by Paul Charles
The hint of bass in her voice combined with her perfect diction made this sound very earthly, sexual, and extremely pleasing to listen to.
“That must be brilliant Cabernet Sauvignon,” Coles said, and then looked as if she regretted it the moment the words had left her lips.
“Yes,” Chloe laughed, “I’m probably a bit squiffy at this stage all right.”
“Let me get this correct: you’re saying you were Mr Mylan’s lover?”
“No, no, no,” Chloe said quietly, as if there were someone in one of the rooms listening to them, “I was his concubine. Concubine as in a Latin word, by way of France - the French are so civil in matters of the heart, aren’t they? They never mistake lust for love. Where was I? Oh yes, it means to lie down with, be a bed-mate, as it were. Lover implies a love affair, where love is involved. We were not lovers. I lay with him. Infrequently, but regularly, I lay with him. Can you be infrequent and regular? Infrequently regular - does that work for you, Inspector?” she was now looking at Kennedy.
“Yes, I think that works,” Kennedy replied.
Chloe’s clear honest eyes willed you on when you spoke to her. It was as though she were encouraging the words from you.
“Anyway, I’m sure you get the picture,” she continued, sparing Houdini the trouble of having to come back from the grave to figure out how to make the wine disappear from the glass.
“Okay,” Kennedy sighed, trying to get a fix on where best to take the questioning. He knew what he wanted to ask, but he wasn’t sure Chloe would cooperate, and even if she did, that DI Anne Coles would encourage her. “When did you first meet Patrick Mylan?”
“I met Patrick - you know he hated to be called Paddy? - in the spring of ninety-five, and way back then I was scared to look people in the eye, but I loved to dance. I loved to dance in front of the fire…”
“But way back then you would only have been…” Coles started in genuine shock.
“Ten, I was ten, way back then,” Chloe said with a big smile, “but don’t fret about my welfare. He wasn’t a perv. I promise you nothing happened until my twenty-second birthday. He was a friend of my father’s. Patrick didn’t really ever become a friend of my mum. I’ve two other sisters, six and seven years older, so I suppose that made us a certain type of family. Patrick would come around from time to time to collect my dad, and I always imagined they’d head off somewhere quite exotic. My mum always thought they were out with women, but Patrick later told me he’d never once witnessed my father being unfaithful to my mum.
“I grew older; Patrick would always ask me to dance when he came around for my dad, and even as a teenager I was quite happy to, because he’d always give me a twenty pound note. Then I reached the age where I started to think he might be a bit of a perv; so I would make sure I stayed up in my room or was out when he came around.
“I was eighteen when I started to get comfortable with him again. I suppose I’d had enough of spotty boys by then. Sadly, my dad died when I was nineteen. From the earliest I can remember, my dad was always going away on trips. He did something in banking - I could never figure out what, but he travelled a lot. When I was young, I remember when he’d get back from a trip I’d shy away from him. My mum says I always said, ‘You go away,’ and I’d push him away from me and hide behind my mother’s skirt. I mean, after a few hours I’d be fine. But I always remember this sense of loss, betrayal, whatever, whenever he went away. It would always take me some time to forgive him for having left me. And then, just when we were getting on great, he went and died on me; he went away for good.
“Patrick turned up at the funeral. I went up to him and reintroduced myself; he said he didn’t recognise me. He didn’t flirt or anything crass. He never did; it just wasn’t his style. I was clearly upset, so he offered me a lift back to the house. I persuaded him to take me for a drink on the way. Patrick introduced me to good wine. He was a great talker. Oh God, he had such a beautiful soft Irish voice, a different Irish lilt from yours. You could hear inside his head through his voice. He’d talk and I’d just melt.”
Here Chloe stopped, cradling her arms across her bosom, lost in the memory. She rose from the sofa where she’d her long legs curled up under her, and she seemed to float her way across the bleached wooden floor. She tipped the remains of the wine from her glass and then refilled it, only this time with the mineral water.
“Patrick taught me never to drink wine to get drunk. He said you should only drink wine where you’re prepared to savour it with good food.”
Kennedy hoped that her uninhibited, free-flow description of her time with Mylan wouldn’t become more stifled with the mineral water. For the first time since this investigation had started, Kennedy was getting a sense of the victim. Just little hints, but nonetheless, thanks to this young woman, something was starting to come through.
“We had a very, very slow start. Four whole years, for heaven’s sake, but in those four years I always had the impression he was grooming me. He never said anything blatant, but there were subtle things. He’d educate me in food and wine; he’d take me to the theatre, to films, to the opera. He’d buy me books, books about the art of lovemaking, about concubines, about erotic art, about all the beauties of foreign countries. When I was twenty-one, I think the penny finally dropped for me. Up until then, he’d never been anything but the prefect gentleman. Never even the slight hint of innuendo. But for my twenty-first birthday, he took me out for a beautiful meal at the Ivy, and before we left he gave me a present which he said I wasn’t allowed to open until I was back in the privacy of my home.”
Chloe took a slow sip of her mineral water.
