Singled Out (20 page)

Laura was amazed to hear herself saying, ‘You can speak in front of Philip. There's no problem. Can I get anyone a drink? Emily?'

‘Well, only if you've got any herb tea. As you know, I don't drink alcohol.'

‘No, of course you don't. Still no herb tea, I'm afraid. Ordinary tea – even got some China – or fruit juice …?'

‘I'll leave it, thank you.'

‘Philip?'

‘I drink alcohol.'

‘Good. White wine?'

‘Thank you.'

‘Won't be a moment, Emily.'

Laura heard no conversation from the sitting room while she was pouring the drinks. But then she couldn't imagine that Philip and Emily would have had a great deal to talk about.

As Laura passed him his glass, Philip's hand touched hers. Electricity zinged through her. God, why the hell had Emily chosen to arrive at that precise moment? Laura sat down again facing her tormentor. ‘All right, fire away. But please make what you have to say as quick as possible.'

‘Very well.' Emily looked primly down at her knees. ‘I'm afraid, Laura, that I am going to have to press criminal charges against Tom.'

Philip raised a quizzical eyebrow, but Laura gestured that he should be silent; she would explain later.

‘I see. Well, that's your decision, and you're entitled to it. I'm intrigued, though, that you use the expression “going to
have
to press criminal charges”. Where's the compulsion? Why do you have to?'

Emily's pale blue eyes were wide and ingenuous. ‘Well, obviously, for the sake of other women.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘An assault was made on me,' the girl explained patiently. ‘A sexual assault. I'm afraid that kind of thing has to be made public, or men will think that they can continue to behave in that way with impunity – just as they have for thousands of years.'

‘I see. Perhaps you'd fill me in on the precise nature of Tom's assault on you …? I've never been told the details … though I must say from where I'm sitting your injuries don't look that serious.'

‘It's not the severity of the attack that matters,' said Emily self-righteously. ‘It's the
fact
of the attack. Anyway, you can't see the bruising on my shoulders. It's worse there.'

‘So what are you saying – that Tom inflicted these injuries on you in the course of raping you?'

‘No.' Emily looked across at Philip, once again questioning whether Laura really wanted him to hear all this.

‘Don't worry about him. You go on. How did Tom attack you?'

Laura was pleased to see that Emily had the decency to blush as she replied, ‘Well, the fact is, Tom and I were in bed together … and suddenly he started hitting me.'

‘Come on, I want a bit more detail than that. Did you
say
anything that made him lose his temper? Did you say anything that might be seen as an assault on the notoriously frail masculine ego?'

‘No, I didn't.' Emily's voice became smaller and more aggrieved. ‘I just reached towards him in a spirit of love and he lashed out at me.'

‘Hm. Well, I think you may have to be a bit more specific on the details if the case ever does get to a court of law.'

‘It will get to a court of law,' Emily insisted complacently. ‘The police are becoming much more sympathetic in cases of violence against women.'

‘Yes, yes …'

‘And it's very important that this kind of incident does get maximum coverage.'

‘
Pour décourager les autres
?'

‘Exactly.'

Laura wondered why Emily made her so angry. What the girl was saying perfectly echoed her own beliefs. With her family background Laura Fisher was an instinctive supporter of anything that might minimize violence against women. But somehow she didn't trust the sentiments she heard coming from Emily's smug little mouth.

For a start, Laura was instinctively defensive of her son. She would have liked to hear Tom's account of what exactly happened in the bedroom of the ‘flat up in Clifton'. And she was suspicious of Emily's motives. She felt certain the girl was being got at, used by her tutor in some intrigue of campus sexual politics. Also she feared that Emily would bring too much relish to her role as feminist martyr. The St Joan of the university, immolated on the flames of masculine insensitivity – yes, Emily Howard would love every minute of that.

‘OK,' said Laura. ‘Thank you. You say you came to tell me face to face that you're going to press criminal charges against Tom. You've done that, so I don't see why I should detain you any longer.'

