Criminals

by Margot Livesey

  I was about to offer sympathy but Maudie rushed on.

  “Really, though, that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst was driving with him next day. The whole two hundred miles to Durham I shrank against the door of the car in terror. At one point he asked about my period. I thought he was worried because he hadn’t used anything but it turned out he wanted to make me pregnant. Some macho kick. When we finally got to Durham, I fled. I never heard from him again. A couple of years later I ran into him at the cinema. With an even younger woman.”

  “Oh, my dear,” I said. Her face had grown ugly telling the story and I had a fleeting pang at what I was about to do. I carried our dishes to the sink. Then I came back and bent over Maudie. I kissed her neck. She leaned against me and I slid my hands inside her tunic. Presently I straightened up. I reached for her hand and led the way upstairs to the guest room. The bed was still rumpled from my nap.

  As we lay down I remembered the johnnies I’d found on my last visit. Should I use one? but then Maudie’s hand was inside my jeans and I forgot. “You’re so sexy,” I whispered. “Tell me what to do. Tell me what pleases you.”

  “Touch me,” she said. “Not there, further back. Do you mind?”

  Then she was climbing on top of me and I was fucking her and fingering her until we both came in a clamorous rush.

  Afterwards I lay beside her, feeling our breathing slow, our bodies cool. “Maudie,” I murmured.

  “Oh, Leo. I love you.”

  The words hung there, my trophy. “I love you too.” I touched her breast. “Tell me a secret.”

  “I just did.”

  • • •

  It was the end of the chapter, and Ewan set the book aside, with relief. This was too similar to his own recent activities. And even without that immediate association he would have felt a voyeuristic grubbiness. While he was reading, the sky had lightened. He got up and went to the window. In the street, nine stories below, a small figure was walking two brown dogs. Another figure bicycled by. Had his sister really been forced to have sex with an elderly man and he, Ewan, living in the same city, known nothing about it? He shuddered, and at that moment the phone rang.

  “Ewan, it’s me, Vanessa. Are you awake?”

  “Yes. I was reading.” He stopped, not knowing how to explain his earlier failure to answer the phone. “Where are you?”

  “London. I got back yesterday morning.” She paused.

  Ewan reached again for his notebook. Whatever was coming, he felt fractionally more able to face it with a piece of paper and a pen. He turned to a clean page and waited. A question, he thought, a question could reveal nothing and still be helpful. “Is something wrong?” he said at last.

  “Didn’t he speak to you? I was sure he would.”

  “Who?”

  “Coyle, for Christ’s sake.”

  Ewan stared at the blank page; it was as if David Coyle’s name was suddenly written all over it. “I’ve heard rumours he’s been trying to reach me. Brian Ross telephoned me, twice. Oh, Vanessa …” He trailed off miserably.

  “But he hasn’t actually talked to you?” Her voice was brisk, like her answering machine.

  “No.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “Why don’t I meet your plane? We need to talk. And whatever happens, don’t speak to Coyle today. Can you do that?”

  “Of course. There’s no reason to think he’d phone me here. What’s going on?”

  “We’ll talk this afternoon. Tell me your flight number.”

  He found his ticket and gave her the details. No, it was no trouble to come to Heathrow. She lived in Chiswick, and even at rush hour, the journey was manageable. “Remember,” she said, “don’t speak to Coyle.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “I’ve got it.”

  In the silence after he put down the phone, Ewan heard the dim, digestive rumbling of the hotel lift. For no reason he could name, he found himself remembering an incident that had occurred the previous summer. He had been early to meet some friends and, to pass the time, had wandered into Regent’s Park to read the paper. He was sitting on a bench, studying the cricket scores, when a small girl rushed by. Just as he registered that she seemed to be alone, a woman on the next bench shouted, “Whose child is this? Whose child is this?”

  Up and down the benches, people stopped chattering and eyed one another warily. No one spoke. The woman ran after the little girl and caught her; the child burst into tears. Then, from a group of picnickers a hundred yards away, rose a long-haired girl in torn jeans. Ewan was near enough to overhear her conversation with the woman. “I’m sorry she’s upset,” the woman had said, “but what if she were abducted?”