“Oh my goodness, when I got home, I was up the stairs like a bat out of hell, but then I forced myself to sit down slowly and unwrap the present like the lady I knew Patrick would want me to be, rather than the frustrated teenager I was acting like.”
Again she stopped. Coles couldn’t resist.
“What had he bought you?” she whispered.
“It wasn’t so much what he bought me as what the present told me,” Chloe whispered back. “He’d bought me the most beautiful pair of silk stockings I’d ever seen. I couldn’t wait to try them on, but again I asked myself what would Patrick want me to do? So I went and had a long bath, soaked in the scents and oils he’d already bought me. I knew from that point on, both of us were preparing myself for him. I got out of the bath, slowly towelled myself down, put on my silk Chinese dressing gown and then and only then allowed myself to put my stockings on. Oh my God, what bliss. Have you ever…no, probably inappropriate to ask while on duty, I mean with your colleague here and all.”
“I know exactly the feeling you describe,” Coles said proudly, still in a whisper.
Kennedy felt his cheeks flush.
“So for the following two years I prepared myself for Patrick. Nothing was ever said, it wasn’t as obvious as that, but through his presents he offered me more and more knowledge and instruction in to what was to be my role in his life. He taught me to love the scents and taste of a man. He taught me all about how important the preparation was. One night in the grooming years, we were out to dinner, and he asked me if I remembered, as a child growing up, which I preferred, Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. I immediately went to say, ‘Christmas Day, of course,’ but then on reflection I started to remember how sometimes, quite a few times in fact, Christmas Day was a disappointment. He said this was because in a lot of instances, including making love, anticipation was better than participation. So he said, ‘You have to learn to take full joy from the anticipation as well.’ Then when it appeared that I might just be taking too much enjoyment out of the Christmas Eves, he instructed me to remember that there also has to be participation at some point so that the anticipation process can exist.”
The three all laughed their different laughs. Simmons had a reflective laugh. Coles - well, to Kennedy, Coles’ laugh looked like a laugh of envy; every time she caught his eye, she gave him a pri
vate discreet acknowledgement. And Kennedy’s laugh - well, he figured his laugh probably sounded guilty, for he was certainly feeling guilty being party to this amazing young woman’s intimate confessions.
“Before you and Mr Mylan got together, did you have, you know, any reservations?” Coles asked, sounding as thought she were voicing what would have been her own concerns.
“Only a few at the Ivy,” Simmons said, and then broke into another hearty chuckle. She had a very sexy, throaty laugh. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist, but all joking aside, no, absolutely not. If, for one moment, I had any doubt about my choice, I only had to look at my sister. Everyone said she was the most beautiful girl in her year at school and college, and she was voted the girl most likely to succeed. The mistake she made was she believed them and thought her looks were her passport to an easy life. Wrong! At the time Patrick was grooming me, my sister had two young babies screaming at her for attention and a husband who didn’t love her any more and was off cheating on her. She eventually dumped him, but her life was a mess by that stage, ruined by her looks. At least that’s what my eldest sister said, and I think she hit the nail right on the head.”
“Was there a chance Mr Mylan might have been grooming someone to replace you?” Christy asked.
“Oh, as in, I’m the creator of The Concubine’s Revenge?”
“Perhaps,” Kennedy admitted.
“Christy, can I call you Christy?” she asked, and then proceeded as though he’d agreed, “What you have to realise is that all men always want something, maybe even someone, new - so you have to ensure that they don’t ever get to know the real you. You have to ensure you’re always revealing a new ‘you’ or at least a new part of yourself. You always have to be a sexual mystery to them.
“What most beautiful girls don’t realise is that most men prefer them to remain enigmatic. Men like to imagine what mysteries we just might be hiding. How the troubled dark souls lurking beneath our surface will explode in sexual passion the second they bed us. What all us girls have to realise is that the mystery, and consequently the majority of the attraction, disappears the very second we open our mouths and mention something revolutionary like how expensive the price of fish is or what a pain it is to need a parking permit for someone who comes around to see you or how important it is we all do something about our green footprint.
“No, what most men want beautiful women to do is shut up, look stunning, appear deep and entertain that week’s fantasy.
“I didn’t ever live with Patrick. But, as I mentioned, our relationship changed on the night of my twenty-second birthday. I stopped being his … student, and I became his concubine. I pleasured him when he needed me to pleasure him. It’s really as simple as that. Was I hooker? I will admit that I was exclusively his and that he paid for my lifestyle, my education, and everything you see around you. But I cared about him, and he cared about me. You don’t spend all those years teaching someone the art of loving and then not, in turn, care for them even just a little. And really, we did know each other for many years before anything happened.
“God knows when he made his decision about me. He would never admit it to me. The only thing I can tell you for definite is that he never ever forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do. It wasn’t even as if being with him was my life. I never once thought I had to sit around looking pretty and available, waiting for the phone to ring. My life is much too important to me for that. And in fairness to Patrick, and his relationship with my father, if that was what he’d wanted then he wouldn’t have picked me. I’ll tell you this: yes, I felt that he had groomed me, but he did it in such a way that it was me and me alone who… what’s the best way to put this? Well, I definitely was the one who made the first move.”
