by Joan Smith
Loretta and Bridget, who had both begun to protest, exchanged looks and fell silent. “I said some of my colleagues—the reason I’m here is that I’m prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt. You may not realize, indeed I have the impression your husband and friends”—she turned her head to include Loretta in this latter category—“are trying to protect you from involvement in what they seem to regard as . . . as some form of inconvenience. I understand their motives, and their concern for your health”—another glance at Loretta—“but I have to warn you you are being badly advised. Cooperation is what we expect from witnesses in a murder inquiry and we take a dim view of people who don’t respond to urgent messages.”
“He didn’t say it was urgent,” Loretta put in. “He said as soon as she got in—”
“Exactly. And when did she—what time did you arrive home—here—yesterday, Dr. Bennett?”
Bridget shrugged. “Half past four—five. Loretta doesn’t expect me to clock in and out.”
The Inspector pursed her lips. “So you got in at—let’s be generous and say five o’clock. Where were you all afternoon, by the way? We tried your college—”
“I had lunch at Browns,” Bridget said sullenly. “Sam and I—”
“Presumably that didn’t take the whole afternoon? Mr. Becker arrived back at Thebes Farm at just after three, I checked with one of my colleagues.”
“Yes, and I didn’t feel like coming back here alone . . . I knew Loretta was going to the dentist. So I walked up to the Ashmolean.”
“The Ashmolean?”
“Yes—why not? There’s a picture, Piero di Cosimo, The Forest Fire. I often go and look at it.”
The Inspector’s eyebrows shot up. “How long does it take you to look at one picture?”
“Not just one—there’s a Ghirlandaio head next to it, and they also have a Giotto. I mean, you don’t look at a picture once and think that’s it, you see it differently every time—”
Loretta interrupted, thinking Bridget was sounding unnecessarily snobbish: “Does it matter? I thought it was Sunday you were interested in, not yesterday afternoon.”
The Inspector let out a “tut” of impatience. “I’m coming to that. What I’m trying to establish at the moment is why Dr. Bennett, who admits coming back here around five, didn’t respond to our message. Sergeant Perrot rang again just after eight, which means she had a full three hours—”
“And something like fifteen messages waiting for me,” Bridget protested. “Where’s that piece of paper, Loretta? I had to ring my mum, my GP—I’m pregnant, you know. I’ve got an appointment at the John Radcliffe later this morning—”
“I’m aware of that.” The Inspector’s eyes flashed.
“Bridget—Dr. Bennett has high blood pressure,” Loretta said in a conciliatory tone. “She’s supposed to rest.” She turned to glare indignantly at the male detective, who had turned away with a snort. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“OK, let’s cool it. This is exactly what I didn’t want . . .” The Inspector lifted her hands in a calming gesture, palms down. She took a few steps towards the arch into the dining room, took a good look at the room and turned back. “All I’m trying to do is impress on Dr. Bennett the importance of giving us her full cooperation. If she’s willing—if you’ll give me your assurance that our calls will be dealt with promptly in future—”
“Yes, yes,” Bridget said impatiently, getting up. “You can skip the lecture, I’ve got to be at the hospital in forty minutes. Here’s your—I’ve done that thing you wanted.” She picked up two sheets of paper from the pine dresser and held them out.
The Inspector glanced at them and frowned. “This is—you moved in on Friday the nineteenth of July and this goes right up till Sunday?” She held the two flimsy sheets side by side. “‘Monday twenty-second of July,’” she went on, picking a day apparently at random. “‘Left house eight forty-five, arrived at college nine thirty approx, lunch with’”—she screwed up her eyes as though she was having difficulty with Bridget’s handwriting—“‘with Sally Fi-ser-ova at Pizza Express, college two thirty till five thirty, arrived home six-oh-five approx.’” She raised her head. “It’s not exactly comprehensive, is it?”
