Wings over the Watcher

by Priscilla Masters

  Lynn answered the door quickly and with pure delight. “Joanna.”

  She quickly disillusioned her. “Hello, Lynn. Look – I’m sorry. This isn’t a social call.”

  The surprise on her friend’s face was almost as hurtful as the raised eyebrows. “Oh. Well come in anyway.” She led her through the lounge, tossing back a comment. “So. I assume it’s about Beatrice Pennington?”

  “Yes.” With relief Joanna took her seat in the UPVC conservatory furnished in Indian cane and cheese plants. “Lynn,” she said frankly. “We’re not getting on as well as we’d hoped. To put it bluntly, we’re stuck.”

  “Poor Joanna,” her friend said dryly. “Must be awful. So how do you think I can help?”

  “Go over the conversations you had with her,” Joanna pleaded. “At some point she must have said something of significance to you.”

  Lynn was quickly on the defensive. “Why me? She’s just as likely to have said something to you.” Already the distance between them was widening.

  “I know what she’s said to me,” Joanna said. “I’ve gone over and over everything. I couldn’t think of anything. That’s why I came to you.”

  Her words mollified the situation a bit. Lynn leaned right back in the chair and let out a hearty sigh.

  “You did listen to her, didn’t you?”

  “Oh yes. But it was nothing very interesting. She talked about men being insensitive. Said that women listened more, that they were gentler, less brash. I think she said something about touching.” She screwed her face up. “It was just mumbo jumbo. Something about the power of touching. To be honest, Jo, I can’t stand all this sort of rubbish. I must admit. I did switch off. She was full of beliefs and trust, a feeling that the world was really not such a bad place as we all thought. I can’t remember exactly the words she used but you know the sort of thing.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Oh, Jo. Not that I can remember.”

  “Did she say anything about her husband?”

  “She mentioned him.”

  “In what vein?”

  “Just that she found him boring, that there were no surprises left, that there was nothing hidden from her, that she’d got to the end of his character…” Lynn rolled her eyes. “Whatever that’s supposed to mean. She wasn’t exactly deep herself. She spoke a lot about losing weight, about the life she was going to lead when she got to her target weight, how fit she felt, clothes. Confidence. New life. She talked some twaddle about love.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Complete tripe. Real romantic stuff. Almost Mills and Boon-y. You know the sort of thing, knees trembling, tingling feeling all over her body, heightened awareness.”

  “We think she was in love with another woman,” Joanna said reluctantly.

  Lynn opened her blue eyes wide. “Really? She didn’t strike me as a lesbian. She seemed. I assumed she was hetero. You knew her as well or as little as we did. What did you think?”

  Joanna thought back to a rainy Sunday morning in the middle of June. Beatrice had arrived early. They had been the first ones there and she had sensed Beatrice was in the mood for a confidence. But she had arrived depressed. She had heard nothing from Matthew and the miscarriage had suddenly and inexplicably seemed terribly sad. Maybe it had been the hormones but listening to Beatrice’s chatter had been beyond her so she had straddled her bike and stared in the direction from where she knew the others would come, hoping Beatrice would stay silent. Then she had turned around and read her eyes. Brown cow eyes, very appealing. Something very happy and excited in her face and she had felt guilty that she had been so wrapped up in her own problems. Joanna frowned away the unexpectedly vivid picture. Beatrice had seemed fulfilled – and dumb. Dumb in the American sense of bordering on stupid. No. That wasn’t right. Dumb in the sense of being animal, manipulated and used, lacking control over her fate.

  And now the memory provoked the same feeling of discomfort. Joanna stood up quickly. “Did she say anything that might give us a clue?”

  “No,” Lynn said. “If she had I would have been the first to get in touch with you.” She sounded hurt.

  “Well – if you do recall anything else you will ring me, won’t you? You know my number.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re still coming on Sunday?”

  “Yes. I’ll be there.” But her friend’s voice had chilled into formality.

  All sorts joined the cycling club. Sport is the great unifier. Pagan, in contrast to Lynn, lived in a tiny terraced house with her four children and even as Joanna lifted her hand to knock on the battered front door she could hear noise. Lots of it. Children shouting, pop music thumping, the sound of a washing machine whirring bronchitically.

  She had to bang loudly to provoke any response. Pagan answered the door abruptly, a pair of eyes peering from behind her. “Joanna,” she said with genuine amazement. “What on earth brings you here? Come in. Come in.”

  There was as much contrast between the two houses as there was in the two women. Pagan’s was a tip. Washing strewn across the backs of chairs, books, fallen open on the floor, the TV blaring out. From upstairs thumped the thud of a bass guitar. There was not one spare inch of space. And two teenagers, disproportionately large compared to the size of the room, lolling across the chairs filled the airspace too. The house was filled with the scent of old fried food and Joanna spied a plate tucked underneath the settee.

  “Come in the kitchen,” Pagan said, vaguely searching around for a spare chair. “We can at least talk in there.”

