by Joan Smith
‘Oh. Anyway, that’s miles away.’
‘Is it? Where are we?’
‘Riverside Drive.’ She moved towards the kitchen, tugging at the bottom of her shirt, which she had gone back to bed in and which suddenly seemed very short. The dog heard her approach and barked imperatively on the other side of the door.
‘Don’t let that animal in here!’
Loretta said over her shoulder: ‘She does live here. What’s the time? I’ll have to take her for a walk soon.’
‘Twenty past nine.’
‘God, she must be desperate. Down, Honey, there’s a good girl.’
‘Honey’ John Tracey called from the living-room. ‘Sure it’s not Fang? Or Saliva?’
Loretta closed the kitchen door while she made coffee for Tracey and tea for herself.
‘What is this muck?’ he asked when she returned with two mugs.
‘It’s instant.’ She yawned. ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night, one way and another, and I couldn’t be bothered to dig out the cafetiére.’
He tasted it. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks. I have to go, Loretta, I have a piece to finish for tomorrow’s paper and with the time difference.’
‘Whitewater?’ she asked, thinking about their conversation in the restaurant.
‘Mmm? No, something and nothing about some actress. I got a message on Thursday night, could I hold the stuff on Clinton and doorstep this actress instead. She’s pregnant and won’t say who’s the father, not that I care but they wanted me to meet a photographer outside her flat yesterday morning.’
Loretta looked up from her mug. ‘Yesterday morning?’
Tracey got up, groaning. ‘Christ, that sofa’s uncomfortable.’ He grinned at Loretta, his good spirits apparently returning. ‘I notice you didn’t let me have the bed.’
‘The bed?’ She glanced over her shoulder.
‘Only joking. As I was saying, I had to get up at the crack of dawn yesterday for the shuttle and as soon as I arrived in New York that bloody wasp got me. By the time I got to her flat she’d gone out, the photographer was thoroughly jacked off and I wasted the whole day chasing round New York in taxis. It’ll have to be a cuttings job and they’ll probably query my expenses. Where’s the loo?’
‘In there.’
A moment later he emerged, still talking. ‘Can you imagine, Loretta, six months ago I was in Bosnia and now it’s come to this, cobbling stuff together from the National Enquirer.’ He drank more coffee, put the half-empty mug on the table and planted a kiss on her cheek. ‘Thanks, love, I owe you one.’ He pulled on his jacket, checked that his wallet was in the inside pocket and went to the door. He turned, his hand on the latch. ‘You didn’t really think I’d become a druggie, did you?’
Loretta flushed.
‘It’s all right,’ he said good-humouredly, ‘we’ll talk about my dependent personality some other time.’ He waved and was gone.
In the kitchen Honey began to whine. Loretta ignored her and went into the bathroom, where she bundled the plastic shower curtain out of the way and turned on the bath taps. The phone rang and she went to answer it, still thinking about the wasp sting.
‘Ms Stramiello?’ A woman’s voice, clearly thrown by hearing Loretta.
‘No, sorry, she’s away for the weekend. Would you like to leave a message?’
‘This is Dr Rosenstein’s secretary, her gynaecologist. Ms Stramiello left an out-of-town number where she could be reached but it seems to be busy this morning. Do you have another number for her?’
‘Sorry, no. Do you want to leave a message in case she rings me?’
‘Please. Dr Rosenstein needs to speak to her fairly urgently. If I could leave a couple of numbers since it’s Saturday ...’
Instead of returning to the bathroom, Loretta thought for a moment and dialled the Sag Harbor number herself. There was a silence, then the engaged tone. ‘Damn,’ she said softly, looking down at her bare feet and wiggling her toes. She wondered what was taking so long, perhaps Jay’s father was offering spiritual advice to a member of his flock?
Loretta remembered she had left the bath taps running. On her way to test the temperature of the water, the phone rang again.
‘Shit,’ said Loretta, going back.
There was a pause. ‘Ms Lawson? Donelly.’
‘He hasn’t phoned again,’ she said rapidly, remembering the detective’s homily about ‘profane’ language. Then: ‘Oh — I suppose you’d know.’ She pushed her hair back from her forehead.
