Fruitful Bodies

by Morag Joss

‘Yes, thank you, Miss Selkirk, I think I can,’ he said. ‘If Miss Cruikshank doesn’t wish to continue, we can speak to her another time. But we shall need to interview her again.’ He had deliberately omitted to say, ‘as a witness’, but this seemed to satisfy Selkirk, who was leaning back with her arms folded. God, she was so bloody superior, all big eyes and no tits. ‘And I understand that Miss Cruikshank is staying with you, isn’t she? Well, we’ll call and arrange for her to talk to someone at the station, assuming you have no objection. Now, if I may detain you for another few minutes, perhaps we can go on to what you saw when you came down the corridor. Assuming your dog doesn’t mind?’

  Pretzel slithered back down to the floor and rested his chin on Joyce’s foot. Ten minutes later, Bridger dismissed Joyce and Sara generously, after hearing Sara’s account of finding the dead woman and Joyce in the corridor. He even managed a smile as he watched them make their way, with the bandy-legged dog, back out into the sunshine. Selkirk wouldn’t be looking so superior much longer. He would crack the old soak’s pathetic story about the corpse falling on top of her out of the cupboard, because Bridger’s instincts were telling him something quite different. Cruikshank was a down-and-out with a drink habit, and the Jean Brodie accent and the presence of Selkirk didn’t alter that. She’d opened that door, all right. But she had been opening it to stuff the corpse in. Because, coming across an easy touch in the toilet, a Jap woman even smaller and weaker than she was, she’d gone after that expensive camera, maybe the wallet, too. That black stinking handbag was big enough to stash them. In all likelihood the Jap had left her stuff on the side of the basin when she was washing her hands or looking in the mirror, people never learned. Anyway, she had presumably seen Cruikshank trying to lift the stuff and put up a struggle, more of a struggle than Cruikshank had bargained for. Perhaps she hadn’t meant to kill her, but after she had, she’d tried to hide her in the cupboard. If she’d managed it, the body wouldn’t have been discovered for hours. It was risky, but less risky than leaving her in the toilet. They’d just ordered lunch, hadn’t they, so she was going to be stuck there for a while and unless she hid it the body would be discovered within minutes, while she was still there. And she had already been in the toilet too long to rush out pretending she’d just found her dead. If she’d been lucky she could have got her into the cupboard in a few seconds, but then the waitress had appeared and spoiled that little plan.

  Bridger beamed with such sudden amiability at WPC Frayling that she looked over her shoulder expecting to see someone else. She had never seen him so pleased.

  ‘We’ll have her charged within twenty-four hours,’ he told her.

  ‘You’re very confident,’ she said. ‘Think you’ve got the evidence, then?’

  Bridger performed a drum roll on the table with his fingers. ‘Oh, we’ll get the evidence. I know she’s guilty. I’m a lateral thinker, and I’m talking with ten years’ experience here. Experience and instinct.’

  Yes, he had a good feeling about it all. He did not go on to explain to Frayling that although his instincts had let him down in the past, this was different. It was different because this time, and for the first time, Detective Chief Inspector Poole was in complete agreement with his version of the probable course of events.

  CHAPTER 9

  IVAN AND HILARY Golightly opened the front door together, looking slightly frightened in the yellow light of the hall. It was raining again, and Ivan stepped aside to usher Andrew in under the dark and dripping doorway. They walked ahead of him down the narrow hall.

  Their sitting room had the beige, slept-in look of early Habitat and Andrew noticed as he sat down that there had been more recent and thoughtful ethnic additions to the tweedy three-piece suite: pink and green cotton throws concealing, Andrew was sure, the worst stains on the elderly armchairs. On the back wall was the ubiquitous pine storage system containing a collection of books, plants, tapes, mugs, plates, telephone, pens and other domestic paraphernalia which suggested that much of the couple’s lives were lived in this room. There was original art on the white walls, mainly unframed, abstract oils of which one could imagine people saying that they ‘had something’ and leaving unanswered the question of what. Art postcards in clipframes filled the sides of the modern tiled fireplace. On the mantelpiece and window sill were several cranky attempts at figurative sculpture, some in wire and plaster, others in clay or papier mâché, which shared the single virtue of being small enough to escape serious notice.