Kennedy, and probably Coles as well, figured that she was about to tell them how she had made the first move. Neither showed their disappointment when she continued:
“We had dates, yes; that’s the way I like to look at it. We had regular dates together. And I swear to you, in the time I was his woman, I know he was with no other.”
“Miss Simmons,” Kennedy started.
“You must call me Chloe, you simply must. I feel you know me better than my mother does at this stage.”
“Okay, Chloe; when you were going through this grooming process, was there… would there have been…” Kennedy struggled to find a way to raise his question.
“You mean would there have been another concubine, his current concubine, my predecessor?” Chloe came to Kennedy’s rescue.
“Yes, thank you, Chloe. That’s the question I was trying to ask.”
“Most definitely,” she confirmed immediately. “It was the way he led his life. I use the word concubine only because that’s the word Patrick used. I believe Patrick introduced the word so he was making clear the parameters of our relationship. He was making it clear there would be no love, even though love to some degree surely existed. He was letting me know there would be no marriage, no children. He was confirming to me our relationship was to be built on mutual pleasure. I will happily admit to you it was most certainly a mutual pleasure. But, perhaps most importantly, he was admitting to me that there would be a successor.”
“So do you think he might have already been grooming your successor?” Kennedy asked.
“I most definitely believe so.”
“Do you know who that might have been?” Coles asked, in clear disbelief.
“No, I don’t. But remember, I told you how long he’d known me, and certainly for a good percentage of that time he was cultivating me, so I have to assume he was already working on my successor.”
“And you have no clues?” Kennedy asked.
Chloe took another sip of her water. She looked as if there were something on her mind. She held the glass to her lips and took another sip, perhaps to give her more time to formulate her answer.
“I suppose if I’m honest, recently when we were together, he wasn’t always in my arms, if you know what I mean.”
“And what about the lady you succeeded?” Kennedy asked, feeling not entirely comfortable asking these necessary questions.
“Patrick always said, ‘Never betray your partner, because all you’re really doing is betraying yourself.’ He also said, ‘Take joy not from what you seek, but from what you already have.’ Sometimes I felt he was trying a wee bit too hard with these sayings of his. Maybe they even bordered on pompous, but at the core of most of them there was something important he felt he needed to share with me. He believed most of it. He believed we’d both eventually have other partners, but during the time we were sharing, this was not important, and he didn’t want it to become a preoccupation. At the time he and I were together, the partner he had before me wasn’t important, and that wasn’t him disrespecting her.”
“You never asked him about her?” Kennedy asked.
“Of course I did,” she replied, laughing heartily. “When I wasn’t being as spiritual or as Zen as he’d like me to be, I most certainly quizzed him.”
“And?”
“And he’d say something Zen like, ‘I am always only with one.’”
“Did you meet any of his friends?” Coles asked.
“Rarely, but when we did he would never be disrespectful and try to hide me. He was always the perfect gentleman. He took pride in treating people the way he wanted to be treated himself.”
“But you met some of his friends?” Kennedy continued.
“Occasionally, as I said, very occasionally.”
“Did you ever get to know them?”
“Not really,” she said, smiling again at Kennedy.
“Which implies that maybe you might have?” he pushed gently.
“I was smiling because when I heard from Rodney about Patrick, I was aware this was all going to come out. I imagined sitting down with a couple of cynical coppers like those on The Bill and trying to get through this with them smirking and being rude and crude … ohhhh,” she said as a shiver wor
ked its way through her entire body. “But then I got you two, and it’s really been like sharing a glass of wine with a couple of friends and talking as mates. The couple of glasses I had before you got here also helped immensely, of course. Are you married?” she said looking at Kennedy.
Kennedy shook his head.
“And you?”
Coles looked at Kennedy, smiled nervously, blushed slightly, looked back at Simmons and said, “No, I’m too busy with my career.”
“You know,” Simmons said reflectively, “I’ve got to start to think about all of that now. Not marriage, of course, but the dating game. It will be a new thing for me.”
“Oh my goodness,” Coles blurted, “can you imagine your first date? With all your knowledge, the bloke will think he’s died and gone to heaven.”
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea to go to bed with someone on your first date. What would you say, Christy?”
“No, no, no,” said Coles. “I mean, I didn’t mean it like that… I meant, I suppose in a way I did, but I just meant, you know, with all of your experience.”
“We get the picture, don’t we, Christy?” Simmons continued, looking as if she were thoroughly enjoying herself by holding on tightly to the moral high ground.
Kennedy said nothing but did enjoy watching Coles squirm a bit. Looking as good as she did, the addition of vulnerability was starting to make Coles look irresistible to Kennedy.
“Can we backtrack a wee bit?” he said, looking to Chloe. “We were talking about Mr Mylan’s friends, and you…”
“I was hoping we’d passed that moment,” Simmons admitted.
“But there was one of his friends you were thinking about?” Kennedy continued.
“Yes,” she replied with a tolerant sigh. “It was that actress, you know Nealey …… what’s her second name?”
“Nealey Dean?”
“Yes. I met her once up at Patrick’s. I think she was aware of me.”
“She knew who you were?” Coles asked.