by Zoe Sharp
Out of his wife's line of sight, Tris sighed, carefully inserted a bookmark as he rose, and disappeared into the narrow kitchen. When I couldn't stand the scruffy round-eyed stares of the kids any longer, I went to join him.
Tris was standing at the sink, staring out into the garden at the lines of terry nappies, flapping like pennants. He was absently trying to dry a teapot with a towel that was too wet to make any difference.
“D'you want a hand?”
“Hmm?” He took a moment to bring his mind back on track. “Oh, yes please, Charlie. Sorry, miles away there.”
Ailsa had cut his hair again, I noticed. It looked like she'd done it with blunt nail scissors, by candlelight. There was a chunk missing over one ear, and half his fringe stood straight up in the air. Ailsa had all the hairdressing aptitude of a bottle-nosed dolphin, but Tris was too good natured to complain.
Left to his own devices he would have favoured something more in the romantic poet style but, he once explained to me with a weary smile, the proliferation of unwashed small children about the place made head lice a very real concern, and a short haircut a necessity.
He was still wearing his working uniform of a short-sleeved white tunic over black trousers, and he smelled of lavender, and orange blossom. When what had once been the drawing room hasn't been commandeered as an overflow bedroom, Tris uses it for aromatherapy massage.
The kettle on the hob began to scream and I lifted it off the heat with a slightly scorched oven glove. Between us we managed to load a tray with all the required equipment for tea and were manoeuvring our way back into the sitting room when the door into the hall swung open again.
A small boy in a football jersey shoved his head through the gap. “'Scuse me, Aunty Ailsa,” he said, a vision of angelic politeness, “but the filth's here.”
Ailsa smiled at him, taking the news of the arrival of the police without undue surprise. For one reason or another, they were regular visitors at Shelseley.
“OK love,” she said to him. “You'd better show them in. Oh, hello Tommy,” she went on when the first of two uniformed constables edged into the room, taking off their hats.
The young officer she'd addressed manfully stifled a blush at her familiarity, and tried to ignore a derisive glance from his colleague. The other man was the older of the two, though that wasn't saying much. Neither of them looked old enough to drive. Wasn't that supposed to be another sign that advanced age was creeping up on me? My God, I wasn't expecting that when I'd only just hit my quarter-century.
“Now then,” Ailsa said briskly, “what can we do for you this time, Tommy?”
From his expression, Tommy's dearest wish was that she'd stop calling him Tommy, but he decided to let it pass. It was his mate who spoke up instead.
“Actually, Mrs Shelseley, it isn't you we wanted to speak to today. It's Miss Fox.”
I'd been halfway through pouring a cup of tea, and the guilty start I gave at the mention of my own name sent a splatter of hot brown liquid over the table top. I glanced up quickly while Ailsa rescued her forms from the flood and sent Tris for a cloth.
I helped mop up, glad of the pause so I could rack my brains to try and come up with a suitable reason why the police were after me. The first thought that popped up was that it might be something to do with the hooky lap-top Terry had given me.
“Yes, that's me,” I said. “Why, what's the problem?”
Tommy's mate ignored the question. “Is there anywhere we can talk in private, Miss?” he asked.
Tris offered use of the drawing room and led us through, frowning. The room was huge. Clean and bright, with his massage couch set up in the centre and a stack of clean dark green towels on a rattan sofa to the side. Tris hastily shifted the towels so we had space to sit down, and left, still looking pensive.
“So, what's the problem?” I said again when I was alone with the policemen.
Tommy's mate ignored my question a second time. He was really starting to become quite tiresome. Instead, he posed an unexpected one of his own. “Were you at the New Adelphi Club in Morecambe on Saturday evening?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling suddenly cold. I sank down onto the sofa Tris had cleared, and clamped my hands together in my lap.
Even as a kid I've always been more afraid of getting into trouble than of getting hurt. I frantically tried to think back over the weekend's events. I knew, logically, they couldn't possibly be here because of Terry's computer, and I couldn't find anything else that would call for two coppers to be tracking me down at work and giving me the third degree. “What's this all about?”
I'm always wary of the police. You ride a motorcycle and it tends to colour your view of the boys in blue. Still, I suppose it was a nice change to be greeted by a uniform whose opening gambit wasn't, “Are you aware of the national speed limit, madam?” Maybe, in this case, it would have been preferable.
I looked from one to the other. Tommy sat down at the other end of the sofa and tried a reassuring smile, but the other one paced round the room, poking along the bottles of Tris's essential oils and making little snorting noises to himself as he read the labels. “Look at this lot, Tom,” he said. “Frankincense, chamomile, ylang-ylang.” He picked one of the bottles off the shelf, turned it in his hand. “Sandalwood. What's that for, then?”
I dredged through my memory for Tris's explanations. I knew sandalwood was calming, a sedative and an aphrodisiac, but I wasn't going to tell him that. It also had antiseptic properties, and was good for dry skin. “Acne,” I said shortly.
