She looked at him delightedly, as though waiting for praise or applause, but their main course arrived and distracted her.
‘Mm,’ she said, sniffing delightedly. ‘Lovely garlic! You could give me matchboxes to eat as long as you fried them in garlic. I hope you like it?’
‘I love it,’ he said.
Long, long ago in his youth, before Real Life had happened to him, he had cooked for Irene on a grease-encrusted, ancient and popping gas stove in their little flat; and he had used garlic – and onions and herbs and wine and spices and ginger – and food had been an immediate and sensuous pleasure. So it still was, he could see, for Joanna. She seemed very close to him, and warm, and what he felt towards her was so basic it seemed earth-movingly profound. He wanted to take hold of her, to have her, to make good, wholesome, tiring love to her, and then to sleep with her all night with their bodies slotted down together like spoons. But did anything so simple and good happen in Real Life? To anyone?
Under the table he had a truly amazing erection, and it couldn’t be entirely because of the garlic. He saw with an agony of disappointment what life could be like with the right person. He imagined waking up beside her, and having her again, warm and sleepy in the early morning quiet; eating with her and sleeping with her and filling her up night after night with himself. Just being together in that uncluttered way, like two animals, no questions to answer and none to ask. He wanted to walk with her hand in hand along some bloody beach in the sunset, with or without the soaring music.
The erection didn’t go down, but the pressure seemed to even itself out, so that he could adjust to it, like adjusting to travelling at speed, all reactions sharpened. He watched her eating not only with desire, but also, surprisingly, with affection. He could see how the rough, heavy locks of her hair were like those sculpted on the bronze head of a Greek hero, soft and dense, pulling straight of their own weight. She ate with simple attention, and when she looked up at him she smiled, as if that were something obvious and easy, and then all her attention was on him.
She put out her hand for her wine glass, and almost before he knew what he had done, he intercepted it across the table. To his astonished relief, her warm fingers curled happily round his and returned his pressure, and the situation resolved itself simply and gracefully, like crystals forming at crystallising point. Nothing to worry about. He released her and they both went on eating, and Slider felt as though he were flying, and was utterly astonished at himself, that he could have done such a thing.
In the interval between the main course and dessert he went to the telephone to ring the station, and spoke to Hunt, who was Duty Officer.
‘I’ve got a next of kin in the Austen case,’ he said, and relayed the information about Mrs Ringwood. ‘Can you put a trace on that, and get one of the local blokes to go round and inform her. She’ll have to formally ID the body. And then we can have the inquest. Would you tell Atherton to get onto it first thing in the morning?’
‘Righto, guv,’ said Hunt.
‘Also I want him to get Mrs Gostyn in to make a statement and see if she can help us put together a photofit of this Inspector Petrie.’
‘Okay, sir. Anything else?’
There was, but not for his ears. ‘Is Nicholls on the desk? Put me through to him will you?’
To Nicholls he said, ‘Listen, Nutty – will you ring Irene for me, and tell her not to wait up. I’ve got a lot of interviews to do, and I won’t be back until very late.’
‘Sure I’ll tell her,’ he said, but with the end of the sentence clearly open for the unspoken words but she’ll not believe it.
‘Thanks, mate.’
‘Okay Bill. Cheeroh. Be careful, won’t you?’
That, thought Slider, was like telling a man about to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel not to get his feet wet.
‘Tell me about that last evening,’ he said over the profiteroles.
‘We were on until nine-thirty at the Television Centre. We packed up –’
‘Did you finish on time?’
She smiled. ‘You bet. Otherwise they have to pay us overtime. We’re fierce about that. We packed up – that would take five minutes or so – and then I’d arranged with a couple of the others – Phil Redcliffe and John Delaney and Anne-Marie – to go for a drink.’
‘Which pub did you use?’ he asked, having a sudden dread that it would be The Dog and Scrotum, which after all was the nearest pub to the TVC.