  “Abducted?” said the girl, tossing her hair indignantly. “I was right here.”

  The woman slumped back to her bench. After a few minutes she got up and walked away. Ewan could still hear her strong voice crying—“Whose child is this?”—as he went into the bathroom and took his second shower of the night.

  Chapter 12

  Mollie woke to the ringing of the telephone. She had lain down on the bed beside Olivia and dropped off into a companionable slumber. Now she rose, heavy-headed, and, ignoring the phone in Chae’s study, a room she had not entered since he left, made her way downstairs. She kept telling herself there was no need to answer. But it was only eight in the evening, and something about the shrill sound curdling the silence demanded a response. Perhaps Ewan, nearing the end of his working day in Milan, was checking up on her, and for several sorts of reasons, Mollie did not wish to cause him unnecessary concern. The receiver, when she picked it up, was chilly with disuse.

  “Hello,” she croaked. She cleared her throat and said again, more robustly, “Hello.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Lafferty.”

  She recognised his voice instantly. From the noises—a babble of conversation and a sixties song—she guessed he was calling from a pub. In the background another man said, “Hey, knock it off, mate.”

  “I want to speak to the bloke in the suit. The pinstripe suit,” he added, as if there might be several to choose from.

  “He’s not here,” Mollie said. And wanted to scream at her own stupidity. “I can take a message.”

  “A message? This is bloody urgent. I don’t have time to mess around with messages. Fetch him.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Who am I?” He sounded taken aback. “That’s not the point. I’m the one asking questions. Get the bloke. He and I need to talk business.”

  “He doesn’t have any business with you,” she said. “None of us do.”

  “Don’t get high-and-mighty with me, bitch,” he shouted. “I know you’ve got—”

  Before he could say the final, incriminating word, Mollie replaced the receiver and took it off the hook again. If she had found herself standing next to the man on a railway platform, she would gladly have pushed him into the path of an oncoming train. If she had known where the pub was, she would have broken every bottle in the place over his head.

  She ran upstairs, two at a time, to where Olivia lay still curled in sleep, and knelt beside the bed. “Olivia,” she said. “What are we going to do?”

  Olivia did not stir.

  Mollie kissed her cheek and stroked her silky hair. She’s mine, she thought. And then, No, she isn’t. Bitterness rose inside her, like ink into the petals of the daffodils she’d dyed for a biology experiment at school. It had been too good to be true: the baby Chae would never give her coming just when he left her, a magical resolution to her pain, as if suffering really did earn you some kind of reward instead of leading on to more suffering. She threw herself down on the bed and lay there, sobbing out her indignation. Beside her, Olivia slept on, lulled by her grief as by the sweetest lullaby.

  Gradually the interval between sobs grew longer, until Mollie realised she was crying out of habit and stopped. She per formed a mental equivalent of the gestures she m
ade at the loom when the selvages or the warp grew slack and she lost the rhythm of the shuttle: she pulled herself together. Tears are useless, she admonished, gazing up at the soft wedge of light from the hall that fell across the ceiling. The only other time she’d gotten an anonymous phone call had been when she was living in Edinburgh, sharing a flat with two other girls. She had been there alone one morning, when the phone rang and a man asked for David, the previous tenant. Mollie explained he had moved back to Kirkcaldy.

  “Oh,” said the man, “and who are you?”

  “I’m Mollie Munro. I live here now.”

  “Mollie Munro, like the song.”

  “No, that’s Malone,” she corrected.

  “I can see you, Mollie. I can see what you do all alone in your room. Do you like touching yourself? Pretty thing.”

  “Who are you?” Mollie asked.

  “I love you,” he said, and put down the phone.

  She had told her friends about the call, claiming, of course, to have been the one to hang up, and they had waxed indignant on her behalf. In truth there was something fascinating about the man, something that made her believe his profession of love. For days afterwards she would turn around in the street, looking for someone who might be looking for her, and if an attractive man was in sight, even if he was pretending to be otherwise occupied, he would become the caller.

