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Authors: Clare Curzon

BOOK: The Body of a Woman
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Preoccupied with his own petty problem, he'd walked away; and so he had this disquieting sense that he should somehow have been able to shield her. Which was totally illogical. Who was he to guarantee invulnerability? Didn't his job sometimes risk the reverse for those near him?
To be truthful, what bugged him was simple frustration. He'd not stayed and listened to her, and so he had no idea of the importance of what she would have said. It might have been no more than a minor query he could have set her mind at rest on. Or - if the killing wasn't random and she was under threat already - it could have proved of use now as vital evidence.
That could implicate someone in her circle; possibly one of those he had already met that day. And since statistically the odds were always on a domestic murder, it seemed inevitable that in Interview Room 1 Professor Aidan Knightley and DI Mott would be getting down to a serious discussion.
He was tired; he had not realised how weary until, after half an hour of paper-shuffling and scribbled memos at the office, he reached home and sprawled at ease in his rattan chair on the patio, a tumbler of Nan's homemade lemonade close at hand. The overgrown ash tree, which he had long intended to cut back, stirred lacy fans overhead, alternately dazzling and dappling his upturned face.
Gently its susurration faded into the sigh and suck of water at a sea's edge. He found himself wandering barefoot along a shoreline. It was the time of evening when only overhead is the sky still blue. Gradually, towards the horizon, it shaded to an indeterminate yellow like the flesh of a pear, and finally flushed to meet the dark sea. Above him craggy cliffs caught the lowering sun, bunched like an enormous arthritic fist.
At the water's edge he was quite alone. Down here the light was already slipping away. Only gentle ripples and the rim of wet sand showed a faint phosphorescence. He moved his weight slowly from foot to foot, watching water press up
between his bare toes, then briefly stay pooled in the imprint as he lifted each foot away, until the sand slid back and no trace remained. He knew that behind him nothing marked that he had come this way.
The thought brought a mild kind of grief, but then ahead phantom pressure marks began to appear in the wet sand. Traces left by finer feet than his own, long-toed and delicate. But with no one there to make them.
Then these imprints too began to vanish. He heard himself cry out in an urgent protest.
He fought himself awake and felt Nan's hand on his shoulder to calm him. ‘Mike, you were dreaming.'
He couldn't speak, lying limply sweating, anguished. At what? A memory rather than the dream. It was a place he'd once visited as a young sergeant with the Met, taking solitary leave in Cornwall. It had been at a turning point in his life as he worked out whether to stay in the job or try for something with better pay; because he'd fallen in love with Nan and he wanted to offer her so much more.
He remembered plodging his feet there at the edge of the warm sea, with his jeans rolled up to the knee. A mudlark sensation, pleasurable and totally physical for the moment.
That was the point where the dream had started to outstrip reality, because it hadn't mattered then that the footmarks must disappear. It was what happened; something acceptable and accepted. So why the angst of the dream? Some Jungian indication that he feared impermanence? A warning he was getting older, due some day to wear out and himself vanish?
That wasn't what disturbed him. Already the dream's outlines were fading. Losing the action, he was still transfixed by the sense of sadness.
Something about those footmarks. He stared into the dark behind his eyelids, and patterns of feeble light started flickering and taking shape.
Then they came back. Not the phantom imprints, but bare
feet he had seen elsewhere; on the peaty floor of Shotters Wood. And on Littlejohn's steel table: fine, arched feet slanting upward and outward in the total relaxation of death. Pathetically toe-tagged.
He stirred in his chair, passed one hand over his dry mouth. Perhaps not so much Jungian as Freudian then? Had Leila Knightley called on his libido from beyond the grave?
Only it wasn't lust he felt; it was more like guilt.
 
While Superintendent Yeadings relaxed at home, Z awaited the scene-of-crime experts. She agreed with her chief that it wasn't an obvious murder scene, but they could not afford to ignore that Leila Knightley had been kept tied up somewhere before her body was dumped in Shotters Wood.
