by Annie Dalton
‘I don’t mean to be all judgey,’ Tansy said awkwardly. ‘I suppose I just don’t get why you’d do it.’
‘Tansy, darling, I was seventeen! I’d been feeling so lost and out of place, a Jewish ugly duckling, and this man had not only singled me out as beautiful: at one stroke he’d given my life meaning! He’d practically ordered me to help him save the world. Sweetie, at that point I’d have followed him through fire!’
Isadora brushed a few dead leaves off the garden bench before she sat down. Hero immediately hopped up beside her. ‘Up till this point, I’d naively imagined that I was the only person he’d approached in this way. Then one afternoon when we met for our usual catch-up off the Cowley Road, my handler told me that he had a different kind of assignment for me. He asked if I’d heard about the society ball that was being held at Blenheim Palace. I said yes, I’d heard some of the real socialites in my year talking about what they were going to wear.
‘“Well, you’d better start thinking what you’re going to wear, Miss Salzman,” he said smiling, “because we’ve arranged for you to be sent an invitation!” He said a girl called Tatiana, who had some vague family connection to the current Russian ambassador, was going to be there, partnering the chinless young aristo whose twenty-first birthday this ball was to celebrate. Tallis said it was the kind of situation where important information might be exchanged and he was going to introduce me to some other undergraduates who would also be going.’
‘You were going to be spying at a ball? That’s outrageous!’ Tansy was half laughing.
‘Sounds bonkers, doesn’t it?’ Isadora said, ‘He made it clear that we were just being brought together for this one event. We were to pair up and attend the ball as if we were normal couples, but really we’d be there as his department’s eyes and ears. He told me to go to the Randolph Hotel on a particular day and he’d introduce me to the other members of his group, and I’d be assigned my partner for the ball.’ Isadora’s voice became brisk as if she needed to get this part over with. ‘And so I went and I met them. The partner assigned to me was James Lowell.’
Anna stared at her, finally understanding what she should have realized from the start. Isadora’s friend James, the one who’d been taken to hospital, dangerously close to death, was James Lowell, the elderly academic Anna had seen being rushed through the college gardens on a gurney.
‘James was my Prince Charming,’ Isadora explained, fighting tears.
In the kitchen, Anna’s phone started to ring. She was torn. She was desperate to hear the rest of Isadora’s story, but there was the chance it might be someone from Bramley Lodge calling about her grandfather. Though she wanted to believe he was immortal, he was almost ninety and rationally she knew the call could come at any time.
‘Just answer it, darling,’ Isadora said, dabbing her eyes. ‘To be honest, this is rather taking it out of me.’
Anna hurried into the house, snatching up the phone just before the answer phone kicked in. ‘Anna Hopkins!’
‘Hi, Anna. I’m really hoping you won’t hang up on me.’ The male voice was husky and uncertain. ‘This is Tim, Tim Freemantle.’
Anna felt the blood leave her face. She heard him swallow. ‘It’s taken me so long to get hold of your number and you didn’t respond to my emails. Perhaps you didn’t read them? I honestly don’t mean to be like your stalker but I need to talk to you. I’ve finally got a lead on Max.’
FOUR
Anna woke in darkness to find a perplexed White Shepherd peering down into her face. She was chilled through to her bones. For some reason her neck hurt – a lot, she realised, when she tried to move.
She put out a groping hand and discovered hard floorboards where her memory-foam mattress was supposed to be. For a moment she stayed where she was, feeling Bonnie’s warm breath on her cheek, wondering what the hell they were both doing in her study. It took a further sixty seconds to register the busy whoosh of water through the pipes. Shit! It was morning!
Anna shot upright, rapidly prioritising her panics. Last night Tansy had told her she wanted to go for a run before work. She’d offered to take Bonnie. But Bonnie was here, shut inside Anna’s study with Anna, where they’d been since – since whenever it was she’d decided she wasn’t going to be able to switch off her bedside light and fall asleep as if this was just another night.
