by Joan Smith
Instead she folded the newspaper, tossed it onto the floor and reached into the top drawer of her desk, where the agenda of the Fern Sap editorial meeting had been lying unopened for nearly two weeks. She had had advance warning, in phone calls from Paris and Munich, that the magazine was facing yet another financial crisis and she had put off reading the details as long as she could. Now she tore the envelope open and pulled out a thick wad of paper, the top sheet a prickly statement from the treasurer in defense of her unpopular proposal to double corporate subscription fees. The next sheet consisted of a counterproposal from two American academics, a superficially attractive prediction of how the magazine could be saved by selling advertising space, but a moment’s glance at the figures told Loretta they were wildly optimistic; she simply could not imagine hard-nosed commercial organizations, department stores and airlines, jumping at the opportunity of advertising their products to a group of intelligent but for the most part impoverished academics. She moved automatically through the other items on the agenda, making an occasional mark in the margin, then felt she had done her duty and worked on her book for a couple of hours.
It was a brilliantly sunny day and as time wore on she was more and more frequently distracted by the antics of weekend boaters. At one point she heard shrieks, lifted her head and saw a teenage girl collapse into giggles as her boat bumped the bank and sprayed her companions with brackish water. Loretta watched them with envy, regretting the demise of her rowing boat and remembering that the oars, propped against the wall of her small garden shed, were all that remained of it. She began to feel a fool for working, struggling to reorder her thoughts on Shirley without even Bertie for company when everyone else was out having a good time. Her shoulders ached and she slipped off her chair, stretched out her arms and did a couple of the warm-up exercises she had been taught at the gym, her movements restricted by the risk of knocking ornaments off the mantelpiece or hitting her hand on the filing cabinet. When she had finished she looked at her watch and saw that it was only half past two, with the long hot afternoon stretching emptily before her.
She decided to walk into the city center and see if any of the bookshops were open, needing to buy copies of the Frost in May trilogy before she attempted to review Antonia White’s diaries. Reviewing was always like this, she thought, fetching her bag and checking that her sunglasses were inside; you agreed to look at one book without realizing how long it had been since you read the author’s other work. Loretta opened the front door, thinking she could read at least a bit of Frost in May on the plane to Paris, and stopped dead on the threshold. A lavish bouquet of summer flowers, enclosed in cellophane, completely covered the step.
There were Longine lilies, flawless and creamy as vellum, stargazers with orange stamens bursting from mottled pink flesh, half a dozen stems of an orchidlike flower whose name she knew but could not remember and three or four white roses. The bouquet was tied with a double bow of white ribbon—real satin, not the artificial kind favored by most florists these days—and Loretta bent with a sense of wonder to pick them up. It was an extravagant gesture on its own and her astonishment was compounded when she saw, underneath, a carrier bag from a smart shoe shop in Little Clarendon Street. Balancing the flowers in the crook of her left arm, she lifted the bag and heard the rattle of tissue paper inside, obscuring its contents.
Downstairs in the kitchen Loretta slid the flowers onto the table and opened the carrier bag. The tissue paper slid apart to reveal her jeans and T-shirt, neatly folded, and an envelope bearing her name and a scribbled sentence in ink of a different color. “Sunday, 8:45 A.M.,” it said, “bell doesn’t work. Please ring me about collecting dress, number inside.” Loretta tore open the envelope, which contained a ten-pound note and a postcard reproduction of Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix. Barely glancing at the familiar image, Loretta turned the card over and read in a neater version of the same script:
Dear Ms. Lawson,
So sorry about Friday night and for rushing off without seeing you—please give your friend the enclosed ten-pound note. Hope you didn’t mind me borrowing your clothes, they’ve been washed and ironed. Apologies also for coming so early, I’ve got a lift to Dorset.