  Joanna followed her into the tiny kitchen, messily painted green with pine units. Every cupboard door was wide open so you could see into fat-stained shelves. There were piles of dishes over every surface. Joanna parked herself on one of the kitchen chairs and as concisely as possible repeated the conversation she had just had with Lynn Oakmaoor. Pagan was less resentful at being questioned and her dark eyes opened wide in sympathy. It struck Joanna that she badly wanted to help.

  And yet – this too can hamper police investigations. It was no use putting ideas into her head. She wanted the whole truth only. Pagan chewed her lip for a minute as Joanna stumbled through her lines.

  “I liked Beattie,” she said. “But she was the most frightful prude, you know?”

  “No?”

  Pagan puffed out a long sigh. “Ridiculous really. So screwed up about sex.”

  “Really?”

  Pagan smothered her giggle with her hand. “Oh yes. She asked me all sorts of weird and wonderful things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Sex toys, same-sex sex, how women managed it.” She gave a throaty laugh. “Why the hell she was asking me I really don’t know. My life is devoid of anything that interesting. All my energy is taken up with managing this.” She waved her arms around her. She met Joanna’s eyes with a frank stare of her own and a hint of shame at her levity. “I’m all right if I forget she’s dead,” she said. “I can cope then. If I laugh I’m fine. It’s when I think that some bastard. Oh excuse me but that’s what he is. When I think he’s just killed her I get really angry. I want to hit and punch.”

  “Who?”

  “Him.”

  “Do you know who him is?”

  “I just know he’s young. And I also know that he made a fool of her and that she knew it. She felt stupid.”

  Joanna was giving away nothing. Although she could guess who this person was she said nothing, simply, “Do you have a name?”

  “No. I just have a picture of some arrogant bloke having a laugh at her expense. Luckily for her she met someone else.”

  Joanna was listening with every single fibre of her body. “Someone else?” she said casually.

  “A woman who healed her with her sympathy and kindness and the laying on of hands.”

  The laying on of hands and the casting out of devils. The question remained. Who killed her? Her jealous husband, this young lover – or someone connected with him?
The woman who had finally shown her such kindness – or someone connected with her?

  The circle spun, expanding at the same time.

  It was obvious that Pagan’s way of thinking was nearer to Beattie Pennington’s than was Lynn’s. “Do you know who she is, this woman?”

  “Just bits. It was obvious that Beattie didn’t want people to know. I know for a fact that she has warm brown eyes. I know she is a professional woman whom Beattie met through her work.”

  “Whose work? Beatrice’s or the woman?”

  “The woman’s, I think.” Pagan frowned. “That was the impression I got.”

  “I know that she was seeing her during the week that she last came out cycling with us, the week of the 13th of June.”

  “Do you know the day? The place? The time?”

  “No. Only that it was sometime that week.. I think she said she had an appointment.”

  “Try and remember. Was it hair? A dentist?”

  “Wait a minute. She was talking about her excitement, that she was going to buy herself something new.”

  “Something new,” Joanna echoed. “Something new.”

  Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Blue as in Beatrice Pennington’s lips.

  She needed to get hold of her diary.

  A row was breaking out at Corinne Angiotti’s house. Pete was standing, facing her, a letter in his hand. One of the letters. He’d found the drawer in her desk at home where she had put the overflow from her surgery.

  “I’ve thought many things about you, Corinne,” he jeered. “I know you’re not over-keen on sex. I know some days you look at me as though you can’t stand me. I know you despise me and dislike me for dragging you here when you were doing so well in your London clinic. I just didn’t think you’d stoop to this.”

  “I haven’t stooped to anything,” Corinne defended herself. “The woman is a deranged patient. Obsessed and sick. Lonely and misguided.”

  “She’s also dead.”

  Corinne said nothing but regarded her husband calmly.

  He, on the other hand, was red and sweating, his emotions gaining control. “It strikes me, Corinne, that I don’t know you, do I?”

  “So what do you think you have just found out about me?”

  “That you have been carrying on some sort of affair with another woman and on top of that she is a patient of yours. History repeats itself.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “It says here.” Pete Angiotti was beside himself. His eyes were bulging with fury. “When you touch me I am alive.”

  He looked up. “I don’t know how you can be so barefaced as to deny it when it says it all here.”

  “I told you,” she said coldly. “The woman was a deranged patient. That’s all. A nutcase. A sad woman. Misguided and deluded. She believed herself in love with me and that I returned this love. It was pathetic. I simply felt sorry for her.” She felt tired and defeated. “I kept trying to return her to reality. I kept pointing out that one day she would feel really stupid about it but all she did was to put various outfits on and make appointments. I was frightened, Pete. I thought she might just convince someone from the General Medical Council that I’d made advances to her.”

  “That is just the sort of explanation I would expect you to make. And now she’s dead and can neither confirm nor deny it so I’ll never know.”

