‘No. I checked with the secretary, that piece. The evening after he left she had to ring him. He’d forgotten to take some papers. I don’t know what. But she said he was there, definitely. And he couldn’t possibly have got back here in the time. Aix-les-Bains is pretty far south, you know. He’d have had to have managed to hire a bloody private plane, and even then ...’
‘I suppose you’re right, DI. Ah, well, it’s just one more good lead that’s turned out to be a no-no. It’s what you can expect with an inquiry like this. There must be people all over the country, all over the world even, harbouring sexual fantasies about poor little Bubbles Xingara. In the end we’ll get on to the one it was.’
‘Or we won’t.’
‘No. No, DI, we will, if it takes another two years. If we go on investigating every lead that comes our way, we’ll get him in the end. That’s good policework, and good policework is what produces a result.’
*
But it was only in the car driving back towards headquarters that Harriet saw what had been wrong. She had been thinking, not for once about Anselm and their next meeting, but about Handy Andy and his sexual antics, his co-operation with many-thunder-bolted Eros. And suddenly she had a mental picture of him standing by the lift gates on the University’s fourth floor chatting up the piece, as he had called her.
What if, she asked herself with a lateral jump, despite the difference in age between Glamour Puss and fifty-year-old hunched-up Dr Mortimer, she’s his mistress? Handy Andy would not have been able to believe it, would never have taken the possibility into account. But it was a possibility. Eros could strike, didn’t she know it, anywhere at any time. Hadn’t John spoken to her once about eighty-year-old Saul Bellow and his new young wife, mother now of his child?
So, when Handy Andy had checked with Glamour Puss that her boss had been at that Aix-les-Bains conference on those dates in June, had she at once, without even thinking, confirmed what he had asked about, even though it was not as he had said. It could be. It could be.
She took a quick glance into her rear mirror, swung the car round in a U-turn and headed back for the University.
Past the would-be dragon at the ground-floor reception desk. Into a lift whose doors were luckily open. Out at floor four. Little Bright Eyes still tapping away at her keyboard.
‘Hello again.’
Swift, teeth-shining smile. So no repercussions from that bit of disinformation.
‘Look, I’d like a private word with your Dr Mortimer’s secretary. Could you get her out here without making a fuss about it?’
‘With Violet? Yeah, I could do that. She’s always ready for a ciggie.’
‘Violet?’ Harriet could not help asking. ‘Is that really her name?’
A grin and a flicker of a wink.
‘It is. But don’t try kidding her about it. She really hates it.’
‘Thanks.’
She went and stood by the lift she had come up in, leaning inside and pressing the Wait button. A nice little interview room neatly standing by.
In a moment glamour-puss Violet arrived, already diving into her open handbag, desperate evidently for that cigarette.
‘One moment. Detective Superintendent Martens, Greater Birchester Police. I want a word.’
And, before the long-legged, blonde-cascading, bosom-flaunting creature knew where she was, Harriet’s hand was at her elbow and the gates of the waiting lift were closing behind her.
Harriet kept a finger on the Doors Close button.
‘Now,’ she said to her captive, ‘I believe you answered some questions earlier today from Detective Inspector Anderson.’
‘Thinks a lot of himself, that one.’
Glamour Puss, Harriet noted, spoke with a strong Birchester accent much mangled by attempting something classier. But more important was what she had said about Handy Andy. Clearly he had tried to make that date. And had failed. So had he questioned her with eyes shut? Or, rather, with them fixed irremovably on those stunning breasts? And had she been already armoured against his arrows?
‘He asked you, I think, about the trip Dr Mortimer took back in June to a conference somewhere?’
She saw, however quickly it was suppressed, the glint of fear in the eyes behind their fringes of blacked eyelashes.
‘Aix-les-Bains,’ she answered after an instant, pronouncing all the Ses. ‘That’s in France.’
‘Yes. That would be the conference DI Anderson was wanting to know about. Did he ask you if there’d been any hitches about it?’
‘Hitches? What do you mean hitches?’