She scrambled to her feet. If Tansy had ever wondered why the fiercely minimalist Anna kept an enormous French armoire in her extremely small study, she’d been too polite to ask. Tansy and Isadora knew some of Anna’s history, but Anna would be mortified if her flatmate knew that last night she had finally crashed into merciful black oblivion only after she’d stretched herself out beside her cupboard of horrors, her fist clenched around its key.
Anna crept to the study door. If she was quick, she could be inside her room before Tansy emerged wide awake and ready for her run. She softly opened the door. Bonnie immediately went rattling down the polished wooden steps to the kitchen, keen to use her dog flap.
The instant Anna was back behind her bedroom door, the nagging voice started up: You go on and on about how you’re going to be Miss Super-Sane from now on, and then you pull a stunt like that.
In one of the more questionable therapy groups she’d attended over the years, they’d had to go on an inner journey to meet, and supposedly overcome, their inner critics. Other group members came face-to-face with critical parents and teachers, bitchy older siblings and other blighting authority figures. On her journey Anna had been confronted by an entire hockey team of narrow-eyed Anna clones who took it in turns to verbally rip her to shreds. But that was then.
‘Back off!’ she muttered, as she headed for her shower. ‘I have changed. I didn’t open it.’ Every nerve in her body had been screaming but she’d resisted. She’d just needed to know that her old safety valve was there if she needed it.
It was hearing Tim Freemantle’s voice that had tipped her over the edge; the shock of hearing someone say Max Strauli’s name after so many years. She’d immediately flashed back to the grubby interior of Max’s biscuit-coloured Ford Fiesta, thick with the fug of skunk and cider mixed with the faint teenage odour of Max himself. She saw his grey-green eyes quickly flick away from hers as he said the last thing he ever said to her. ‘I think you’re a great girl Anna and I really like you … I’m just not, you know, in love with you. Is that cool?’ Sexy, scruffy, devious Max, who’d dropped out of sight after her family’s murders and had never been seen since.
Tim’s phone call, on top of everything else that had happened that day, had been one trauma too many to process. This doesn’t have to be a drama, Anna told herself. She’d survived without sleep plenty of times before. A scalding-hot shower and a couple of cups of strong coffee inside her and she’d be able to function.
Thanks to Tansy taking Bonnie out on her run, Anna had time to regroup. She showered, dried her hair and put on her work clothes before going down to the kitchen to make coffee.
Lately, and Anna found this weirdly difficult to admit, she almost looked forward to work days. She’d taken her admin job as a means to an end; a way to give her life structure while the real business of her life, as Anna had seen it then, went on behind the scenes. Though she hoped she’d never develop Nadine’s unnatural passion for all things admin, Anna had been surprised to discover that she found genuine satisfaction in resolving a student’s problems, or smoothing out misunderstandings between departments. She also liked looking up from a tricky phone call with the bursar, a famous bore, to see Kirsty miming an attack of narcolepsy. She liked that she and Kirsty had started going out for a sandwich and a gossip at lunchtime. Just little unimportant things, but together they added up to something that Anna had never imagined she could have: a life.
She’d had a life before obviously, but it had been largely make-believe. She’d been make-believe. She’d gone through the motions of going out to work, or to visit her grandfather, but inside she was secretly lo
nging for that moment when she could shut herself safely behind her front door and stop pretending. I was in hiding, she thought, in my beautiful flat with my granny’s beautiful china. She glanced across at her dresser shelves empty except for one exquisite china cup. The rest of her grandmother’s precious Limoges tea set had been smashed to pieces as Bonnie tried to defend Anna from their would-be killers.
When Anna had eventually returned with her friends to clear up the mess, she’d immediately started to sweep up all the broken crockery. Tansy had made her stop. While Anna and Isadora had scrubbed away at Bonnie’s bloodstains, Tansy had sifted through the fragments, until she’d located five eggshell-thin pieces that originated from the same cup. Taking them home she’d painstakingly glued them back together. The salvaged cup, with its visible hairline fractures, gave Anna a bittersweet feeling each time she saw it. Anna wasn’t a fan of motivational sentiments but that one about ‘becoming strong at the broken places’ had struck a chord. She had become stronger these past months. She didn’t need everything in her life to be beautiful and flawless before she could feel OK. And one bad night didn’t mean she was going bat-shit crazy.