‘That isn’t why I’m calling, Ms Lawson. There’s been a development –’
‘What? What d’you mean, a development?’
‘I have a fax here from the lab. They’ve subjected your tape –’
‘It’s not my tape.’
Another pause. ‘They’ve subjected the tape to a new system called anemone, the results are –’
‘Anemone? You mean the flower?’
She heard the faint rustle of paper. ‘Ambient... Hold on a minute while I find the page. OK, this is it. ANEMONE -Ambient Noise Enhancement and Monitoring System. State of the art stuff. By running your tape through ANEMONE, they’ve been able to detect a very faint noise in the background which they’ve tentatively identified as bells.’
‘Bells’
‘That’s what it says here. Church bells.’
Loretta breathed out. ‘What good’s that? I don’t see –’
Lieutenant Donelly said reprovingly: ‘I have an officer coming in to work on it right now, Ms Lawson. Records are about to fax me a list of churches in Manhattan, with telephone numbers –’
‘Churches in Manhattan?’ She thought of St Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and St Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue where Jackie Kennedy’s funeral service had been held earlier in the year. ‘There must be ... dozens. Hundreds. And what if he’s calling from somewhere else? Kansas or ... I don’t know, California.’
‘We have no evidence to suggest he’s calling long-distance. This may just give us a location –’
‘Wait a minute. There’s something I wanted to ask you, about whether the people who make obscene phone calls ever ... whether there’s any evidence of them going on to ... other types of crimes?’ She stood with her head bowed, clutching the receiver close to her ear. ‘I mean, is there any evidence that this man, Michael or whatever his real name is, have any of his other victims reported being followed?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Did any of the other women ... Have any of them ever had the impression that someone was following them? Spying on them?’
‘Ms Lawson, are you suggesting this guy — that he’s trying to make physical contact with you?’ He sounded incredulous.
‘Physical contact? That’s an odd way of putting it but I suppose — yes.’
‘Ms Lawson, you don’t think you’re over-reacting to what happened last night? I know these calls are highly disturbing to a woman on her own but we have no evidence that — what I’m saying, it’s not his style.’
‘So far. You mean I imagined it?’
‘Imagined... what precisely?’
She let out a sound which eloquently conveyed her exasperation. ‘Someone following me, at the Met and down Fifth Avenue. I’m — I’m an English lecturer, I’m not the sort of person who imagines things and I know he was there. I just know it.’
‘Take it easy, Ms Lawson, I’m very grateful for your cooperation so far and I certainly don’t want to jeopardise our –’
‘Well, you have. I’m not sure I want to go on with this. I mean, whether he’s following me or not, you’re no nearer catching him than you were yesterday. All you’ve come up with is this nonsense about bells –’
‘Hey, hey. Ms Lawson.’ His voice was soothing, as though he was talking to a distressed child.
‘There’s no need to speak to me like that.’
‘I’m sorry, I guess this was just — unexpected. I’ll file a report at once if you’d like to give me the deta
ils, where and when the incident happened. Let me find a — OK, fire away, I have a pen.’
‘Shit,’ exclaimed Loretta, remembering the bath taps. She threw down the receiver and rushed into the bathroom, where the water in the small tub was just beginning to lap over the side. She wrenched the taps off, slipping on the damp floor as she pulled out the plug, and hurried back to the phone.
‘I’ve flooded the bathroom, can I ring you back in ten minutes?’
Ten minutes? I have a meeting, maybe I could call you?’
‘How long’s the meeting going to go on?’
‘An hour, then I have to go over to the lab. I could call at –would twelve suit you?’
‘No, I’ll be out all day.’
‘All day? What about tonight?’
Loretta remembered Kelly’s message inviting her to a drinks party. ‘I’m coming back to change between, I don’t know, five and six.’
‘Sure?’ He sounded anxious, worried that he’d offended her. ‘I’d like to get these details down.’
‘Yes, I have to be somewhere at half past six.’
‘OK, I’ll call between five and six.’ He rang off.
Still imprisoned in the kitchen, Honey began to howl — a high, despairing note Loretta hadn’t heard before. ‘Oh God,’ she said, foreseeing another domestic emergency, and reached for the jeans she had put on when she went downstairs in search of the porter during the night.
