Trial by Fire (6 page)

Às for you,' she said, 'you look like this on first acquaintance; you really do,' she told him, drawing three straight lines in a notebook at the head of a blank page, the lowest of the lines leading into a vertical line for a definite nose, a wide, curling questioning line for a mouth, and a short vertical stab for a cleft in the chin, forming at last a downward-pointing T

to incorporate a strong and stubborn jaw. It suggested everything. A face full of hairline traces like overcooked porcelain: an infinite capacity for change within definite limits.

He had fingered this face, found the grooves she had displayed with her eyes away from them, laughed in disbelief and a tiny tinge of embarrassment to see himself depicted with such careless accuracy. 'Better than Identikit,' he said.

Òh, I hope so,' said Helen. 'I know you better than some witness who might have seen you robbing a bank.'

Ànd the other people you sketch?'

`Them too, I expect. Surely I have a better recollection than anyone who is not being horrified at the time.'

Ànd Edward Jaskowski, Stanislaus, your clients, your guilty ones, all those you have sent to some kind of prison — can you draw them?'

`No,' she said firmly, snapping closed her notebook, 'not unless I must. Which is never at all, I think, unless they come and ask me.' Then she would draw more; he would try to copy. They would end as usual, entwined and absorbed in easy laughter.

So far these pictorial observations with pen and ink had provided little apart from relief from the frustration of words, with which she was unduly skilled. The most constructive relief was found on a day like this in a spare room, attempting to construct something with a hope of beauty. Helen painted and sketched on a day like this to rid her mind of everything else. Frowning, she quickly sketched the face of Antony Sumner. Widely spaced eyes, a long, sad nose, high forehead, full mouth and a slightly receding chin.

A soft face, miscast and starving Labrador retriever, made strong by affection, a touch of stubbornness around the eyes, a temper. The exercise of bringing into focus that scarcely familiar face encountered only once in the High Street reassured her. Petulant, argumentative, clumsy with emotion, capable of eruption but only suddenly. Quite incapable, she decided, of the sustained rage and stupidity that were prerequisites in a true man of violence.

She threw down her pen in the top room of the house, drew instead in her mind's eye the garden of her basement in London, full of overblown flowers, cat in the long grass of the lawn, animals instead of city sounds, some child crouching there awaiting her return. Then she went out to watch life on the reconstructed village green, not even really wishing she belonged, not unhappy, not rude, but not trying, either.

The village green had been the creation of the property developers, a cunning thought, to give the place a focus, John Blundell had said. At the other end of Branston, comfortably far from this village green, standing aloof from the edge of the community and half turned away, the Blundell household did not resemble the miniatures of itself that clustered in Invaders Court where Helen dwelt and which Mr Blundell had helped to build. John Blundell, estate agent and developer, had put Branston on the map, first by selling its reconditioned houses, then by adding to them.

Sympathetic additions, he said. His motives had not been bad, since although he had lined his pocket, the zeal to do well for ever and to become an elder of the kirk, if there had been a kirk, was foremost in his mind. This ambition for parish pump prominence had at least ensured well-constructed buildings and a manner in Mr Blundell which could be called honest; but recognition for his crusade was not received at home or abroad, since nothing he had commandeered into bricks and mortar could ever make him significant.

He remained small, but became rich, pale, cunning, unhealthy, desperate to be liked, if not loved, and quite unable, for all that, to suppress a streak of meanness. Even while knowing by instinct what people wanted in their houses, he could never fathom the slightest notion of what they thought.

His large house, last of the genuine and best in Branston as befitted its only estate agent, turned away from the road into its own garden at an angle of forty-five degrees, just as John Blundell turned his face, always looking into the middle distance in suspicion of being cheated, vengeful if he was, rarely catching an eye.

At the moment he faced his daughter Evelyn, failing to see the contempt in her expression, trying to know better, conscious of profound failure. He was dimly aware that the wheel of his fractious family life, maybe his whole life, was about to come off, that notoriety in the form of pity, rather than the respect he craved, was about to become his lot. And even after turning his head aside from the stern gaze of his daughter, he felt the accusation in it.

`Father, you'll have to tell them. If you don't. I bloody well will.'

`Don't swear, Evelyn, sweetheart,' the said automatically. 'It's unbecoming in a child.'

She clenched her teeth, drew breath sharply, banged her small fist on the table. The voice that emerged from her angelic teenage face was strangely mature. 'You'll have to tell them,' she repeated.