Emily did, thank goodness, look a little discomfitted by this. ‘Very well, I'll be on my way.'

‘Fine.'

‘I'll be making a statement to the police in the next couple of days, so the criminal proceedings will then get under way and … take as long as they take.'

‘I should think that'd be about how long they take, yes.'

Emily's lips pursed. Even someone with her immunity to irony could recognize she was being sent up. ‘So … I'd be grateful if you could pass on the news of what's happening to Tom.'

‘If I see him, you can rest assured I will.'

‘If you see him? Why, where is he?'

‘I have no idea,' Laura replied.

‘But he lives here, with you.'

‘
Lived
. He's walked out.'

‘Oh, but –'

‘Now, I'm sorry, Emily, I really must ask you to leave.'

‘Very well.' Emily picked herself up from the sofa, practising martyred dignity. Laura ushered the girl out into the hall and handed her her coat. They didn't speak till the door was open and Emily, more waiflike than ever, stood in the filtered light of a streetlamp.

‘I don't know why you resent me so much, Laura. I'm only standing up for my rights. All I'm trying to do is conduct my life on my own terms, as a woman – just as you did back in the seventies.'

Laura bit back the rich variety of responses which sprang to her mind and simply said, ‘Goodbye, Emily.'

‘Goodbye, Laura.' The girl turned away in the direction of the park and was already dwindling into the distance as Laura closed the door.

She went back into the sitting room. Philip was standing, bewildered, in front of his armchair. ‘What on earth was all that about?'

Laura felt herself moistening as she moved towards him. Their bodies came together. His erection was proud against her through folds of clothing. Their lips fused in soft delight. Hands moved intuitively downwards. Hers slid from his buttocks to the front, wrestling with his clasp and zip. His were raising her skirt, sidling through underwear to the nub of her, hooking a finger in the silk of her briefs, pulling them down.

He pushed her, she drew him back until she was against the wall. His trousers crumpled down to the floor. Laura pulled the thickness of his penis free and, raising herself on tiptoe against the wall, crammed him into the sweet welcome of her cunt. Both moaned as he thrust upwards. Laura's thighs arched and thrust back at him. It only took a few strokes and he spurted into her. Her body shuddered in answering orgasm.

She saw his face close to hers, smiling. It was transformed. Now it was the face that had for so long inhabited her fantasies. Suddenly everything made sense.

‘Bit quick, that one,' Philip said with a lazy grin.

‘It was perfect.' Laura grinned back. ‘I think we were ready for it.'

‘Has been a longish wait, yes. Next time we'll do it slowly.'

‘Mm …' purred Laura, as she felt his slowly shrinking penis twitch inside and let the ripples of her own afterglow wash over her.

It was as though they had never been apart. Their hunger for each other, their instinctive knowledge of the other's needs, lasted all through the night.

The age of their bodies seemed an irrelevance. The hair on Philip's chest was now white, his belly round and prominent, but the feeling of his skin remained the same. Laura felt a little charge each time she touched him. Her broad hips, stretch marks and pendulous breasts did not worry Philip either. Indeed they seemed to enhance his pleasure, when he took all of a breast into his mouth and fretted its nipple with the tip of his tongue, or reached a hand deep, deep into her cunt, marvelling at its unfamiliar capaciousness.

As before, their love-making was seamless, a continuum of touching and exploring, punctuated by little swells of orgasm for Laura and the occasional gasping, juddering climax from Philip. Their sex was redemptive and life-affirming. Laura felt justified. The ache for Philip she had experienced over the years had not just been fantasy. The reality vindicated her hopes.

It was mutual. It was wonderful. This, Laura reflected, is what equality between the sexes is about, neither partner dominant, neither adversarial, each pleased to give, each happy to receive.

They fell into a comatose doze about six, as daylight began to pale the colours of the bedroom curtains. They woke at ten and after another delicious little encounter, Laura rose to make some coffee. Standing in the autumn sunlight of her kitchen, she felt eased, massaged, with all her problems resolved and melted away.