Yours,
Caroline Wilson
Loretta stared at the telephone number in the top right-hand corner of the card, almost comically dismayed. She had been certain that she would not hear from Caroline Wilson again—so certain that she had taken Bridget’s advice and dropped the white dress off at the Oxfam shop in Summertown the previous afternoon. There was time to return to the shop the following morning, before Loretta set off for Paris, but would the shop simply hand it back? Even charities were shrewd these days, and the time was gone when designer dresses could be found for a fiver among the washed-out cardigans and C & A tat. Loretta grunted, threw down the card and turned to go upstairs when she remembered she had not looked out a vase for the blameless flowers.
The young man had a surly, uncongenial expression; there was something about him which suggested he was watchful, suspicious, even that he resented her looking at him at all. Loretta had a feeling he expected someone else, someone who certainly wasn’t a woman, yet she was unsure whether his reaction would be hostile or erotic. She took a step back, deliberately distancing herself, yet his eyes continued to hold hers. His nose was bulbous, his lips fleshy, and it was easy to imagine his stubby fingers moving from the musical instrument they presently held to grasp a glistening fig from the table in front of him, squeezing it until the purple skin split and the jammy seeds spilled out.
Loretta nearly laughed out loud, recognizing the way in which her own suggestibility had colluded with the painter’s intention. It was all to do with mood, with the brooding horror she had been trying to push to the back of her mind ever since Paula Wolf’s body was discovered in the barn in Bridget and Sam’s garden a week ago; why else should she be so affected by a picture she had passed without a second glance on previous visits to the Ashmolean? She leaned closer and peered at the inscription in small letters along the bottom of the frame to discover who had unsettled her so much.
Still Life with a Young Man playing a Recorder, she read, and the artist’s name: attributed to Francesco (Cecco) del Caravaggio. Loretta’s smile faded and she moved back, thinking of her discussion with Janet Dunne earlier in the week and wondering whose argument was validated by her unexpected reaction to the painting. The sinister undertones had been plain to her before she knew the identity of the painter, obviously a follower of the more notorious Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, yet she was already looking at it with a fresh eye, reading even more sinister things into it. A recorder could easily double as a club, especially one as thick and heavy as Cecco del Caravaggio had chosen to paint, and the unidentified vegetable on the table, next to the straining figs, bore a marked resemblance to an exposed human brain.
“I wouldn’t like to meet him on a dark night,” said a voice somewhere behind her left shoulder, uncannily echoing Loretta’s own thoughts. Red hair flashed past her as the police inspector, the woman whose name Loretta could never remember, bent to read the inscription on the frame. “Car-a-vagg-io,” she said, pronouncing it with a hard g as though the name was unfamiliar. She straightened and moved back to stand next to Loretta. “Big place this; I’ve seen hundreds of Greek vases but not that picture your friend was raving about.”
Loretta, who was astonished by the policewoman’s presence in the museum, remembered her indignant questions to Bridget about what she had been doing on Tuesday—no, Monday—afternoon. “Are you—is this official?” she blurted out.
The Inspector, who had been glancing at pictures on the end wall of the gallery without much interest, turned to look at her as though she was mad. “Official?” she repeated.
“Well, I mean, aren’t you on duty?”
The Inspector’s eyes narrowed. “I got home at midnight last night after spending most of yesterday at the hospital interviewing a very distresse
d woman who was beaten unconscious just over a week ago. I came in at seven this morning and I don’t suppose I’ll get home before midnight tonight. All I’ve had to eat is a succession of sandwiches and a lot of canteen coffee. Don’t you think I’m entitled to a short break?”
“Of course” Loretta said quickly, aware that the policewoman had raised her voice and people were looking at them. “I’m sure it must be terrible for you—no, I mean it. I didn’t expect to see you here, that’s all, in an art gallery.”
“It’s been recognized as an occupational hazard, stress. Everyone knows policemen retire early, but do you know how many of them actually get to the official retirement age? My first superintendent, he retired and set up his own security firm, he dropped dead at fifty-seven. Fifty-seven.”
“OK, you don’t have to convince me.” Loretta had been misled by the woman’s smartly pressed suit and bright lipstick, but now she saw the taut skin below her eyes, the pallor of her cheeks beneath her tinted foundation. “Why don’t I show you, if you’re still interested, the painting Bridget was talking about? It’s through here.”