“I told your—I said I didn’t have my diary with me. Anyway, it tells you when the house was empty, which is what I thought you wanted to know.”
The Inspector glanced at the second sheet, then folded them briskly together. “All right,” she said, “as we haven’t got much time . . . Harvey.” The detective, who had been staring at a wall calendar with a picture of the cathedral in Siena, gave a start, then lifted a flat plastic wallet from his knees and placed it on the table. He unzipped three sides, slid out a sheet of paper and pushed it across the table towards Bridget.
“Oh, that,” she said offhandedly. “I’ve already seen it, it’s in the Guardian this morning.”
“And?” The Inspector waited.
“And what?”
“Do you recognize her? Have you ever seen this woman, or anyone like her?”
“Well—”
“Go on.”
“It’s hard to tell. It’s such a bad drawing.”
“I’m not asking you to review it, Dr. Bennett. All I want you to do is look at it carefully, artistic considerations aside, and tell me whether—”
The phone rang. Everyone glared at Loretta as though she was personally responsible for the interruption.
After a pause she crossed the room, intensely conscious of the three pairs of eyes following her, and picked it up. “Yes”—she turned to look at the Inspector—“yes, she’s here. It’s for you.” She held out the receiver.
“He’s sure?” the woman said after listening in silence for about a minute. A note of suppressed excitement had entered her voice, and she turned her back on them as she fired off a series of rapid questions. “They have? Say it again . . . I’m on my way. Where . . . No, where is he now?” She pulled back the sleeve of her raincoat and looked at her watch. “He should be there in what, twenty minutes? OK, I’ll be there in ten . . . No, it can wait till I get back.” She slammed the receiver down so hard it bounced from its cradle, slithered across the work surface and swung gently by its cord. “Harvey,” she snapped, stepping sideways with unconcealed impatience as Loretta bent to rescue the phone. “Sorry, Dr. Lawson, Dr. Bennett, something’s come up.” She moved towards the door.
“Not again” Bridget protested.
“I have apologized.” The policewoman looked back into the room, her hand on the doorframe. “Harvey.” Loretta almost felt sorry for the young DC, who was fumbling with the zip of his document case. He abandoned the attempt to close it, thrust it under his arm and hurried after his boss, ignoring Bridget’s reminder that he’d forgotten the drawing of the dead woman.
“Don’t worry, it looks like a photocopy.” Loretta put out her hand for the piece of paper as they disappeared upstairs.
“Doc-tor Law-son, Doc-tor Benn-ett. Do you think she was being sarcastic?”
“Mmm? No,” said Loretta, who thought she herself had started it on Sunday. She took the drawing and stared at the dead face, at the eyes expressionless as stones. She had read somewhere that Victorian detectives resorted to the supernatural, photographing the irises of murder victims in the hope that the killer’s image was somehow imprinted upon them; the occult had failed them, and Jack the Ripper was never caught. Presumably this corpse had decomposed beyond the point where it could be photographed and shown to the public, and there was nothing to be learned from the penciled eyes, not so much as a hint of the dead woman’s character. Loretta shuddered, allowing lurid images of putrefaction to rise in her mind for the first time since Sunday evening, and she realized that her slight but instinctive shrinking from the red-haired Inspector was due to an unfair association of the woman’s presence with the terrible, overpowering smell from Bridget’s garden. She wished she could view the drawing as calmly as her friend, who had pointed it o
ut to her on page two of the Guardian with the same expression of mild distaste she had shown for TV pictures of fighting between Serbs and Croats in Yugoslavia on the previous evening’s news.
“It’s a relief in a way,” Bridget said suddenly, moving away and searching for something in her bag. “Not recognizing her, that is. I didn’t expect to, of course, but—I suppose it’s just superstition,” she finished obscurely.
Loretta went on examining the long face and blank eyes, the straggling shoulder-length hair, and wondered if some unknown person was even now gazing at the same picture with a different emotion—horrified recognition. Before she could say anything, the doorbell once again uttered its despairing stutter.
