Sour Grapes

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Most of the time,’ said Willow with an eagerness that surprised Emma. ‘Only I didn’t know that was what it was. I knew I was quite out of tune with everyone I had anything to do with and sometimes seemed not only to be speaking in a different language but actually breathing a different kind of air. I used to get furiously impatient with people who couldn’t see what I saw and didn’t agree with me about what was important. They used to mock me for that, and resent it.’ She laughed. ‘I didn’t mind the resentment, but I sure as hell hated the mockery.’

  ‘I think we turn left here, don’t we?’ said Emma, relieved to have something she could say easily.

  She did not know what to do with Willow’s confidence or with what was clearly supposed to be an invitation for other confidences to be returned. There was a lot Emma wanted to tell her, and to ask, but she did not know how to start.

  ‘D’you want to talk about how we ought to tackle Lutterworth?’ asked Willow as she braked for a red traffic light. ‘I mean, if you’re not in fact going to do a polygraph test, should we plan an old-style good-cop-bad-cop routine?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Oh, hell! That sounds incredibly pathetic but it’s not as bad as that. Honestly. Look, I’ve decided that we ought to pretend I’m carrying out a polygraph test. You know, at least have the thing switched on and operating even if I don’t try to use the data afterwards. I think that if he’s attached to the monitors, he’ll be less likely to react violently. I’ve written a whole list of dullish questions that I hope will get him so used to talking without thinking much about the answers that when I get to the one that really matters he’ll answer that, too. D’you see what I mean?’

  ‘Of course. I think it’s a sound idea. What exactly are you planning to ask once you’ve softened him up?’

  Emma was silent for a while. Willow put the car in gear as the light changed and drove slowly across the junction to avoid a clutch of bicyclists who were labouring up the shallow incline.

  ‘This may be going to sound even sillier,’ Emma said eventually.

  ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned above all others, it’s that there’s nothing more stupid than refusing to ask a question because it might make one look a fool. Emperor’s new clothes and all that. Go for it, Em.’

  ‘OK. Here goes. I want to ask Lutterworth whether he used to drive his mistress about in his car and murdered her one night before burying her body in the garden in Berkshire.’ Emma had screwed up her face, assuming that Willow would either laugh or explode with contemptuous irritation. Instead she said, ‘The memorial garden? That could explain why it’s so vile. Is this just a leap of intuition, Em, or have you got some evidence for it?’

  ‘Not much. Jemima gave me a sort of hint yesterday and something his secretary said makes it seem feasible.’ Emma explained in detail all the reasons she had for her suspicions, adding at the end, ‘So you see, if I’m right, then he’s capable of the sort of violence I find terrifying even to contemplate. And if I’m wrong he’ll be devastatingly hurt and probably furious. Justifiably so. If he’s fundamentally a good man, which he may be, the last thing I want to do is hurt him like that—you know, with the suggestion that I think he’s capable of killing someone. I just wish I had something real to go on so that I could be sure.’

  ‘Hmm. I can see that. But don’t forget you have got his wildly erratic polygraph charts. There was something going on in that first test that he’s been careful to conceal. He’s clearly guilty of something. Hang on to that. I think it’s a reasonable basis for suspicion. And, as you say, his secretary’s evidence about his hands is interesting.’ Willow thought for a little longer. ‘No wonder you were scared of confronting him on your own. I think a spot of good-cop-bad-cop might be no bad thing. He likes you, doesn’t he?’

  ‘I’m not sure. At the beginning I thought he did, but you see, Willow, I’m so very bad at working out whether that sort of liking is real. It’s one reason why I …’ Emma had a sudden vivid memory of Hal looking yearningly at her in the winebar, almost as though he had adored her for years. She remembered his flowers and the attractive notes that had come with them, and her own longing to talk to him when Jag had been difficult. And she remembered the warning that Willow herself had passed on from Jane.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Willow, who had glanced sideways when Emma’s silence had begun to worry her.

  ‘Oh, nothing much. I was just remembering Jane’s journalist.’

