‘You would suit lace,’ Anna said, her face suddenly breaking into a grin which did indeed show dimples, hollowed into the cheeks, bunching the flesh of her face into a picture of good nature. ‘You could get away with lace and ribbons. Rose tells me you’re getting married.’ She could deflect conversation away from herself with suspicious ease, Helen observed; she did it as to the manner born. They could quite easily have sat as they were and discussed the wedding garments.
‘I hate lace, ribbons, buckles and bows,’ Helen said. ‘And Rose tells me you were attacked and can’t talk about it. Can’t, won’t. Rose talks a lot, about other people.’
‘So does my aunt. I didn’t swear her to secrecy. Obviously not,’ Anna said, quick to defend Rose. ‘I’ve been dripping on people, that’s all. I shouldn’t have. Rose is too young and too happy, it isn’t fair.’
She leant back in her chair, which creaked under considerable rather than formidable weight. Shapely weight, as if all her proportions were exaggerated. Not fat, simply too much. Not a lady for wearing Lycra, that was all.
Helen liked her. She had liked her on first sight. For all her reserve, she could fall into instant and profound liking and, all of a sudden, it was imperative to help. She put to one side the thought of Bailey’s terse phone call with the news about Ryan; also the daily cases which made it seem that rape was an epidemic, sexual assault an everyday occurrence which she judged by a set of well-established, horribly objective criteria. The questions here were different.
Anna Stirland shrugged and let out a sigh.
‘I’m a nurse,’ she said. ‘A midwife. A competent caring person with professional skills. I’ve been wiping bums since childhood.’ She hesitated. ‘In other words, I’m one of nature’s sensible people and I’m ashamed of how I’ve dealt with this so far. And yes, I can talk to you; I have to. Perhaps you could regard it as a piece of dictation. Take it down like a lawyer. That way it might make sense.’
‘I shan’t fall into a fit of the vapours,’ Helen said.
‘Because you’ve heard it all before?’ Anna asked mildly. ‘You haven’t, you know. I bet you haven’t.’
At six-thirty in the evening, Detective Sergeant Ryan was formally suspended from duty, denied access to his office and instructed to go home and await the result of enquiries. His own detective chief inspector did this with Todd as witness, Bailey lurking on the sidelines. Ryan looked as if they were sending him out into the world naked, Todd thought with some satisfaction. The DCI thought the same, albeit with greater sympathy. Ryan had been so indefatigably popular, a man’s man with a taste for women; the sort they admired. It was Bailey who arranged the car to take Ryan away; no one else had formed Bailey’s conclusion that if left unattended, Ryan’s departure from the station would demonstrate the shortest route between the back door and the nearest public house. Ryan looked at him wryly, each of them second-guessing the other.
Bailey watched the car disappear, driven by a woman constable. He wondered what, if anything, the two of them would say to one another and reminded himself to ask her later, slightly ashamed of the subterfuge. The pursuit of truth was all, was it not? All legitimate means were allowed. Or perhaps the pursuit of some niggling ambition that Ryan would let slip in private to the driver, some definitive clue to his own innocence. Rape is a crime which calls for vengeance, Todd had said portentously, revealing a churchgoing tendency.
Barring Bailey’s progress in the carpark stood a blonde girl, hands on hips, looking at him belligerently. He recognized her as a detective, one of Ryan’s sexual offences team. It occurred to him that, so far, the irony of Ryan’s current work taken in conjunction with the offence they would likely charge him with, had escaped him. Yesterday, Bailey had been giving Ryan advice on the diplomacy of dealing with incredulous parents; today, he was en route to see another set, the ones who belonged to Ryan’s own victim. It was all offensively circular.
‘Sally Smythe, sir. What are we supposed to do with Ryan’s cases?’ It was an accusation, spat out with minimal pretence at politeness.
‘I don’t know. Carry on. He won’t be back for some time.’
The blonde looked at him as if he was solely responsible for the doubling of her workload, the demise of her life and the appearance of her first grey hairs. Bailey began to walk towards his car, away from Todd; there was an implicit invitation for her to fall into step beside him.
