‘Yes,’ said Slider. ‘And Josh says he really didn’t have sex with Phoebe Agnew on Thursday.’
‘But—’
‘You have to ask yourself, who else had access to his semen apart from him?’
Swilley’s face curved in distaste. ‘Oh, good God!’
Slider said nothing more, and she did not break the silence. It was too horrible to discuss. If he was right, it was something close to monstrous.
The house was silent. ‘No answer,’ Swilley said at last, when she had knocked and rung extensively. ‘She must be out.’
‘She’s in there,’ Slider said abruptly.
Norma glanced at him, and shrugged. There was no arguing with instinct. She looked up at the house. The landing window was partly open. ‘Did you hear that cry of distress, sir?’
Slider followed her gaze. ‘Could you get up there?’ he said in surprise.
‘Drainpipe. Easy.’
‘All right. God help us if the neighbours are watching. It seemed like a very loud cry for help,’ he said for the record, and added, ‘If she’s there, be careful. She might be desperate.’
Swilley slid out of her coat, handed it to Slider, and swarmed with light, muscular ease up the drainpipe, which had been thoughtfully placed in a more trusting age nicely adjacent to the window. It was a sash window, and there were a few heart-stopping moments as Swilley struggled to push it up one-handed, and Slider imagined her falling, the drainpipe breaking, or Noni Prentiss appearing like Norman Bates in a wig and stabbing her through the window.
But at last Swilley got it up enough to wriggle in and disappeared. A moment later the front door opened and she let him into the hall. ‘No sound anywhere,’ she whispered. ‘Maybe she’s asleep – or out.’
Slider stood a moment, his senses prickling. ‘Downstairs,’ he said.
He led the way. The narrow, dark stairs bent at the bottom into the subterranean gloom of an eighteenth-century basement kitchen. It had been knocked through into one room, front to back, which gave it a window at each end; but both windows were below ground level and, as the saying goes, twice fuck all is still fuck all.
Swilley shivered, wondering how people could live like this. The kitchen floor was stone-flagged, the cupboards were old pine painted grey-green, and there was a big, battered pine table in the middle, so it probably looked much the same as when it was first built. All very desirable in a certain stratum of society, but Swilley was a Mo¨ben girl at heart. It was at least warm, with an Aga in the chimney, where the original range would have stood. She had shivered from distaste, and the suspicion that gloomy basements always meant beetles.
Slider stepped out off the stairs into the kitchen, and at once there was a rush of movement. Noni Prentiss had been pressed against the wall beside the staircase and now flung herself at him. Her right hand was upraised, and even this poor light was enough to glint melodramatically off the blade of the large butcher’s knife clenched in her fist as it swept downwards.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Origin of the specious
Reaction was instant and instinctive. Slider heard the movement and was side-stepping and turning even as Swilley launched herself from her vantage point one step up, grabbing the wrist of the knife hand as she brought the attacker down. Swilley was tall and strong and Mrs Prentiss small and slight and it was over, there and then. Mrs P disappeared under Swilley’s body, Slider was knocked out of the way, and the Kitchen Devil went scooting off across the stone floor and under the table like an electric rat.
Mrs Prentiss had made no sound before Swilley got her; she could make none after, with the breath knocked out of her; but she writhed with the strength of desperation until Slider said, ‘Keep still, or you’ll hurt yourself. Just stop struggling and we’ll let you up.’ At the sound of his voice she became still, and when Slider had retrieved the knife and put it out of harm’s way, Swilley rose and helped her up, still keeping hold of her wrist.
‘You’re hurting me,’ Noni said. Her face was deathly white, gleaming faintly in the basement gloom like a peeled hard-boiled egg.
Slider nodded to Swilley to let her go, and she rubbed her wrist with the other hand but made no other movement. She was trembling so much it almost beat the air, like wings.
‘I’m sorry we startled you,’ Slider said.
She looked at him with glazed, unseeing eyes. ‘I thought it was him. I thought he’d come back.’
‘You mean your husband?’ She swayed, as if she was going to faint. Slider pulled a chair out from the table and guided her to it. ‘So you were going to kill him too, were you?’