  ‘Which one? Oh, you mean the wicked seducer who dumped her when she’d given him what he wanted? It’s a very unlikely picture, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think so. But Jane must know the truth about him. That’s what I mean. I liked him, and I thought he liked me, but it sounds as though I was just being naïve. I can’t work out who’s real …’ She bit her lip and tried to get a grip on her emotions. In a cooler voice, she added, ‘But this is different. At least it ought to be. Lutterworth is a subject. Between us I’m sure you and I can get him to reveal who he really is and what he’s done.’

  ‘Good for you, Em. I’d better let you take the lead and be nice to him, asking gentle questions and showing trust and affection for him, and then I’ll crash in at some pivotal moment and try to force him into telling you the truth. How’s that?’

  Emma took a deep breath. ‘Sounds good to me. And—’

  ‘And if he’s angry,’ said Willow, who thought she knew considerably more about Emma than Jag had allowed, ‘I’ll take the flak. Don’t worry about it. This way I’ll be the villain.’

  There was another long silence until Emma said quietly, staring out of the window at her side, ‘You make me feel very ashamed of my cowardice.’

  Willow lifted her left hand from the steering wheel in order to brush Emma’s thin shoulder. It felt rigid with tension.

  ‘There’s no need for that. I’m more than twenty years older than you and more experienced and secure. The things that could hurt you are not likely to damage me. I’ve nothing invested in Andrew Lutterworth—nothing he can say will bother me too much. But I think he probably could hurt you. It’s no shame to want to avoid that.’

  Emma did not answer.

  Just over an hour later they reached the grim-looking prison. Willow parked the car and helped Emma carry her polygraph equipment into the visitors’entrance, standing in a queue of impatient-looking women and children who where also waiting to be admitted.

  When it was her turn to be checked at last, Emma produced their documents and explained that there should be a letter authorising Willow’s entry. It was found after a few minutes’search and they were given plastic-coated passes to hang around their necks and told to wear them all the time they were within the prison.

  Their bags and all Emma’s equipment had to be sent through the X-ray machines, as usual, and their keys were taken away from them.

  ‘Do you have any maps or umbrellas?’ asked the officer who gave them back their bags. They both answered ‘no’ and were passed on to another officer, who showed them to the room that had been booked for the interview and said that Lutterworth would be with them shortly.

  ‘Maps?’ said Willow when he had left them and Emma was arranging her equipment on the table.

  ‘Presumably in case any of them are planning an escape. It’s always the same. In the London prisons they ask if you’ve got an A to Z on you.’

  ‘And umbrellas?’

  ‘I don’t know. Unless the spokes could be used to make weapons. I know people have been stabbed with daggers made from the spokes of bicycle wheels, so …’

  ‘Probably. Oh, this must be him.’

  Emma straightened up and faced the door as Lutterworth was ushered into the room.

  ‘All OK?’ said the officer and when Emma had smiled and thanked him he shut the door and left the three of them alone.

  As usual Andrew was looking impeccably clean and well shaved. His striped shirt looked as though it had just been laundered, and his jeans had such a sharp
crease down the front of each leg that Emma thought he must have slept with them under his mattress. His hair was newly cut and he smiled graciously at Willow.

  ‘They told me Emma was bringing a friend,’ he said, walking forwards to shake hands with her. ‘Andrew Lutterworth. How do you do?’

  ‘Willow Worth. It’s good of you to see us.’

  ‘Willow? That’s an interesting name.’

  ‘It’s short for Wilhelmina,’ she said, making a face. ‘One of my teachers decided that no five-year-old should labour under a mouthful like that and renamed me.’

  ‘How sensible. I quite agree. Children ought to be given straightforward, unmockable names, preferably ones that cannot be shortened at all.’

  Emma was busying herself with her machines, glad that Willow was there to absorb some of Andrew’s attention, and did not feel that it was incumbent on her to make any comment. Willow, who had no way of knowing whether Jemima had told Andrew anything about her visit to their house, merely smiled as though he was an ordinary acquaintance and started to talk casually about Lucinda and whether she would come to curse her parents for her name when she grew older.

