‘To kill a woman without trace, Doctor, would take some skill, wouldn’t it?’
She looked at him with scarcely more approval than she had granted to Todd. They were both imbeciles, one slightly better than the other.
‘Yes.’
‘Medical skill?’
What did he think she meant? The skill of an engineer?
‘Maybe a plumber,’ she said. ‘A medical plumber.’
That was what they all were, Anna Stirland thought as she tidied the third surgery, aligning the instruments in order, wiping the padded examination table with antiseptic and then putting a new sheet of paper over the top. Sensitive technicians in human tubing. The idea was to make them feel that internal examination was no more than having in the plumber to take a quick look at the drains, and all this was going to be as relaxing as half an hour on a sunbed, although rather more expensive. No prescriptions without examination, no surgery without express permission, sympathy unlimited, but absolutely nothing doing at all without money up front. The voice of the receptionist, asking how miss or madam would like to pay, writing down a credit card number like one transcribing a precious secret, was only as dulcet as her own asking, Are you sure this is what you want to do? It’s only a little scrape, dear. Oh, hello, Miss Smith. Are you back again? How odd it was that even women in extremes of anxiety were prone to fall in love with the doctor and ignore the nurse. How odd it was that such a variety of people came here, even those whose general practitioners offered free access to advice and treatment they could otherwise ill afford. Ah, but there was something about payment which was supposed to guarantee quality and safety, discretion and soft, soft hands. Of course, one would have to pay for a clinic which offered such individual attention and such comprehensive appreciation of the whole female psyche. From the waist down.
Of course they did good, she argued with herself; they helped women avoid the ruination of their own lives. And they gave one doctor a playground.
Anna often fancied she could hear the echo of a baby crying in the murmuring quiet of this place.
She scrunched the used paper from the couch and put it into a sealed bin. A nice little girl, the one who had left, happy with her cap and happy with her life, and, like most of them, squeaky clean for her visit. If only they would not wear perfume, as if embarrassed by any possibility of their own smell. Clean underwear for the doctor, as if this was a brand-new date, and no thought about how he might be allergic to their artificial scent while being immune to what was natural. No, that little girl with her steady relationship and determined control over her own future would not be one the good doctor would choose.
It would be someone like Brigid Connor, Anna surmised. Someone who came in full of fear, who would have worn a paper bag over her head if she could, because the mere fact of begging a doctor to find something wrong with her, and then pleading for the means to avoid a late and dreaded pregnancy, was so obviously wicked that she had shaken with the fear of it. That was the type of person.
Anna told herself she only wanted to know what he was doing. Why it was he accessed certain personal details from the confidential records again and again, preferring the ones he had treated with conspicuous tenderness. Why he could continue to express such interest in the insecure, sometimes the downright ugly, and then treat her as he had.
Passing down a long corridor, footsteps silent on the carpeted floor, she paused to nip a bud from a plant. She took a deep breath, knocked and assembled a brilliant smile. ‘Tonight OK, then?’ was all she would ask. And he would say, ‘Yes, fine.’
Her house would be bursting with flowers. The window-boxes she was creating for Rose were beginning to flourish in the backyard.
Rose stood by the office door, pulling faces at Helen’s back. She had said hello twice to no response. Miss West gazed through the window and there was a suspicious smell of cigarette smoke. ‘Tut, tut, tut,’ Rose said loudly; Redwood would never forgive that. Major disaster, perhaps; general cock-ups in the administration of justice; poor timekeeping; innocent souls languishing in prison; cases lost by negligence; anything which would not easily be found out, but an infringement of the clear-desk and no-smoking policies was certainly a hanging offence.
‘Wake up, Helen, there’s a good girl. Oh, what are they doing now?’ The occupants of the office over the road never failed to cause amusement. It was like watching a video without the sound; trying to decode the body language from a distance of twenty metres and through two panes of glass. Once they had all seen a fight and since then Rose and Helen watched all the time. Nothing quite as exciting had happened since, forcing Rose to invent a situation of seething rivalry between two men in suits lorded over by a lady of large size, indeterminate years and sultry authority.