  A month later, Chae had appeared at the restaurant. He chatted to her while she served his food, and left a note inviting her to meet him at Deacon Brodie’s. It was signed with a name she had never seen before. When she came into the pub, the first thing she asked was what Chae meant.

  He smiled and patted the stool beside him. “My mother called me after a character in a novel she read while she was pregnant: Sunset Song, by Lewis Grassic Gibbon.” Mollie told him her name, and he said, “Maybe you’re named after a character too. Moll Flanders, Molly Bloom, lots of pretty women to choose from.”

  “No.” Mollie blushed. “It was my grandmother’s name.” She was blushing because Chae had pronounced pretty exactly like the anonymous caller. From that moment, she no longer needed to search the streets.

  Now she thought the two phone calls did not have much in common—there was nothing lover-like about the man who rang about Olivia—but she did sense the same dark power emanating from the receiver. The shutters were all closed, the doors locked. He was calling from a pub, and the nearest one was in the town five miles away. Still, Mollie felt he could mysteriously see her, not in the ordinary way, but with X-ray vision that permitted him to view her thoughts, her very soul. Even his ignorance about Ewan’s movements did not lessen her belief in his omniscience; for she knew it was Ewan he wanted, not Chae.

  She stood up and went to the bathroom. The mirror showed a wild-faced woman she wished were a stranger. But no, it was herself before Olivia arrived. Her cheeks, creased from sleeping against the patchwork quilt, were blotched red, and her eyelids puffy with tears. She bent over the basin, scooping warm water onto her face, and dried herself with Olivia’s towel. At the end of these ablutions she looked, if anything, slightly more bedraggled. She went back to the bedroom and gently picked up Olivia, without waking her, and carried her downstairs to sit by the stove.

  Only the day before she had been congratulating herself on inventing a credible history for Olivia. Mrs. Tulliver had seemed to believe her unquestioningly; other people would fall into line. Now she was reminded that there was at least one person who would not believe any story about Olivia, however credible, however carefully invented. And that person was losing his temper.

  In her sleep Olivia made a gurgling sound, and above them in his cage Plato began to sing, something he seldom did after dusk. He puffed out his chest and warbled away with especial brio. As she listened, Mollie felt her mind grow smooth and clean as a freshly laundered sheet.

  What exactly had Ewan told her about finding Olivia? He had used the public conveniences at Perth bus station and been on the point of leaving when she caught his attention with a little sound; perhaps the same sound that had just caught Plato’s. He had picked her up. Then he was afraid his bus was going to drive off, with his luggage and without him. So he climbed on board carrying Olivia, and the bus had left immediately. Once in the town, he had probably waited for less than five minutes at the Odeon before Mollie appeared.

  Anyone seeing Ewan in Perth, Mollie thought, would have had no way of connecting him with her. She stood up, leaving Olivia tucked in the chair, and moved to the table. In the notebook she had used to work out her story for Mrs. Tulliver, she wrote down the few facts she knew. After his first phone call she had imagined the man as an older version of Olivia—Indian, dark-eyed, sinister in a polite way. Now she began to glimpse the outlines of a younger, ruder man, who had followed Ewan and Olivia onto the bus, who had seen her meet them, who phoned calling her bitch.

  Her immediate thought, her greatest fear, was that he wanted Olivia. But if that was the case, why didn’t he just ask? Or tell the police? For the first time since Ewan’s arrival, Mollie admitted to herself that there was an angle from which her actions could be viewed as culpable. So what did he want? she wondered.

  Suddenly it seemed it would be better to know. That keeping the phone off the hook was merely a delaying tactic, not likely to solve anything. If he couldn’t reach her by phone, he would try some other method. She went out into the hall and replaced the receiver. She lingered, thinking it might ring at once. Nothing happened. The man in the suit, she thought. The man in the suit is money.

