Dead Romantic (21 page)

Bashful, sip thy jasmines,

As the fainting bee,

Reaching late his flower,

Round her chamber hums,

Counts his nectars –

enters,

And is lost in balms!

The poem calmed her. Its mention of jasmines was serendipitous in the setting of Winter Jasmine Cottage. As ever for Madeleine, literature had the power to take the sharp edge off reality.

The door from the bathroom clicked open, and Bernard came in. He held the small case in his left hand; in his right were his shoes, and over his right arm his clothes were neatly folded. He wore light green pyjamas with dark green collar and cuffs. He kept his eyes and his body averted from Madeleine and the bed while he laid his clothes over a chair.

Madeleine concentrated on her book as she felt the mattress give to take his weight. He pulled the bedclothes over himself and lay back on the pillow. There was a silence.

‘Emily Dickinson, eh?' His voice was deep and very close beside her.

‘Yes. Yes, it is,' she replied fatuously.

‘Brought your brief-case with you, I see,' he said, trying without complete success to lighten his voice. ‘Reckoning to catch up on work over the weekend, are you?'

‘Oh no, not that.' She sat up now, needing to be busy, needing to occupy her hands, needing to end the embarrassment of his proximity. She pointed out the contents of her bag as she itemised them. ‘It's just that I put so much stuff in here that I never like to be without it. You know, books, newspapers, addresses, theatre programmes, prints. . . It's just me, I'm afraid. This bag is like me, really, mind full of all kinds of things, you know, a bit scatty. . .' She was gabbling. There didn't seem to be enough objects in the bag to keep her going. She needed to keep talking; she needed to re-establish their intellectual empathy before the physical encounter. ‘And all kinds of bits and pieces slip down to the bottom . . . pens and pencils . . . and, oh, there's my stapler. I've been looking for that for weeks. And that's a hair-slide . . . and a catalogue from an art exhibition and –'

She stopped dead.

‘Why on earth do you carry that?' asked Bernard, looking at the black-handled sheath-knife.

‘Well, I. . . To be quite honest I'd forgotten it was there. I confiscated it from one of my students. I mean, really, you can't have them coming in to tutorials armed to the teeth?' She let out a little giggle. ‘Can you?'

‘No,' Bernard's voice sounded abstracted. He looked hard at the knife.

‘Still, don't want that.' Madeleine's gloved hand put it down firmly on the bedside-table. ‘Or this.' She put
The Poems of Emily Dickinson
down beside the knife, and turned to face Bernard. ‘Hello,' she said softly.

‘Hello,' he echoed and, awkwardly, put his arms around her.

For a moment they lay wordless and still.

‘It's warm,' said Madeleine. Her tensions were easing. This was quite cosy, being held in the warmth of the bed. It was reminiscent of childhood. It was just a cuddle, nothing frightening.

Bernard kept a space between their bodies. He too felt calmed. There was nothing to be afraid of. With a woman whom he loved, it would be different. His erection was hard and firm. It was all quite natural. He was with a woman to whom he wanted to make love, and he would make love to her. All the confusions in his mind would resolve themselves. At last he would be normal.

He moved his face towards hers and kissed her. At first their lips just touched dryly and drew back. Then they touched for longer, then they were pressing each other apart, then liquid, turning, tongues joining. Bernard felt the moist opening and giving of her lips, and desperately needed the other opening and giving that they parallelled. His arms closed behind her back and pressed the softness of her body against the hardness of his own.

The need in him was now furiously urgent, the need that had gone unsatisfied for over thirty years. He rolled his body over on top of hers, disengaging his hands which came round to knead and pummel her breasts through the crisp pleats of the nightdress. The lower part of his body was thrusting through the fabric at the tight knot of her legs. His hands reached down in desperation, first to pull off his pyjamas, then scrabbling to raise the white skirt and give him access.

This was not how Madeleine had envisaged it. The cuddling had been nice, the gentle exploratory kissing had been nice. She had felt herself slowly aroused, felt a melting within as he touched her. But this sudden animal attack was different. There was no beauty in this, no romance in the jabbing and ransacking of her privacy. It was too fast, too fierce; it was not the gentle rhythm that her own fingers could so regularly find. Her gloved hands were no longer around him, pulling him towards her; now they were pushing, trying to hold him off, trying to force away the urgent sweatiness of his flesh. ‘No, no,' she shouted. ‘No. Not like this.'