As well as Knightley's dinner jacket she had also removed the computer from the study to pick over its contents at her convenience. Now she had a tussle with her conscience over having commandeered Chloë's stack of disks as well. She decided it was better to be over-cautious, and transferred them all to the car, using a grocery carton she found in the utility room.
With Knightley's departure for questioning, the Hadfields had moved their luggage in, Janey collecting it from beside the front doorstep and transferring it to a twin-bedded guest room at the rear.
‘If Aidan comes back and needs somewhere to sleep,' she decreed, ‘he can use Eddie's old room or make up a fresh bed for himself. I don't mind cooking but I don't intend waiting on him.' She then took over the kitchen and started preparing an evening meal.
Charles Hadfield had been curiously silent since Yeadings intervened in the flare-up on Knightley's arrival. He had been content to listen and ponder. Now, with Chloë pottering about at the far end of the garden, he voiced his opinion that if the police had any sense at all they needn't expect her
father back that night. He appeared to have changed his mind yet again about Knightley's guilt.
‘They'll keep him as long as permitted without charging him. Isn't that thirty-six hours? By which time he'll have broken down and admitted the killing. I suppose I should get in touch with his solicitor, if only for Chloë's sake. And we may need someone ourselves to keep those social workers at bay. Not to mention the Press once they're on to this. Can't have them upsetting the poor girl.'
For a long time Chloë had stayed crouched on the edge of her bed with her head in her hands. Elsewhere in the house there were sounds of comings and goings. She thought at one point she heard her father's voice. A little later the front door had closed noisily and a car drove away but she didn't bother to look out.
It didn't matter. Nothing did. It was awful, this swirling void. Whenever she closed her eyes she seemed to be moving in a vortex. Needing air she slipped out into the garden. The ground seemed to be tipping under her. Lying flat she had to dig her fingers into the lawn to keep herself from sliding away.
She pulled herself up on to the stone bench by the garage wall. Now at least she had her feet against the ground but still there was movement, and she knew it was inside her head.
Janey had asked if she would ‘like something'; meaning aspirin, she supposed. She had refused because it was both too little and too much. She had feared being any more confused than she already was. What she needed was to go out like a light.
Back at Granny's she'd believed she was beginning to get herself straightened out, and now total disaster. Leila gone. Leila killed, for God's sake, by some maniac in Shotters Wood.
There was no sense in anything any more. She had almost made up her mind to tell Leila everything once she got home, in maybe two or three weeks' time, but now - She
found she was rocking forward and backward over her knees. Like a madman in some gothic film, she thought. She had to force herself to stop and sit stiffly straight with her arms wrapped about her. And still her brain felt to be sloshing to and fro, knocking against the bony inner skull.
Someone came out on to the patio. Janey, calling her name.
‘Not now,' she cried desperately. ‘Leave me alone!'
But that was the opposite of what she wanted. It scared her being abandoned. She wanted Leila there, close, holding her, talking in that low, level voice that could turn the worst nightmares normal.
Janey wouldn't do. How could she understand, being so old and so odd? Things like this didn't, couldn't, happen to Janey. But Leila - who knew men could be shit and still remained sane - Leila just might have understood.
At first the very idea of admitting what had happened was impossible, a grotesque extension of the original horror. But by getting away she had achieved a sort of perspective, if only a slightly skewed one. She'd had time to draw breath, believe that she'd almost escaped, survived without permanent damage. But still there were decisions to be made. She had to put a finish to it forever or she couldn't live with herself again. And Leila might have helped her there, although it wasn't clear just how. Now she had no one. How could so many hideous things crash down on her at once?
She shook her head wildly, angry at seeing herself at the centre of this new horror. It was Leila it had happened to, Leila abused, done away with. Something that left her outside. It made her hate herself more.
‘I want to die,' she growled through stiffly clenched jaws. But she knew she didn't: there was too much anger boiling away under the shame.