  Back in the kitchen, Plato had stopped singing and was pecking at his cuttlebone in an irritating fashion. “Shut up, Plato,” she said, to no effect. She sat down. What she needed was not another story but a plan. A few hours ago she had believed this house could be their sanctuary; the utopia she had failed to create here with Chae would belong to her and Olivia. Now that ambition struck her as ludicrous. Apart from anything else there was money, of which Mollie had none, or at least an amount so small that it could easily be measured out in nappies and formula. Even if she wove night and day, the wool would not turn into silver and gold.

  Forget utopia, she told herself. She stood up again and went to look at Olivia. The baby’s eyelashes quivered, and one of her hands, lying outside the blanket, reached for a handful of air. The idea of Olivia being taken away, of their being separated, was insupportable. She was still mouthing the five syllables, in-sup-por-ta-ble, when there came a knock at the door, a single loud thwack, more like a blow than a request for admission.

  Mollie’s hair rose as if an icy hand had passed over her scalp. Her feet were bolted to the floor. She could not move, even to save Olivia.

  There was a gaping silence, during which she imagined mayhem and terror. Plato was quiet and Sadie stood at alert, looking at the door. Then came a volley of blows.

  “Mollie, it’s me. Let me in,” Chae shouted.

  Quickly she carried Olivia upstairs. She put her in the guest room where Ewan had slept, wedged against the wall with a pillow. She closed the door and turned on the radio in her bedroom. In the bathroom she swept all signs of Olivia into the airing cupboard, then raced back downstairs to the kitchen and put the formula and bottles under the sink. She couldn’t keep Chae out. He would see the car in the garage, and he would not, like Lorraine, leave a note and disappear. She pictured him battering the door down, breaking a window, not so much out of a desire to reach her as from an absolute dislike of being foiled. She hated him. She poured a glass of whisky, set it on the table, and hid her notebook in among the cookbooks on the windowsill above the sink. Finally she opened the door. Sadie pushed past her. Without looking down, Chae bent to fondle the dog’s ears.

  Seeing him was like being hit by a tornado. The rush of adrenaline, the emotion of whatever unnameable kind, was so all-encompassing that Mollie felt herself momentarily and absolutely lifted free from the terrible history that had occurred between them. Here was the person she knew best in th
e world.

  Then the tornado deposited her, just where she had been, on the doorstep of the house she had until recently shared with this man from whom she had separated in bitter anger.

  “Mollie,” he said, “can I come in?” She smelled beer on his breath and something else, a faint mintiness.

  Not saying anything, she led the way into the kitchen. He followed, forgetting to close either the outer or the inner door and then, noticing the draft, going back to shut them. While he came and went, Mollie made a decision. She would admit the presence of a baby; she was baby-sitting for these friends of Ewan’s. They needed somewhere to leave their daughter for twenty-four hours, and she had volunteered. This was far safer than outright denial.

  He was wearing a red tee shirt, black jeans, and a black jacket. His boots were caked with mud, but Mollie did not plan to ask him to remove a single piece of clothing for any reason. Not knowing what else to do, she sat down again at the table. She wondered if the signs of her tears had faded, and the thought that Chae would assume she’d been crying over him was galling. He was about to sit down opposite when he caught sight of the glass of whisky in front of her and stepped back, obviously intending to help himself, before he remembered. “May I have a drink?” he said hoarsely.

  “Go ahead.”

  They were the first words she had spoken to him in a month, and they came out just as she would have hoped: calm, composed, careless. But her hands were shaking so much she did not dare to raise her glass. She watched Chae shamble around the kitchen. He had always been, in spite of his stocky build, a rather graceful man, competent in his movements. Now he stumbled across the room. She watched him fumble with the bottle, the glass, rummage around in search of ice. When, finally, he sat down, she said nothing. She would not give him even the small satisfaction of her curiosity.

  He looked, she thought, a little rough. Unshaven but not glamorously so. His thick, dark hair was too long, his eyes bloodshot and heavily shadowed. He looked old, older.