‘I thought he’d come to get me,’ she said.
‘Come to get you? Why? Because you threw him out?’ She only stared. Slider pulled out another chair and sat down facing her. ‘Why did you throw him out?’ She didn’t answer. ‘Mrs Prentiss, look at me. Why were you trying to kill your husband?’
Swilley had been looking in cupboards, and had found a bottle of Sainsbury’s brandy. She poured some into a tumbler and brought it over to show Slider, who nodded. She put it down in front of Mrs Prentiss, carefully closed her icy hand round it and said, ‘Drink some of this. It’ll make you feel better.’
In a few minutes the bolting terror had subsided in favour of a lower-key mixture of fear and misery. Slider observed her with interest. If Josh was looking haggard, this was a woman who had been all the way to hell and only halfway back. It fitted with his suspicions; now he had to find the best way of getting her story. If she had killed Phoebe Agnew, it must have been in the grip of emotions so powerful they might well rob her of speech, even of reason. Better to come to it indirectly, he thought, and from a long way back. This jump wanted long, wide wings, or the horse would refuse.
‘You’ve had a hard few days,’ he said at last. ‘You’ve been living with a terrible secret. But it’s over now. The secret’s out. I know you were at Phoebe Agnew’s flat that Thursday. I know what you did there. Now it’s time to tell me everything in your own words, and get it off your chest.’ He nudged her hand. ‘Have some more of that. That’s right. You’re not afraid of me, are you?’ She shook her head slightly. ‘Good. So, then, tell me everything. Begin with you. Tell me all about you.’
It took a little coaxing and some gentle, probing questions before she began. But then it all came out, slowly at first, but with growing fluency: a story of love and of love mistaken, of the shadow that killed it and the crop of bitter jealousy that grew up in its place.
Anona Regan had been an only child, cherished daughter of rather elderly parents. Her mother was thirty-eight when she was born, her father seven years older. He was a cobbler by trade and had his own small shop in a respectable working-class suburb of London. By the time Anona was growing up the business was doing well enough for him to hire an assistant and keep his hands clean attending the counter; a change that conferred the perilous gentility of white-collarhood on him and his family. His wife had never worked. They lived in a neat maisonette which she kept spotless; she made her own and her child’s clothes, cooked the plain, unimaginative meals of the fifties, and always put on her hat to go shopping.
Anona grew up a quiet, well-mannered, docile child, bending like sea-grass to the languid tides of the elderly household; the sort of little girl in hair-slides and white socks who never had any difficulty in staying clean, who played nicely on her own and could be relied on at any meal table not to spill or speak with her mouth full. At school she gave no trouble to teachers, and occupied the unexceptional place towards the bottom of the top third.
She had a little girl’s passion for ballet, and since it seemed to Mrs Regan a wholly proper, feminine interest, Anona was allowed to begin dance lessons. It proved something for which she had a talent, and though she passed the eleven-plus and could have gone to grammar school, she pleaded in a quiet way to audition for a local well-known stage school, and was allowed. There she did solidly well, though not brilliantly – the hallmark of her lif
e – and since, unlike many of the other pupils, she was also reasonably good at the academic lessons, the headmistress said it would be the sensible thing for her to go to university, just for insurance. With a degree, she would always be able to get a job if the stage failed her.
Anona never resisted the sensible, and her parents were proud and bewildered at the idea of a child at university, something that was becoming more common by 1966, but was still outside their frame of reference. The shop was doing less well – people were throwing away shoes and buying new ones now, instead of having them mended – and there was no longer an assistant; but Mr Regan, sixty-three, said a man with his own business never had to retire. He learned how to work a machine for cutting keys and engraving dog medals, and so managed to scrape up the money to supplement Noni’s grant.
Quiet, clean, obedient Noni went to UCL in the October of 1966. Decades always have a time-lag, and the sixties, in the sense that history thinks of them, were just really getting under way. London was finally breaking free of the massive undertow of the war: the last of the bomb-sites were built over, there were goods in the shops and money to buy them, restaurants were opening to serve exotic food a world away from gravy and two veg, and young people were having notice taken of them in a way that was bound to go to their heads.
