowl and his exclusively male student fan club, had turned a private disagreement into a public slanging match, accusing Bridget in a Sunday newspaper of attempting to impose political correctness on her colleagues. This caricature of Bridget’s view outraged her friends and alarmed the warden of her college, whose reactionary views meant that he and Bridget were unlikely to see eye to eye. Loretta was horrified to find the argument revived in print, certain that the article would upset Bridget far more than the wild speculation in other papers about how long the unknown woman in the barn had been dead, and the current market value of what one of them had thoughtfully dubbed “Death Farm.”
She collected the papers into an untidy pile on the passenger seat and fastened her safety belt, wondering how long the intense press interest was going to last. It only needed another big story to come along, a threat to “out” a soap-opera star or Princess Diana wearing the same dress two days running, and the reporters laying siege to Thebes Farm would leap into their cars and disappear. In the meantime, they would be riffling through their contacts books in a determined effort to find someone who knew Bridget’s temporary address. They might even have discovered it—Loretta pictured Bridget, half-asleep and her hair uncombed, hurrying downstairs to answer the front door and finding herself confronted with half a dozen snapping cameras and a crew from Central Television. They had managed to make Stephen Kaplan, who had no more than a walk-on part in the story, look like the First Murderer; Bridget in her nightie would probably come out of it like Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking scene. Regretting that she had left Bridget alone while she worked off the previous day’s stress at the gym, Loretta twisted the key in the ignition, reversed out of her parking space and drove hurriedly round to the exit.
In Southmoor Road she breathed a sigh of relief: the sole evidence of human activity was a traffic warden idling along the street in the brilliant sunshine, glancing at car windscreens to make sure their residents’ parking permits were in place. Loretta, who had renewed hers the previous week, nodded to the warden as she struggled out of her car with her bags and the newspapers, which seemed to have doubled in volume since she had bought them. A woman with a ponytail came out of a house on the other side of the road, wheeling a bike, and waved to Loretta, reinforcing the illusion that it was an ordinary Monday morning. Inside the house she dropped her leotard and plimsolls on the floor, dumped the shopping and the papers on the hall table and returned to collect a pint of milk from the doorstep. Suddenly she stiffened, her hand tightening on the neck of the bottle, as she became aware of voices from the floor below. One was Bridget’s, there was no difficulty about that; the other, a man’s, was unfamiliar. It did not sound like Sam—Loretta moved quietly towards the stairs, straining to hear, and confirmed her impression that the visitor did not have an American accent. A reporter? The conversation sounded amicable, desultory even, and Loretta found it hard to believe Bridget was having a cozy conversation with someone from the Sun or even one of the local papers. A puzzled look on her face, she seized the bag of shopping in her free hand and hurried downstairs.
“Linda Hall—no, you’ve already got her.” Bridget was slouched at the kitchen table, supporting her head with one hand while she drew invisible patterns on the pine surface with the index finger of the other. She sighed heavily as Loretta walked into the room and recited more names in an uncertain voice: “Brian Baker, Janet Dunne—Loretta!” Her face lit up. “I wondered when you’d get back. This is Detective Constable—” She gestured to a man with dark curly hair sitting opposite her. “Sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”
“DC Sidney.” He put down a ballpoint and got up. “Dr. Lawson?” He had a cocky grin which Loretta immediat
ely distrusted. “Nice place you’ve got here.” He extended his hand, forcing her to look for a place to discard her shopping.
“There wasn’t—I don’t remember seeing a police car.” His hand was damp and she drew hers away, glancing surreptitiously at her other wrist as she did so. Five past ten—they’d wasted no time.
“He’s CID, Loretta. He’s here to take my statement but I’m not much help . . . I mean, we got to the part where I started throwing up over the hydrangeas and that was it.” Bridget smiled weakly but she sounded tired and a little despondent. “I slept in,” she went on, plucking at the silk wrap she had borrowed the previous evening. “In fact, I was still asleep when, um, when the doorbell rang. We’re just trying to put together a list of everyone who RSVP’d in case they’ve missed anyone. Oh—” Her eyes, which had been flicking from Loretta to the detective and back again, came to rest on the bottle on the corner of the table. “You’ve got some milk. I was going to make coffee but there wasn’t any . . . Well, there was, but it’s gone off. You are hopeless, Loretta.” This attempt at affectionate banter simply underlined her nervousness, and Loretta decided to come to the rescue.
