by Nicola Upson
‘She’s taken one bad cut to the arm, but most of the knife wounds are minor.’
‘Good.’ He nodded towards the end of passage. ‘The ambulance will be here any minute and I don’t want to get in their way, but perhaps I could have a quick word with Miss Ennis if she’s up to it?’
‘Of course.’
She stood aside to let him into the hallway, then showed him to the sitting room, impressed by how sensitively he behaved. ‘Miss Ennis, I’m DI Tom Webster,’ he said, removing his hat and sitting down in the chair furthest from the sofa so as not to intimidate her. ‘I understand that it will be difficult for you to talk about what happened tonight, but it would be a great help if you could give me a very brief account before we get you safely to hospital. Is that all right?’
‘Yes, but I don’t think I can help you. I don’t even know what he looked like.’
‘Let’s start with how he got in. Do you have any idea about that?’
‘It was so stupid of me,’ Mary said, and Josephine sensed that she was close to tears again. ‘I was getting ready to go out and I didn’t have my lipstick. I guessed that it must have fallen out of my bag while I was cycling home from the hospital, so I went out to look in the basket and I left the door open. That must be how he got in, because I’d locked all my windows like they’ve been telling us to. It was on the spur of the moment and I didn’t think anything of it. I was only going to be a minute or two, after all.’
‘Did you see anyone hanging around the passage while you were outside?’
‘No. Just a group of undergraduates on their way into town. I only had my dressing gown on and I didn’t want them to see me so I hurried back inside.’
‘And you’re sure you shut the door properly?’
‘Yes. I bolted it behind me.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘I ran a bath and got into it. That’s when I first knew something was wrong.’ Josephine listened, appalled to think that Mary’s attacker must have been in the house for some time while she was innocently going about her business. ‘The music stopped suddenly, as if someone had turned the record off, and I thought I saw someone on the landing. Just a shadow, really, underneath the door. Then the lights went out.’
‘And you were alone in the house, apart from this man?’
‘That’s right. The rooms upstairs are empty at the moment, and Mrs Walsh—that’s my landlady—is away with her daughter until next weekend. I should let her know what’s happened, I suppose, but I’ve no idea how to get in touch with her.’
‘All in good time, Miss Ennis. What did you do when you suspected there was an intruder in the house?’
‘Put some clothes on and went out onto the landing. That’s when I knew I wasn’t imagining things. There was a man on the stairs—I could just see his outline in the light from the street lamp outside. He was standing still, looking up at me. I ran back into my room, but he was too quick and I wasn’t strong enough to shut the door on him.’
‘And that’s when he forced himself on you?’
Mary nodded. ‘He hit me first, then he held me down on the bed until he’d finished.’
‘Did you get any sense of his build?’
‘He wasn’t particularly tall—about your height, I suppose—but he was strong and well built.’
‘What about his voice? Did he say anything?’
‘Not much. He swore at me, and he used my name. Just once, but that was what made me struggle with him. It was the worst thing, really—the thought that he might have known me, that he wasn’t just some faceless person who’d picked me at random.’
The information obviously interested Webster, but he was considerate enough to confine his questioning to the basic facts rather than tire his witness with endless speculation. ‘Is that when he used the knife? When you fought back?’
‘Yes. He made it clear it was a stupid thing to have done. After that, I just lay there, praying that he’d leave.’
‘Did he go out by the front door?’
‘He must have done, because it was unbolted. After he left my room, I heard him moving about downstairs for a while, then it all went quiet. The only other thing I noticed was the rattle of an old bicycle underneath the window, but I suppose that could have been anyone going past. I waited until I thought it was safe—it felt like ages, but I don’t know if it was—then I pulled some clothes on and came here. I didn’t stop to see if any of the back windows had been opened.’
‘And did you see or hear anything during the evening, Miss Tey?’