She wanted to forget, yes. Only there'd been so much confused blurring of her mind already, with patches of time gone missing, that she'd thought she was going insane.
No; what she fervently wanted was for none of it ever to
have happened: to go back to that afternoon of the French orals. It had been a Friday, so afterwards she'd walked to the Uni's Faculty of Science to beg a lift home with her father. Leila had gone north for the weekend, to the annual trade fair, so there was no one at home, and Chloe hadn't yet been given a doorkey for the new house.
That had been the beginning. That was the last moment life had been normal, without unnerving distortions. The afternoon that she'd got involved with Beryl Ryder.
I had admired Beryl Ryder from afar. She was one of those willowy, superior blondes worshipped by some of the juniors at my girls' day-school. My own respect wasn't so sloppy, but I would have given a lot to be like her. What I most envied, beyond her tall beauty, was her obvious lack of concern for any of the people or things which cramped my own horizons.
She had no idea who I was. Her gaze was far above the level of someone with the main subjects of GCSE still to master. She had already survived those exams to reach the Sixth Form. Although automatically a prefect through seniority, she had somehow steered clear of other student chores - School Captain, Head of House or Games Captain. If the positions had been elective and not from the Head's choice she would probably have filled them all, but I could never see such a brazenly free spirit organizing school charities or team lists.
When she swanned into my father's room that afternoon I assumed she'd become one of his students, and I realized then that I hadn't seen her about the school corridors for some months.
She stood draped in the doorway, one hip exaggeratedly jutting, fabulously slim - almost anorexic - and sneered at me. ‘For godsake,' she challenged, ‘lectures ended at four. What the hell are you doing still here?'
She sounded so officious that I bobbed up from my chair and explained I was waiting for my father.
She took one look at my uniform and placed me as a student applicant due to be picked up after an interview. I didn't trouble to put her right because her lofty attitude was beginning to make me bristle.
She brushed past me with assumed authority, seated
herself at Miss Morris's empty desk and began opening drawers and riffling through them. On Fridays my father's secretary left soon after lunch, and I wondered if Beryl was appointed to replace her part-time.
After a minute or two of silence she picked up the internal phone. ‘Joanne,' she complained, ‘have you any idea where Aidan's got to? There's a schoolgirl here who's expecting to be picked up by her family. D'you know anything about it? Well, can you …?'
And it was then that he walked in. My father. Clearly her lover. Their eyes locked with such indecent familiarity.
If he felt wrongfooted at sight of me he covered it well. With practice, I suppose. He instantly picked up on the cross-purposes we'd been at and sorted us out with casual introductions. ‘My daughter Chloë,' he explained me away. But ‘A student here who's helping me with the paperwork,' he offered for Beryl.
‘She was at my school,' I told him.
‘Oh.' He looked at her, then back at me. ‘So you know each other, good.' He went through to his inner room and I expected him back with his briefcase, but after a few scrabbling sounds in there he called, ‘Beryl, I can't seem to find my -'
She swayed in with her long-legged stride and closed the door behind her. I heard their voices, mainly his, but couldn't - didn't want to - make out any words.
They came out together and faced me. ‘Look,' my father said, ‘I've got stuff here to clear up, so I could be another half hour. Why don't you both trot off and have tea somewhere in town? Then later Beryl can give me a buzz, so I know where to pick you up.' He had obviously forgotten he was to drive me home, and there was no enquiry about how the French oral had gone.
The last thing I wanted was Beryl Ryder's company, although at that point I chose to see her as someone who'd been through the examination mill ahead of me and might
offer some lowdown on tackling the next stage. As for Beryl, she seemed almost amused, certainly recovered from the distaste she'd shown on finding me in Father's outer office.
