Sour Grapes

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Talked mainly. Oh, and ate and drank a lot, and helped Willow with her baby.’ Emma paused and then added casually, ‘She did say that the next time I go I must take you with me.’

  ‘She knows about me?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Great.’ Jag watched her across the room, unsmiling. After a moment, he added, ‘What does she know?’

  ‘That we’re friends, that you’re immensely tall and come from the other side of the world.’ Emma laughed suddenly, impatient with her own doubts. ‘I could see exactly what else she wanted to ask, but I didn’t see why I should indulge her curiosity.’

  ‘Quite right. She’s got no right to question you about your friends.’

  Frustrated that Jag did not seem to have picked up that hint either, Emma asked herself how long it would be before she had grown out of the last of the rules she had been taught and learned how to say exactly what she wanted. It seemed absurd to go on giving Jag signals he did not even notice.

  After all, she said to herself, what on earth would it matter if she told him she found him madly attractive and wanted more than almost anything else to go to bed with him?

  The answer to that question was easy enough: she might not be able to bear it if he turned her down.

  Apparently unaware of any of the doubts or frustrations in Emma’s mind, Jag poured the last of the beer down his throat and put the little bottle on the floor beside the untouched glass.

  ‘I ought to get back. Are you going to Wright’s lecture tomorrow?’

  ‘I hadn’t planned to. Should I?’

  ‘Well it is on lying.’

  ‘Oh, great!’ Emma tried to concentrate on thoughts of work instead of the increasingly vivid image she had of the two of them making love. ‘Jag, thank you. I haven’t been paying proper attention to anything for weeks and I’d have missed it if you hadn’t noticed. And thank you for meeting me tonight, too. That was way beyond the call of friendship.’

  ‘I wanted to see you,’ he said, casually blowing her a kiss. He looked even larger than usual as he stood up, taking up most of the spare space in her small, cluttered room. ‘I’ll catch you at the lecture tomorrow.’

  ‘Sure. And I’ll restock the chillybin with bigger bottles of something more macho before your next visit.’

  He laughed at that and came back from the door to kiss her properly, holding her by the shoulders with enough firmness to make her even more impatient with herself. She held his bristly face between her hands, hoping to encourage him, but he pulled back almost at once.

  When he had collected his two helmets and gone, Emma told herself she would do better next time. She washed her face in very cold water, which made her feel more in control of herself, and then picked up the small pile of messages and letters she had taken from the pigeonhole. There was a note from her supervisor, asking her to ring him, another from a woman who worked in the language labs and was helping her to analyse some of her more puzzling polygraph results, and a letter from her mother.

  She opened that and was relieved to see that it was a relatively anodyne account of the people she had seen since she last wrote, the books she had read, and her plans for opening her garden in aid of the Macmillan nurses during the summer. She did include the usual lament that Emma had not been home for so long and that she was not going to meet any of the sort of people she could possibly marry at a university like St Albans. But its tone was fairly easy to take, and at least there were none of the familiar comments about how disappointed Emma’s father would have been by her odd behaviour and unsuitable friends.

  He had died just before she left school and, even though he had always seemed just as conventional as her mother, it was one of Emma’s most cherished private beliefs that he would have found a way to approve of what she was trying to do. She remembered him as being a fundamentally kind man, if unaware of what she was really like, and he had occasionally shown signs of being able to believe that people who were different from himself might be almost as valuable. That was something the rest of the family were quite unable to accept.

  Emma put her mother’s letter at the back of her desk to remind her to answer it quickly and got out Jane’s file.

  Three hours later she was still reading its contents, having learned a great deal about Andrew Lutterworth, his car, the accident, and the woman who had died with her child, but nothing at all about why his wife should have been certain that he was innocent.

  At no stage in the trial or the preceding investigation had anyone suggested that the crashed car had not been Lutterworth’s. He had used it every day to drive from his home in Berkshire to work, leaving it in an underground car park where his firm rented his space for all the senior partners. It shut every evening at 8.30 so that people wanting to work later than that had to retrieve their cars by 8.25 and put them in one of the streets outside the office, where restrictions were lifted at half past six.

  Andrew Lutterworth claimed at his trial that that was precisely what he had done. There had been no spaces left directly outside the front of his office and so he had put the car in a neighbouring side street and run back to the building through the rain. When he had emerged from his room just after 10.30, having finished an urgent piece of work, he looked for the car and could not find it. At first assuming that he had merely mis-remembered the parking space he had found, he had walked all round the possible streets. But there was no sign of the car in any of them. He had returned to the original space, seen that it would have been big enough for his car, checked the local landmarks and decided that he had definitely left it there.

  He had then telephoned the local police from his mobile to report the theft. Once they had taken all his details, he had rung his wife to explain what had happened and announce that he would spend the night in their one-bedroomed Barbican flat, hire a car the following day and be with her as soon as he could make it in the evening.