  It was this that finally defeated her. Pete would never believe her version. Therefore she would have this sitting on her shoulder – for ever. It struck her then how very tired she was. For months now her nightmare had been that Beatrice Pennington would make a complaint to the General Medical Council and they would spend years investigating. All that time she might be suspended from practice and the newspapers would have a field day – as they had for her husband. What a fine pair they were – the teacher husband who assaulted a pupil and the doctor wife who has an affair with a patient. Both abusing their positions of trust – except she hadn’t. But the public have scant sympathy for professionals who mistreat the very people they are paid to protect. This small town would quickly turn hostile. Who would believe her? Husband and wife would be tarred with the same brush? She had watched doctors have their careers ruined by just such patients and wondered. Maligned? Guilty? Innocent? Who would ever know? And the pundits are right. Mud does stick. So hard that when it is removed it takes some of your skin away. You can never be the same again. How many times had she gone over and over each early consultation and wondered how she might have turned away the flood of emotion. What had she done to invite this devotion? Because if she did not know then it could happen again and again and again.

  She never would be free of the shackles of a deluded patient’s devotion.

  Absorbed, obsessed, deluded. Beatrice had been only the first. A lonely woman who had clung to the one person who had dished out sympathy in great big dollops.

  But it is part of the job, she might protest.

  If she couldn’t even convince her own husband who should know and trust her above all others what chance did she have with a wider audience? None.

  “Why did you keep the letters?” he was saying.

  Why had she? She didn’t know. Only that they were beautiful. And dangerous. More poetic than anything that had ever been written to her or about her. In a subtle way they had given her more than she could have wanted, praised her above all others, elevated her. Canonised her even. Some devil in her had not wanted to to destroy them. Why not? Because they were beautiful? Because they were dangerous? Because they were evidence? The only tangible proof of the truth behind the fantasy.

  Because they were all three. They had told her things she had wanted to be told.

  “Did you ever write back to her?”

  She had. Not love letters but curt notes explaining, as she thought, the principle of the doctor/patient relationship. Corinne looked at her husband. She would have loved him to have put his arms around her, hug her to him and tell her it would be all right. But this was as silly as wishing for the moon to be made of cream cheese and have a smiling man who lived in it. In his way Pete was another Arthur Pennington. Unaware.

  Corinne looked at her husband and knew she could never begin to explain. He would never understand, never sympathise because he was at the centre of his universe and she was too far on the periphery to make impact.

  Then she understood something else. This was not news to him. He had known before. This was a well-rehearsed scene, one he had played over a few times in his imagination. His shock was not new but second-hand. Thoughts began to tumble faster through her mind. He had been reading the letters long before she had brought them home from the tightly-jammed drawer in her surgery. He had seen them there and derived some sort of vicarious thrill from his secret knowledge. “How long have you been reading the letters for?”

  “For a while.”

  Yes, now she thought of it Pete had seemed to find any excuse to call at the surgery and wait for her.

  “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

  “I thought I’d watch you. After all – it’s easy to fake things, deny the truth. I wasn’t sure just what was going on.”

  “And what do you think now?”

  Something in him seemed to crumple. “I don’t know,” he said. “I simply don’t know.”

  Corinne was amazed. “You can’t really believe I’d embarked on some sort of affair with one of my patients, can you?”

  The mean side of her husband came to the fore then. “Well something was keeping that woman’s fantasies going.”

  So he believed the worst. Pete’s eyes narrowed and he looked at her with a tightness around his mouth.

  That was when Corinne Angiotti felt the first stirrings of real fear. Pete was her husband. He knew her better than anyone. Or at least he should do. Beatrice Pennington was dead. The woman who could so easily have wrecked her career and ruined her life. Who would employ a woman doctor who had had an affair with
her patient? Men were struck off for the like. It only remained for the first really high profile case of a woman to come to the fore. Equal opportunities? Equal trouble.

  What a motive.

  Beatrice was dead and looking at the suspicion in Pete’s eyes she could see he believed she could have killed her. Simple really. She eyed him. No one but he knew about this. All right, stupidly she had kept the letters. Silly – but letters could be burnt. The real question was, could Pete be silenced?

  “I didn’t kill her,” she said.

  “Prove it.”

  Corinne fell quiet and thought. Nasty suspicious little worms were boring into her brain. Pete was a jealous, unstable man, prone to fits of petty jealousy and irrational behaviour. People knew that. And he had left his previous job under an ugly cloud. No one liked a teacher who was accused of suddenly losing his temper and assaulting a pupil. No one would believe him either. If push came to shove who would be believed? She – or him? It would be an interesting contest. What if…?

  “Did you kill her, Pete?”

  “Oh, I know what you’re doing,” he said nastily. “Trying to turn the tables on to me. It won’t work.”

  “Give me the letters,” she said.

  “I’ve hidden them.”

  So – ultimately can marriage degenerate into this? Suspicion and hatred. The complete inability to communicate without pointing fingers. And finally – can it descend into fear?

  Joanna was back in the station, reading through the statements. Arthur Pennington’s, the colleagues. Her two friends. And into the picture swam someone else. Someone else. Someone who lived near the library, near enough for her to prefer to walk rather than cycle round there. She had worn a smart dress that day in honour of this person, this woman. She believed this woman loved her back. Maybe she had.