“Is this going to take much longer?” she asked curtly, wondering why Bridget had not insisted on getting dressed rather than allowing the interview to take place when she was at such an obvious disadvantage.
The detective, who had wandered over to the mantelpiece, picked up a china cat, one of a pair, and examined it as though he hadn’t heard her question. “This original?”
“It’s a copy. Look, I think it would be a good idea if Bridget goes and puts some clothes on while I make coffee.”
“No problem, is there, Dr. Lawson?” he asked, putting down the ornament and giving her a frank, open look. He returned to the table, picked up several sheets of paper covered in neat handwriting and counted the names Bridget had given him. “Thirty-eight—must be nearly there. I’ve got a couple more questions to ask Dr. Bennett—let’s see, I should be with you in ten minutes, Dr. Lawson.”
“Me?”
“He wants a statement from you as well, Loretta.”
She had forgotten. “Oh, all right,” she said grumpily. “In that case I might as well go upstairs and get on with some work. You can call me when you’ve finished.” Ignoring the policeman’s hopeful glance at the milk, she strode to the fridge and put it in the bottle compartment in the door. “I’ll be in my study,” she announced, and left the room.
She went upstairs, grumbling silently to herself, and turned into the long double drawing room whose back half she used as her study. The blind was drawn and the answering machine blinked at her from a dark corner, reminding her that she had not checked the machine since the previous evening. Perhaps the police, whose methods she had just been excoriating, had tried to get in touch and sent someone round only when they kept getting a taped message? She crossed the room, pressed the “message play” key and sat down at her desk, rolling her eyes upwards when she heard, interspersed with anxious inquiries from Bridget’s friends and colleagues, yet another message from Sam and one from Bridget’s mother. She had already counted eight messages for Bridget—none from the police—when, to her surprise, she recognized the voice of her former lover, Joe Lunderius.
“Loretta. You know where I am if you need me.” That was all, not even his name, and Loretta was thinking he was the last person she would turn to for help when the tape began to hiss and crackle.
“. . . a bit of a long shot,” said an unfamiliar voice through the interference, “but I’m trying to get in touch with Dr. Bridget Bennett.” He pronounced the three words with a bouncing rhythm, Doc-tor Brid-get Bennett. “I don’t know if you . . .” Loretta reached across to the machine, turned up the volume, but caught only the closing words: “. . . Denis Goodwin, Daily Mail” Her thoughts flew to Stephen Kaplan and she wondered if this was his way of squaring his conscience: providing her number without saying for certain that Bridget would be there. Or maybe this Goodwin person was being circumspect; John Tracey had always gone in for a lot of guff about protecting his sources.
The answering machine began to rewind and Loretta allowed it to finish before pressing a key to store the messages it had just played. Then she stood up and leaned over her computer to raise the blind, letting in a soft mid-morning light which gently illuminated the varnished wood of her desk. She moved her chair into a more comfortable position and switched on the laptop, waiting as it beeped and whirred through its opening procedures; outside, at the bottom of the garden, a narrow boat slid by with a wolflike black dog in the stern. The dog belonged, she was almost certain, to the potter who traveled up and down the canal with a gas-fired kiln on his boat; she had met him waiting to go through a lock the previous summer and bought one of his bowls. The computer fell silent and she keyed in the codes to call up the latest chapter of her book, adjusting the brightness of the screen and scrolling down through the blue letters to the point at which she had broken off on Friday afternoon.
