by Joan Smith
Tracey shook his head. “It’s the one-way system, I’ve gone past the ice rink so many times I’ve got it on the brain.”
Loretta took three mugs out of the dishwasher and Bridget said: “How come you were able to get all the details of these attacks so fast? If you’re saying nobody knew they were connected . . .”
Tracey looked up from studying his notebook. “That’s one of the advantages of the new computer system. All you have to do is put in a name or a word and it prints out every reference . . . I rang from the coroner’s court and got them to do a search for anything mentioning the A34—excluding roadworks, of course.” He tapped his notebook. “And here it all is. Thanks, Loretta.” He took the mug of milky coffee she was holding out to him, sipped from it and put it down beside him on the worktop. “I’ve got to go, they’re faxing that stuff over to the hotel and I don’t want to clog up your phone.” He leaned towards Loretta, kissed her cheek and waved to Bridget. “Don’t bother to come up. Talk to you later.”
Loretta sat down with her coffee, staring after him. “I’d forgotten what it’s like, journalism,” she said, and turned at a slight movement from Bridget. Her head was cocked, listening, and when the front door slammed she let out a heartfelt sigh of relief. “God, Loretta,” she said, slumping forward over the table, “I can’t tell you what a relief . . . I never thought,” she said, raising her head slightly, “I never thought there’d come a day when I was glad to hear there’s a rapist on the loose but after yesterday . . . I was half expecting to walk into the courtroom and they’d arrest me.” She laughed loudly and almost hysterically. “I’ve never been so frightened. I had to hang on to Sam or my legs would’ve given way.”
“Does he know? Not again,” she exclaimed as the phone sounded, thinking the interruption could not have come at a more inopportune moment. The female caller asked for Bridget and identified herself as the estate agent who had phoned yesterday. “For you,” said Loretta, handing the phone over.
“You have?” Bridget said, her face lighting up. “How much?” Her manner became businesslike, and Loretta could see from her expression that she was doing a series of mental calculations. “Well, it’s a lot less than I’d hoped. I know, but the mortgage . . . You don’t think he’ll go up five thousand? Oh, I see, a cash buyer. Can I think about this? I’ll have to talk to my husband, anyway, and my solicitor. No, that’s fine, give me half an hour and I’ll call you back.” She put the phone down and turned apologetically to Loretta. “Some chap called Professor Lai has made an offer on the house, it’s a bit low but he’s a cash buyer and he wants an answer by the end of this afternoon. Sorry.”
Loretta sighed. “I’ll be upstairs,” she said, picking up her coffee as Bridget began dialing another number.
“Loretta—”
She paused by the door but Bridget shook her head helplessly and spoke into the phone. Loretta shrugged, went back for the Guardian and carried it and her coffee up to the ground floor.
Loretta pushed open the door to the ladies’ lavatory at the back of the restaurant and glanced furtively to her left. The open doors of the cubicles confirmed she had the place to herself and she went to a washbasin, balanced her evening bag on the edge and examined her reflection in the mirror. She had drunk two glasses of wine at the theater, one before the performance started and another during the interval, and the alcohol had brought a slight flush to her cheeks. Her hair, tied back with a black ribbon, had worked loose and hung in spiral curls, softening the outline of her face. Her lipstick had all but disappeared and she hastily rubbed off the last traces, reaching in her bag for the gold tube and reapplying it with hesitant strokes. The color was new, a deeper red than she usually wore, and the face which looked out of the mirror seemed for an instant to belong to someone else, someone sexier and more self-assured than she had felt for several months.
Loretta tilted her head, getting used to this new version of herself. She would be thirty-eight in three days’ time, a fact her mother had pointed out in a frosty phone call just before Loretta left the house to meet Christopher Cisar. She took a step back from the mirror, thinking that her face, if she didn’t look too closely at the fine lines below her eyes, could easily be that of a much younger woman. Even her crushed silk dress, which had felt ridiculously out of place in the crowded foyer of the Apollo Theatre, looked soft and seductive now she was no longer surrounded by posters announcing forthcoming appearances by Bobby Davro and the Chippendales.