She did not switch on the radio, so she did not hear the news that the body of a girl had been discovered in Bristol. It was only when the police arrived about noon that she heard of the murder. Emily Howard had been found strangled in Brandon Hill Park, only yards from Laura's house. Her body had been discovered amongst the shrubs that surrounded a little ornamental grotto. And the police wanted to interview Tom.

Laura gave the police all the information she knew. She told them of Emily's visit the evening before and, as she did so, the awful truth dawned that the girl had probably walked straight from the house to her death. Laura asked whether the detectives knew the time of the murder, but they were evasive and said it hadn't been confirmed yet.

She also gave them all the information she could about Tom. She confessed that he had walked out earlier in the week after a row with her, and supplied the meagre list of friends to whom he might possibly have turned for refuge. Yes, she admitted, she was aware of her son's previous attack on Emily Howard. In fact it was in connection with that incident that the girl had come to see her.

The two detectives were grave and non-committal, but Laura received the firm impression that Tom was their number one – quite possibly their only – suspect.

‘It's important that we contact him as soon as possible, Mrs Fisher,' said one of the detectives, ‘so that we can eliminate him from our enquiries.' But somehow she didn't think that was what they really wanted to do. ‘… so that we can nail the bugger' might have more accurately reflected the detectives' attitude.

‘I should warn you, Mrs Fisher,' said the other one, ‘that you would be very foolish to waste police time by trying to protect your son. We'll find him soon enough, and if you are actually withholding information as to his whereabouts –'

‘I'm not. I genuinely have no idea where he is.'

‘Very well,' said the detective, clearly disbelieving. ‘As soon as you do have any information – or as soon as you remember anything that might be relevant to our enquiries, we're relying on you to get in touch with us immediately.'

‘I will. Of course I will.'

The main interview had been conducted with Laura on her own, while Philip sat in the kitchen pretending interest in the Sunday papers. Before the detectives left, they spoke briefly to him, confirming Laura's story about Emily's visit. They asked him about Tom and seemed sceptical of his assertion that he had never met the boy. Then they took his address and said they might need to contact him for further questions.

As soon as Laura had seen them out, she came through to the kitchen, tight-lipped and pale. Philip poured coffee for her as she sank on to a straight-backed wooden chair.

‘What's it all about, Laura? That is, if you don't mind telling me …?'

‘I don't mind.'

‘I mean, it must be nonsense. They must be barking up the wrong tree. You don't think Tom could have had anything to do with the murder, do you?'

‘I don't know, Philip,' she replied. ‘I just don't know. I would have said, until the last week, that I knew my son, and that if he suffered from any personality defect it was
lack
of aggression. Now … I just don't know.'

‘Tell me as much as you want to tell me, Laura.'

And she did. Her initial intention had been to edit her revelations, to mention only non-specific fears of inherited criminality, but once she started talking, it all came out.

She told Philip things she had never spoken of to anyone except Kent. She re-created for him the Fisher family home, the neat, net-curtained façade and the evil that lay behind it. She told Philip how her father had abused his two children, and she told him about her mother's murder. She could see that Philip's middle-class sensibilities were appalled, but could not stop herself from telling everything.

‘You didn't actually witness your mother's death, did you?'

‘No. That was at least one trauma I was spared. I was at school when it happened. My brother Kent suffered, though. He came back from school and found her body in the sitting room. She'd been strangled.'

‘I don't know anything about your brother.'

‘There are lots of things we don't know about each other, Philip,' said Laura bleakly.

‘True. What does Kent do?'

‘He's in the police. Detective Inspector, here in Bristol.'

‘Well, for God's sake – ring him! Ring him as soon as possible. He'll be able to find out what's going on … you know, if they've got any evidence against Tom.'

Kent was not in his office, but Laura left a message for him to ring her as soon as possible.