‘She’s putting on weight again,’ Rose said, pointing. ‘Shame, after she was doing so well on that diet. All those apples. She’ll have to stop pigging out at lunch-time. Hamburger and chips, I’ve seen. What’s the matter? Speak to me. I’ve brought you a memo.’
‘Great. Do you suppose someone has given her a memo about her weight and that’s why she hasn’t spoken to anyone all afternoon? That one at the other end, for instance? The one who could be Redwood’s cousin?’
Rose peered. ‘Oh, yeah, for sure. He looks the type. They could do with a few plants over there. It always looks like an open-plan greenhouse recently visited by locusts. Oh, and I bought you some flowers to go with the memo, in case Redwood forgot; you know what he’s like.’
A small and delicate bunch of freesias landed, without ceremony, on the crowded desk.
‘Thanks,’ said Helen, touched and, only as an afterthought, suspicious. ‘What have I done to deserve this?’
‘Nothing,’ Rose said carelessly, running fingers through the spikes of her hair. ‘Only I heard on the Michael grapevine about everyone being out looking for that bastard Ryan. They all had it in this morning’s briefings. I didn’t think it was the kind of news which would be making for a happy atmosphere at home, that’s all.’
‘No,’ said Helen. ‘It won’t.’
She yawned and stretched. The scent of the flowers drifted upon her and she had a sudden and inexplicable urge to cry. Any act of kindness could have that effect, but she rallied since there was no point in public tearfulness if she could not explain it and she knew she did not want to make the attempt.
‘So what does the memo say?’
Rose shrugged and offered a chewy peppermint, her panacea for all office ills.
‘Reorganization. Again. Me to go to outer Mongolia and you to go to Special Casework. Extradition, forgery, counterfeiting, a lot of it about. No more rape.’
‘That’ll be the day,’ Helen said. ‘Which part of outer Mongolia?’
‘Camberwell Green. He told me he thinks you’re bad for me.’
This time, the urge to cry was becoming real.
‘Maybe he just thinks rape isn’t good for either of us.’
‘C’mon, Helen. It isn’t good for anyone.’
The afternoon was thunderously dark, the rain gentle and relentless.
Rain filled the pond which Ryan had dug in his garden and lined with polythene before leaving it incomplete. Mary Ryan, along with the youngest child, who was wearing bright-red wellington boots, both threw clods of earth into the hole which had been designed for exotic fish and now resembled nothing more than an overlarge puddle. The child whooped with delight; Daddy might as well have made him a scarecrow or a makeshift coconut shy, or simply have given him something to smash or throw things at. And where was Daddy now? And why had the house been turned upside down? All a game, darling; Daddy’s lost his cheque book and these friends of his are trying to find it. And Mummy isn’t saying anything about the note which Daddy left, which she destroyed not because it told her to do so but because it made her incoherent with anger. ‘Got to go,’ it said. ‘Things to do, or we’ll never get this sorted … can’t explain more, yet.’ As if he had ever explained anything at
all. No, please believe me, I love you etc., not that sentimental words or promises loomed large in their relationship, but there were points like this when she might have clung to any endearment or plea for help. So she had stood by, mutinous, unco-operative and monosyllabic while the house was searched, only vaguely grateful for the fact that her status as a detective’s wife, even one charged with rape and suspected of worse, meant that they were tidier and more considerate than they might have been. She remembered his tales, told with glee when he was a younger man, of how easy it was to trash a house when some guilty thief had flown. The only other saving grace was the absence of Bailey from the grim-faced number. She would have hit him with a hammer.
‘Time to go indoors, love. We’re soaked through.’
The child was too old to be playing such childish games. Retrograde behaviour, like her own in stuffing her face with chocolate and making herself feel sick. Maybe Ryan had dug the hole for the pond as a place to bury himself. She wished he had.