Impressed to be having these kinds of positive thoughts on ninety minutes sleep, Anna took down the jar filled with Tansy’s home-made granola, poured some into a bowl and added a dollop of yoghurt. Despite no longer being a strict vegan, Tansy was still big on what she called ‘clean eating’, making home-made soups and stews, and insisting they buy their bread from her friend Leo’s bakery in the covered market. Anna was still sitting at the kitchen table, crunching granola and contemplating a second cup of coffee, when Tansy came back with a happy, panting Bonnie.
Bonnie went straight to Anna and pressed against her knees, giving her the foolish doggie grin that Anna now unquestioningly accepted as a genuine heartfelt smile. ‘Did you have a good time?’ Anna asked her. ‘Did Tansy meet Mr Darcy?’ Meeting Mr Darcy on Port Meadow had been their recurring joke since the week they’d both been off sick with flu and Anna had made Tansy watch all her favourite screen adaptations of Jane Austen.
‘No fictional heroes in sexy wet shirts today, sadly!’ Tansy took a loaf of sourdough bread out of the bread bin, and slotted two slices into the toaster. ‘I saw Blossom and her man. I think Blossom’s man is actually quite lonely.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘Not sure. It’s just a vibe.’ In the middle of pouring herself a glass of pink grapefruit juice, Tansy gave an anxious glance at the clock. ‘Better get a move on. I’m supposed to be helping to organize a private view. Did I tell you, I’m going to look at a studio flat later?’
‘Promise you won’t take it if it’s grim,’ Anna said, really meaning it. ‘I’m not that desperate to get rid of you.’
‘I know that,’ Tansy said cheerfully, ‘but I also don’t want to outstay my welcome.’ She snatched her bread slices out of the toaster as they started to scorch. ‘So how about Isadora’s big reveal yesterday?’ she added in a Tansy-type segue. ‘My Secret Life as a Chain-smoking Spy?’
‘She never did the big reveal though,’ Anna pointed out. ‘She never told us what happened at the ball.’
Emotionally shattered after her phone call, Anna had gone to rejoin her friends only to find Isadora zipping her tobacco tin into her bag, getting ready to leave. ‘I need to go home and rest now,’ she’d told Anna. ‘I need to be by myself. I can face it now, thanks to you and Tansy.’ She’d enveloped them both in a hug and Anna had smelled her musky perfume overlaid with the raw sweetish scent of rolling tobacco.
‘You didn’t finish your story?’ Tansy had protested. Isadora had given her a weary smile. ‘It will keep for another time, darling girl.’
‘You’ve got to admit it’s weird though.’ Tansy had a quick swallow of her juice. ‘The three of us meet for the first time at a murder scene and each one of us turns out to have secrets!’ She slid an involuntary glance at her unstamped Christmas card still lying on the counter. ‘I mean, what are the chances?’
‘Probably quite high.’ Anna absently rubbed the bruise on her palm left by the antique key she had clutched all through the night. ‘Probably everybody has secrets, if we only knew.’
‘Not Liam,’ Tansy said with a sunny smile. ‘What you see is what you get with Liam. That’s one of the things I like about him.’ She waggled her eyebrows at Anna. ‘I’ve just got to persuade him to dive into a lake in his shirt and he’ll be bloody perfect!’
On her stop-start bus journey into work, Anna found herself going over her phone call from Tim. She’d cut herself off from his family so completely that it had felt dangerous even to think about them. Now for the first time she found herself feeling almost nostalgic. She couldn’t remember how her parents and Tim’s had first become friends; in her memories they seemed always to have been there. The two families were in and out of each other’s homes so often that she’d come to consider Chris and Jane as her second set of parents; a far superior set, she’d thought at the time. More extrovert in temperament than Anna’s parents, Tim’s mother and father had a way of infusing everyone around them with their infectious joie de vivre. The happiest holidays, the liveliest parties and excursions were the ones they’d shared with Tim’s family. Her more reserved parents had blossomed in the Freemantles’ company and Anna had had Tim for her partner in crime. Nine months younger than Anna, he’d been closer to her in age than Dan and Will, her brothers. But it wasn’t only proximity that had made her regard Tim as her friend. He was a kind, good-humoured boy who had once devoted almost all of one half-term holiday to teaching Anna all his best moves so she’d be able to shine at her first school dance. They’d been pretty cool moves too, she thought, for an eleven-year-old.