She had a little car, a blue Fiat, and drove leaning back as if it were a sun lounger, both hands at the top of the wheel. I couldn't miss the weird variety of rings she wore. She wouldn' t have been allowed them at school; and certainly not the pearl-mounted one piercing her left eyebrow. Her style in clothes had changed too, ultra-mod, just short of punk. I thought her make-up was too harsh for a blonde, but it certainly made you see her.
She drove out of town and pulled up in the yard of a country pub. ‘Right,' she said, sounding no end chuffed, ‘let's get to know each other. You can leave your school blazer in the car. And you'll find it cooler if you pull your shirt out.'
I don't like anyone bossing me over my appearance, but I thought twice about arguing with an erstwhile goddess, however much she seemed to have changed. So I did as she suggested and did feel cooler.
The pub had a little garden round at the back with a scrappy lawn and a couple of overgrown rose arches. We settled at a rough, creosoted bench which had a matching one facing us with a wooden table between. The whole set looked crude, like furniture in an illustration from Goldilocks: surfaces suited to wild bears immune to splinters.
Beryl brought us out long glasses of something chilled with a ball of golden sorbet floating at the top. I asked what flavour it was and she said passion fruit, then laughed. To make conversation I said I'd sat the French oral that afternoon, and she stared as if I came from an alien planet.
‘Didn't you?' I asked.
‘Suppose I did,' she granted. ‘A long time back. Seems so, anyway.' Then she switched on some appearance of interest. ‘How did it go?'
‘All right, I think. Except when we got on to politics.'
‘I thought that was banned: politics, sex and religion.
Dangerous stuff for the innocent young mind.' She was mocking me.
‘It was about the European Union. I said I hadn't much interest in the idea of a superstate and was happier with literature. So then we got on to something I knew a bit about.'
‘Good move; manipulate the bastards. Anyway, why work at French? I suppose you'll turn into a scientist like your father.'
‘No, I shan't.'
She gave a scoffing laugh. ‘You can't help it. It's in the genes. Like your red hair.'
‘Actually I'm more like my mother.'
She looked hard at me, one eyebrow stagily raised. ‘But she's only a stepmother, isn't she?'
Beryl started lighting a cigarette from the butt of her previous one and didn't catch me staring back. I couldn't believe she'd be so undiplomatic, but that wasn't what jarred me. Although back at the Uni she'd had no idea who I was, yet she knew about my actual relationship with Leila. How could she, unless from my father having discussed it with her?
How much intimate family information had been passed on as gossip? Would she even know how I'd persuaded Leila to henna her hair, so we'd look like real mother and daughter? I'd meant my father to know that, to hurt him, but I hadn' thought he'd noticed.
There followed a silence which had to be filled. ‘Have you met my brother?' I asked.
She was sucking in smoke, her eyes lazily half-closed. ‘No idea. What's he called?'
‘Edward.'
‘I know three Edwards. The name's common enough. How did he get into the conversation?'
I wasn't quite sure myself. The lowering sun shone full in my eyes and seemed to leave swirling disks in the dark when I closed them. ‘He's going to be a scientist,' I said.
‘How frantically exciting.' Her drawling tone said the opposite.
I considered. She was right: as conversation it was pretty limp. But then so would be any topic I had to offer. She'd apparently forgotten her suggestion that we get to know each other.
We had sat there quite a lot longer than the half hour my father had mentioned. Beryl had twice renewed our drinks. A number of cars had driven into the inn's yard, and the saloon bar behind us was noisily beginning to fill up for the evening. Others came outside with their drinks and I hoped no one would think to question my age. Beryl had been wise to make me leave my blazer in the car. There was nothing specifically schoolish about my plain white shirt and grey skirt.
I must have been dozing when her mobile phone started warbling. She pulled it out of her shoulder-bag and murmured into it, ‘About time too.' And then, ‘Oh no! Shit! I'm not sure I can.' Her voice had turned sulky. ‘Well, all right then, but it's a bloody bore all the same. You'd better make it worth my while.'
She snapped the phone off and stuffed it back in her bag. ‘He wants me to see you home.'