Then she looked at his flowers, the shrubs, the blooms, the riot of colour which had been his creation. In the damp air of the early evening, she tried to convince herself that he was incapable of savagery, but she could not. The only things Ryan loved were plants and children: growing things. Women were never in the same league.
Women could be stupid, but only as stupid as men. Stupidity was the place of last resort and Helen knew she had reached it when she realized she was calling herself a silly bitch and then correcting the description to say – on the top deck of the bus, watching as the rain ceased and a sky appeared, purple as a fresh bruise – that although she merited the description of silly, giddy, irrational from time to time, it wasn’t a constant state of being and, try as she might, she was not what she herself would call a bitch. A female dog was never, as far as she knew, accredited with anything more malicious than a habit of fighting with a competitor when under the influence of hormones, and then fighting twice as hard to protect her young. It wasn’t such a bad thing to be a bitch. Silly bitch was nothing more than a description for a kind of giddiness, a lack of steadiness in the head, an imbalance of vanity against reality, the optimism of prettiness against the ugliness of age and so on. It was Bailey who loved the Oxford English Dictionary, with its definitions of so many words which had become, essentially, so bloody meaningless. Like ‘bloody’, for instance. A word removed to the fringe of language, by misuse.
Helen got indoors, with the sky still purple, and set about the task of clearing up the kitchen debris, working to some mental calendar which told her rubbish was collected tomorrow. The desire to weep for no particular reason other than a universal sense of failure was still prevalent.
After a cursory rummage round, the sink was clear and the rubbish sack in the bin underneath was far too full. She rammed it down with force, trying to be deliberate. The second finger on her right hand shoved itself against the rim of the chicken soup can of the day before yesterday, standing proud with its nasty serrated rim. What a lot of blood, she thought bleakly; what an awful lot for such a pedestrian accident, and what a very distinctive, unmistakable colour fresh blood has. She was running her finger under the tap at the time, wondering if traces of chicken soup could be infectious, condemning herself for choosing the kind of sustenance so bland to the taste and yet with a container so malicious. She was thinking, too, about whether the disablement of this little digit could stop her holding a cigarette for ever. The desire to cry was ever stronger.
She moved her finger from the kitchen sink, swathed it in layers of kitchen towel and still it bled. On the floor, in the sink, wherever she tried to keep it out of harm’s way, it bled. She managed to avoid drops on the carpet, but any admonition to her finger did nothing more than make it spout blood even faster. She held it above her head, like a trophy, wrapped in kitchen towel and still it bled. The Elastoplast was somewhere, she forgot where, inaccessible. Finally, she went into the garden. Blood was surely good for the soil.
The rain had stopped, but the sky had turned from purple to a bleak grey.
Signs of neglect out here, Helen remarked to herself, crossing her hands across her chest. Anna Stirland said you had a care of your plants if you could stop them throttling one another. Which, revived by rain, they were about the business of doing; she imagined she could see them moving, the whole thing a jungle, praying for attention, made aggressive by nourishment.
Gloves, then; let the finger bleed inside the sleeve of her stiff gardening gloves, hanging by the door, awaiting a mood like this, when care and control of the garden seemed more important than anything, if only as a substitute for control over her own life. Nothing hurt when she worked in the garden; she would surprise herself later with the discovery of unconsciously acquired scratches on arms, legs and torso, regarding them proudly as symbols of the fact that, though she might not be an expert, something in this small wilderness had received the benefit of her energy.
There was a school playground on the other side of the high wall which bounded the back of Helen’s garden and made it so private. She liked the presence of the children she never saw, although on days at home she heard the raucous playground screams, always amazed at the sheer exuberance of their noise and the deafening nature of the quiet which followed. Remembering now, as it grew dark and silent around her, how long it had taken to feel safe in this garden. She pulled at the convolvulus which made the ivy look shaggy, tore at it as if it was a real enemy and, as the pile of weedy rubbish grew on the grass, she felt the beginnings of satisfaction. The dark grew gently deeper, summer dusk turning inky black, so that soon the only light spilt from the kitchen window and it was silly to go on. Helen paused, thirsty, and turned to go indoors.