  ‘All set,’ said Emma at last. ‘Mr Lutterworth?’

  ‘I thought we’d settled on Andrew, Emma,’ he said, smiling up at her as he stripped his sleeve and offered her his arm.

  ‘Very well, Andrew. Thank you.’ She strapped on the blood-pressure cuff, attached the heart monitor to his chest and the pads to the ends of his fingers. Then, having checked that all the printer arms were able to move freely, she switched on both the machine and the tape recorder and began by thanking him for letting them come to talk to him again.

  Then she asked his name, the name of his cellmate and what he had had for breakfast, before asking him again about the night of his interrogation by the police. The arms moved more wildly on the spool of paper, but that was hardly surprising. He was still likely to be both angry and upset by what had happened.

  ‘And when the police officers told you that they would have your car searched, what did you say?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ he said as the arms moved sharply up and down the paper. They made a curious scratching noise, which Emma had never noticed before. She hoped that they were not going to break on her before she had persuaded him to produce the information for which she had come.

  ‘It was after that, according to the notes, that you made your confession,’ she reminded him calmly. ‘Was that confession true?’

  ‘No,’ he said and the lines scrolled out steadily.

  ‘Was it a lie?’

  ‘Yes.’ The lines were still steady. Emma stopped looking at them. ‘Did you want them to search your car?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Damned impertinence,’ he said, sounding angry enough to justify the sudden change in the sharpness of the graph.

  ‘Who had been your last passenger in the car?’

  ‘Can’t remember.’

  ‘Who had been the last passenger you had driven to your house in Berkshire?’

  As the arms leaped about again, scratching the paper, Willow nodded slightly. Emma glanced at her and saw that she was getting ready to intervene.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Andrew said again and the lines had settled down. Then he added more irritably, with the lines shooting about again, ‘It’s years now. You can’t expect me to have irrelevant details like that to hand.’

  ‘Where is the car now?’

  ‘It was returned to the partnership. I imagine they sold it.’

  ‘Does that please you?’ asked Emma, hoping that Andrew never had read any of the books about how to beat a polygraph test. If he had, he would have known just how far she had deviated from the proper format of such a test. She was leading him towards the crucial question and that was all that mattered to her.

  ‘What’s the matter, Emma?’ he asked, sounding concerned. ‘Aren’t you feeling well?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, putting a hand over her eyes to grab a moment’s privacy in which to deal with her doubts. ‘I think I must have a migraine coming on. Andrew, I must ask …’ The words would not come.

  Willow leaned forward, as though to speak, and that pushed Emma into saying, ‘Andrew, did you know that your wife was planning to have the memorial garden dug up?’

  The thin, wirelike arms of the polygraph machine all moved convulsively over the paper as Lutterworth’s breathing changed, his heart rate speeded up and the electrical impulses in the skin of his hands flashed faster.

  Oh God! thought Emma. It’s really true. She found herself staring at his bare arm, noticing the coarse black hairs that sprouted out of his skin all the way down to below his wrist. His hand was lying relaxed on the table and looking quite harmless, but she remembered the strength of his grip. As before, his fingernails were perfectly clean. She wondered whether his loathing of dirty fingernails might be in some way connected with the night when his own had been torn and filthy, the night when he had killed someone and scrabbled the earth over her mutilated body.

  ‘Emma?’ His voice was seductively gentle, almost as gentle as Jag’s when he was making love to her. Emma shuddered. She could not help it. Then she forced herself to look away from Lutterworth’s hand. For a moment she could not remember what she was supposed to be asking him.

  ‘The memorial garden,’ she said, trying not to sound too vague and peculiar. ‘It seems to worry you that it might be dug up. Why?’

  He took a moment before he answered and then, sounding only mildly annoyed, he said, ‘I told you, I didn’t want you to speak about my son. I also told you that I would not answer any questions that related to him. I am not going to talk about the garden that is his only memorial.’