‘Which was his biggest case?’
‘They’re all big. Indecent assault, buggery, you name it. And he had an ongoing thing … Oh, shit.’ She was gabbling, on the verge of tears. ‘How could he do it, sir? How could he?’
‘To you? To me? To the victim?’ Bailey asked lightly, touching her arm with the slightest gesture, enough to suggest commiseration, but not camaraderie.
‘He was good,’ she said fiercely. ‘Really good. Getting better. I know none of us liked the appointment at first, but he had this case, eighteen months ago. Broke his heart. After that, he seemed, well, he seemed able to identify with the victims. If we can’t, he said, who can?’
‘Tomorrow at ten,’ Bailey said, watching Todd catching up, ‘I’d like to look at all his casework. There might be a clue to his alleged behaviour. It is only alleged, you know.’
She nodded dumbly, peeled away and left him to watch her plodding footsteps with regret. If Ryan’s career was blighted, then so, by infection, was hers.
The evening sun raised a pink haze as they drove north, Bailey at the wheel with no need to consult a map. Vague directions would do equally well; he had known these streets since childhood. They were in the no man’s land where Islington merges with King’s Cross in a series of used-car dealerships, traffic lights and treeless thoroughfares which hide from view the pleasanter, leafier roads of a mixed hinterland. They sat behind a belching bus, watching it shiver with fumes in the heat, Bailey longing for the privilege of a fast vehicle with a siren to move everything from their path. Traffic cried for vengeance, as well as rape. He scorched past the bus and into the side-streets, put on a turn of speed through a series of back-doubles. He flung the car round corners on a small industrial estate, took it up a cobbled alley-way, round the back of a parking lot and back on to the main route again, tyres screaming. When they arrived at number fourteen Roman Court, Todd was pale and Bailey felt calmer, not ashamed for shaking his passenger’s composure.
They would not be talking to the victim. She was resting in her own flat, her mother said, and that was not, in any event, the purpose of the visit. Bailey had seen her statement already, it was background he wanted. Something to make the girl more than a silhouette and a name on paper. Something, perhaps, to stop himself disliking her.
The parents were not of the kind accustomed to being deferential to the police. Middle years, old enough to have watched Dixon of Dock Green on TV and then read three decades of newspapers detailing the destruction of that avuncular image. Mr Pelmore had twice been stopped for speeding and Mrs Pelmore had once been the victim of an overzealous store detective, so both of them were experts on the law. They saw themselves as minority honest citizens; fully employed, subject to harassment. Shelley, their daughter, was one of three children. Looking around, Bailey imagined he could guess an enthusiasm to leave home, even, as in Shelley’s case, to live with a boyfriend less than two miles away.
‘She’s a good girl,’ the mother said, as if anyone had yet suggested otherwise. ‘A sweet girl. Quiet.’
A parent would always claim a girl was good. Bailey had waited years for one to boast that his or her child was gloriously, colourfully bad. The father was silent. Both sat in their living room, defiantly occupying their regular oatmeal fabric covered chairs with uncomfortable wooden arms. Two dining chairs had been produced for the officers to sit facing them, perhaps to emphasize the fact that the interview was on sufferance. Tea was not offered. The room itself personified contemporary gloom: dark-blue carpet, patterned blue curtains, light-blue wallpaper with heavy borders near the c
eiling, fittings of orangey-coloured wood. The shelves housed no books, but contained instead carefully arranged china figures of ladies in crinolines, shepherds and shepherdesses, dogs, cats and horses, all prancing together in sterile contemplation of a large loud clock on the opposite wall. Everything was depressingly tidy. Bailey remembered that his own flat had been given a similar description by Helen some time since, but his flat was different. It was eclectic. There was another passing thought, as he let the words flow over and around him, while he arranged his own face in an expression of rapt and kindly concentration. Would he and Helen sit thus, in chairs like this, when they reached the stage of Darby and Joan? The thought made him shudder. He never wanted to be fastidious. Not about emotion; not about anything.
