“And he got in all right?”
“Eventually.” This picture was strangely clear. “He had a bit of trouble. That’s why I waited. The key ... it took him several tries. He even looked to see if he was using the right key. He had to sort of swing on the lock before he could get in. Then he turned and waved to show he was in.”
“And how long was it before you parked and got back to the house?”
“Oh five minutes? There were no parking places. I had to go into the next street.”
“When you got back?”
“I knew something was wrong immediately. The house was dark. And I heard a strange sound. I called out.”
“What did you hear?”
“A shout,” she answered with reasonable confidence. “Ben .. . shouting.”
“Do you remember what he was saying?”
“Saying?” Such detail was beyond her. “No ... I can’t remember. No
.. .”
“You say the house was dark. Were there no lights at all?”
Reluctantly, she dug deeper into her memory. “There was one on, I think. Maybe two. But across the hall.”
“In other rooms?”
She closed her eyes for a moment, better to see the night. “Yes.”
“Can you remember which?”
“The sitting room, I think. And the kitchen. Or it may have been .. .
No, the kitchen. Down the passage. Yes, I remember that.”
“No light in the hall?”
She thought about this. “No.”
“You didn’t try to turn the hall light on?”
She was slow to speak because her answer was going to sound odd, even to herself. “I don’t think I did, no.”
“The kitchen and sitting-room lights,” Wilson continued, ‘they hadn’t been left on while you were away?”
Again she couldn’t think why he should want such detail; again she answered obediently. “The sitting room has a light on a time switch. A small lamp. I think it may just have been that one light, yes. But the kitchen we never leave a light on in there, never.”
Wilson shifted his weight and attempted an expression of encouragement. “Please do go on again. From the moment you heard the sound and realised something was wrong.”
A pause while she searched through her memory so that she could be sure to stick to the steadier images, to what was reasonably certain, and stay clear of the less reliable visions that flickered uncertainly at the edges of her memory, like unfocused photographs. “Yes .. .” she resumed with an effort. “I heard Ben shouting upstairs. I called, but he only shouted again, so I ran upstairs.”
“And you don’t remember what he was shouting?”
“No.” But this was Wilson’s trick, of course, to make her slow the action that was spooling through her head, to wind the film back and replay it if she could. Following his unspoken command, she took herself back to the door of the house once again, she stood at the foot of the stairs. After a long while she murmured, “He said something like “Get out, you bastard” or “What the hell are you doing, you bastard?” Something along those lines.”
As Ben’s voice came back to her, she heard the rage in it, the roar of aggression; behind this, like an echo, she heard herself screaming at him, she felt the fear stir in her stomach like a reflex.
After a time Wilson prompted, “Did you hear another voice at this stage?”
“Another? I don’t think so.” Wanting to be clear, she added, “What I mean is, I only remember Ben’s voice. At that time. Yes .. .” She held up the remnant of memory as if to a strong light. “Yes,” she confirmed. “Only his.” But even as she said this another sound resonated faintly on the periphery of her mind, a sound that seemed to strike a lower and colder note. Another voice? Or Ben speaking in a different tone? Or was her imagination simply building on Wilson’s suggestion? She excavated the moment more deeply and it seemed to her that the sound resonated again.
“Perhaps you should ask him that yourself,” she suggested again.
“Yes, but it always helps to have a story from two different witnesses,” Wilson explained in a speech he had obviously made dozens of times before. “It’s amazing what comes out. Things that the other person didn’t notice. Or simply forgot.” He gave a brief professional smile. “You’re doing fine, Catherine. How’re you feeling? Up to going on?”
Taking her silence as tacit agreement, he took her forward. “So you went upstairs?”
She returned to the scene with reluctance. “It was dark up there. On the landing. I stopped. I reached across to the light switch and then ... I wasn’t sure if it was the best thing to do, to put the light on. Half of me .. .” She found herself on the brink of saying wanted to hide, and realised that it was true, that her sense of danger had been very strong. “I wasn’t sure what to do. I remember shouting Ben’s name. Over and over again. I thought he might be hurt, I thought well, I thought terrible things were happening.”
“There was noise?”
“Oh yes. Incredible noise. Crashing. Breaking. It sounded as though the place was being wrecked,” she whispered.
“But no voices?”
“No,” she decided, and immediately paused to examine the possibility again. “No only my own. I think I was yelling.”
“And where was this noise coming from?”
“The spare room. Which is our study.”
“And you couldn’t see anything?”
“No. No, I couldn’t see anything until...” Her breath locked high in her chest.
From the end of the bed Denise’s head popped up, her eyebrows raised in silent enquiry.
“Take your time,” Wilson said quietly.
The rushing shadow had jumped into dark focus and, with it, the fear. Catherine took two long pulls of air. “It all happened very quickly. I don’t remember much. Just .. . this figure coming from nowhere. Suddenly. Suddenly. Rushing at me. And Another recollection came to her so unexpectedly that her first instinct was to distrust it, yet almost immediately it took on the shape and rigidity of memory. “I forgot,” she added dutifully, ‘there was this silence. Just before he came for me. This .. . long silence.”