  Andrew turned to the couple sitting on the sofa, concluding from the faint pride in Hilary’s eyes that she had been watching his visual scan of the pictures and sculptures, and that they were hers. Ivan and Hilary were holding hands. She looked a good few years older than her husband, in her mid-forties judging by the grey streaks in her long, frizzy dark hair, and much more solid. She had a wide, sensual mouth and very large breasts which Andrew felt sure she would refer to as her bosoms, happier with the notion of maternal safety than of pneumatic sexuality. She was of his mother’s type, women for whom there exist two states of being: very, very busy or very, very tired. Such women look as if they work harder than their husbands, Andrew had noticed, especially if the husband is of Ivan Golightly’s sort: fair, tall and thin, with impractical hands and large, intelligent, frail eyes. Andrew suddenly remembered, in the way that he quite often did when he really should be thinking of other things, a remark of Sara’s. She had said (he suddenly also remembered that at the time she had been naked in bed and sipping a cup of tea, watching him dry himself after a shower) that his body looked as if it had been designed for two things: rugby and sex, and what a good thing he didn’t bother with the rugby. Andrew felt that she might judge Ivan Golightly’s body to be designed for chess and poetry. As if that were relevant. He coughed to signal the start of proceedings.

  ‘Now, you reported Mrs Takahashi missing at nine-thirty this evening. What made you think she was missing at that time? It’s not terribly late to be out, after all.’

  ‘Well no, it’s not,’ Hilary said. The sense of solidity was strengthened by a nasally sensible Yorkshire accent. She stretched forward on the sofa to make her point. ‘It’s just that she’s been out all day, since before nine this morning. And she comes back before seven, usually. She’s been sat in her room for the past few evenings. And well, she … she, look, I don’t pry, but she …’ She stole a look at Ivan. ‘She was on her own, she didn’t get up to much, what with the weather so changeable. So … so I rang the police station, just in case … you know, an accident, run over, what with the traffic driving on the other side … or worse. She had seemed a bit upset, you see.’

  ‘Upset? In what way?’

  ‘My wife is very sensitive to other people,’ Ivan said, gazing at her with a look that made Bambi look like a Komodo dragon. He stroked her hand. ‘She can sense things about people. She’s very intuitive.’

  Hilary seemed to know how silly this must sound. ‘Well I don’t know if it’s that, or what. I heard Mrs Takahashi crying in her room, Thursday night it was. I asked if she was all right and she said yes. You can’t pry, can you? But she wasn’t happy. I do get feelings, vibes, sometimes,’ she said, stoutly. ‘And sometimes people try to do away with themselves, when they’re upset, don’t they?’ She glanced at Ivan.

  ‘Especially now,’ Ivan said, fondly. ‘Heightened intuition, it’s well known.’ He turned to Andrew with a look of sleepy pride. ‘My wife is having a baby. We only found out yesterday. We’ve waited so long. We’re so thrilled.’ The interlocking fingers resting on the sofa squirmed and tightened.

  ‘Oh, Ivan, don’t. We should be thinking about Mrs Takahashi.’

  ‘That’s lovely news. Congratulations,’ Andrew said, with a nod rather than a smile. ‘Got three myself.’ He was unwilling to pursue the matter of Hilary’s intuition—which he did not believe in, hers or anybody’s—and she had in any case given him several quite straightforward reasons to account for her uneasiness about Mrs Takaha
shi’s safety.

  ‘Now, I’m afraid,’ he began. He took in their concerned, gentle faces and judged her certainly, him less so, to be a non-panicker, which would make the next bit easier. ‘Now, I’m afraid we do have reason to suspect that Mrs Takahashi may, I stress may, have been involved in a serious incident which took place in Bath this morning. I would like, of course, to be able to eliminate the possibility if I can, and that means finding some identification for Mrs Takahashi.’ He paused. ‘A photograph, ideally. So I would like to have a look in her room, and if possible locate her passport.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Hilary exclaimed, raising her hands to her face. ‘You’ve got a body, haven’t you? Oh my God.’

  Ivan stood up. ‘You’re not to upset yourself. You stay here. I’ll take the inspector along.’

  The room was adequate and unpleasant, heavy with the scent of a syrupy room spray which mixed with, rather than disguised, the gingery, inflammable smells of nylon carpet and furniture glue. The Golightlys had fixed up the room for B&B guests on minimum outlay, with dismayingly twee bedroom furniture with plastic gilt handles. Under the ugly light of an overhead bulb in a white fringed shade the woman’s unremarkable possessions were set out with precision on the dressing table, a reddish, synthetic veneer-eal surface one scratch away from raw chipboard. Andrew found the passport in the dressing table drawer and flipped it open. The woman in the photograph, looking with a half-smile towards some focal point slightly to one side, was about five years younger than the blue-faced corpse in the mortuary, but it was the same face.