“Emily’s radical vision simultaneously awed and terrified Charlotte,” she had written, “and this ambivalence manifested itself both in her repudiation of Heathcliff in the posthumous Preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and in the novel Shirley, which she wrote as a tribute to her dead sister. Shirley Keeldar, its eponymous heroine, is Emily as she might have been in more fortunate circumstances—rich and influential instead of poor and unknown. Yet the novel, for all its apparent celebration of Shirley/Emily’s androgynous power, nevertheless concludes with—”
It was unusual for Loretta to break off in mid-sentence but she had been interrupted at this point on Friday by a phone call from a former colleague who wanted her to speak at a weekend conference in Manchester in November. By the time she had turned him down with sufficient expressions of interest and regret to avoid hurting his feelings it was nearly six, barely time to get to the cinema in Magdalen Street for the early-evening screening of Thelma & Louise. She had simply saved what she had written, grabbed her bag and rushed out of the house.
“—a conventional happy ending,” she typed, picking up her train of thought, “whose effect is to obliterate the heroine; our last view of Shirley, mediated through the eyes of a minor character—”
The phone rang. Loretta let out a little gasp of annoyance and, with her eyes still on the screen, lifted the receiver to her ear.
“Mmm?”
“DC Sidney there?”
“Who?”
“DC Sidney.” He repeated it impatiently, as though she was being deliberately obtuse.
“Just a minute. Who’s speaking?”
“Thames Valley Police.”
“All of them?” He did not reply and Loretta placed the receiver crossly on her desk. She clattered down-stairs, making so much noise that Bridget and the detective looked up with startled expressions as she appeared in the doorway.
“Phone,” she said tersely, and Bridget pushed back her chair.
“No, it’s for—” She indicated the policeman.
“O-kay.” He got up and went to the kitchen extension, ignoring her obvious irritation. “DC Sidney—Oh, hello, Sarge.”
Loretta shot a wry glance at Bridget, who pulled a face in return, and went back upstairs. At the door of her study she heard a tinny sound coming from her desk and remembered that she had not replaced the receiver. She stretched out a hand towards it, frowned, and on impulse lifted it to her ear. Holding her breath, she heard the Sergeant’s voice: “. . . watch what you say till we know for certain, we don’t want to alarm her, not yet. Just make an excuse and get back here pronto. Phil, you there?”
“Yes, Sarge. I thought I heard—”
Loretta froze. Then, in slow motion, she lowered the receiver back onto its rest. A few seconds later she heard the double chirrup which told her that the policeman had finished his call, and leaned towards her computer screen in an attitude of deep, though bogus, concentration.
“Dr. Lawson?”
“Yes?” She didn’t have to fake a start as the detective appeared in the doorway.
“Something’s come up,” he said casually. “I’m off now.”
“Oh, right.”
“Thanks for the co—” He broke off, obviously recalling that both she and Bridget had offered to make coffee without actually doing so. “Don’t bother to see me out.”
“What about—” She was going to ask about her statement, but he was gone. Seconds later the front door slammed and she got up from her desk, hurried to the other end of the room and saw him getting into an unmarked red car parked in front of her Golf. The engine roared into life, then died as he thrust open the door, half got out and snatched a parking ticket from under one of the windscreen wipers. Loretta jumped back as he threw it contemptuously onto the passenger seat, but he was too intent on making a quick exit to look up and catch her watching him. The car pulled out, too fast for the narrow street, and Loretta shook her head. “Someone’s been watching too much Miami Vice” she murmured, making light of his abrupt departure and wishing she had not given in to her urge to pick up the phone; eavesdropping was as underhanded as going through a lover’s pockets, and the material you turned up as useless. She retraced her steps, trying without much success to focus her thoughts on the forces undermining the authenticity of female characters in fiction, and was for once rather relieved when the phone rang.
“So you’re really going to go?” Bridget demanded as she poured milk over the muesli Loretta had brought back from the deli.
“Yes—I told you.” Loretta, feeling her cheeks grow red, dipped her knife into the jar for more quince jelly.
“About time,” said Bridget, whose spirits had risen noticeably since the detective left. “You’ve spent far too much time moping after Joe Lunderius.”