At UCL Anona Regan met Phoebe Agnew, who was so different from her, and who seemed to represent everything exciting about that magic decade. It was hardly too much to say that Noni fell in love with her. Phoebe was wild and beautiful, with her strange, loose clothes and unkempt mane of red curls. Phoebe smoked, drank, and talked incessantly, said unconventional things, used swear words, understood politics; laughed out loud, spoke to lecturers as if she were their equal, and addressed members of the opposite sex with teasing frankness. She even, Noni suspected, had sex. Most of the girl students talked about having it, but like Noni shied away from the awful reality, Phoebe didn’t talk about it much – brushing the subject only casually in passing – but that seemed only to confirm the idea that she knew enough about it first hand to take it or leave it.
Phoebe was also brilliant, a top scholar with a real talent for writing, and she knew what she wanted to use her writing for. Other students were reading English because they had been good at it at school and couldn’t think of anything else to do. They supposed, vaguely, that they would eventually become teachers. But Phoebe already had a track record in political activism and journalism. Why, that summer of 1966, before even starting at university, she had wangled her way into a trip to Chile, organised by a militant student group, to build a youth centre; and while there she had actually managed to get an interview with Allende, the Marxist leader of the land reform party. The interview appeared in the official Students’ Union newspaper, and was subsequently reprinted in the Socialist Worker and précised in the Guardian. Thus Phoebe proved to her impressed fellow students that she not only knew what she wanted to do, she was getting on with doing it.
It was not to be wondered at that Noni was fascinated by this vivid extrovert. What Phoebe saw in her was less obvious. Perhaps it was the attraction of opposites; or perhaps Phoebe saw that Noni was not quite as much of an opposite as it appeared. For Noni was different from the other students. She too knew what she wanted to do, and she had a talent: that became apparent when they joined Dramsoc. Not everyone who joined wanted to act: it was the fashionable society to belong to, and was therefore a means to meet the most interesting members of the opposite sex. But plays were put on, and members auditioned for parts. Phoebe got one because her intellect dictated that she would succeed at what she undertook; Noni got the lead role because she could act. Phoebe’s respect for Noni grew; Noni copied Phoebe’s style in a quiet way, and the two girls achieved a small local fame together.
Josh did not audition for plays. Josh had joined Dramsoc so that he could have the pick of the women students; and the pick of the Dramsoc members, as far as he was concerned, were Noni and Phoebe.
At first it was an equal relationship. The three of them were drawn together, and took to hanging around and going out as a threesome. ‘At least, that’s what I believed,’ said Mrs Prentiss. So far, she had told her story in a dreamy undertone, as if it were the history of someone quite detached from her. But now a bitterness began to creep in. ‘I thought it was the three of us. But I see now it was always Phoebe. Always. Always. Right from the beginning.’
‘You mean – her and your husband?’ said Slider.
She nodded slowly, the now empty tumbler held in both hands before her face. ‘How could I compete with her?’
‘Weren’t they just friends? He said it was a purely platonic relationship.’
‘He told you that? What a liar he is! A man can’t be “just friends” with a woman. It doesn’t happen. I should know – God, I’ve lived with it all these years! All the Sophies and Stephanies and Carolines – all his secretaries and researchers and whatever else he liked to call them! Well, I put up with it. In a way, it didn’t matter, because he didn’t care a jot about them, the little sluts. But Phoebe – how could I bear that? It was different with her. He loved her.’
‘Have you any evidence that they had a physical relationship?’ Slider asked.
‘Evidence?’ She opened her eyes wide. ‘You should have heard how he talked about her! He praised her to the skies. “Phoebe was so different – Phoebe understood – Phoebe had a real intellect.” Not like poor stupid Noni, oh no! And he was always ringing her. They’d talk for hours on the phone. He asked her opinion. They had lunch together. He was always dropping in on her. And you ask me if I had any evidence?’
