Sour Grapes

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Could it possibly have happened like that?’ Emma asked herself out loud as she stood in the middle of her untidy room with her hands on her head. ‘No, of course it couldn’t. Don’t be an idiot.’

  For one thing, she told herself crisply, no man with a secret like that would have agreed to take a polygraph test.

  On the other hand, she thought, Lutterworth was said to be very arrogant. Perhaps he had decided that he was so clever he would be able to beat the polygraph and saw it as a chance to establish his innocence before he started looking for jobs on his release. After all, the chart had suggested that he might know how to manipulate the test results.

  Suddenly Emma laughed as another point occurred to her. She let her arms fall to her sides and began to relax. The vehicle examiner who had dealt with Lutterworth’s car had found no damage whatsoever to the locks or alarm system. That had always puzzled Emma whenever she had thought about it, in spite of Willow’s suggestion that it could be typical of his absent-mindedness. There might be many possible explanations, but one in particular appealed to Emma.

  Aware of just how difficult it would have been to remove all the forensic evidence from the car, the murderer of her fantasies could easily have decided to get rid of it altogether. He could not have sold it so soon after acquiring it without breaking the partnership’s car-scheme rules. Therefore, unless he was prepared to crash it deliberately, which would have put him at serious risk, much the safest way of dealing with the problem would have been to entice some passing thief to take it Then with luck the thief would crash it himself or, even better, torch it. That way, if any scientist were ever to examine the car, whatever damning evidence was found could be put down to the thief.

  Thinking that it must have been quite extraordinarily frustrating for Lutterworth to discover that his carefully laid plans had worked beautifully up to a point and then become dangerously unstuck, Emma realised that she had begun to take her own fantasies seriously.

  The telephone rang. Automatically she walked over to her desk to pick up the receiver and said her name.

  ‘Are you coming, Emma?’ said Jag’s voice against a noisy background. ‘We’re nursing our second drinks here, making polite conversation and hating each other for not being you. If you’re not going to show, we can get out of here and leave each other in peace.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Jag. I hadn’t realised how long I’d been. I’ll come now and be as quick as I can.’

  Emma left the mess of papers around her desk as it was, locked her room, and ran to the pub favoured by most of the criminology and psychology graduates.

  Jag and Ben Wrexham were leaning against the bar with pint tankards in their hands, looking perfectly at ease with each other when she arrived breathless in the doorway. As Emma moved nearer to them, unnoticed, she began to distinguish the sound of their voices against the music and the rest of the crowd. To her amusement they were having a lovely male-bonding conversation about motorcycle engines, and neither showed any signs of restiveness. Even when she reached Jag’s side, she had to touch his elbow to distract him.

  ‘So where did you run off to?’ said Ben, looking as though he were trying hard not to show irritation at having been interrupted in one of the things that really matter in life.

  ‘I had a thought about one of the trickiest bits of my thesis,’ said Emma as disarmingly as possible. ‘And I had to get it down before I forgot it, but it all took much longer than I meant. I’m sorry to be so late. What did you think of the lecture?’

  ‘Quite interesting,’ said Ben as Jag went off to buy her a drink.

  ‘Although I think he exaggerated the excluding effect of private language.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure,’ said Emma and then, when she saw some of the old derision creeping into his eyes, told him a little of how she had felt when she first arrived at St Albans.

  Once Jag had returned with half a pint of lager for her, she gradually eased the discussion back to motorcycles and saw the pair of them relax again. Smiling secretly at the thought that she had followed all her mother’s rules in keeping the conversation going and allowing the men to talk about what they most enjoyed, she leaned against the bar and thought in peace about Andrew Lutterworth and his car and what he had been afraid the forensic scientists might find.

  As she sipped her drink, she began to think of another explanation of his confession. It was much more realistic than any of the stories she had been telling herself, and she could not think why it had not occurred to her sooner. If Andrew had genuinely believed that the car had been stolen, he would have responded to Podley’s accusations with out-raged denials until he had been told about the pristine state of the car’s locks and alarm. At that point he must have remembered that his wife also had keys to the car. He would have known better than anyone else in the world that she had been behaving erratically ever since their son’s death. It was not stupid to assume that he must have decided that she had taken the car and crashed it.

  In that case he might well have been afraid of the evidence the scientists would find and confessed in order to protect her. Later, once he had been released on bail and been able to talk to her, he would have become convinced that she had not done it. Then there would have been no reason to stick by his confession.

  Emma found herself smiling at the thought that Lutterworth might, after all, be a decent and likable man. She was distracted by the smell of charring and then an almost painful sensation in the front of her left shoulder. Looking down and brushing at it, assuming that something must have bitten her, she saw that there was a small heap of glowing cigarette ash burning through her thin shirt. Moving away and shaking her shirt hard to get it all off, she looked up at the large, strange young man who had let part of his cigarette drop on her.

  ‘Do you realise what you’ve just done?’ she asked in a mixture of shock and anger.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ he said unpleasantly.

  ‘You’ve just ruined my best shirt and burned me,’ she said, amazed by the aggressiveness. ‘You might at least apologise.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off!’ he said, picking up his large drink with the hand that held the cigarette.