‘All right, I’m coming,’ she called to the dog, pulling her hair back from her face and securing it with a band from her jeans pocket. Honey hurled herself at the kitchen door as Loretta opened it, shooting past her into the living-room and performing a frenzied dance below the hook where Toni kept her lead. The dog was so obviously desperate that Loretta had time only to glance into the bathroom as she passed, reassuring herself that the water had almost drained away, before allowing Honey to drag her through the front door and round the corner to the lift.
It was around eleven when Loretta finally left the flat, her plans for the morning upset by a prolonged heavy shower which had only just eased off. Steam rose from the pavement as she headed towards the junction of Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway, the air a damp caress on her bare arms and the triangle of her neck and throat not covered by her cotton dress. Almost every parked car she passed had a handwritten notice taped to a window or lying on the dashboard: ‘no radio’, ‘no valuables’, and from one particularly despairing owner, ‘no nothing’. Loretta’s own car radio had been stolen twice in six months in Oxford but it had never occurred to her to plead with potential thieves in this way. A resigned acceptance to crime seemed to be woven into the fabric of everyday life in New York, so much so that even the TV weather forecast she had watched before leaving Toni’s flat was squeezed between live news reports from a siege somewhere in the East Village. Loretta had sat down to watch, fascinated and horrified, as a reporter on the spot described how three men with masks and guns had burst into a sports shop earlier that morning, giving the manager just enough time as they entered to press a panic button. Now he, his assistant, the raiders and an unknown number of customers were holed up inside the shop, the street cleared of people and traffic except for police marksmen, the inevitable TV crews and a negotiator trained to deal with hostage situations.
That was how the reporter had characterised it in her terse, rapid-fire commentary: ‘a fast-developing hostage situation’. Loretta wondered whether the people in the shop would get out alive; the camera had zoomed in briefly on one of the window displays, trainers and steel-framed tennis racquets and Speedo swimming costumes, and she thought how awful it would be to die for a pair of Nikes. The live coverage of the siege was interspersed with cheery updates on the weekend weather, colourful maps of New York and Long Island with dark clouds like a child’s first attempt at drawing scudding across the shoreline. Loretta had pulled a light summer dress over her head and fastened the buttons, thinking that the outfit had not yet been invented which could withstand the volatile climatic conditions of New York. Immediately she felt guilty for worrying about such trivialities when lives were at stake only a few miles across the city, not that there was any way that she could affect the outcome. She had turned the sound down on the TV while she tried Jay’s parents again, her eyes fixed on the small screen, and was annoyed but not surprised to get the answering-machine. Hardly bothering to disguise her irritation, she relayed Dr Rosenstein’s message and left another one of her own, pointing out that she was still waiting for Toni to ring her back.
Loretta turned south on to Broadway, occasionally skipping sideways to avoid being splashed by thoughtless drivers. The heat was sticky and intense, the brief interval of freshness after the storm ending almost as soon as the rain clouds passed over. Loretta could not understand how anyone managed to live in New York all year round, especially people like Toni whose only access to green space was in scruffy urban parks like Riverside. It occurred to her that Toni must be planning to move to a larger apartment, perhaps with Jay, if the calls to and from Dr Rosenstein’s office meant what she thought they did. She stopped to watch two women carry buckets of flowers out of a shop and set them up on the pavement, most of the blooms taller and much more striking than anything Loretta had seen for sale in England. The birds of paradise were especially exotic, their orange and purple heads shaped like beaks, and the vibrant red of amaryllis contrasted with the slender whiteness of lilies. Loretta was admiring frilly white heads of dill when one of the assistants emerged with a container of green roses — dyed, of course, but no less alluring for that — and she was sorely tempted to buy the lot. She would only be able to enjoy them for a day but Toni would be back on Monday and they’d probably last well beyond that. Common sense restrained her, she could hardly continue her walk down Broadway with her arms full of flowers, so she memorised the location of the florist instead. She’d almost certainly pass it later on her way back to the flat.