He was still young enough for the terrors of rampant spots to be too close for comfort. He put the bottle back on the shelf quickly.
“Look,” I said, “I very much doubt you two are here for a guided tour of aromatherapy oils, so why don't we just cut to the chase?”
They glanced at each other and the younger one, Tommy, pulled out his pocket book. “According to reports we've received, you had a bit of an altercation with a woman at the New Adelphi Club on Saturday night. A Miss Susie Hollins?”
So that was it. “Altercation isn't quite the word I'd use to describe it.”
“And what word would you use, exactly?”
I didn't like the tone, it was too quiet, too tactfully noncommittal.
I sighed again. “She clouted a friend of mine,” I said. “All I did was hold her off until the management arrived. She started it, as any one of a number of witnesses should be able to tell you. If she's telling you I jumped her, she's lying through her teeth. Is that why you're here? Is that what she's saying?” I looked from one to the other, seeking confirmation, but they were giving nothing away.
“Oh, she's not saying anything, Miss Fox,” the older policeman said.
That chill again. “Why? What's happened?”
“I'm afraid Miss Hollins is dead,” he said. It was obviously the most thrilling bit of news he'd had to impart since he left police training college. He was trying hard to put the right subdued note into his voice. “Her body was discovered yesterday morning.”
I stared at them blankly. Susie was dead? “How?”
Tommy gave me an old-fashioned look which said I should know better than to ask, and consulted his notebook again. “Obviously we can't discuss details, but I can tell you we're now involved in a murder enquiry,” he allowed. “We understand you were one of the last people to see her alive, so we need to know all of what you can remember about Saturday night.”
I told them everything then, of course I did. About rescuing Clare from Susie's attack, about Marc Quinn stepping in to deal with her. “He told us he'd thrown her out of the club, and I didn't see her again for the rest of the evening,” I finished.
“And her boyfriend, this Tony, you said he seemed pretty upset with her?” the younger one asked.
“Highly pissed off, but he didn't leave when Susie did. I don't know when she was killed, but I saw him again a couple of times later on. Once about half an hour after she'd been chucked out. He w
as consoling himself by chatting up a red-head in the lower bar. When Clare and I left at about quarter to midnight the pair of them were staggering into a taxi, giving each other a pretty good impression of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was a private hire cab, I think, a blue Cavalier. I didn't notice which firm, sorry.”
“That's OK, we can check with the club. They would have had to call it from there.” He made scribbled notes, then backtracked to the previous page. “So, you said Mr Quinn threw Miss Hollins out and then came to speak to you? How long was he with you?”
I frowned, considering. “He was there about ten minutes or so. Then he disappeared and I didn't see him again until just after Dave had done his final set. That's when they presented Clare with her karaoke prize. We left shortly after that.”
“That would be Dave Clemmens, who was the DJ in charge of the karaoke, right?”
I nodded.
“And what about you? Where did you go when you left the New Adelphi Club?”
“Can I prove my whereabouts, you mean?” I demanded. “Why, do you think I killed her?” I held his gaze levelly.
“No, Miss Fox,” he said, with a grim smile. “I don't.”
I didn't understand exactly what he meant by that until later, after the police had gone, when I heard the regional report on the afternoon news. They didn't name her, of course, but I don't think there was more than one murder of a young woman in the area for them to go at.
Details were sketchy, but the reason I wasn't on the suspect list was immediately obvious. I just wasn't equipped for it. In addition to having her throat half cut and being beaten to death, Susie Hollins had been repeatedly and viciously raped.
Four
Clare rang me later that evening. The police had been to see her, too, and she was as stunned as I was by the whole thing. I let her talk it through without major interruptions. To let her equilibrium right itself.
“I can't help feeling guilty,” she finished, illogically. “I mean, it was sort of because of me that Susie got chucked out, and if she hadn't . . .” Her voice tailed off uncertainly.
“Oh Clare, don't even think about that,” I told her. “Susie made her own choices. She just made some bad ones. Getting thrown out of the club was her fault, not yours. You didn't provoke her. And she could have just got herself a cab home.”
“I know, you're right,” she said, sounding forlorn. “I just feel really bad about it.” She paused, sighing. “I'm glad you were there, though.”
“That's OK,” I said. I was standing leaning against one of the deep set windows in the flat, watching the lights of the traffic on the other side of the river, streaming across Greyhound Bridge towards Morecambe. The movement was soothing, hypnotic in its droning regularity.
I took another swig from a bottle of cloudy wheat beer I'd found as a pleasant surprise lurking in the salad drawer at the bottom of the fridge. “So, how's the black eye?”
“Oh, don't. Jacob's been giving me stick about that ever since, but it covers up all right. One of the boys on the crime desk wanted to interview me about my little fracas with Susie as a side story for the next issue, by the way,” she added with an audible grimace. “He not only wanted to get Photographic to take pictures of me without make-up, but said he'd get the art department to touch it up and make it look like a really worthwhile bruise. Cheeky bastards. I told them you were the one they should be talking to.”