The door from the restaurant to the lavatories slid open and Loretta hurried into one of the cubicles, not wanting to be caught posing narcissistically in front of the mirrors. When she emerged, a woman with long dark hair was leaning over one of the washbasins in an attitude of concentration, retouching her lips as Loretta had a moment before. Their eyes met in the mirror and they both laughed spontaneously, sharing a silent joke about a ritual first encountered at school discos.
“You’d think it’d be easy after all these years,” the woman said, blotting her lips on a tissue.
Loretta rinsed her hands at the other washbasin. “It seems rather frivolous but I wish I could get the hang of a lip pencil.” The dark woman grinned and slid open the door to the restaurant, leaving Loretta to dry her hands.
Christopher Cisar gave her a puzzled look as she slid back into her chair. “You meet a friend back there? You were gone so long I almost sent a waitress after you.”
Loretta smiled apologetically. “How’s the wine?” she asked, still relieved by her discovery that he was not the teetotal health freak she had originally taken him for.
“Fine.” Christopher still looked slightly suspicious. “You sure you’re OK?”
“Mmm.” Loretta tasted the wine, a Californian white which had arrived while she was away from the table.
“In that case”—Christopher leaned back in his chair—“why don’t you tell me what got you so steamed up at the opera?”
Loretta lifted her head. “What?”
“You were fine till somewhere near the end, then you began shifting around in your seat.”
“Did I?”
“M-hmm.”
“Well, it did get rather silly. When Zerbin—Zerbinella—”
“Zerbinetta.”
“Yes, when Zerbinetta started handing out advice to Ariadne. I mean, my German’s not that good but I got the gist. We’re such helpless little creatures, as soon as the next man comes along we throw ourselves into his arms, we just can’t help it . . . The librettist, what’s his name?”
“Hugo von Hoffmannsthal.”
“Yeah, well, maybe it’s something about the Germans—like Wedekind and Lulu. When he has her say her ideal lover is a sexual maniac or words to that effect. It’s exactly what I’m writing about at the moment, the way writers produce all these banal theories about female sexuality and put them in women’s mouths.”
He grinned. “I get the point. So what do you think Ariadne ought to do? When she wakes up and discovers Theseus has dumped her in the night?”
“Ariadne? There’s not much she can do, is there, stuck in a legend? All I’m saying is, there’s no need to overdo it.”
“Isn’t that kind of defeatist? I guess she and Zerbinetta could set up some kind of cooperative—grow vegetables or something till the coastguard happens along.”
“Of course,” said Loretta, thinking aloud, “she is pregnant, which is a slightly limiting factor.”
“Who is?”
“Ariadne. Doesn’t anyone mention it in the opera? Maybe they don’t.”
“Not as I recall.”
“Interesting. Because the point is that not only has she betrayed her father, helping Theseus to kill the Minotaur and get out of the maze, she’s actually pregnant by him—”
Loretta felt a light touch on her left arm and turned to see a thin-lipped, nervous woman smiling at her. “Harriet!” she exclaimed without enthusiasm. “Where are you sitting? I didn’t see you.” She peered over her shoulder, looking for H
arriet’s husband, and saw him wave at her from a table in the far corner.
Harriet’s eyes darted to Christopher and back to Loretta. “I tried to catch you when you went to the loo but you were miles away. How is Bridget? We only got back from France last night and I haven’t had a chance to ring.”
“Quite well, in the circumstances. They’re keeping an eye on her blood pressure, it’s higher than it should be, but mentally she’s . . . pretty well.” Loretta thought, but did not say, that delirious was a more apt description; the unexpected sale of her house, coming immediately after she had been let off the hook by the bizarre new development in the murder investigation, had sent Bridget into a state bordering on euphoria. She had insisted on giving Loretta a lift to George Street, talking all the way about her plans for the next few weeks and stopping the car to give her a big hug when they got to the Apollo Theatre.