  Hilary stood in the doorway. ‘She’s died, hasn’t she? You’ve got a body. You think Mrs Takahashi’s dead. Don’t you?’

  Andrew turned and nodded. ‘It’s possible, Mrs Golightly. There was a fatal incident in Bath this morning, and we’d like to rule out Mrs Takahashi if we can. We’d like your assistance with identification, though of course her next of kin—’ Just then Ivan swayed on his feet and sat down heavily on the bed, turning to his wife with a face that was stunned and white.

  ‘Oh, Hil, how can—I didn’t think we’d have to do that kind of—’

  Hilary came forward protectively and placed her arm across his shoulder. ‘My husband isn’t good at taking shocks. He mustn’t be given sudden shocks, he reacts badly. Poppet, come back to the lounge with me and sit down.’

  ‘No, no, I’m fine. Fine now,’ he said, standing up. ‘Don’t worry about me. You’re the one who needs looking after.’ They exchanged another of their looks. All four hands were now earnestly kneading one another.

  Hilary looked at Andrew, who appeared to be waiting for something. ‘You don’t mean right now? It’s after eleven. Do you really want my husband going off to identify a body at this time of night?’ She looked up at her husband with concern.

  Andrew pursed his lips, feeling almost nauseous. Perhaps it was jealousy. It was of course late, in other people’s terms. He tended to lose sight of that kind of thing, but if he were honest, the reason he was still calling on people at close to midnight had less to do with dedication to his job than with postponing the moment when he had to return to his depressing flat, because he had been assuming, with a combination of gloom and angry pride, that he would not go back to Medlar Cottage that night. He was still feeling piqued at how Sara that afternoon had in the space of a minute grown so remote, extinguishing any glimmer of sympathy or understanding for the position in which his job placed him. Suddenly all he wanted was to get back to her, the unreasonable, adorable, demanding bitch, and he still had to deal with Cathy and Heathcliff here.

  ‘It is late, but if you’re agreeable, sir, I’ll take you over to the mortuary now. Best if we can get the ball rolling. We don’t want any unnecessary delay in informing next of kin, and confirming the identification, as I’m sure you’ll understand.’

  It was horribly easy to say the right thing sometimes, Andrew reflected, as he drove down the hedge-lined lane that skirted the village of Limpley Stoke and turned the car on to the main road. Ivan sat beside him, calm. Andrew had come straight out with the right words, about next of kin and all that, when what he actually meant was let’s get on with it so that I can get back to the person I love most in the world and who I have upset yet again and who I am terrified might suddenly have decided she doesn’t want me. But the official, responsible thing came pinging out of his mouth, even out of his brain, more automatically (as well as more grammatically) than any expression of his personal wishes, and that was exactly what froze Sara into an unresponding block. Whether his job had begun to change him into a machine or a monster he was not sure, but his responses to things too often fell short of simple human ones. It was true that he did not wish any delay in identifying the body. But it was also true that he wanted Ivan Golightly’s confirmation of Mrs Takahashi’s identity within the next hour, so that he could be back with Sara to begin convincing her all over again how much he loved her.

  CHAPTER 10

  YES, THAT’S NICE. Nice, lyrical opening phrasing you’re giving us, yes, this lovely phrase—tyaa da daa tyaa da dum!—that’s quite good …’ It wasn’t, actually, it was barely kind of adequateish, but for the sake of everyone present—for the crowd of about a hundred (very respectable for a Sunday morning masterclass), for Tom who was in the back row openly reading the Scotsman, for the aspiring pianist herself and, Christ knew, for himself—James Ballantyne was trying to move the thing on, so that he could get off the stage as fast as possible. There were three others chosen from Scotland’s music conservatoire—Caledonia’s finest, Tom called them—waiting to have their well-rehearsed renditions of Rachmaninov taken apart and put back together in public, but after this one perhaps he could call a little unscheduled interval and see if ten minutes’ lying down would ease the pain in his stomach. Actually, if it went on like this he was going to have to lie down, interval or not.