“That’ll be my taxi. Sorry, Loretta, I must dash.” Bridget seized her jacket from the back of a chair and blew a kiss to Loretta. “If Sam rings, tell him I’ll be back about half twelve unless they’re running very late.”
A minute later Loretta heard her quick, light footsteps on the path, followed by the sound of a car door slamming. She switched on the radio, fiddled with the dial until she recognized a Mozart Mass and turned the volume up a little. Then she pulled out a chair to look at the Guardian, which Bridget had picked up in the hall on her way to the kitchen that morning. The latter, who’d been up first in nervous anticipation of the Inspector’s visit, thrust the paper towards her when Loretta came downstairs but gave her no chance to read it, launching almost immediately into the account of her late-night conversation with Donald Cromer which was still going on when the two detectives arrived.
“Hi, puss.” Loretta reached down as she felt Bertie brush against her calves; the frequent arrivals and departures since Sunday evening had unsettled him and she recognized the anxious rearing of his head as a demand for reassurance. She turned her attention back to the paper, which carried a short and factual report of the murder investigation by the paper’s crime correspondent. It was mainly about the post-mortem, which had produced the information that the victim was aged around nineteen and had been killed by a blow to the head with a blunt, heavy instrument. In spite of an intensive search—Loretta remembered all those policemen and women in blue overalls—the murder weapon had not been found, and detectives now believed the woman had been killed elsewhere and placed in the floor of the barn some time after her death. They refused to speculate on the interval between the murder and this event, and they were also being cagey on the question of rape or sexual assault.
“Bertie, please” The cat had jumped onto the table and slumped on his side on the newspaper, twitching his tail and obscuring the page Loretta was reading. She rolled him gently away, withdrawing her hand with a sharp intake of breath as he seized it and dug in his claws. “That’s enough.” She lifted him with both hands, restraining his stocky, squirming body with difficulty until she’d returned him to the floor. He scampered off in the direction of the cat flap, leaving her to reflect that there was nothing in the Guardian to explain the abrupt changes of plan in the police investigation, the aborted visits and demands for apparently irrelevant pieces of information. So what if Bridget chose to spend part of Monday afternoon staring at an early sixteenth-century painting? It seemed a harmless enough way to pass the time if you were pregnant, recovering from shock and reluctant to spend the afternoon alone. Loretta got up, stretched and yawned, shaking her head in an attempt to fight off the tiredness which was the result of two nights of restless, disturbed sleep. She remembered that she’d come downstairs without washing and went into the cramped downstairs bathroom, stripping off her T-shirt and splashing cold water on her face and neck to wake herself up. She dried herself vigorously with a towel, went over to the loo and began to unbutton her jeans, lifting her head wearily when she thought she heard the trilling of the phone. It sounded again, impersonal and intrusive against the Credo in unum Deum chorus filling the kitchen, and she hurried to answer its summons, naked to the waist and with her jeans gaping open.
“Loretta? Is this a bad moment? This is Janet—Janet Dunne.”
“Oh, Janet,” she said, relieved. “Hang on while I turn the radio down. That’s better. Sorry to sound offhand, there’ve been so many calls and we’ve had the police round already this morning.”
“You as well? Is Bridget there?”
“No, she’s gone to the antenatal clinic. What did they want, the police?”
“Oh, that’s what I wanted to talk to Bridget about. I may be overreacting but . . . When’ll she be back?”
“She said half past twelve. Did they—” She broke off, not knowing Janet well enough to press her.
“That would suit me very well. I’ve got to drop something off at Somerville later this morning and I gather you’re not far.”
“Ten minutes’ walk if you leave by the back entrance—I’ll be here all morning.”
“You’re sure I’m not interrupting?”
Loretta gave a short laugh. “I’ve abandoned hope of getting any work done this morning. Do you know where I am?”