“Do you know Christopher Cisar?” Loretta asked, remembering her manners. “Christopher—Harriet Hunt. Harriet’s a friend of Bridget, in fact I don’t think we’ve met since—”
“Since she moved from Woodstock Road,” Harriet confirmed. “You know she actually invited us—I mean we would have been there, at the party, if we hadn’t been in France. I was absolutely amazed when I read about it, Frank brought a copy of the Daily Express back from Avignon, it was the only English paper he could get, and there it was on the front page. And then on the news tonight, before we came out, they said it was something to do with a rapist on the A34?” She paused, waiting for Loretta to pick up this cue.
She said reluctantly: “I wasn’t at the inquest so I’ve only heard secondhand. The connection seems to be a van, the one that was used in these attacks on the road to Newbury. Someone saw her getting into it, apparently. My”—she glanced at Christopher—“a friend of mine who’s a journalist says they’re interviewing the other women who’ve been attacked, trying to establish the make and so on.”
Harriet screwed up her eyes. “But I had no idea about these attacks on the A34, I drive that way every month to see my mother and you’d think . . . Well, we should have been warned.”
“Excuse me.” The waitress came up behind her with two plates, an onion tart for Christopher and quenelles de brochet for Loretta, giving Harriet little choice but to move aside.
“I suppose it’ll be in The Times tomorrow,” she said regretfully. “Listen, Loretta, why don’t you join us for a drink if we’re still here when you finish? We’ve only just finished our main course.” She nodded to Christopher and went back to her husband.
“Eat slowly,” Loretta urged, sotto voce, when Harriet was out of earshot. “Her husband’s the most terrible bore, he’s a fellow at St. Anthony’s. Bridget feels sorry for her, I can’t think why else she’d go on seeing them.”
“She’s watching us,” Christopher said warningly.
Loretta pulled a face and picked up her fork. “Oh, well. Listen, there’s something I wanted to ask you about computers.”
“Computers?”
“Isn’t that your—I thought it was your field.”
“It is. But I couldn’t help noticing how your eyes glazed over at the party when I started to tell you about the engine-simulator program.”
She blushed. “What?”
“Come on, you were almost comatose.” He grinned, then said: “OK, what do you want to know?”
“Well,” she said diffidently, just wanting to get something clear in her own mind, “someone was telling me about a thing called an audit trail. Apparently it’s a sort of log, you must have one at CES, and I just wondered if there was any way—” She froze, her fork halfway to her lips, as the street door opened and two men walked into the restaurant. A woman slid out from behind the bar to greet them and Loretta could see a conversation going on about tables, the woman looking doubtful and glancing at her watch. For a moment she thought she was safe, that they would turn and leave without noticing her, but then the woman turned and pointed uncertainly to the party of four who had just finished coffee at the next table. Both men swiveled their heads in obedience to her gesture and Loretta tensed, guessing what was about to follow.
“Loretta.” John Tracey stalked to her table and glared down at her, a thunderous expression on his face.
“Hello, John.” She put down her fork, controlling her own anger and assuring herself that she owed him no apologies. “How’s the story going?”
“The story?” He looked blank for a moment, then said cruelly: “I thought you’d lost interest now your mate’s in the clear.” His companion, a tall bearded man who had followed Tracey to Loretta’s table, coughed politely behind him. Tracey turned. “I don’t think you’ve met my ex-wife, have you, Mark? Mark Dawson, Independent on Sunday.”
“This is Christopher Cisar,” said Loretta crisply. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, our food’s getting cold.”
“Oh, yes,” Tracey said bitterly, “we don’t want to break up the party. Come on, let’s go somewhere where the company’s a bit more congenial.” He wheeled round and collided with a waitress, who was, fortunately for both of them, empty-handed.
Mark Dawson called after him: “John? What’s the problem?” but Tracey was already wrenching open the door to the street. Dawson held up his hands in mute apology and hurried after him, disappearing into the warm night.
Loretta leaned back and closed her eyes. “I can explain.”
Christopher said: “Why should you? It’s none of my business if the guy still carries a torch for you.” He picked up his knife and fork and resumed eating.