‘It could still have been platonic—’
‘Men and women don’t have platonic relationships,’ she said flatly. ‘Not in the real world.’
There seemed no way of arguing with that. ‘But she was your friend too,’ Slider said.
‘We did everything together at college. And afterwards she was always there. She helped me, advised me. I trusted her – she always knew better than me what to do. She had a – a grasp of things. I’ve never been clever like Phoebe, but she said I had something more important, that I had talent.’ She rocked a little, mourning her friend. ‘She did everything for me, sorted out all my troubles. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t even have had Toby and Emma. Josh never wanted children – he hated his own father too much. But I wanted them so much. She told me just to stop taking the pill. I would never have dared. But she said he’d love the children once they were there, and of course he did. And when he found out what I’d done, she stopped him being angry with me. Took him away and talked to him and wouldn’t let him shout at me. She always loved Toby and Emma; and they loved her. They called her Aunty Phoebe. She used to pretend to tell them off about that, but she loved it really.’
She rocked harder, and the tears began to slip out. Slider kept very still, letting the story come.
‘Then when Emma went to school, it was Phoebe persuaded me to take up my career again, and made Josh use his contacts to get me on. He would never have bothered if she hadn’t nagged him. He never thought my career was important. But Phoebe believed in me. She said I could be great – and I was good, I was!’
She met Slider’s eyes in an appeal, and he nodded. ‘I know you were.’
She seemed appeased, and went on. ‘She always backed me up. When I got pregnant again and Josh wanted me to have an abortion because he said I was too old, she blew him up. She said I must have the baby. She was always dead against abortion. She fought him tooth and nail and made him change his mind – anyway, made him leave me alone about it,’ she amended. ‘He was never really persuaded.’
‘Maybe he was worried about your health,’ Slider suggested.
She shrugged the intervention away. ‘She wanted that baby so much, almost as much as I did. When I lost it, it was her that cried. I couldn’t cry – it was all locked up inside me. But I couldn’t have got through if it wasn’t for her.’
S
he paused and wiped the tears from under her eyes with her fingers and, finding her nose was running too, rubbed it on the back of her hand – an unconscious reversion to the childhood state before appearances mattered, showing how far from her normal poise she had fallen in the crash of what had been her life.
‘It sounds as though she really was your friend,’ Slider said. ‘She must have loved you.’
Noni stared at him. ‘Yes, that’s what I thought. But I see now it was all an act. It’s only in the past few years I’ve started to realise what was really going on. Now I know what a fool I’ve been. She was playing me along, while she and Josh carried on behind my back. It was them all the time, the two of them, heads together, laughing at me. I was the outsider.’
‘But it was you he married,’ Slider said.
‘Yes, and how he regretted it!’ she cried bitterly. ‘He only married me because she’d gone away somewhere. The moment she came back he brought her home, and after that they started their game of making a fool of me. That’s the real reason she made me have the kids – to keep me out of the way. She was jealous and wanted him to herself. I didn’t see it at the time, but I see it now.’
‘But you said she really loved the children – and they her.’
‘Yes. She did. I suppose she couldn’t help it. Oh, I don’t know! Leave me alone, can’t you! She’s dead now, and it’s all over. It doesn’t matter any more. Nothing matters any more.’
She began to cry in earnest, putting her face into her hands. It was plain she was deeply confused about the situation; that she had loved her friend and even now, having convinced herself that there had been an affair going on, didn’t want to believe it.
Slider saw how the layers of emotion – of love and admiration, of hurt and jealousy – had been confounded by a basic lack of understanding, an inability really to see what Phoebe Agnew had been about. A woman like her was so different from Noni that her motives must always have been a mystery. What you don’t understand, you can only interpret according to your own lights. So, there could be no friendship without sex between a man and a woman; and an unmarried Phoebe could only have been jealous of and therefore hostile towards Josh’s wife Noni. Add to that Noni’s emotional breakdown following the loss of a child and the failure of her career, and the comparison of that with Phoebe’s burgeoning success, and you had a seething cauldron of love and hatred that could easily spill over into action.
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