  The constable who had answered his original call had made thorough notes, but there had been no officers available to visit the site of the theft or talk to Lutterworth face to face. No one had expressed surprise at that. After all, there was nothing to see, and police stations were no longer staffed lavishly enough for unproductive meetings.

  Lutterworth claimed that as soon as he had finished making his telephoned report he had walked to his flat, where he had stripped off his rain-soaked clothes, hung them up in the shower cabinet to drip dry, and had a bath. After that he had made himself a toasted cheese sandwich from supplies kept in the freezer and gone straight to bed, only to be woken some three hours later by police officers accusing him of having been involved in a fatal accident in Buckinghamshire. They asked him to provide them with the clothes he had been wearing that evening and accompany them to the local station to await officers from Buckinghamshire.

  Emma looked up from the batch of scribbled notes, wishing that they were easier to read. She thought she could imagine the scene. Lutterworth, by then dressed in pyjamas, sleepy and puzzled (or pretending to be), would have led the police to the bathroom to show them his suit and shoes dripping into the tiled shower cabinet. Seeing the clothes, perhaps wet enough to have had smears of blood and oil rinsed out of them, the police must have felt reasonably confident that they had got their man.

  Squinting to refocus her tired eyes, Emma went back to the file. She saw with relief that the next note was typed. It stated that Lutterworth’s car had been discovered at the scene of the accident by a motorist coming from the opposite direction a little before eleven o’clock. He had found the bodies and, having no mobile telephone of his own, had run to the nearest house to ask the owner to call the police. He had then returned to the scene. Having realised that there was nothing he could do for either the woman or the child, he had felt the car’s bonnet and later told the police that it had been only faintly warm. He had waited, as a good citizen should, until they arrived, when he had given them a precise account of his movements, his name and address.

 
; The police had discovered a half-empty whisky bottle rolling about on the carpet on the passenger side of the crashed car. Although there was a driver’s airbag, which had inflated, there was not one on the passenger’s side. The window on the passenger’s side had been broken and there were faint traces of blood on some of the pieces of glass found within the car near the front passenger seat. It was later discovered that the blood could not be matched to either the dead woman or her baby.

  As she read that, Emma skipped through the rest of the file in search of any more reports on the scientific evidence that might include a statement that the blood had come from Andrew Lutterworth. Interestingly there was nothing. She was sure that the Mercury would have reported anything that supported their view that Lutterworth was guilty.

  She went back to reading the notes and cuttings in chronological order. The forensic scientists had discovered plenty of Lutterworth’s fingerprints in the car, which was hardly surprising, and plenty of others, including some smudges that suggested gloved hands had touched the wheel and the doors. That did not seem surprising either. Lots of drivers used gloves on cold days. There were many different hairs and fibres in the car, but none of them seemed to have been of any use to either the prosecution or the defence.

  What was more damning for Lutterworth was the fact that none of the car’s locks had been forced and, in spite of the crash, the alarm system had been discovered to be in full working order. During his interview he had told the police that neither he nor his wife had ever lost their keys or lent them to anyone, something that she had subsequently confirmed.

  Car thieves had become highly skilled at breaking into all sorts of cars, but Emma found it hard to believe that any of them irresponsible and clumsy enough to drive so badly would have been able to break into the car without leaving any sign. Lutterworth’s alibi looked quite as shaky to Emma as it must have done to everyone else involved.

  The Mercury had made much of the fact that the woman he was accused of killing had been a ‘good woman’. She was a single mother, it was true, and in other campaigns the paper had railed vociferously against unmarried mothers who thought they could have children they could not afford and bring them up at the taxpayers’expense, but the dead woman might have been a saint for the way the journalists had written about her.

  She had been twenty-five, exactly Emma’s age, and had lived in the village all her life except for the brief, disastrous time she had spent in London, where she had become pregnant. Returning to have her child in the familiar surroundings of the village, she had lived off Social Security only until the child was old enough to be cared for by a child-minder and she had then taken two jobs in order to pay her way. During the mornings, she had worked in the Post Office, leaving at one o’clock to collect the baby. They had spent every afternoon together, as the Mercury believed a virtuous mother should, and then at six she had gone to work as a waitress in an expensive restaurant on the edge of the village.

  It had a good enough reputation to draw people from all the surrounding towns and villages, but that night, a wet Monday in February, it had been almost empty. The owner, conscious of how tired she was looking, had given her permission to go home early and she had left at half past ten. Having put on her customary wet-weather gear of cagoule, waterproof trousers and wellingtons, she had walked to the childminder’s house, which was at the opposite end of the village, collected her sleeping baby in its pram and started to wheel it towards her own tiny rented cottage.

  She was hit from behind at a speed, it was later calculated, of at least sixty miles per hour. As Jane had said, the Mercury’s journalists were incensed by the fact that she had not been killed outright and might have lived if the driver of the car had not fled.

  Turning to the account of the trial itself in search of Andrew Lutterworth’s defence, Emma was disappointed to see almost no details except that he had retracted the confession he had made to the police and claimed that the joyrider who had stolen his car must have caused the crash. The journalist’s mocking disbelief came unmistakably through the short deceptively simple sentences of his report.