I supposed she meant my father, but it made no difference one way or the other. I was already past caring who said what, where I went, what I did. It would be good, I thought, to find somewhere soft to lie down and sleep.
I vaguely remember getting to the car, being helped in and its stored heat hitting me. For security she had left all its windows tightly closed and it was facing into the sun. My head lolled forward on the fascia which bobbled disagreeably as she started the car and we lurched out on to the road. At some more distant moment she was shaking me, demanding something, then shouting again into her phone.
The last I was conscious of was her exasperated swearing. ‘Now he's shut the fucking thing off! How can I get the little cow home if I don't know where she lives?'
At some time after that the nightmare must have begun to build, but I had no recollection of it when I awoke at last in my own bed. Early light was beginning to show at the edges of the curtains.
I knew I'd been in the pub garden and that I'd unknowingly drunk something strongly alcoholic. In the past I'd had wine in small quantities at home with special meals, and it had never affected me. This was different. I hoped I hadn't been sick or objectionable to anyone.
I remembered Eddie coming home drunk once, back at Caversham. Father had been away, and Leila helped the cabbie get Eddie indoors and upstairs to his room. Disturbed by the shouted abuse and horrible retchings I had lain sweating in my bed, until a flaming dawn was breaking over the Chilterns, and I was convinced that something horrendous had changed our lives forever.
But Eddie had recovered; Leila had put me right. ‘We all make mistakes,' she said. ‘It's best not to dwell on them. I'm sure Eddie will have a word with you about it.'
And he had. He apologized. ‘I'm sorry if I frightened you,' he said. ‘I never knew the state I was in.'
I'd told him it was just the noise that woke me: a bit of banging and crashing on the stairs.
He made a lemon-sucking face. ‘Well, there's one thng I do know now,' he said. ‘Drink's something I can't take. Perhaps it's just as well.'
What he'd said then, about not being able to take it, stayed in my mind. So I guess I'm the same with alcohol and it's a family thing.
I slept in late that Saturday after my meeting with Beryl Ryder, only waking properly in mid-afternoon feeling headachy, sick and confused. Over the next couple of days tender red patches on my flesh gradually went purple and later greenish yellow. They felt like bruises. On my upper arms dark fingermarks showed, so I guessed I'd been unsteady on my feet and needed firm holding; but the patches
of bruising on my inner thighs were bigger and quite painful. They frightened me, because I couldn't account for them. When Leila came home and suggested we went swimming I had to cry off. I didn't dare let her see, for fear of what they might signify. I don't think Father had mentioned the episode to her, and I was too ashamed to.
The effects weren't only physical. My mind was affected. I guess it was like one of those ancient cinema films Granny called ‘the flicks'. From almost total darkness a shutter kept opening on slits of light and fragments of images. These terrible flashes came when I least expected and were gone before I could account for them. And there were alarming sensations following certain movements. I felt vertigo as I tried to rise from a chair or walk across a stretch of floor.
Often after sleep I've been conscious of having dreamed but can't remember specifically what happened, yet the certainty is there because the dream's atmosphere hangs on. I know I've been to a frightening place, or been worried, or experiencing delight or been warmly comforted: the glow or the unease remains as I come awake. And sometimes I know exactly who I've been with, yet have no idea of any incident we were involved in. It was the same now: the sensation that came back in waves was one of absolute terror.
Now I tried to explain away these flashes of confused dream as a chemical effect, the action of alcohol on my hormones. I'm adolescent, so surely my body chemistry is still dodgy. But that doesn't excuse, doesn't account for, everything that disturbed me. As well as the physical evidence of bruising, there were strangers' faces, or part-faces, that flashed up without warning.
The most terrible and recurrent was of eyes pressing so close over me that they had merged into a single black beetle-shape. And then they would reappear less close, separate, with pinpoint dark irises set in a strangely mottled pale blue, which made me think of tie-dye jeans with the colour washed out.

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