  ‘I’m afraid you must,’ said Willow sharply. ‘Why are you so worried about it? What are they going to find when they dig it up, when they peel back the turf and start shovelling the soil away from under those trees?’

  ‘Roots and concrete foundations for the statue,’ he said, fighting to imply a calmness that was completely belied by the machines to which he was attached. As though he had suddenly realised how much they might be giving away, he wrenched the pads off his fingers and then began pulling at the cuff from his arm.

  ‘Will you take these things off me? At once.’

  Emma sat unable to move. She ought to have been feeling triumphant, or at least relieved. But she was not. All she could feel was a coldness that seemed to reach right into the depths of her body, a sensation she had only felt once before, during an appalling bout of seasickness. Then came a familiar lurching in her brain and a nausea in her gut that made her think she might actually vomit.

  ‘Take them off! Get these things off me.’ Andrew Lutterworth was almost screaming.

  ‘Emma?’ said Willow quietly. ‘Would you like me to help?’

  She shook her head, coughing to get rid of the vile sensation in her throat, and then leaned across the table to remove the various monitors. As she struggled with the Velcro fastening of the blood-pressure cuff, fumbling far more than usual, her fingers met his and she almost screamed herself.

  Calm down, she ordered in silent savagery. There’s nothing he can do to you. Get a hold of yourself or you’ll lose everything. You’ll never get another chance. He’s given himself away now. With the right spur, he’ll tell you the whole lot. There’s a body in the memorial garden. It’ll be found anyway as soon as Jemima gets the workmen in. It’s not your responsibility. Yes, it damn well is. Talk. Talk to him. Don’t let him escape.

  ‘There,’ she said, panting a little but once more in control. ‘That’s the last. I’m sorry they upset you so much, Andrew.’

  ‘I want to go back to my cell,’ he said, looking over his shoulder as though in the hope of seeing one of the officers. ‘Get the screw in here. Now.’

  ‘In a minute,’ said Willow, apparently unmoved. ‘There’s something I have to say to you first. Sit down, Emma. This doe
s not concern you.’

  Emma stared at her, having forgotten their plans.

  ‘Mr Lutterworth, you may pull the wool over Emma’s eyes, but you can’t deceive me. We know that you were not involved in the crash; we have found the man who stole your car that night and killed those two people. We also know perfectly well that the only reason you confessed was to stop the police searching the car for the evidence that would convict you of a different killing. Murder. But you don’t have to worry about the blood in the car or the hairs and fibres. Even if the car could be traced, nothing anyone could find in it is going to incriminate you now. It’s all too long ago.’

  Emma thought she saw a very slight slackening in his muscles as he listened. She could not think why Willow thought such reassurance would help to make him confess.

  ‘But the body in the garden is a different matter,’ Willow went on with perfect calm as Andrew’s left hand moved.

  He managed to keep his face quite still and put both hands in his lap, gripping them together.

  ‘I want to go back to my cell. Fetch the screw.’

  ‘It’s no wonder you haven’t let Jemima sell the house,’ said Willow. ‘She was saying to me only the other day that—’

  ‘What the hell have you been saying to her about me?’ he shouted, leaning across the table until his face was only a foot or so from Willow’s.

  Swallowing, Emma started to take part again.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ she said. ‘But we’ve both interviewed her, Andrew, and she’s told us a good deal herself. She’s not as ignorant as you think. And I’ve talked to Annie Frome, too. We don’t need much more than her description of your hands that morning when she surprised you at your desk. There were tears pouring down your face and scratches all over your hands and soil under your nails. You see, Andrew, we know it all. We know exactly what you did to your girlfriend.’

  Emma realised as she reached the end of her little speech that she was losing him. He moved back, almost smiling, and crossed his legs. ‘You know nothing. Nothing at all. You’ve made a fool of yourself, Emma, but it’s worse than that, you know. You’ve been tormenting my wife about some fantasy you’ve invented, and you’ve been harassing me. I can sue you for that, and I will. I shall be out of here in little more than six months, and then you just wait. You can kiss goodbye to your degree, madam.’