‘Yes,’ said father at last. ‘A very good girl. Always worked, Shell. Never cost us.’ Bailey could not help himself, he leant forward with his arms resting on his thin knees. His legs were too long for the narrow room; Todd thought he had a face like a hatchet.
‘What exactly do you mean by “good”? Do you mean good in school, good at helping blind people at zebra crossings, kind to animals, or not many boyfriends?’ He spoke with all the congeniality of a cobra, but quietly, scratching his head as an afterthought to suggest genuine confusion. Both mum and dad bridled; mother spoke first.
‘I mean a good girl, that’s what I mean! Not one of those dole spongers! And she lives with this decent bloke. Been going out with him since she was sixteen. Works hard, he does, too. Electrician; works shifts. They got a flat on a mortgage. Getting married.’ She spat the last with a note of triumph.
‘She liked animals,’ father added as a delayed reaction. ‘Least, she did when she was a kid.’
Mother darted from her chair and produced a photo album, as if by magic. She placed it on Bailey’s lap with a smart thump and retreated to her own seat to sit with folded arms. Todd sensed a conversational hiatus, filled it blithely, looking at the bovine face of dad.
‘What kind of animals?’
‘Pardon?’
‘She didn’t really like animals,’ mother interrupted, anxious to avoid anything which might suggest a lack of hygiene in any sense. ‘Only gerbils and things.’
Bailey was suffering from a desperate desire to laugh, another to scream. He was turning the pages of the album, seeing Shelley as an overdressed baby, held aloft by her mother like a trophy; Shelley at school, earnest in socks; Shelley with her mates and cousins on her thirteenth birthday, a pretty child, refusing to smile for the camera. He felt only relief that these parents had never met the age of the camcorder, the better to depict in movement what was, to his jaundiced view, that fleeting sly expression of their child. Did not like animals. Having reached the point where the photos tailed off, Shelley aged fifteen, he snapped the album shut and placed it back in Mrs P’s lap. She had the impression of a large pale ghost coming towards her and retreating, quailed slightly and blinked. By the time she looked again, he was back as he had been, legs crossed this time.
‘When was she getting married?’ Todd asked, looking like an earnest bank manager, almost cocking his hand behind an ear for the reply.
‘What do you mean, was? She still is, isn’t she? Next month, sometime. She isn’t dead, is she?’
Oh, she lied, she lied. All mothers know the date of a daughter’s wedding. Did they? Bailey was getting married himself, sometime next month. When the weather was fine, whenever; month decided, date not fixed; a register office do. Left deliberately vague, God help them both. Summer, Helen had said. We’ll think about the arrangements two weeks before. It occurred to him, in this frozen room, just why they might both be so diffident. This daughter’s mother seemed to regard a wedding as a prize for winning a race.
‘He’s a lovely lad, her fiancée,’ Mrs Pelmore said fondly. ‘Lovely. It was him reported it. Then, after the police came, he phoned me. He’s good to her. Steady.’
‘Did you know about her other involvement with the police?’ Todd asked.
‘She’s never been in trouble with the police,’ dad cut in.
‘I know,’ Todd said easily. ‘But there was an occasion, not long ago, when she went out clubbing with a friend, and the friend had an accident on the way home. Shelley helped us with information. We think that’s how she met Mr Ryan.’
Mrs Pelmore looked blank.
‘How often do you see Shelley?’ Bailey asked.
There was a long fidgeting pause. Mother opened her mouth to speak and closed it again. Father hauled himself upright, the bones of his elbows crunching on the uncomfortable chair. Mother put out a warning hand which he ignored.
‘She never comes near us,’ he said flatly. ‘Not if she can help it. He comes, though, her boy. He comes to see us. That’s how we know how she is.’