‘We always go to The Crown and Sceptre – it’s Fullers, you see,’ she said simply, and he nodded. For a beer-drinker, it was that simple. ‘As I was going out, Simon Thompson asked me if I was going for a drink, and I said yes but Anne-Marie was coming, and he said in that case he didn’t want to come, and that delayed me a bit –’
‘Why didn’t he want to come if she was going?’ Slider interrupted.
‘They’d been having a bit of trouble.’ She grimaced. ‘Look, I don’t want you to make too much of this, but I’ll tell you about it, because someone will, so it had better be me. I told you Anne-Marie and Simon had been together on tour?’
‘Yes, you did. Do you mean they were having an affair?’
‘Oh, it didn’t really amount to that. Being on tour is sort of like fainlights –’ She demonstrated the crossed fingers of childhood games. ‘It doesn’t really count. People sleep together, go round together, and when they get back to England, it’s all forgotten. Anne-Marie and Simon were like that, except that after the last tour in October, to Italy, Anne-Marie tried to carry it on. Simon didn’t like that because he’s got a permanent girlfriend, and Anne-Marie –’ She paused. ‘Well, she got a bit funny about it. She insisted that Simon had been serious about her, that they had decided to get married, and that now he was trying to get out of it.’
‘Did you believe her?’
‘I don’t know. There must have been something in it, surely? Simon said she was just making it up, of course, but then he would, wouldn’t he? He started saying all sorts of nasty things about her, that she was unbalanced and so on, but I don’t know what the truth of it was. Anne-Marie just gave it up after a while and left him alone, but he made a great performance out of not having anything to do with her – changing tables in the coffee-bar if she sat down near him, not going for a drink with a group of us if she was included – that sort of thing.’
‘I see,’ Slider said encouragingly, hoping that he would. ‘How did she seem to you that last day? Did she seem in her normal spirits?’
‘I didn’t notice really, one way or the other. She’d been a bit quiet since that trouble with Simon – a bit low, you know, withdrawn. As I said, I never thought she was a particularly happy person, and that could only make it worse.’
Slider nodded. ‘So you spoke to Simon Thompson, and then what? You went out to your car?’
‘Yes. We were all in separate cars, of course. Phil and John had already gone, and with Simon stopping me – oh, and I talked to John Brown as well about something, the fixer, so I was the last one out. Anne-Marie had rushed off when she saw Simon coming. She left her car outside, you know in that narrow bit to the side of the main gate where the Minis and small cars are parked.’
‘Yes, I know. Did she drive a Mini?’
‘No, she had a red MG – just about the one thing in her life she really loved, that car. Anyway, as I came out, she was just running back across the yard towards me. She said she was glad she’d caught me, and why didn’t we go to The Dog and Sportsman instead. That’s another pub, along the –’
‘I know,’ Slider said. I knew it, he thought flatly. I should never have drunk on my own manor.
Joanna eyed him curiously. ‘Well, it’s a horrible pub, and in any case Phil and John had already gone. I said so, and she seemed quite put out, and tried to persuade me to go to The Dog, just the two of us, but I didn’t want to, and in the end she just left me and went back to her car. I went to The Crown and Sceptre, and of course she never showed up. I don’t know if ev
entually she did go to the other pub, or if she – if they –’ She stopped.
‘Did she say why she wanted to go to the other pub?’ Slider asked, not without sympathy.
‘No. She didn’t give any reason. I’ve wondered since whether, if we’d gone with her, she might not have been killed. Do you think she could have known something was going to happen to her?’
Slider was thinking. ‘At what stage did she change her mind? She was going to The Crown with you? She knew that’s where you planned to go?’
‘Oh yes, we always went there. And when she left the first time, when she went out to her car, she knew that’s where we were going. In fact I think when she went past me as I was talking to John Brown she said something like “See you in there”.’
‘So something happened to make her change her mind when she was outside, going to her car. Did she speak to someone in the car park?’
‘I don’t know. When I came out she was already running back towards me. The men in the gatehouse might have seen something. There are always two of them on duty, and they’d have been able to see her car from their windows.’