Oh, yes, she’s lying all right. Time to go for it? Yes, I think so.
‘You know damn well what I mean. You told Mr Anderson that all had gone according to plan about that conference, didn’t you? And it hadn’t, had it? Dr Mortimer wasn’t there at all, was he?’
‘But — But — How did you know? I mean, I may have made a mistake when — when Mr Anderson was talking to me. He didn’t seem all that interested in the answer, tell you the truth. So I didn’t bother to think all that much about it, just told him it was okay what he’d asked.’
‘Well, I am interested in the answer. Very interested. So you will tell me exactly what happened back there in June. Now.’
‘Yes, yes. I will. All right. Well, you see, Trevor, I mean Dr Mortimer — oh, well, yes, Trevor, you might as well know it all — didn’t really want to go. He said there’d be no one there who knew anything worth tuppence about whatever it was they were going to talk about. So — So, well, he said what I never thought he would. He said, Why don’t we go away somewhere, you and I? Well, that was it. We went. Down to Cornwall. And, well, we had one hell of a good time. In bed from morning till night, if you must know.’
Ignoring the triumphantly lascivious look all across Glamour Puss’s glamoured-up face, Harriet realized that, once again, a good lead had melted away. If this flaunting creature and her hunched-up boss had been in bed together for even half the time she had boasted of, then he could not have been killing Bubbles, Bubbles of the 167 photos, far away at Adam and Eve House.
‘But I didn’t want to get Trev — Dr Mortimer into trouble,’ Glamour Puss went on. ‘I mean, the college was paying his fare and everything. So I didn’t say nothing to that Inspector Whatsit.’
But Harriet hardly listened to these last wretched details that had led to Handy Andy being deceived. Three tiny words that had come almost carelessly from Glamour Puss’s mouth had sent reverberations pulsating up in her mind. You and I, And at once all she could think about was how back in June — it had been as she was setting off from Levenham to go to Adam and Eve House for the second time — the words of that terrible old song from the days of the music halls had come back to her in a surge of longing for her newly discovered love-object. For Anselm, Anselm, Anselm. And now she felt them again, with blotting-out urgency.
You and I, alone in a world for two.
Chapter Twenty
In the days that followed, while wintry January turned into a February every bit as cold and windswept, Harriet found she thought of little, night and day, but her Anselm. Her barely renewed grip on the Bubbles Xingara inquiry had been almost wholly loosened again the moment glamour-puss Violet had quoted those three words her boss had said, you and I. That day just after New Year she had checked, still duty-bound, with Dr Mortimer that what Violet had told her was the truth. But she had done no more than that.
‘Yes. Oh, yes,’ hunched-up, grizzled Dr Mortimer had said. ‘I did take the ridiculous creature away for that weekend. I mean, she’s so — so bloody sexy. And she’s taken a fancy to me. God knows why. But you can never tell with sex, can you? And I was trying then to get Bubbles out of my mind, not very successfully of course. It’s strange, Bubbles is the one I love, even now that she’s dead. And God knows, as far as I can see, I’ll go on loving her as long as I live, despite all the fucking I do with that magnificent brainless body that I seem to have been given the freedom of.�
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As long as I live, Harriet thought. And am I going to go on being in love with Anselm as long as I live?
The question echoed again in her head a few days later. It was first thing in the morning. Anselm, heaving himself out of their bed and heading for the bathroom, said casually over his naked shoulder, ‘You know what day it is this time next week?’
‘What day it is? What d’you mean?’
He grinned at the door.
‘St Valentine’s. Feb the fourteenth.’
And it came as a little jolt to her that Anselm should know the date of St Valentine’s Day. That, plainly, it meant something to him, whereas she had never paid attention to what she thought of as cooked-up commercial anniversaries, Mother’s Day, Hallowe’en, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day. She wondered now what had put the thought of it into his head. Was he one of the people who made much of the day, an excuse if any was needed for some love-making, or an occasion to parade silly, sexy ads in the newspapers? Certainly he seemed to have the date firmly in his mind. But perhaps in sleepy Levenham some old St Valentine’s customs still prevailed, like leaving real anonymous notes when lovers lacked the courage to declare themselves. And, come to think of it, hadn’t poor Bubbles-obsessed Prudence Mackintosh said something about some local ritual on that day? Teenagers going down to the Leven at dawn?