Three or four minutes later dark clouds rolled over and translucent pearls of rain dropped out of the sky, dissolving in warm pools as they made contact with her skin. Loretta had never experienced hot rain before, the sensation was disconcerting but not unpleasant until the drops began to multiply. Within minutes the wide skirt of her cotton dress clung damply to her legs, her toes were gritty in her open-toed sandals and her hair hung about her face in damp tendrils. A bus swept past and Loretta broke into a trot, catching up with it at a bus stop a few yards down the road. She waited as the woman ahead of her in the queue methodically shook and furled a large umbrella, ascending the steps with maddening slowness while Loretta fretted behind her. She took the last window seat, sliding gratefully across and running her hands through her wet hair. According to her map, which she unfolded as soon as she’d finished trying to repair her appearance, they would soon be in the Theater District, passing right through the middle of Times Square.
By now the rain was hurling itself against the glass, obscuring her view of shopfronts and people sheltering from the rain. Loretta studied the map, turning it sideways to read the names of the few churches it marked. Plenty of other landmarks were shown, places she’d heard about in films or books without knowing their location: Radio City on Sixth Avenue, the United Nations HQ on First, Bellevue Hospital a few blocks down from the UN, but the map was clearly not intended for the more devout tourist. Loretta assumed that one of Donelly’s subordinates was even now working his or her way down a list of ecclesiastical telephone numbers, questioning puzzled clerics as to whether they were in the habit of holding services on Friday nights. Evensong? Loretta was so ignorant about the liturgy that she had no idea whether bells were rung before an evening service and it occurred to her that the faint sound on the tape might just as easily be bell practice. The exercise seemed a waste of time and resources, such a long shot as hardly to justify the cost of making the calls, but she supposed Donelly’s unit had to do something to justify its existence. She tugged at her skirt, which was bunched uncomfortably under he
r, and went back to the map, this time trying to remember the name of John Tracey’s hotel. He’d said it was at the far end of Lexington and she traced the avenue with her finger until she came to what she was looking for: it ended at East 21st Street, at a small green blob marked on the map as Gramercy Park, which she recognised as the name of his hotel. He should have finished his story by now and faxed it over although he might still be dealing with subs and lawyers in London. Loretta thought she’d give him a bit more time before calling to ask if he had time to meet her for a drink before she left New York the following evening.
She yawned, thinking how fond she was of Tracey. They had been getting on very well in the last few months, better than at any time since their divorce, and he was her closest male friend in spite of their surface incompatibilities. Knowing him as well as she did, she could not imagine him settling down in some backwater in Hampshire; his natural habitat, if not actually a war zone, was somewhere with a population of several million and plenty of late-opening bars. He had an exhaustive knowledge of London by night, once taking her to an all-night café in Brick Lane where a burly man with a glass eye acknowledged him with the slightest of nods. Tracey refused to reveal the man’s identity, even to Loretta, but said they had ‘helped each other out’ on numerous occasions. Loretta suspected he was a retired mercenary, if such a species existed.
Tracey occasionally sent her maudlin letters from warravaged East European cities, talking longingly of having someone to come home to, but they were usually written late at night and, Loretta guessed, under the influence of several whiskies. In a recent telephone call to San Francisco he had even spoken regretfully of the fact that they hadn’t had children, prompting an acerbic reply from Loretta; she was fairly sure that Tracey liked to indulge in wistful regret about not being a father while having someone else to blame for a situation that suited him very well. She had noticed that he soon tired of his boisterous twin nephews on the rare occasions he paid a visit to his brother and sister-in-law’s house in Ealing.
The bus stopped and an overweight woman in tight red trousers lumbered down the aisle and fell into the seat next to Loretta. She exuded an odour Loretta couldn’t quite identify, stale food and old perfume, and she turned her head to the window, wrinkling her nose to shut it out. She yawned again and did not at first notice that the rain had very nearly stopped, skimming down in diagonal lines so fine as to be almost invisible. A weak sun was struggling to come out, as yet only a luminous disc in an opaque white sky, but Loretta guessed that the weather was about to make another of its abrupt changes. The fat woman reached into her bag and drew out a Hershey bar, peeled off the wrapper and broke it in halves; the smell of the chocolate reminded Loretta she was hungry, she had skipped breakfast for the second day running and her last uninterrupted meal, in the restaurant at the Met, was almost 24 hours ago. Shaking off the trance-like mood of passivity which had settled on her since she got on the bus, she stood up and asked her neighbour rather brusquely to allow her to pass.