‘I know what I'm doing.' He almost spat the words at her, and closed her mouth with a kiss. But this was not a gentle kiss, it was like a gag to silence her, to stifle her perhaps. There was no tenderness; his teeth were hard and bruising on her lips.

His hands had now fought away the skirts of the white nightdress and were reaching, scratching, digging into the privacy between her rigid legs. Madeleine tried to scream, but his mouth was still clamped on hers, stopping her breath. She tried to scratch and pinch his chest, but through the gloves her nails had no power to hurt.

Suddenly she felt the body above her twitch and shudder. Bernard detached his mouth from hers and let out a little whimper of despair. Then, odiously, Madeleine felt a viscous warmth spreading across the private flesh below her navel.

The weight of Bernard's body was suddenly lifted off and he threw himself to the far side of the bed, with his back to her.

‘Well, really!' Madeleine burst out, when she had sufficient breath for indignation. ‘What on earth did you think you were doing?'

‘I know what I'm doing,' Bernard's voice was petulantly dogged, but edged with despair.

‘No, you don't. God, if that was meant to be making love. . . That had nothing to do with love.'

‘If you'd been more gentle, if you had been more loving, it would have been all right.' His tone was now one of whining adolescence.

‘Huh. Why should I be gentle, when you behave like an animal? God,' she said with sudden venom, ‘you revolt me!'

Suddenly he was once more facing her, his hands tight and pinching on her shoulders, his eyes only inches from hers. ‘Revolt you?'

‘Yes,' she hissed. ‘You're disgusting and pathetic. And', she added viciously, ‘you can't even do it properly.'

There did not seem to have been time for him to move, before she felt the immobilising weight of his body on top of her and the pressure of his rigid fingers on her throat.

Desperately she reached her gloved hand round for the black-handled sheath-knife on the table.

But Bernard saw what she was doing, and their two hands reached for the weapon together.

Chapter 23

During the Christmas rush, Tony Ashton helped out as a barman in Sharon's father's pub. After Christmas he stayed on. By the time he and Sharon announced their engagement the following May, Tony was managing two of the bars. (He had also by then been prevailed upon to abandon his ear-ring.) And by the time they were married, in the November of that year, Sharon had managed to get her fiancé to share her interests in mortgages, fitted kitchens and matching bathroom suites. Their first house was bought, decorated and ready to move into by the time that, on their wedding night, in a hotel in Paris, just like something out of one of her favourite romances, Sharon relinquished her virginity.

Paul Grigson confounded expectation by being accepted at Oxford. Perhaps some of Madeleine's coaching had paid off; or perhaps his brush with the police had concentrated his mind sufficiently for him to get the best out of his natural intelligence.

He had appeared in court on a considerable accumulation of charges after his adventure in Pulborough, but skilful legal representation had so convincingly attributed his behaviour to anxiety about his examinations and his mother's state of health that he got off lightly (although it would be some time before he could contemplate continuing his driving lessons). When Paul had mentioned suspicions about the death at Winter Jasmine Cottage, his solicitor had been of the opinion that the young man had ‘quite enough legal complications on his plate', and advised him to ‘leave well enough alone', which, after only a momentary struggle with his conscience, Paul did.

Mrs Grigson got better. The hospital, after running every test they could think of on her, finally isolated a food allergy as the cause of her illness. By keeping strictly to the prescribed diet, she was able to return to a completely normal life.

She was delighted that her son had justified her confidence by getting to Oxford. (She even wrote a letter, thanking him for the school's help, to Julian Garrett, who added it to the file that he always produced to convince the wavering parents of potential pupils.) Her ambitions for Paul had been achieved and so she was not too reluctant to accede to her son's request to spend four months doing Voluntary Service in Nigeria. The separation was good for both of them. After a few weeks in Africa, Paul lost his virginity to and had an eight-week affair with an uncomplicated German girl called Helga. The relationship only ended because of her return to Germany, but it was not continued. Both of them were keen to meet other people. Paul managed another brief sexual fling in Nigeria, had two more back in Brighton that summer, and looked forward to meeting the female undergraduates when he started at Oriel College in the autumn.