‘I know,’ said Anna Stirland, ‘about rape. Oh, I don’t mean in a legal sense, I mean I know about violation. I work with women, you see. It’s a kind of violation, having a baby you don’t want, by a man you don’t love. I don’t meet many men, though in my kind of environment there are a lot of them around. Men seem to like me well enough, but they don’t, well, look at me. I’m one of the lads, a good sport; they’ll put that on my gravestone. To tell the truth, I don’t do much looking either; no point in a great lump like me flirting, is there? Only when I look at these baby kids, I know how I’d like my life to go: in the direction of a household with a nice man and a couple of children. Especially children. Well, I’m over thirty and the prospect gets ever more remote. I just don’t like men well enough to try. Then I met John. That isn’t his real name. I’m not going to tell you his real name.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’ll see. And if this is dictation, you aren’t supposed to interrupt.’
‘Sorry.’
‘He worked in the same place as me. We got on well. I used to watch his hands and think, God, you are the most beautiful creature nature ever invented. He had all the humanity I like in a man; vulnerability, too. Not the sort of drivel you’d put in a statement, is it? I suppose it might have been obvious that I went into spasms whenever I saw him, but the others didn’t seem to notice, so I thought he hadn’t either. We copers have self-control, you know. Yes, you probably do know. What would have been more obvious was the fact that I sparkled when he was around, became the life and soul of the party, full of wit and energy. Falling in love must be like that. I’ve always hated the phrase. I thought the best thing would be to be friends first, let love, or whatever you choose to call it, grow like a plant. But desire isn’t like that, is it? It’s a bloody affliction. It has nothing to do with approval, mutual feeling and appreciation, nothing at all. It’s a ghastly virus, immune to medicine.’
She gulped her wine. Helen sat in front of her notepad, trying to make herself as anonymous as a shorthand-taker at a board meeting.
‘And we were friends, I thought. He has a special smile he reserved for me; he seemed to seek me out, even when every other female in the place simpered and would have thrown their knickers at him, given half the chance. So I let hope spring eternal. Perhaps one day he’d say, let’s have a drink? How about dinner sometime? The one thing I wasn’t going to do was make the suggestion: I was too scared of rejection. I sort of prayed it would come from him. It’s always better to live in hope than risk the negative, don’t you think? Well, it is if you look like me. Such sensitivity, I have.’
Her fingernails were neatly trimmed, Helen noticed. There were flecks of paint on the back of both wrists. Anna stuffed her hands into the long sleeves of the kaftan she wore, as if hiding them.
‘But no, he didn’t take whatever bait I was offering, not in months, and then he was posted somewhere else. A man with a career path, you see. I was devastated at the thought of not seeing him again. So there I was, acting out of character, saying, why don’t you come round to supper before you go? He said he couldn’t, but he’d drop round for a drink sometime. I had to be content with that. Had to? I was content. Doesn’
t take much to please me. I worshipped him.’
Helen caught a waft of scent from the garden. It would be pleasant to eat at this table, with the doors open like this and the blaze of flowers outside.
‘I waited, of course one waits, but not all the time. He turned up, like they do, when least expected. It was that hot spell, a couple of weeks since; freakishly hot. Midnight or so, too late for a casual call. I looked a mess; it made me flustered. I was in the living room.’ She jerked her head in the direction of the first room off the hall which Helen had only noticed briefly. ‘I was doing my ironing. Well I tried to smooth myself down, fetched us a drink, but it isn’t easy to look both alluring and casual when all you have on is a long T-shirt. I was too flustered to get the ice; he did that.’ She gulped.
‘I put down the drinks: gin and tonic, first things first; I was joking and had my back to him. I wanted to unplug the iron, put the board away, because I didn’t want the damn thing littering up the room. I wanted … I wanted him to see what a nice room it was. Admire me for it. Pathetic, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ Helen said. ‘It isn’t.’
‘And then he was on me. No preliminaries, no nothing. I thought at first he was hugging me from behind, fooling around, and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want a quick poke, for God’s sake; even I can get one of those if I want nothing more. I wanted sweet words, admiration, some sort of tentative beginning, some curiosity about me … Oh, I don’t know what I wanted, I didn’t even want him to see my bare knees.’ Her voice fell into silence. Helen wondered if it was permissible to smoke a cigarette and decided not.
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