Josephine hesitated. ‘I noticed that the music had stopped,’ she said. ‘I had the windows open to ease the smell of paint, so I could hear the gramophone earlier. And at one point I thought I heard someone cry out. I went to the window to check, but everything seemed fine. I’m sorry,’ she added, turning to Mary and thinking of how different things might have been if she had taken more notice while Archie was still with her. ‘I should have been more thorough, but I thought it was students or someone from the inn round the corner. There’s often a lot of noise there at night.’
The doorbell rang again and the small sitting room was soon filled with ambulance men and the paraphernalia of an emergency, but Josephine was pleased for Mary’s sake that neither of them seemed to know her from the hospital. They began to examine her, and Webster stood to leave them to it. ‘Looks like you’re in safe hands, Miss Ennis. Thank you for what you’ve told me. We’ll need a full statement from you and I can come to the hospital to take it, or if you’d find it easier to speak to a female officer, I can send our WPC to do it on my behalf.’
He had obviously won Mary’s confidence because she didn’t need time to think about it. ‘No, there’s no need to send anyone else. I’ll talk to you.’
‘All right. I’ll come in the morning when you’ve had some sleep.’ It was the first naive thing that he had said, Josephine thought; she doubted very much that Mary Ennis would be able to sleep properly for some time. ‘In the meantime, we’ll look at your flat and see if we can learn anything more about this man from that. Where are your keys?’
‘In my bag. I always keep them there so I can’t lock myself out. It’s by the dressing table.’
‘Fine. I’ll make sure everything’s locked up when we’ve finished, and I’ll leave the keys with Miss Tey if that’s all right?’
Josephine nodded and showed the detective to the front door.
‘I made him angry,’ Mary said as he was on his way out. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’
Webster stopped and turned back to her. ‘He was already angry when he got to you,’ he said firmly. ‘That’s why he was there. Don’t ever think that you’ve encouraged him, or that you could have done anything to discourage him. This man is beyond any sort of logic or reason, but we will catch him—I promise you that. I’m only sorry that you had to get hurt before we managed it.’
‘Forgive me if this sounds rude,’ Josephine said quietly in the hallway, ‘but I wasn’t expecting you to show her that much understanding. From what I’ve read in the papers, your colleague’s attitude is rather more typical.’
‘Perhaps I’ve just seen it more often than they have,’ Webster said earnestly. ‘Some things stay with you, and you have to do what you can.’
It was the sort of response that Archie might have given, determined and world-weary at the same time, and she watched him go next door. When she returned to the sitting room, the ambulance men were packing up, ready to leave. ‘Nice job with the dressings,’ one of them said, smiling at Josephine. ‘Now—can you walk, miss, or would you like a wheelchair?’
‘I can walk,’ Mary said. ‘I don’t want a fuss.’ She stood up, as if to prove a point, and Josephine noticed the blood on the back of her skirt and on the sofa where she had been sitting. It was the smallest of marks, trivial in comparison with the staining from the wound on her arm, and yet it was far more disturbing, far more indicative of the real outrage which she had endured. Mary
stared down at the dustsheet, and the evidence there seemed to break her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, turning to Josephine. ‘I’m so sorry, but he hurt me and I couldn’t stop him.’
No matter how many questions she was asked, no one would ever get closer to the truth than that simple testimony. Mary began to cry, and Josephine held her close while the ambulance men hovered awkwardly by the door. ‘Is there anyone you’d like me to contact?’ she asked gently. ‘Your parents? A friend?’
‘No, I don’t want my parents to see me like this, and anyway, they live away. And most of my friends are either out dancing or at the hospital already.’
‘Then shall I come with you?’
The girl looked at her gratefully. ‘Would you?’
‘Of course. Just let me fetch you a coat and some shoes.’
With the help of an ambulance man, Josephine led Mary outside and down the short walk to the end of the passage. A small crowd of people had gathered around the ambulance on Bridge Street, and Josephine wondered bitterly where all the casual spectators—herself included—had been when it mattered, when they could have done something to help. How instinctively the subtle craft of shame was learned, she thought, watching Mary hide her face until the ambulance doors were firmly shut behind her.