Why had she stopped shouting? Why hadn’t she called Ben’s name one more time? If the thief had realised she was there, he might not have reacted so violently. Might not have attacked her. But even as she agonised over this she remembered the grip of that dreadful intense silence and knew that she had been incapable of breaking it.
“That’s all I remember,” she said, though that wasn’t quite true. In some fraction of time before the shadowy figure struck her she remembered a shrill unfamiliar sound, which was the sound of her own scream.
Wilson nodded slowly. “You can’t describe this man in any way?”
“No. It was so dark. He was just a shape. Rushing. Very quickly.”
“Was he carrying anything? Holding anything? A weapon?”
She thought about this for some time. “I ... just don’t know.”
Wilson turned away to say something to Denise, which she didn’t hear.
When he swung back his eyes fixed thoughtfully on Catherine’s again.
“And later? After the accident?”
“Later,” she murmured. “Well, I don’t remember much, of course. A couple of small things, that’s all.” She measured each word, to be sure of getting it right, but also to give substance to the little she did have to say. “I remember being on the floor. It was like .. . coming round from an anaesthetic. I felt sick, totally disorientated. I knew ... it was bad. I thought.. .” What she had thought was that she was going to die. Dimly, through the shock and injury, she had thought: So this is how it feels to die. “The things I remember they’re pretty hazy.”
The door sounded and someone came into the room. Wilson turned sharply, there was a muttered exchange and whoever it was left again.
Wilson bent forward over the bed. “You were saying?”
“Just two things. I’m n
ot sure which came first.”
That’s all right.”
“In one there were blinding lights. Well .. . lights anyway. Perhaps they just seemed bright. I knew I was on the floor. And I knew there was someone there. Beside me. Kneeling or ... I can’t tell you who ... or anything about them ... I only know this person was there. It could have been an ambulance man, couldn’t it?” she asked, wanting the reassurance of the obvious. “Or whoever called the ambulance?”
Wilson nodded vaguely. “Anything else you remember from this time?”
He already knew the answer, of course; Denise would have relayed it to him three days ago, when Catherine had told her.
“I remember something close to my face.”
“What sort of thing?”
“Something .. . softish. Fabric.”
“Now when you say close to your face I’d like to be clear do you mean it was being held over your face?”
“Not over, no,” she replied firmly. “No, I was on my left side .. . well, my head was over to the left anyway. And this soft stuff was just ... I don’t know, against my face. Not pressed into it, just.. . against my face.”
“Touching your nose?”
“Well .. . yes.”
“And mouth?”
She knew where this was leading and she wanted to put him straight.
“Touching my mouth, but not pushed against it.”
“So there was no pressure as such?”
“You mean,” she said, ‘was this person trying to suffocate me?”
Wilson’s button eyes did not waver. “I just want to be clear.”
Catherine exhaled slowly. “There was no pressure.”
“Anything else you recall?”
With a final effort of memory, she stared at the blank screen of the ceiling and summoned the kneeling figure once again. This time, however, the effect was to blur the existing picture. How had she known this person was there? How had she known he was kneeling? Had this person spoken, or was it just the later one? Had there been two people at all, or had she doubled up one in a trick of memory? Before everything became irretrievably confused, she said, “That’s all I can tell you.”
“And the second occasion?”
“I think it was later, though I can’t be sure. There was a voice. A man’s voice. Calling my name.”
Denise’s head tilted upwards. Wilson waited, motionless.
“I was still on the floor. In the same place well, I assume so anyway.
He said my name and something like, “They’re on their way.”
“When you say he called you by your name .. .?”
“Catherine.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“And he said “They’re on their way”?”
“Something like that. And “You’re going to be all right.” He said that several times.”
Another phrase came to her, something like rest easy or lie easy. But she might have lifted that from a film.
“Did you recognise the voice?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you think you’d recognise this voice if you heard it again?”
She thought about this for a long time. “I can’t say,” she answered finally.
“Anything else you remember?”
“No, I... No.”
Wilson turned away and, bending down out of sight, said something to Denise in a low voice. Catherine heard a rustling and he straightened up again. “Would you look at these items, Catherine, and tell me if you recognise them?”
“What are they?”
“If you could just tell me if you’ve seen them before. This is the first.”
He held up a transparent plastic bag bearing a white rectangular label marked with some sort of code number. Inside was a small amount of lacy fabric that had once been white but was now stained and grubby. She reached up a hand to bring the bag closer.
“What are they panties?”
“Yes.”
She felt a descent into cold. She whispered, “Are you saying ... they’re miner Her mind raced on, making connections that filled her with foreboding.
Denise shot to her feet. Catherine stared at her helplessly. “No, no,” Denise said. “No, you were fully dressed when you were found.”