‘Yes,’ Slider said, and made a note: Gatekeepers! and Ask Hilda. He looked up. Joanna was staring at him unhappily. ‘What is it?’
‘Maybe she was afraid, and wanted us to come with her for protection. Maybe if we’d gone with her –’
Slider felt compelled to offer her some comfort. ‘I don’t think it would have made any difference. I think it would just have happened some other time.’
Her eyes widened as she considered the implications of this. ‘I don’t think that helps very much,’ she said.
The eating and drinking were over. He paid, and they walked out into the street. ‘It was a good meal,’ he said. ‘I like Italian food.’ He remembered Anne-Marie like touching a mouth ulcer he’d forgotten.
‘You mind, don’t you,’ Joanna said. ‘About Anne-Marie. Why do you? I mean, all murder is dreadful, but you must have seen some horrible cases in your time, worse than this. Why is it different?’
He wanted to ask how she knew, but was afraid of the answer. Instead he said, ‘I don’t know,’ which was unoriginal, but true, and she accepted it at face value.
‘I can’t feel it much – not continuously. She still doesn’t feel dead to me. She was so young, and I always thought her rather silly – not a particularly capable person. Vulnerable. It seems almost like cheating to kill someone so easy to kill.’
They stood looking at each other on the pavement. Now the moment had come, he didn’t know how he could possibly ask her. He had no right to. He had nothing to offer – he could only take. But how, otherwise, were they ever to move from this spot? He looked at her helplessly.
‘Can you be struck off, like doctors, for fraternising with witnesses?’ she asked lightly. She had seen his trouble, and was doing the job for him, making it easy for him either to go on or to go away. He knew how generous that was of her, and yet still he blundered.
‘I’m married,’ he said – blurted – and he actually saw it hurt her.
‘I know that,’ she said quietly.
‘How do you know?’ Now he was simply delaying, evading.
She shrugged. ‘You have the look – hungry. Like a man with worms, you eat but it doesn’t satisfy you.’ She looked at him consideringly, and he was aware painfully that he had put this distance between them, that it was all his fault. ‘I even know what she looks like,’ she went on. ‘Pretty, very slim, smart. Keeps the house spotless, and hasn’t much sense of humour.’
‘How can you know that?’ he said uneasily.
He saw her suddenly tire of it. She had placed everything at his service, and he had been too weak and cowardly to do the right thing, one way or the other. She hitched her bag onto her shoulder and said, ‘I’d better be going. Thank you very much for supper.’
Leave it be, let it go. Don’t ask for trouble. Life is complicated enough as it is.
‘Where do you live?’ he gasped. One last breath before going under, one last grasp at the straw. She would say north or south, anything, not west, and that would be that. Let God decide. Yet if she said west, what then? She turned back the little she had turned away, and it seemed an effort, and she looked at him doubtfully, as if she were not sure whether to answer him or not.
‘Turnham Green,’ she said at last, with no inflection at all.
He licked his lips. ‘That’s on my way,’ he said in a voice like fishbones. ‘I live in Ruislip.’
‘You can follow me,’ she said, ‘if you promise not to book me for speeding.’
His stomach went away from him like an express lift and he nodded, and they walked towards their cars, parked nose-to-tail down the side street. Even in his extremity he told himself he was not committed yet, that it would be perfectly easy for him to lose her on the cross-town drive. But of course she knew that too, and it was too late, by several hours at least.
The drive back to Chiswick was long enough for Slider to think of everything and fear everything several times over. It was close to twenty years since he had made love to anyone but Irene, and it was a long time – he paused – good God, was it really over a year? – since he had made love even to her. Large-scale social and moral considerations jostled for space in his cringing mind with mute and ignoble worries about custom, expectation, performance, and even underwear, to the point where desire was suppressed and he could no longer think of any good and sufficient reason to be doing what he was doing at all.
And yet still he followed her, almost automatically, keeping the taillights of her Alfa GTV just two lengths ahead of him, copying her lefts and rights like a colt following its dam, because doing anything else would have involved him in a decision he was no longer capable of making.