The man riding in the back with them talked constantly throughout the short journey to Addenbrooke’s. ‘What a terrible business,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It’s hard to know what to do to help. A colleague of mine has started organising rides home for the girls in the ambulances when we’re not too busy—those that don’t live in the nurses’ hostel, obviously. He sees them to the door and has a quick look round inside to check all the windows and make sure they’re safe.’
‘That’s thoughtful,’ Josephine said, resisting the temptation to point out that it hadn’t helped Mary Ennis. She looked at the ambulance man and realised that she, too, was falling into the trap of paranoia and suspicion which seemed to be growing in the town. How easy it would be for his colleague to use such an apparently selfless scheme to identify houses where women were regularly on their own and vulnerable, to find the windows with loose catches and weak locks, and then to return another time, masked and anonymous. Everyone was fair game to her imagination, it seemed: one of the decorators was a short, well-built young man, and she had caught herself wondering if any of the victims lived in houses which had recently been painted.
Addenbrooke’s Hospital was an extravagant building on Trumpington Street, a Victorian outpouring of buttresses, coloured bricks and imposing colonnades. The ambulance driver pulled up by the front entrance and his colleague leapt out to find Mary a wheelchair. She hesitated when she saw it, instinctively resenting the invalid status it conferred, but the exhaustion of her ordeal was beginning to take its toll and she allowed herself to be pushed passively along corridors which, on a normal day, she would have walked with a spring in her step. As they reached the wards, Josephine noticed that more and more of the nurses on duty were beginning to recognise their new patient; some came forward to speak to her or squeeze her hand in solidarity, others huddled in small groups and talked quietly among themselves, but they had in common an expression that hovered somewhere between pity and horror, an expression which came partly from the obvious distress of someone they cared about and partly from the realisation that any one of them could be standing in her shoes.
Whatever Josephine thought of the building’s facade, there was no doubt that its architects had created an interior of real distinction. The wards were long, high-ceilinged rooms, supported by enormous pillars and blessed with tall windows which—in the daytime—would flood the polished floors with sunshine. Now, the lighting was muted, the wards peaceful, and nurses moved silently between the beds, tucking in sheets and administering the final medication of the day.
Josephine waited with Mary while an empty examination room was found, and then she was whisked away. ‘Is this what we all fear it is?’ A matron stood at her shoulder, looking on anxiously. ‘We teach our girls never to jump to conclusions in this job, but I’m afraid we’re all guilty of it now.’
‘And you’re right to in this case, but the fewer people who know the better.’ She smiled at her own naivety. ‘I suppose that’s a ridiculous thing to say, but it’s one of the things that’s upsetting her the most, I think—the idea that people will treat her differently once they find out what’s happened.’
‘You’re a friend of Nurse Ennis?’
‘No, just a neighbour. We’d never met until tonight. She came to me for help after it happened.’
‘And did he . . .?’ The matron tailed off, unable to finish the sentence, and Josephine nodded. ‘What a terrible thing to happen to someone so bright. Ennis is one of the most talented nurses we have—probably one of the most talented we’ve ever had. It all comes so naturally to her. She has a real empathy with people from all walks of life, and you can’t teach that.’ She seemed suddenly embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry—of course it’s a terrible thing to happen to any girl, but . . .’
‘You don’t have to apologise. I know exactly what you mean.’
‘It’s just that I fear for her. In my experience, the best nurses make the worst patients. She’ll need time to come to terms with this, and I hope she’ll allow herself the same understanding that she shows to everyone else.’
Josephine hoped so too. ‘I’d better leave you to get on with your work,’ she said. ‘Would you tell Mary I’ll come back to see her at visiting time tomorrow?’