As she stepped off the bus, Anna had a sudden vivid memory of the silky fabric of the dress she’d worn for the dance. She had felt so wonderful in that dress! Tim had phoned her the next morning to check how it had gone. ‘I knew you’d be fine,’ he’d told her. ‘I mean, once you’ve learned from the best …!’
Until his phone call Anna hadn’t spoken to Tim since that summer, sixteen years ago; the summer her life fell apart. She’d seen him at the funeral beside his parents, white-faced, in an unfamiliar suit. Tim’s mother had cried and tried to embrace Anna, but she’d brusquely extracted herself and walked away, unable to forget that she’d once childishly preferred Chris and Jane to her own mother and father; a preference she doubted she’d tried to hide. The only parents she’d wanted just then were her own, and since she couldn’t have them she would just have to get on with the business of being a bona fide orphan.
Anna made her way down the High towards Walsingham College, still lost in her thoughts. Inside the porter’s lodge, Mr Boswell was explaining something to do with the log book to a young trainee porter who had just recently started working at the college. The older man briefly broke off to greet Anna, telling her she had post. She collected her bundle of mail, then passed through the medieval archway into the walled gardens. In the distance, two gardeners were patiently working their way along the rose beds. The drab colours of their clothes made them appear timeless, almost part of the gardens, as if these same two elderly men had always been here, patiently tending Walsingham’s roses.
As she was thinking this, a familiar figure emerged from a doorway. ‘Hello, Anna. How are you?’ Inspector Chaudhari greeted her. ‘Apart from finding yourself in unfortunate proximity to another violent crime, obviously.’ He gave Anna a wry smile, as if trying to soften any implied criticism.
‘Apart from that, I’m very well, thank you,’ she told him. She could never really get a satisfactory fix on how old Inspector Chaudhari was. Apart from a slightly pouchy look around the eyes, he gave the impression of a man confidently in his prime.
‘Policemen are supposed to be inured to this sort of thing,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘but I find it hard to think what that poor old man could have done to provoke such a savage attack.’
‘I th
ink everyone here feels like that,’ she said.
The inspector passed his hand over his glossy black hair and Anna felt her heart sink, sensing that he was getting ready to broach something uncomfortable. She was fairly sure she knew what this might be. ‘I imagine you’ve been wondering if a date has been set for the trial?’ he said, then before she could answer, he said apologetically, ‘It’ll be a good few months yet, I’m afraid. But my sergeant tells me you’ve got some good friends supporting you?’
She nodded. ‘I have. I’m very lucky.’
‘Well, if you should need anyone extra for backup, my wife asked me to tell you that she cooks a mean—’ Anna was almost sure he was going to say ‘curry’, when the inspector flashed her a sly grin and said, ‘Sunday roast. Alisha’s lasagne is also extremely popular in our house!’ he added.
‘That’s really kind of you both.’ Anna could tell he was trying to make up for their rocky start after she’d found Naomi’s body.
‘She means it, you know.’ Inspector Chaudhari’s expression took on a sudden solemn intensity, as if he thought Anna doubted his wife’s intentions. ‘You would be made very welcome.’
She felt herself turning pink. ‘Thank you,’ she managed awkwardly.
They turned as Liam Goodhart came hurrying up from the porter’s lodge, talking into his phone, and Anna had a surreal sense of her two worlds colliding. A couple of days ago she’d run into Tansy’s boyfriend in his boxers on her landing and here he was being an official policeman. Liam gave her a neutral wave as if he had just remembered the same encounter and Anna gave a neutral wave back, before continuing on her way to the admin block.
A few minutes later she was at her desk trying to figure out a tactful way to remind certain college tutors to check the central departmental database and upload their end-of-term marking, if they hadn’t already done so. (In fact, none of the tutors she was writing to had done so.) It seemed like a simple task but Anna was finding out that very little in academic life was ever simple.