She gave Janet instructions on getting to Southmoor Road, warned her about the faulty doorbell and hung up. In the bathroom she pulled her T-shirt over her head, tucked it into her jeans and tied her hair back with the elastic band she discovered in one of her pockets. Then she returned to the kitchen, pulled the Guardian towards her and reread the report of the murder. There was nothing, no significant detail she’d missed the first time, and she toyed with the idea of ringing John Tracey and asking him to use his contacts to find out what was going on behind the scenes. She was fairly sure he would know the Guardian’s crime correspondent, but she was reluctant to dial his number when they hadn’t spoken for so long. Anyway, he was probably out of the country, winning prizes somewhere in Eastern Europe; Loretta stepped back from the table, hugged her chest with her arms and stared out of the kitchen window at the blank basement wall, her stomach contracting as though it contained little cords of anxiety on which someone had just given a sharp tug.
“How long have I known Bridget, who her friends are, when did she meet Sam—that sort of thing.” Janet turned her head and glanced out of the window at a passing car, her dark hair a mass of springy curls against the white muslin curtains. She was a vivid, slightly disturbing presence in Loretta’s pale drawing room, her coral earrings swinging every time she moved, like animated reflections of the red splashes on her inky-blue dress.
“What did you say?”
“Mmm?” She turned back to Loretta. “Oh, that I didn’t mind going over Sunday afternoon again if it was really necessary, but I certainly wasn’t going to pass on gossip.”
“Gossip? What gossip?”
Janet looked slightly amused. “I didn’t mean—all I meant was Bridget and Sam’s marriage isn’t any of my business. Or theirs, more to the point. But I thought she ought to know the sort of thing they’re asking. You know what north Oxford’s like, if they talk to enough people they’re bound to come up with something.”
“Such as?”
Janet shrugged. “Bridget’s not exactly conventional. All it needs is a word or two, a hint about her lovers—”
“She’s never made any secret of that. Anyway, it’s all in the past.”
“Yes, but. . . These are the same people who think a few overexcited kids celebrating in the High Street are a threat to civilization as we know it. It wouldn’t take much to persuade them they’re dealing with the Whore of Babylon.”
“The—” Loretta stared at Janet, astonished. “Whose side are you on?”
Janet sighed. “It’s not a matter of sides. In some ways, Bridget’s never stopped living in the sixties—she’s exactly the kind of person to activate all their prejudices. I assume they’ve already got a file on her—wasn’t she arrested at some demonstration?”
“Only for obstruction. She sat in the road—they didn’t actually charge her. And she was fined for possession of cannabis, but that was years ago. Before I knew her.”
“There you are then.”
L
oretta gave a snort of contempt. “But that’s got nothing to do with . . . this business. They brought a picture round this morning and she didn’t even know the woman. So what if she’s had a few lovers?”
“Loretta, I’m just telling you the kind of questions they’re asking and trying to make an intelligent guess about how their minds work. From the way he talked about her, the man who came round this morning, I got the impression she’s already put their backs up. She should be careful, that’s all.”
“Oh, well,” Loretta said, relieved, “I know what that’s about. They left a message here yesterday and she didn’t ring back, though it was as much their fault as hers. She was far more worried about Donald Cromer.”
“Donald Cromer? Has he been on to her?”
Loretta pulled a face. “He certainly has. He’s more or less banned her from going into college till this is over.”
“You see, Loretta, that proves my point. Ever since Cromer became warden she’s had to tread very carefully, he’s nowhere near as easy-going as Jim Pollock.” The latter, an economist who had advised Harold Wilson in the sixties, had been lured to Harvard and replaced by Cromer, who was rumored to be a crony not only of Princess Margaret, whom he regularly invited to dinner, but of Mrs. Thatcher. “Donald’s obsessed with scandal, he expects the fellows to behave like Caesar’s wife. Do you remember that business at St. Mark’s—no, you weren’t in Oxford then.”