I spat most of the mouthful of beer I'd been about to swallow back into the bottle. “Oh no,” I said, spluttering. “I can just see the way they'd write the story and I can quite do without that kind of publicity, thank you very much!”
“Oh come on, Charlie, it might give business a boost. After all, there should be hordes of women who want to learn self-defence after this. You'll be turning them away in their hundreds.”
The laughter in her voice was infectious and I couldn't help a smile, but kept my voice sober. “Oh yeah? All some tacky story in the local paper will do is throw down a challenge to all the punky kids in the area. Remember that boy last year?”
He'd been fourteen or so, cocky, sneering. He'd walked into one of my introductory classes unexpectedly armed with a small pocket knife. I hadn't moved quite fast enough and I still had the scar, a pale three-inch line across my ribcage that didn't tan well in the summer.
“Oh,” Clare said, suddenly becoming serious. “Yes, I do. Sorry, Charlie, I wasn't thinking.” She was sounding subdued again.
“Don't worry about it. And don't dwell on this whole thing, either. It sounds heartless to say it, but people do stupid things every day and get away with it. Susie was just plain unlucky.”
How many times did I teach my students how to avoid making themselves easy targets? Don't walk home alone at night. Don't take short cuts. It seemed so obvious to me that I found myself unsympathetic towards anyone who didn't follow the simple rules. Some people seemed almost to have a death-wish.
Rape is one of those life-changing experiences that you never entirely recover from, you never really get over. You put it behind you, and you try to move on, but it will always be there, colouring your thoughts and actions. Like a big mental and emotional scar.
If it's touched you personally, you look at other people taking risks with a sense of anger, as though they're belittling your own experience. Like a cancer victim watching people casually smoking. If I could have done anything to avoid having been attacked, I would have done it.
“I don't care how stupid she was. Nobody deserves to die that way,” Clare said now, with a touch of belligerence. “What he did to her – it just makes me feel sick to my stomach.”
“They must have told you more than they told me, then,” I observed. “The police wouldn't do more than say it was a murder enquiry.”
“I talked to the girl on the crime desk at work,” Clare admitted. Although she was only in accounts, Clare's always seemed to be very pally with most of the editorial staff at the paper. “She knows all the gen, but they're not allowed to publish half of it. The police want to hold back as much as possible to try and trap the killer. They don't want a copy cat, either, which doesn't really bear thinking about.” I could almost hear her delicate shudder.
“Can you find out some more of the details for me?” I asked. I'd already had twenty questions from Ailsa. My pupils were bound to talk about the Susie Hollins murder, too. Bound to ask me if I really thought my theories could help them to avoid meeting a similar fate. Until I knew what had happened to Susie, I couldn't answer that. Students get very nervous at unanswered questions. She hesitated.
“Clare,” I said dryly, “I'm hardly likely to go to print in the rival freesheet with it, now am I?”
“OK, I'll ask,” she said, “but I can't guarantee she'll tell me more than she has already.”
She agreed to give me a call later on in the week and invited me round for a meal the following weekend. I rang off with a feeling of unease that I couldn't shift. And although Jacob makes curries that strip the enamel off your teeth, it had nothing to do with the prospect of his cooking, either.
***
The sense of foreboding still hadn't gone by the time Sam arrived. He turned up so exactly on the dot of eight-thirty that he must have been waiting outside the door, one finger hovering above the doorbell, eyes on his watch.
I answered the door to be met by a big smile and a waft of expensive aftershave. I always find that strange on someone who obviously doesn't own a razor. The lower half of Sam's face is covered by a straggly anarchist's beard. He sauntered in, the only way you can walk when you're wearing cowboy boots, in a pair of black Wranglers and a bike jacket. “Hi,” he said, dumping his battered AGV helmet on a chair and shaking a box of computer disks at me. “Lead me to your computer.”
“Hi Sam, I've put it on the desk. Help yourself.” I offered coffee and went to see to the machine, which was down to the last nutty dregs in the bottom of the pot. I like coffee that way, but it's the sort of thing other people tend
to tip into plant pots when they think I'm not looking. That can be a real pain when you consider I don't have any pot plants.
I gave up and flicked on the kettle. When I came back Sam had opened up the lap-top and was pondering the message on the screen. He'd put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses for close work and his long eyelashes brushed against the lenses. Most women would kill for them.
“We need a password. I don't suppose we know anything about the guy who owned this, do we?” he asked. I shook my head. I wasn't about to tell Sam that the only thing I knew about the previous owner was that he was a weirdo. “Pity. People usually use something obvious like their date of birth, or their dog's name as a password.”
“Fido?” I suggested.
Sam rolled his eyes. “In this case, it has to be something with seven letters,” he said.