He hardly thought of Madeleine Severn after the last time that he saw her. Paul Grigson grew up.

The murderer continued to work at the Garrettway School of Languages as if nothing had happened.

After the tussle in the bed of Winter Jasmine Cottage when, with strength she did not know she possessed, Madeleine had snatched the knife from Bernard and stabbed him in the chest, she had gone very calm and worked out her escape-route. The nightdress, whose pleated front was soaked in blood, she had decided to leave. It was such a new purchase that no one could relate it to her. Taking it off and leaving it by the side of the bed, she had had a long, relaxing bath, then meticulously tidied up and removed every trace of herself from the cottage. She even picked a few red-gold strands from the pillow and checked for them by the dressing-table and in the bathroom where she had brushed her hair.

Before midnight she was in her Renault 5 and driving back to Brighton.

After the police had been summoned to Winter Jasmine Cottage the following Wednesday by Mrs Rankin, they started an exhaustive investigation into the murder. They questioned Bernard Hopkins' employer and colleagues at the Garrettway School of Languages. The hint from Stella Franklin of a possible romance between Bernard and Madeleine led them to question the latter in considerable detail and for a while their suspicions were strong.

They had, however, no evidence against her. The attack of eczema which had forced her to wear gloves meant that there were none of her fingerprints anywhere at Winter Jasmine Cottage. The remoteness of the location meant that no one had seen any arrivals or departures on the relevant night, and the frosty ground ruled out the possibility of her vehicle being identified by tyre-marks.

Besides, Madeleine had an unshakeable alibi. Her niece, Laura, could vouch for her having been in the Kemp Town house all of the weekend. Laura had serious misgivings about supporting this lie, but she was more worried about her mother discovering how she had really spent the Friday night and, closing her mind to the implications, went along with it Yes, she informed the police, she had stayed up late on the Friday night talking with her aunt, and they had spent all the rest of the time together. There was no way that Madeleine could have been in Pulborough at the time when the police experts were convinced the murder had taken place.

The one person who might have told a different story, Laura's boyfriend Terry (whose mother had died when he was a child and who went back to Worcester every weekend to his unsuspecting wife), was never going to break her alibi. No one had any reason to connect him with the house in Kemp Town, and that was the way he intended things should stay. Apart from anything else, he was getting a little bored with Laura's unquestioning devotion and had decided the relationship wasn't going to go the distance. So when, a fortnight after the murder, his work in Brighton ended, he did not bother to call her again. (And when, a month later, Laura found herself to be pregnant and, not wishing to repeat Aggie's mistake, arranged an abortion, Terry never knew anything about it. Nor did Laura's mother. Nor did her aunt.)

The other person who might have threatened Madeleine was Julian Garrett. He had, after all, seen her on the night of the murder, in the Garrettway School of Languages at a very unusual time and apparently in disguise. But Julian's attitude to responsibility pervaded all aspects of his life. The idea that Madeleine might have murdered Bernard gave him a little ironic amusement, but he was never going to volunteer information that might link her with the crime. Leave well enough alone, thought Julian, as usual, and looked forward to the spring, when he would be able to bring a little romance into the lives of the new influx of nubile foreigners.

The police investigation into Madeleine might have gone deeper, if they had not suddenly received new information from the Metropolitan Police linking Bernard Hopkins with a series of prostitute killings which had been going on over the previous five years. The manner of ‘Mandy's murder closely echoed the other cases; samples of semen and saliva matched. So the enquiry went off in a completely different direction and the police moved towards the conclusion that the murderer was yet another prostitute whom Bernard had enticed down to a country cottage and who had turned the tables on him. Though questioning around the London underworld, particularly of friends of former victims, led nowhere, the new approach to the investigation had the effect of taking the heat off Madeleine. She even, later, received a letter of apology from the police for the pressure of questioning that she had undergone.