“Ah!”
“I swear,” Denise reassured her again. “It wasn’t like that.”
Catherine gave a short nervous laugh. “For a moment there I thought I’d suffered a fate worse than death.” And then she laughed again, even more strangely, because the real joke was that, given the choice between sexual and neurological violation, she would have taken rape any day.
“Can I have a better look?” she asked.
Wilson had clearly allowed for this possibility because he produced plastic gloves and slipped them on before lifting the panties out of the plastic by one corner and holding them up.
The panties were not soiled with dirt, she saw now, but with what looked like dried blood, lots of it, covering almost every part of the fabric.
Wilson said, “Take as long as you like.”
The panties were bikini style made from ersatz satin with lace trim at the leg, the sort that were sold everywhere. “I don’t think they’re mine,” she said eventually. “But I can’t be sure.”
“You have some like these?”
“Sort of ... but I think the lace was different. I can’t be sure.
Sorry.”
Wilson pushed out his lower lip in disappointment or resignation.
Catherine had to ask, “The blood is it mine?”
Wilson hesitated as he put the panties carefully back in the bag and
re-sealed it. “I’d rather not answer that just at the moment, if you
don’t mind.”
He reached down again towards his feet and produced another transparent bag. Inside was a length of skimpy diaphanous fabric, probably silk, in aqua green, also stained with blood, but not so extensively, just a series of blotches.
“No,” she said without hesitation. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“You’re absolutely certain?”
“It’s a scarf, isn’t it?” When Wilson nodded, she confirmed, “No, definitely not mine.”
Wilson seemed neither surprised nor disappointed.
“Where did you find them, these things?”
He took his time before saying, “At the scene. Thank you,” he added quickly, as if to curtail any further questions. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve helped at all.”
She had come to look forward to the evenings. The family usually left by eight, and by nine the corridors were falling quiet as the last visitors to the surrounding wards drifted away. After Sister’s rounds the night staff would come to check her mattress and lines and collar, and if they weren’t too busy would chat for a while. When she was low she liked to talk to the Filipinos because they were practical and without sentiment, they did not share the universal reverence for the brave front; they believed in God striking you down and yours not to reason why and shifting for yourself by all the means at your disposal. When she was in a lighter mood she’d hope for an Irish nurse and some talk of men and parties and pubs. They could be offhand, even abrupt, these women from Limerick and Donegal, with their cutting tongues and acid wit, but she liked that too, because they expected nothing in return.
By ten there was silence over the floor apart from the click of an occasional door and the murmur of the traffic beyond the window. Then, with Walkman and headphones on, adjusted for mono listening, eyes closed, she would put on some baroque music and take a walk on strong striding legs into a garden. Sometimes it would be a garden from the past, one she’d seen through to completion, but more often than not she would walk her way through her current commission, a traditional country-house garden in Gloucestershire.
Her journey to the garden could be unpredictable. Sometimes it was like tryin
g to cling to a fast escaping dream in the moment after you wake up; she scarcely made it to the gate before she found herself slipping back into reality and having to begin the journey all over again. Sometimes she never made it at all, and then the night seemed long.
Tonight, however, aided and abetted by two long swigs of brandy extremely medicinal and some Scarlatti cantatas the journey was a doddle, just a quick flight, and she went straight to the large walled garden at one side of the Gloucestershire house. This was the part of the garden she saw most clearly.
Once the derelict fruit cages and cold frames were removed, it would make a perfect ornamental garden, half vegetable, half flower garden; with secluded arbours and long vistas that drew you forward to the next turning, the next composition. There would be geometric beds containing decorative vegetables, purple- and silver-leaved, such as chard and artichoke, interspersed with red-leaved and exotic salads. In the centre there would be a fountain encircled by festooned plum trees, and against the walls espaliers of apple and pear and peach, while around the perimeter the wide flower and shrub borders would be themed by colour. Naturally there would be a white border she was famous for her white borders also a blue one, a pinky-mauve one, and what she called a “Spanish’ border, containing the passionate crimsons and inky-blues that went so well together: blood and death in the arena. She would bring in plenty of autumn and winter interest too, with winter honeysuckle and viburnums and early camellias.
The garden would be divided into seven areas, each with its own geometry. In the salad area there would be squares formed by the wider paths and edged in box. Within the squares, however, she had yet to decide between running the paths diagonally to make triangular beds, or at right angles to make smaller squares, or in two concentric circles intersecting a cross, in the style of a Celtic labyrinth.
In the real world someone touched her arm.
She opened her eyes with a start to see Ben. She pulled off the earphones. “You gave me a shock.”
“A shock?” he cooed with sham sympathy. “Thought you were awake, Moggy. They said you were.”
Catherine didn’t have to catch the wine on his breathy kiss to realise that he was on his way back from dinner: his voice rang with affability, his eyes were heavy-lidded, his smile was addressed to the world at large.
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