12
Josephine woke late after a restless night. It was gone three when the taxi dropped her back from the hospital, and she had returned to the house with a mixture of sadness and trepidation, putting the lights on in every room and checking the locks on the windows before eventually trying to sleep. After breakfast, she took the keys that had been deposited through her letterbox and went next door. She knew that Mary lived upstairs, and the ground floor and basement were obviously the landlady’s domain. The hall was fussily decorated with floral print wallpaper and a penchant for lace trim. There was a pile of post and paperwork gathered neatly on the console table by the door and Josephine glanced quickly through it to see if she could find a forwarding address or any other means of contacting Mrs Walsh to let her know what had happened, but she was obviously not the sort who expected emergencies in her absence. A single sheet of notepaper was propped against a vase, reminding Mary’s landlady of all the arrangements that needed to be made before she went away, and Josephine was impressed to see that everything had been carefully ticked off—newspapers cancelled, milk order halved, Mary’s rent collected. She often wrote herself a similar list before coming south, but rarely got round to completing half of it; Mrs Walsh obviously travelled less frequently than she did or was far more diligent by nature.
She went up to the first floor, unable to climb the stairs without seeing in her mind’s eye the shadowy outline of the rapist and trying to imagine how terrified Mary must have been in that split-second realisation. The bath was still full, giving the room a faint scent of lily of the valley, and Josephine rolled back her sleeve and reached in to take the plug out, wincing at the coldness of the water. There was a sticky pool of ginger wine on the black-and-white linoleum and she did her best to wipe it away, then picked up the empty glass and discarded magazine and took Mary’s dressing gown down from the back of the door. As far as possible, she was keen to remove anything that would serve as a reminder of that traumatic Friday night, and ordinary domestic details were just as likely to bring it all flooding back as any overt signs of violence.
Nothing could have prepared her for the shock of the bedroom. The note which the police had left with the keys made it clear that they had finished with the premises, and Josephine rashly assumed that some semblance of order would have been restored, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. The room was a shambles, with every square foot of it testifying to the hatred and violence that had fuelled the attack. The mattr
ess had been pushed halfway off the bed by the force of the struggle, and there were bloodstains on the sheets and blankets—bloodstains mixed with smears of something darker that looked like dirt or coal. On the dressing table, a couple of small ornaments had been broken and Mary’s make-up was strewn everywhere, as if the intruder had wanted to smash anything that was pretty or feminine. And perhaps most unsettling of all, the clothes that he had cut from Mary’s body lay in tatters on the floor, a stark reminder of how easily he could have killed her. ‘Lucky’ was a word that Josephine refused to use in relation to anyone who had suffered an ordeal like this, but it was surely only a matter of time before the violence escalated to yet another level. She thought back to what Inspector Webster had said the night before and realised how right he was: even now, in broad daylight and with the perpetrator long gone, the anger in the room was palpable.
Rather than restoring order, the police search of the room had actually made things worse and a thin film of dust now covered all the surfaces. She would have to come back and clean thoroughly, but in the meantime she tidied as best she could—stripping the bed, refolding clothes that had been pulled from drawers, and opening the windows to allow some much-needed air into the room. There was no saving the sheets and blankets, which she piled in a corner ready to get rid of, but at least the blood hadn’t soaked through to the mattress and most of the other chaos was simply a matter of straightening and tidying. Mary’s jewellery was still on the dressing table, she noticed; if robbery had ever been an incentive for these crimes, the urge to steal had been replaced by something far more violent. It took Josephine less than half an hour to restore the room to a semblance of normality, although she doubted that Mary would ever return to live here; in her position, she would want a fresh start, as far away from St Clement’s Passage as possible. Last but not least, she lifted ‘Tiger Rag’ off the gramophone deck and put it back in its sleeve at the bottom of a pile of other records; it would be a long time before Mary could listen to the Benny Goodman Quartet without being instantly transported back to the worst night of her life.