  He sucked in a breath silently and mopped at his forehead, reminding himself that the young woman at the piano was not responsible for his pain, nor was it constructive to hate her quite so wholeheartedly because she couldn’t play Rachmaninov.

  ‘So in this one, the opus 23, No 4 in D, isn’t it, when we come on to this new melody, Morag,’ James avoided even thinking about Tom’s face as he spoke her name. Backstage, just as James had been pretending he felt fine, Tom had looked up from the programme in horror. ‘Your first one’s actually a Morag. I didn’t think people were really called that.’

  Morag was pushing back her velvet hairband (James could find no words to express his view of velvet hair-bands on women of twenty-two) and nodding. The light was glinting off the lenses of her glasses, making it impossible to see her eyes, but the anxious working of her long top teeth on her bottom lip told James she was concentrating.

  ‘I think it may be calling for serenity, certainly, but perhaps also something more languorous … tyaa da dyaa?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Languorous,’ she echoed.

  ‘First, I want you to try giving us more at the beginning. Pull it out even more, as you come to the end of the first melody, it is all but exhausted, yes, but you move on slowly, wait, caress the phrase, let it grow even bigger, there’s going to be more … tyaa da da TYAAH … you see?’ There was a short snorting sound from behind the Scotsman at the back of the hall. He would kill Tom later.

  ‘Right, uh-huh … Emm …’ Morag seemed reluctant to start playing. James sighed and as he did so a pain like teeth ripped at his insides with such savagery that his face crumpled.

  ‘And then we come to this, nice and languorous. So try thinking … suppose you try to think’—he rose slowly to his feet, gently holding his side—‘of the kind of languor Rachmaninov wants here. This is the opus 23 after all, still intensely passionate, still echoing the idiom of the second piano concerto. He wrote this, didn’t he, in the summer of 1903. At the family’s summer estate, at Ivanovka, I believe. Still a young man, wasn’t he, and newly married. In love. Langoroso. How would you feel languorous? What woul
d you do to feel languorous?’

  Morag put her head on one side and pushed her glasses up on to the bridge of her nose. ‘Well … em, maybe when you have a bath … really, really hot … with, em, Radox …’James closed his eyes. Morag tried harder. ‘And … and then, em, you know, just relax …’

  ‘Morag, try picturing Rachmaninov—young Sergei—and his new wife, Natalya. In the summertime, at Ivanovka. Go on, just for fun. Imagine—it’s hot. The sun’s beating down outside, it’s afternoon, imagine you’re Natalya …’

  James’s pain was sending him over the top now. Anything to get his mind off it, he didn’t care what. One miserable piano student gets embarrassed, who cares? ‘This piece is not for virgins. You’re not a virgin, are you, Morag?’ He looked hard at her, now pink and staring down at the keys, as the audience’s giggles burbled round her. ‘You’re Natalya Rachmaninova, and Sergei, your new husband, he plays you like you’re a piano. You’ve just spent four hours making love in the afternoon … the golden wheat is whispering on the steppe … there are ripe cherries in the orchard … can you imagine that?’

  ‘I’m from Penicuik,’ Morag whispered.

  James ignored her. Pacing the platform now, and paddling the air with his arms he practically shouted, ‘Try it again, Morag. Languorous, you see? Let’s have some languor for grown-ups. Rachmaninov’s not for virgins. Make it big, make it about sex, Morag. The languor in this piece is post-coital. Do you understand? Come on, Morag, make love to the piano.’

  Morag was sweating visibly. She raised a timid hand, more to stop him than to ask her question. But James’s sudden involuntary cry of pain and his heavy collapse on the stage all but drowned out her mystified, ‘Em—with or without pedal?’

  CHAPTER 11

  THERE WAS SOMETHING teeth-grindingly irritating about students, Andrew thought. He had long since lost (he believed) any sense of inferiority at not having gone to university himself, but had not noticed that he had lapsed instead into a dull sense of superiority arising from an unexamined conviction that young people nowadays had things easier than he had. He was quite sure that he, when in his early twenties, would have been sufficiently awake if not sufficiently respectful of authority to give better directions than those he had taken from the tall girl carrying folders and a laptop, and which had now got him lost on the windswept brick and concrete campus of the University of the West of England. His annoyance hurried his pace past the flat glass walls on either side of the raised concourse and DS Bridger, who had driven all the way from Bath without daring to break DCI Poole’s angry silence, had to take his hands out of his pockets in order to keep up.