The Inspector pulled back her cuff and looked at her watch. “I don’t know, I ought to get back to the station.”
“It’s the quickest way out, from here.” Loretta took a couple of steps towards the far end of the Weldon Gallery, uncertain whether the policewoman would accompany her.
“Oh, well, as I’m here.” They walked the length of the gallery, the Inspector enlarging on the theme of stress, exhaustion and their effect on efficiency. “I mean, it’s macho culture; when I started you couldn’t admit you were too tired to question somebody properly or you wanted to be sick after seeing a body. Which way here?”
They were in a wide, high hall with elaborate wall hangings and a staircase rising to the second floor. “Those are the Raphael and Michelangelo sketches,” Loretta said, gesturing with her right hand to a series of vertical glass cases. “The Pre-Raphaelites are up those stairs if you like that sort of thing, which I don’t . . . The Piero’s through here, at the far end.”
Talking seemed to have tired the Inspector and she said nothing as they turned into another long gallery. Loretta mentioned one or two pictures as they passed, and pointed out a small bronze relief of a woman in a chariot drawn by two panthers. Finally she stopped and said: “This is it—The Forest Fire.”
The policewoman leaned forward to examine a fat bird, a partridge or a grouse, which had launched itself from a tree and appeared to be taking deadly aim at a passing cow herd. Beside her Loretta admired the bears, a mother and her cubs, lumbering up a slope guarded by a lion in an attempt to escape the flames devouring the trees behind.
The Inspector said: “I can’t see it myself, why she likes it so much. Why have they got human faces?”
“I suppose they’re mythological. Don’t you like the bears?”
“They’re a funny color, aren’t they? And those ducks—my aunt’s got a set of plaster ones on her wall that look more lifelike.”
Loretta smiled. “So has my mother. Shall I show you the way out?” She led the way through an antechamber, past the portrait of Elias Ashmole in full-bottomed wig and a coat of rose-colored velvet, to the great marble staircase which descended to the ground floor.
“I know where I am now,” the Inspector said at the top of the steps. “No need to come down.”
“I might as well, I think it closes quite soon.” She added hesitantly: “Are you having any luck with the van? The Transit?”
The Inspector shook her head. “Not my bit of the inquiry. There’s a couple of DCs going through all the registrations in Oxfordshire but it’s a long job—he may not even be local.” She didn’t seem to mind Loretta’s question, and they walked companionably through the souvenir shop and out into the open air.
The Inspector stopped on the path, glanced back at the fluted marble columns and said thoughtfully: “Sometimes I wonder why I do this job.” Her gaze traveled up the neoclassical façade to the seated figure with one arm upraised on the apex of the pediment. Loretta waited for her to say more but she merely sighed, and resumed her progress towards the short flight of steps leading down from the courtyard into Beaumont Street. The grass on either side of the path was neatly mowed and bright green, a monument to the efforts of the gardening staff and a wettish summer.
Loretta said: “Presumably it’s worth it in the end. Especially in a case like this one.”
The Inspector stared across the road, watching a limousine with a uniformed driver turn out of the garage of the Randolph Hotel into Beaumont Street. A fat man sat in the back, smoking a cigar. “How do you mean?”
“Well—you know. When it’s someone who’s attacked several women.” There was a plaque fixed to the open gate, listing the museum’s opening times in white letters on a shiny black surface. Loretta read: “Tue. to Sat. 10-4. Sunday 2-4. Closed on Mondays.” She thought: Closed on Mondays?
“It’ll all be forgotten in a week,” the detective was saying. “Those coppers who caught Peter Sutcliffe, who remembers them now?”
Loretta wasn’t listening to her. Bridget said she had visited the Ashmolean on Monday afternoon, after lunch at Browns with Sam, yet there it was in black and white in front of her—the museum was closed on Mondays. Loretta narrowed her eyes, trying to think of an alternative explanation to the obvious one that she had caught her friend out in another lie. Nothing came, but the fib was so trivial and so pointless that Loretta could not imagine what was behind it.