Perhaps Anselm is actually plotting to send a Valentine’s card to me. Something all hearts and roses, best card-shop style? Or, worse, with some crude sex pun? No, surely not that. His feelings too genuine, surely. But yukky hearts and roses? It’s possible, I suppose. I can see him choosing one like that, if he is going to get one. And what am I going to feel when I see it?
And, more, what year after year am I going to feel each February the — what did he say? — yes, the fourteenth, when I get yet one more hearts-entwined horror? If I do, if I do.
Try not to think about it. But the tiniest crack in the seamless pattern of our absorbed life together?
The sound of water from the shower tumbling down the waste-pipe outside.
But didn’t John tell me something about Valentine’s Day once long ago? Before he went to Brazil, or even earlier? Some little thing he’d noted about it, blurry writing on a restaurant paper-napkin? All part of the great theory about the ubiquitous sex-cloud. That isn’t, as I know now, any mere theory.
What was it he said? The original St Valentine having nothing to do with lovers? Yes, that was it. Valentine had got to be the patron saint of lovers only because his feast day was established on the day that had been the old Roman feast called ... called, yes, the Lupercalia. And, yes, something else. Yes, John’s glee about another little fact, that Valentine’s feast actually comes one day before the Roman one. But nobody was going to worry about that, he said, not when love, love, love’s in question. Or really sex, sex, sex. And, yes, the Lupercalia was very definitely a love feast, a sex one. Another of John’s battered little notes to himself, culled from the French reference book — Larousse, wasn’t it? — consisted of the two words Lupercales and licencieuses. Saying it all.
Except, come to think of it, John didn’t let that just say it all. Oh, no, I got the full lecture. Starting from the huge profits florists and the manufacturers of greetings cards make out of the Valentine hoo-hah, and then going on to sex in the world of business. Eros multinational. Hollywood and the whole millions-making film industry largely depending on sex. Then the fashion industry down the ages. And the immense amounts of energy and money scientists have devoted to bringing the ubiquitous cloud down even lower, rubber technology, the Pill, and combating the after-effects of Eros’s activities, all the sexual diseases and their cures and palliatives.
Yes, she thought now, and I can add the tennis industry to the list. Don’t tell me Bubbles’ wealth came just from her ability to hit a ball very hard with that hand made ugly with calluses. No, she got her millions, whether consciously or not because of her vibrant sexuality. Gift of Eros. Who also, surely, gave her the poisoned gift of murder.
‘And all based’ — didn’t John say? — ‘on just that single urge to perform, setting aside the piled-up preliminaries, the one simple act. Testosterone, inescapable part of our bodily processes, even the female, urging and urging the discharge of seminal fluids at every possible opportunity.’
*
It turned out to be, however, a Valentine of an altogether different nature that Anselm gave Harriet, early on the morning of February the fourteenth, a day when he was absent from her bed on duty in Levenham. Her phone rang while she was still asleep. No longer was she always up at half-past six, the Hard Detective ready for battle. Now, when Anselm was not with her, she would lie there once she had woken and let herself dreamily think of him. Dreamily, but in vivid particularity.
And it was his voice she heard when she muttered a Hello into the phone. But he was not murmuring endearments, as shy Anselm had gradually learnt to do over the past months.
‘Ma’am. Something to report.’
The inquiry. At once some nerve-tingling excitement came stealthily into her. The Hard Detective surfacing again.
‘Right. Spit it out.’
‘The weapon’s been found.’
‘The weapon? The javelin? Was it a javelin?’