  At the sound of his insult, Jag and Ben both came out of their motorcycle dreams at the same moment and moved to stand at either side of Emma. Their faces were suffused with exactly the same fury. Emma was touched by their automatic attempt to defend her, but she wished that the whole pantomime had not been necessary.

  The careless smoker, seeing that the small young woman who had challenged him had two broad-shouldered male protectors, both well over six foot, pretended that he had been talking to someone else and tried to disappear into the crowd. Unfortunately it was too tight and unyielding for that and he had nowhere to go.

  ‘I’m grateful, guys, but honestly I’d rather you didn’t make a scene,’ said Emma, wanting to forget the whole thing as quickly as possible.

  ‘I’m not going to make any kind of scene,’ said Jag, gritting his teeth. ‘I’m just going to stop this turd doing anything like that again. Isn’t that what you wanted?’

  ‘Not enough for all this,’ she said quickly. ‘Ben, you’re a police officer for heaven’s sake. You can’t go round hitting people.’

  ‘Want to bet?’ said Ben, looking as though he were enjoying himself even more than he had during the motorcycle discussion. ‘I’m not on duty.’

  At the mention of the word police, Emma’s antagonist made an even greater effort to get away and eventually succeeded.

  ‘There,’ said Jag, brushing his hands together and returning to the bar. ‘Isn’t it great to be able to make people do what you want?’

  ‘And without laying a finger on them,’ agreed Ben. ‘A very useful tactic, mate, believe me.’

  Emma turned away, trying not to feel sanctimonious and pleased to be female since for one moment she had been quite as angry as they and had wanted quite as much to force the unpleasant stranger to grovel to her.

&
nbsp; When Emma got back to her room, she found a third bunch of freesias left propped up against the door. Smiling at Hal’s extravagance—and the delectable smell of the flowers—she opened the note.

  ‘You still haven’t rung me back. Are you angry that I wasn’t here the first time, or are you avoiding me? Can I come and see you? How’s your work on the shit L. going? Love Hal.’

  Still not at all sure what she wanted from him—or he from her—she unlocked her door, emptied the old flowers out of the vase, washed it out and refilled it. Briefly touching on the fragile yellow petals with her left hand, she picked up the telephone receiver with her right and punched the number of his flat.

  After four rings, his answering machine cut in. Emma planned her message as she listened to his recorded voice. After the beep, she said as naturally as she could, ‘Hello, Hal, it’s Emma Gnatche here. Thank you so much for all the gorgeous flowers. You really shouldn’t, you know. I’m sorry I haven’t got back to you before, but I’ve been chasing my tail over this Lutterworth business. I haven’t any more plans to be in London for a while, but when I have I’ll get in touch and hope you’re around. It’d be great to see you. Thanks so much for the flowers. I love them, but you really shouldn’t. Um. Well, thanks anyway. Um. ’Bye.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Willow sat opposite Jag on the train up to Leeds, hardly registering the sight of him as she thought about Tom. Ever since their quarrel on the day he had returned from Strasbourg he had been careful to ask no questions that might imply any infringement of her right to do whatever she chose. She, filled with compunction at what her outburst had—or could have—done to him, had been trying to show that she wanted to make peace without going so far as to retract anything she had said, but the message did not seem to be getting through in the way she was trying to send it. The two of them were still circling stiffly around each other and being horribly polite.

  She was glad that he seemed to have absorbed the point of what she had said, but it was clear that she had hurt him and she hated that. From previous experience she knew that there was no point trying to talk the hurt away. Tom was prepared to say more about emotional matters than most men she had met, but there were limits to his tolerance of what he called ‘touchy-feely chatter’. She tried to console herself with the thought that they had had plenty of difficulties in the past and had always overcome them. Hoping that they would get past the new awkwardness too, she wished that she could do something to hurry it away.

  In some ways it might have seemed perverse to be pursuing a possibly violent thug, but, however much she wanted to soothe Tom’s distress, she could not do it at the cost of her own independence. After all, that would have meant that the whole painful process would have been for nothing, which would have been unbearable. She told herself to stop thinking about it and to concentrate on the present.

  ‘It’s terrifically good of you to have given up your time like this, Jag. I do hope you didn’t have to get up too early,’ she said in an effort to do just that. ‘To get to London in time for this train, I mean.’

  He looked surprised at her sudden interruption of his peaceful study of the newspaper he had brought, but he shook his curly dark head and smiled at her amiably enough. In spite of the smile, she could see that his intense dark eyes were more hostile than they ever seemed when Emma was around. Willow realised that Jag must still dislike her and she was sorry for that.

  ‘I don’t mind an early start when it’s necessary,’ he added, presumably in an attempt to be polite. ‘And this obviously was.’

  ‘Thank you. I hope it won’t be a great waste of your day.’

  ‘Emma wanted me to come. That was enough for me. And my work’s been going well. I had time.’

  ‘Lucky Emma,’ Willow said drily. ‘And lucky me, too, of course.’

  Jag raised his eyebrows. They slanted up in strong dark lines from the point where they met over the bridge of his nose, making him look even tougher than usual.