“Is that all? Don’t you want to know the whole story?”
“Nope. This tart is terrific. Are you going to let that mousse go cold?”
Loretta gazed at him for a moment, looked down at her untasted quenelles and picked up her own fork.
11
The Room Was Dark And Loretta’s Eye lids fluttered open to an illusion of unfamiliarity, of objects lost in shadow or eerily illuminated by the glacial light of the moon. A gleam in one corner, just within her field of vision, was the dressing-table mirror, perfectly angled to reflect its cold beam; she gazed for a moment at the ceiling, searching for the hair-thin crack which branched from the rose, then let out a small, involuntary sound of pleasure as Christopher’s hands parted her thighs. She glanced down at his head, overwhelmed by sensations she had not known for months as his tongue caressed and teased her, and her disappointment when he suddenly pulled away was acute.
“Did you hear that?” He sat on the end of the bed, listening intently, but Loretta was too disappointed to take in what he was saying. Instead she reached forward without speaking and tried to draw him back, before the exciting sensations subsided entirely.
“No, listen.” He pushed her gently away, got up and went to the window, where he pulled a curtain across at waist level while he stared down at the garden. Loretta propped herself on one elbow, heard a distant sound between a shout and a cry and said crossly: “It’s only kids. Come back to bed.” She fell back, frustrated and embarrassed in about equal proportions, and was astonished when Christopher padded across the room and began retrieving discarded clothes from the floor and a chair.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going down. Looks like you’ve got visitors in your garden.”
Loretta sat bolt upright. “In the garden? Impossible—they’d have had to come through the house.”
“All the more reason to go look.” He tucked in his shirt, zipped his fly and returned to the bed, his hand closing on her wrist as she reached for the lamp. “No lights. Let’s find out what’s happening first.” He kissed her on the lips, parting them with his tongue to reassure her that he was going reluctantly, and went to the door. The brass knob turned soundlessly, and Loretta saw his dark form slip from the room.
“Hang on.” She scrambled off the bed, not wanting to be cast in the role of helpless female, and promptly tripped over a shoe. “Christopher,” she called, on hands and knees, “wait
for me.” She lunged for the chair in the corner, pushed herself upright and seized an old T-shirt from the heap of clothes. “Christopher.”
“Shhh,” he called warningly from the floor below. She pulled on the T-shirt and felt her way after him, whispering in a nervous, urgent voice: “Shouldn’t we—what about the police?” He did not reply and she glanced back at the pale shape of the phone on her bedside table, wondering how long the emergency services would take to answer if she dialed 999. She didn’t want to be left holding the receiver while Christopher grappled with a burglar two floors below, and she had recently heard a radio program alleging that sick and frightened people were frequently left waiting twenty minutes or more. She hurried onto the landing, throwing a worried look at the closed door to the other bedroom where Bridget was, as far as she knew, tucked up and fast asleep. Relieved that they hadn’t already disturbed her, Loretta felt for the banister and began tiptoeing down the stairs in her bare feet.
Her progress became easier at the half-landing, which was illuminated by the cold light of a street lamp shining through the fanlight above the front door. She took the remaining stairs two at a time, grasping the newel post and swinging round onto the basement steps without a pause. She was unprepared for the dark tunnel after the bend and her shoulder brushed the wall, knocking a picture askew, as she hurried down to the kitchen. Here the street lamp came to her aid again, streaming through the uncurtained basement windows and reflecting coldly off the white cupboards.
“Christopher?” She spoke in a loud whisper. “Where are you?”
“In here.” His voice came from the dining room. “Where’s the key?”
“What key?”
“To these doors.”
“Oh—I’ll get it. What can you see?”
“Zilch, because of the steps, but somebody’s out there all right.”
She lifted the key from its hiding place on the mantelpiece and tiptoed to the French windows, registering a slight nervous shock when her hand brushed Christopher’s bare forearm. She slid the key silently into the lock and turned it, reaching for the handle only to find that he had got there before her.