They stopped at last, parked, got out of their cars. Hollow excuses formed themselves inside his head, and if she had spoken to him or even looked back at him, he would probably have babbled them and fled. But she had her door key ready in her hand, opened her front door and went in, leaving it open for him, without once looking round, and so he simply followed, as if the moment for making the absolutely definitely final decision had not yet arrived.
Afterwards he wondered how much of his state of mind she had guessed and was making allowance for. Inside the hallway of her flat she was waiting for him. She had not put on the lights or taken off her coat. She had simply put down her bags on the floor, and as he entered the half dark of the passage she put her arms round him inside his coat and lifted her mouth to be kissed.
Slider went tremblingly to pieces. No questions to ask and none to answer. He pulled the female softness against him and was kissing her ravenously, and her mouth and tongue led him with the lightness of a familiar dancing-partner. She moved her pelvis, and he could feel his erection like a rock between them, and he felt distantly, ridiculously proud. She broke off from kissing him at last, but it was only to lead the way into her bedroom beyond, which was lit dimly by the glow from a streetlamp outside – just light enough, and not too much.
There was the bed, a big double, covered by a counterpane. She went round to the far side and sat on the edge with her back to him and began to take off her clothes with neat, economical movements. So they were really going to do it, part of his mind said in amazement. He was glad she was letting him undress himself. His state of mind was so far gone he was no longer sure what he’d got on, or whether he could get it off without fumbling stupidly. By the time he was down to his underpants she had finished, and slid gracefully in under the sheets and looked at him calmly from the pillows. He pulled in his stomach and took off his pants. The air felt cold on his skin, but his erection felt so huge and hot he half thought it would warm up the room, like an immersion heater. What a ridiculous thing to think, he rebuked himself; but he must have smiled, for she smiled in response and pulled back the covers for him.
After all his fears, it was all so beautifully simple. He lay down beside her, feeling
the whole length of her against his body warm and delicious; and before he could start wondering what she would expect of him by way of preliminaries, she drew him onto and into her so easily that he sighed in enormous relief, as if he were coming home. Being in her was both exotic and familiar in such piercing, blissful combination that he knew it could not last long. But it didn’t matter – there would be time for everything later. He turned his mouth, nuzzling for hers, and as they connected he felt her lift and close on him, and that was it. He let go gratefully and flooded her as though all of his life he had been saving up for this moment.
Close and far away he heard her sigh ‘Ah!’ And then they were drifting out together into dark water, clean and complete as if newborn. A long time later she kissed his cheek and lay her face against his neck, and he slid over onto his back and took her in his arms, with her head on his shoulder, and it felt very good. He wanted to tell her he loved her, but he couldn’t speak: everything was too vivid, as though all his nerve endings were exposed, and the difference between pleasure and pain was slight. He needed to be silent for a while, to discover whether this new and perilous existence could be sustained.
CHAPTER 6
Moth and Behemoth
He woke gently, with that Christmas-Day feeling of something delicious having happened that he had forgotten about while asleep. He moved slightly and felt a responding movement beside him, and knew he was not in his own bed and not alone, and everything came back to him all-of-a-piece. He opened his eyes. In the light from the window he looked at her, curled on her side, sleeping quietly. The covers had slipped off her, and she seemed all made of curves, strongly indented at the waist, richly rounded at breast and hip. Her hair looked soft and heavy as if it were moulded from bullion, too dense to curl, each lock lying separately like the petals of a bronze chrysanthemum.
He reached out a hand to push it from her face and she smiled and moved her face to his hand. He smoothed her eyebrows and the smiling dents at the corners of her mouth, and her face felt pliant and flowing under his fingers as if he could shape her. He felt powerful. The world outside was dark and damp like something newborn, and it was all his. She shivered suddenly, and he drew her to him and pulled the covers over her. She stretched gratefully in the restored warmth, and her hand contacted his penis, and it rose to meet her.
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