‘Oh, yes, ma’am, it was a javelin all right. Some teenagers found it, in the Leven. It was at dawn this morning, at a place — it’s about half a mile upstream from Adam and Eve House, actually — where youngsters have always held a sort of ceremony on Valentine’s Day. Ever since ever. The girls gather on the Levenham side of the river and the boys go round to the other one. Then you’ve got to wade across, if you can — the river’s pretty full this time of year — and snatch a kiss. Or that’s how it used to be. Gather they go a bit further nowadays.’
‘But you’re telling me they’ve got the javelin, yes?’
‘Oh, yes, ma’am, they have. One of the boys tripped on it as he was getting across, three-parts hidden in the mud, and he pulled it out.’
‘And you think it is the one, our javelin, the weapon?’
‘Well, can’t be absolutely certain, of course. I suppose Forensics may find something. But, if it is what we’ve been looking for all this while and it’s been in the river the whole time, it’s not going to be easy to recover prints or anything.’
‘It’s going to be impossible. But that hardly matters. What’s important is where it was found. Are you out there now?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Right. Meet me at Adam and Eve House. That’ll be the nearest place by road for me. I want to see that javelin.’
*
Driving at speed, careless of the icy patches on the country roads, Harriet realised that, although it was Anselm she was going to meet, she had hardly thought of him at all after she had taken his call. She knew, too, with the passion for hunting something running strong in her, that when they were face-to-face at Adam and Eve House he would be back to being DI Brent and nothing more.
Parking at the edge of the house’s big sweep of lawn, covered now in icy slush, the remains of the last fall of snow, with here and there zigzags of dark cold-bitten grass breaking through, she thought how different it all was from that dawn day when she had first seen it. No cuckoo crazily love-calling now. Scarcely any sound at all in the still winter air. No rich odours of cows from the pastures round about. No more than a few desperately clinging leaves on the bare branches of the big untidy mock-orange. The lavender hedge that before had filled the air with its sweetly acidy scent now little more than a long tangle of dried twigs.
The house, too, now up for sale, was standing emptily bleak, seeming in its cradle of dead, black creeper branches almost physically pale and shivering in the biting cold. And, perhaps most different of all, the Leven, no longer that trickle of water between mud banks deep-cracked by the heat, was a brawling, swirling, fast-flowing stream.
Down beside it there was, yes, DI Brent. He was standing with his burly Leven Val
e Police colleague Sgt Wintercombe, who was holding delicately between the fingers of his thickly gloved hands the javelin.
The weapon. Hard to believe now that anything else had been used. Why otherwise would a javelin of all things come to be lying at the bottom of the Leven, not half a mile from the murder scene?
She went over to them.
‘Let’s have a look, Sergeant.’
She held out her own gloved hands — thank goodness, I had the sense to put on my padded jacket — carefully took the long rust-dappled shaft and began to imagine just what had been done with it almost eight months earlier at this precise place. Bubbles, back from her run, sweat-drenched in the summer heat, standing probably with hands on knees, leaning a little forward, regaining her breath. Then the killer suddenly coming up to her, filled with hate at that earlier sharp rejection Bubbles had told Fiona Diplock about. The humiliating kick or knock-down, whatever it had been. The long weapon aimed, thrust, withdrawn.
And the killer, yes, going back the way they had come. By way of, yes, yes, of course, by way of the river. So, in a boat. No. No, impossible. The Leven in June had been that mere trickle between two dried-mud banks.
So how could ... No boat. Walking? All the way along the river bed?
No. Too far. Too far carrying that not-to-be-seen javelin.
Wait. I know.
I know now. A canoe. A canoe could, just, have floated on top of that trickle of a stream. It would be deep enough. I can see it now as it was that day. Yes, a canoe.
And I can see something else. Something I never thought ...
I can see a noisy gang of schoolboys making their way past Levenham police station, carrying twin-bladed kayak oars or with the light boats inverted on their heads. And I can see, too, even that trailing along at the rear was that lumpy friend of Anselm’s young nephew. The one who tore up the sheet I’d written Join the Police on.
She felt as if she had been invaded, almost as if an alien from outer space had taken her over, by a notion. An idea. Something hazy, not quite in focus. And perhaps something that forcing into focus would send pulsing away to smithereens.
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