It was then she saw a figure crossing the patch of light, disappearing into the shadows. Her elderly cat had died in the spring and its presence haunted her still, but she knew it was not the cat, or any ghost. She was suddenly engulfed with a fear which was at once strange and yet appallingly familiar. There was more than one kind of ghost in this garden. Bailey would not joke like this: he knew her fears and respected them, but all the same she called his name, her voice quavering uncertainly.
‘Bailey? That you?’
Silence. The tree which shrouded the corner seemed to sigh, shuffling a full head of leaves and loosening the very last of the rain. The scrape of a shoe on stone.
It was a small garden by country standards, large in urban terms, but now it felt enormous, the distance between herself and the back door the length of a long minefield. She stumbled in her headlong run to the rectangle of light which represented safety, her glove skidding against the rough surface of the wall, her hair flicking into her eyes, all of her sick with fear. Falling into his arms.
There were lights from the upstairs windows of the houses on either side, their promise a mockery. Her scream ascended unheeded as she had known it would; she was in the midst of a crowded street and it made no difference. The creature who twisted her body round so that he held her neck and clamped a dirty hand over her mouth might as well have been holding her over a cliff on a shoreline devoid of humanity for all the help she could summon.
‘Shut up,’ he snarled. ‘Shut up.’
She nodded her head, let her body go limp. The hand moved from her mouth to her throat, his other arm pinioning her round the waist, pressing her against his groin.
‘Lovely Miss West,’ his voice murmured. ‘And you never knew I cared.’
She could feel his penis stir against the soft flesh of her buttocks; his palm strayed to brush across her breast and a deep shudder passed through her. Then she began to tremble.
‘Obviously mutual,’ the voice continued. ‘Always knew you fancied me rotten. Shall we go inside, love? Get ourselves comfy, eh?’
It was Todd who kept stating his wonderment about how Ryan could disappear, repeating himself stupidly without thinking about what he was saying. Bailey had no such confusion and he was bored of listening to the ramblings of frus
tration. Despite his years as an officer, Todd had never somehow taken to the streets; he had formed no affiliations there and still could not understand how a man like Ryan, who had so often failed to make his own way home in the evening, could remain at large now. Bailey thought the quickest way to flush him out would be to stop his credit cards; let him play cat and mouse if he would; he himself was tired of the game and angry with Ryan for prolonging it.
‘I feel sorry for the boyfriend,’ Todd said, nursing his pint like someone slightly afraid of it, sitting there in the uncomfortable company of Bailey, guilty for being in a pub at all, but knowing he would feel guiltier if he simply gave up. He was like a dog gnawing at a bone, turning it over with one paw and chewing the other end. If he had been Ryan, he would have given up on the subject long before now and gone on to his summer holidays.
‘He seemed a decent bloke,’ Todd went on.
‘He probably is,’ Bailey agreed, recalling a lad with a large ever-mobile Adam’s apple and eyes full of tears, whose stress he had thought owed as much to fear as to grief. Eyes darting everywhere whenever they forgot to maintain a self-consciously sincere contact with those of his interlocutors. Lying about something, Bailey thought; the boy was suspiciously relieved to have it stressed that his dearly beloved had not died of strangulation, and even more suspiciously confused and angry to learn there had been no signs of sexual attack. Then he had cried. Bailey had disliked him even more than the manageress in the shop where Shelley Pelmore worked: a bitch from hell, who, even in the midst of genuine shock and tears, remembered to flirt. Bailey had failed to tell Todd that after this pint he was going back to see her.
‘Did I hear tell you were getting married?’ Todd was asking, trying too late in the day to be conversational. ‘A triumph of hope over experience, is it?’
Only Ryan was allowed to tease and Bailey could feel himself about to snap, until he realized it had slipped his mind. Slipped? The thought of marriage had sunk like a stone. When was it? Next week? Tomorrow? Christ, tomorrow. Perhaps, after all, he was already married; to Ryan. Go home, Todd, he urged silently. Go home and let me get on.
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