  ‘I’m lucky in having your protection, I mean. I’m not sure that Emma’s fears of what Terry Lepe might want to do to me are entirely justified, but it’s nice not to have to worry about it.’

  Jag nodded. ‘It’s hard to discover how justified any of her fears might be.’

  ‘Does she have so many?’ asked Willow in surprise.

  ‘Several I think, although she won’t talk about them. She’s become terrified of Lutterworth, and—’

  ‘Has she? She hasn’t said anything about that to me,’ said Willow, even more surprised.

  ‘She hasn’t said anything to me either,’ said Jag, looking as though he was amused. ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s not obvious.’

  ‘But why should she be?’ said Willow, suppressing the thought that she must have been peculiarly insensitive if it were that clear to someone who had known Emma for as short a time as Jag had done. ‘He’s in prison. There’s nothing he can do to her.’

  Jag shrugged. ‘Well, apart from the fact that she’s frightened of men in general, she—’

  ‘What?’ Willow was so surprised that she could not help interrupting him again. Jag looked irritated and more than a little contemptuous.

  ‘You must have seen that at least.’

  ‘Well, no. I haven’t,’ said Willow, allowing some contempt of her own to show. ‘She’s not remotely afraid of my husband or any of the men she’s brought to my house or met there.’ She watched Jag’s face and then added slowly, ‘Is she afraid of you?’

  ‘Not most of the time, but occasionally, when she forgets she knows me, she can be.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ The disdain had gone from his eyes, to be replaced by a thoughtfulness Willow would not have expected of him. ‘But I have a feeling it’s something to do with her brother.’

  ‘Anthony?’ said Willow in a squawk. ‘You must be joking. No one as excellent as Emma could be frightened of such a pompous fool. Does she talk much about him?’

  ‘Nope. And I don’t want to crash in there and ask questions she can’t answer. Or doesn’t want to. Have you ever met him?’

  ‘Briefly, but not for some years. He once took me out to dinner.’

  ‘You? Why?’ Jag’s face would have served as a model of astonishment for a traditional art class.

  ‘I think he fancied me,’ said Willow, hiding her enjoyment. Then the sight of Jag’s confusion was too much for her acting skills and she burst out laughing. She thought he looked very young in his embarrassment and she felt much more friendly towards him. ‘People have done sometimes in the past.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I was teasing you. As far as I can remember, Anthony Gnatche was hidebound, conventional, boring and contemptuous of everything he did not know or understand. In other words, he’s as different from Emma as you could possibly imagine. She values thought, kindness, intelligence, openness, awareness and all the other’nesses you can think of.’

  Jag did not comment.

  ‘I can’t imagine Emma’s being afraid of him,’ Willow went on. ‘I’m sure you’ve got that wrong, even if Lutterworth has scared her. If he has.’

  Jag shrugged. ‘There’s no if about it. She’s definitely afraid. But he may not have done anything beyond showing the kind of automatic male aggression she hates so much.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything odd about being afraid of that,’ said Willow sharply. “Most women are, except the fools who find it titillating.”

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said as the amusement crept back into his dark eyes. ‘Although she minds it much more than you do, doesn’t she? You were quite prepared to go up against Terry Lepe without any help or protection. It was Emma who insisted that you should have a bodyguard.’

  Willow nodded, intrigued to notice that, while Tom’s attempts to protect her were almost always irritating, Emma’s could be merely touching. She sat in silence, working out why. It was not particularly difficult Nothing
Emma did smacked of the exercise of superior power.

  And why is that? Willow asked herself, knowing the answer perfectly well and feeling thoroughly ashamed of it.

  Given the rage that Tom could make her feel whenever he showed that he thought of her as subordinate to him, she ought to have known better than to feel exactly the same about Emma. She hoped that Emma had never understood it.

  ‘Tell me about Terry Lepe,’ said Jag. ‘All I know is what you wrote in your letter after you’d seen his pathetic girlfriend.’

  Willow looked at him, thinking that the fates were really driving the message home. She ought not have felt either surprise or offence at the discovery that Emma showed Jag her letters, but she could not ignore the fact that she felt both and felt them sharply. Emma was not her property—or her child, even though she was the right age for that. She was an independent woman, who could do what she liked when she liked.

  ‘I don’t know any more than you, Jag. I wish I did. He sounded completely revolting from everything Susie said, but, as I told Emma, she wasn’t the brightest woman in the world and she may have misunderstood or misrepresented him. Although I don’t see how she could have imagined everything she told me. What do you think?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Your account of what she’d said sounded convincing. We’ll know more when we’ve seen him and heard him talk.’

  Remembering that Jag was a psycholinguist and presumably made judgements about people from the way they used words, Willow suddenly wondered what conclusions he had come to about her and wished that she had taken a vow of silence before she had got on the train.

  ‘Does he know we’re coming?’ asked Jag.

  Willow shook her head. ‘I thought it would be better to take him by surprise. He’s on an early day shift at a local factory at the moment. Head office said he was due to stop in to collect his wages on his way home at the end of the shift. If we get there around noon, we ought to be able to run into him and find a way to persuade him to talk to us.’