A car squealed to a halt at the bottom of the steps, unmarked but giving itself away by the squawking of a police radio through the open windows. The passenger door flew open and a man in shirtsleeves leaped out, stopping abruptly when he recognized the Inspector.
“Ma’am,” he exclaimed with a mixture of relief and urgency, “the boss says, can you come at once? He thinks we’ve got him.”
The woman’s eyes flickered as she assimilated this startling piece of news, and her whole body tensed. Seconds later she was striding down the steps, firing questions at the excited detective: “OK, Blady, where are we going? Does he know we’re on to him?”
Blady hurried forward as the Inspector slid into the seat he had just vacated, briefing her in a voice too low for Loretta to hear. She hung back, thinking she had been forgotten, but at the last minute the woman paused and leaned out of the car. Her eyes glittering with anticipation, she said tersely: “Sorry, Dr. Lawson—you heard.”
The door snapped shut, Blady threw himself into the back and the engine roared into life. The police car accelerated towards the traffic lights at the end of Beaumont Street, swung into the right-hand lane to avoid a tourist bus and veered left into St. Giles as the lights changed to green. It was gone before Loretta had time to think and she walked slowly down the steps, peering towards the Martyrs’ Memorial as though she expected the car to rematerialize; it was like being in a cinema, she thought, on the edge of your seat, and suddenly the projector had broken down at the climactic moment. This time there was no point in waiting for the screen to flicker back into life and she turned away, keeping her head down as she skirted a party of American tourists arguing over the quickest route from Beaumont Street to the Botanic Gardens.
13
“Hello,” Said Bridget In An Artificially bright voice, “you’re talking to an answering machine but please don’t hang up. If your call is urgent—”
Loretta cut her off in mid-sentence, seeing little point in adding to the two messages she had left the previous afternoon. The phone’s digital display told her she had used up only ten pence of the pound coin she had fed into the slot and she took a piece of paper from her jeans pocket, punched in the number of the Oxfam shop in Summertown and asked whether the woman in charge of pricing secondhand clothes had come in yet. She hadn’t and Loretta left another message about the white ball dress, pleading with the shop assistant to make sure no one sold it before she returned from Paris. Then she pressed the follow-
on call button, trying to overcome her nerves and ring John Tracey. It was Monday, the Sunday journalist’s day off, and Tracey would probably be at home; he might know no more than the two-sentence announcement she had heard on several news bulletins, a terse, legalistic confirmation that Thames Valley Police were questioning a man about the murder of an American tourist and a series of sex attacks on the Newbury-to-Oxford road, but he would certainly be able to find out more. Someone coughed noisily, reminding Loretta there was a queue to use the phone, and she hastily punched in Tracey’s number, biting her lip as she listened to the familiar double burr of the ringing tone.
There was a click, another answering machine: “Hi, John Tracey speaking. I’m also taking messages for Terese McKinnon.” Loretta blinked at this unexpected addition to his usual laconic greeting, the name meaning nothing to her. Tracey was droning on, giving the number of his fax machine at home and his direct line at the office, and when she finally heard the tone Loretta could think of nothing to say. She hooked the receiver back on its rest, abandoning her remaining fifty-four pence, and glanced up at the departures board. The boarding sign had come up against her flight and she hoisted the strap of her carpetbag onto her shoulder, making way for a choleric middle-aged man who brushed up against her in his eagerness to reach the phone.
Loretta headed for passport control, wondering about Terese McKinnon. She might be a stringer on a visit to London, Tracey did occasionally offer his spare room to foreign journalists, but Loretta did not think she had seen the woman’s byline in the Sunday Herald. She handed her passport to an immigration official, waited while he gave it a cursory glance and joined the queue to have her hand luggage X-rayed. The security staff were as stony-faced as ever, reminding her of a trip to Amsterdam during the Gulf War when the sight of police with automatic weapons patrolling the passenger terminals at Heathrow had made her doubt the wisdom of her spur-of-the-moment decision to go away for the weekend.