  Emma wished that the file had included a description of Andrew Lutterworth’s character. It seemed unlikely to her that a man who had reached a senior position in a large and responsible firm of accountants would have run away from such an accident. If he had drunk half a bottle of whisky, he might well have wanted to avoid being breathalysed by the police, but if he had been that drunk he would probably not have had the wit to invent the story about his car’s having been stolen or the steadiness to report it to the police without sounding slurred enough to alert them.

  It seemed even less likely that he would have been able to get himself back from the wilds of Buckinghamshire in time to be arrested at his flat by the City police on behalf of their provincial colleagues, and just about impossible that there would have been no trace of the accident on his body or his clothes, even if he had scrubbed himself in the bath and run water through the bloodstains in his suit.

  The file was disappointingly short of all sorts of information Emma wanted and she had reached for the telephone to ring Jane before she noticed the time. It was after two o’clock.

  The following morning, Emma threw away the cold coffee dregs in her mug and made some more coffee without even bothering to rinse the mug. She took it back to bed with the Mercury’s file. For once she did not even notice the smallness or ugliness of her room, and no thought of her mother’s well-appointed house, where all the furniture was beautiful and the firm beds were made up with smoothly laundered linen, crossed her mind as she pushed her feet past the deep ridges she had made in the polyester sheet that covered her narrow squidgy mattress.

  As soon as it was late enough she rang the Daily Mercury’s offices.

  ‘Well,’ said Jane when her secretary had connected them. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think the case has definitely got possibilities,’ said Emma. ‘And I’m really grateful that you’ve given it to me. But there’s a lot more I need to know. Have you got any more stuff in your office?’

  ‘I haven’t,’ said Jane, ‘but it’s possible that one of the reporters who worked on the story may have something. If you’re definitely going ahead, I could arrange for you to meet him. He’ll probably have useful things to tell you even if there’s nothing more on paper. Where are you going to start?’

  ‘I’ll write to Lutterworth straight away to find out if he’d be prepared to give me an interview and take a polygraph test. That won’t give away anything. I’ve already written to his governor, asking for volunteers for my research, so with luck he’ll think I’m just doing a follow-up.’

  ‘Although, if Lutterworth is coming up for parole, he might not want to jeopardise that by talking to you.’

  ‘It depends,’ said Emma. ‘Quite a lot of the inmates seemed to think it might help, even though I’ve been extra careful to make sure they know I can’t influence what happens, whatever their polygraphs show. We’ll have to see. Could you ring me if any of your reporters have got anything more I might be able to use?’

  ‘Sure. Give me the number.’

  Emma dictated it and then remembered the lecture Jag had recommended. ‘But I’ll be out this afternoon from about two till five or even later, and I haven’t got an answering machine here yet.’

  ‘OK. I’ll try and get back to you before two. Otherwise is there somewhere I can leave a message?’

  ‘Not really. I’ll ring you back tomorrow morning if I haven’t heard anything. You are kind, Jane. Thank you very much.’

  ‘It was good to see you. I’m sorry I was so preoccupied. If only Jemima Lutterworth…’

  ‘She really got to you, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, she did. Will you be talking to her?’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Emma. ‘At least not until I’ve got somewhere with him. I want to work out what I think about him and his story before I risk being influenced by hers. After all, she ca
n’t actually know anything. She’s only making assumptions from what she thinks she knows about him. That counts for bugger all. No one can know anything about anyone else. Not for sure.’

  ‘True,’ said Jane with a gasping laugh. ‘How reassuring! I see I should have come to you for comfort ages ago. But don’t forget that they’ve been married for years; I’d have thought she must have a reasonable idea of what he’s like—and what he’s capable of. Rats! Someone’s signalling at me through the door. I’ll have to go, Emma. I’ll be in touch.’

  The telephone rang almost as soon as Emma had replaced the receiver. Her supervisor was calling to find out whether she had got his note and whether she wanted to discuss her embryonic thesis. She temporised, explaining that she was on the track of some new material that might alter the thrust of what she was going to write.

  ‘That sounds encouraging,’ said Professor Bonmotte kindly. ‘At least, more encouraging than anything you said to me last time we spoke. Look, why not drop in and tell me about what you’ve got so far? It would be good to see you in any case.’

  ‘Well, if you think it would be useful. I’m planning to go to Wright’s lecture this afternoon. Would you be in after that?’

  ‘Yes. Perfect. Come and have a drink and we can talk. There’s no need to go into any great detail about the new direction if you’d rather not.’

  As she replaced the receiver, Emma thought that she must have been showing more signs of hopelessness than she had realised and resolved to put up a better front. Bonmotte sounded as though he had been quite worried about her. She switched on her laptop computer, retrieved her standard letter to prison governors and edited it to provide a suitable covering note for her proposition to Andrew Lutterworth.

  The letter to him took her longer, but eventually she produced a slightly sycophantic version, which she thought might evoke the response she wanted.

  Chapter Five