`Them? Who's them?'

`Don't be silly, Father. The police. Them. Whoever you tell when your wife's gone missing. ‘Her eye fell on the short paragraph in the Saturday morning paper: 'The body of an unclothed female was found in woodland near Branston on Thursday night, identity unknown.

Police inquiries are in hand.' She did not draw the item to his attention. 'Mother's been gone nearly a fortnight. You've done nothing about it, absolutely nothing. She could be dead by now.

`Don't be silly,' he repeated her words. 'Of course she's not. Your mother was unhappy, going through a bit of a bad patch. She's gone off for a bit of a break somewhere.

She told me she would.' The last lie was transparent.

`You don't care.' Evelyn's voice was suddenly a shrill and childish treble. 'You don't care and you keep on pretending. She didn't tell me, and she didn't leave any food.'

`Darling child, she left a freezer full of it,' he said mildly.

Evelyn was shouting, 'She just went out one evening, and you don't know where she's gone and you won't do anything about it.'

He turned wearily, watery gaze and automatic smile fixed on her for the first time. 'And where do you suggest I begin to look? She went out of this house, wearing a solid gold bracelet and necklace worth a small fortune, probably a bit of money in her handbag, too. She could be anywhere. She went of her own free will. What do you want me to do? Have her dragged back in chains?'

`Report her missing, that's all.'

Ìt's nobody else's business. I don't want anyone to know.'

`That's it, isn't it? Well, it'll soon be everyone's business. What if she's hurt or lost?

What if she's this woman here?' Evelyn stabbed at the page of newsprint, pushing it towards him over the table where they sat. 'Then you'll look an even bigger bloody fool, won't you?

They'll think you did it. What if she's fallen under a train? When they find her, they'll think you pushed her because you haven't said anything, like you were trying to hide. Please yourself. Make it worse.'

`You've always had a dramatic imagination, darling child,' he said, trying to grasp the hand that pushed the paper towards him. Evelyn snatched it back. She was not there to give comfort. He was weak, ineffectual, indecisive: she knew all these words because Antony Sumner, her very own teacher, had taught her what they meant. Her father had retreated into silence for over a week, leaving her alone as she had always been left alone when he was not gasping for affection like a dying fish. He did not deserve comfort.

The kitchen was spacious and beautiful, solid wooden units with a dull gleam in the afternoon sun, quarry-tiled floor, dried herbs in a copper bucket, a perfect facsimile of magazine country life, showing signs of neglect, a tribute to huge expense and, finally, desertion. Tears gathered in John Blundell's eyes, rolled down his pale cheeks, blurring his vision of one magnificent room and one strangely beautiful fourteen-year-old daughter. She leapt to her feet, disgusted by the tears, snatched the phone from the bracket on the wall behind him, slammed it down on the pine table in front of his twisting hands.

`Do it,' she said. 'Do something for once. Phone the police, and when they get here, I'll speak to them, too. Do it now. Or you'll wish you'd never been born when they all start asking. Think of the neighbours, Dad. Do it.'

Antony Sumner wished he had never been born. No, lying in the generous arms of Christine Summerfield in Christine's pretty little house at nine o'clock on a Saturday evening, he could never wish any such thing. But he wished he could take back the last year, and especially the last fortnight, and give it to her instead. Wished he had never set eyes on Yvonne Blundell, who looked like a gypsy; wished he had never agreed to give English lessons in the evenings to that daughter Evelyn who was the last to need them. Another gypsy.

He was flattered, he supposed, to be asked, liked money for old rope, liked being flirted with, same old weakness. Christine darling, please cure me. Release me from a frustrated housewife who reads poetry, aspires to culture in a desert. People should not read poetry on top of a bad life. It's like mixing drinks or eating cheese before sleeping, very bad for the emotional digestion.

Antony Sumner turned and kissed Christine. She was fast asleep, blissful Saturday evening torpor, rubbish flickering on the television screen, bottle of wine and a good meal gone. Peaceful, free in conscience. Yvonne Blundell was not like you, his mind continued fondly. She was looking for an affair before she hit forty, that daughter looking for learning like someone starving looks for food, both of them with wonderful eyes, fit to tear him apart.

But the girl could write. He wished he had never bedded Mrs Blundell. It was like curling up with an octopus, then having to detach her one tentacle at a time. Oh, why wasn't someone there to save him? Walking in the woods after meeting her in The Crown, taking the argument into the trees. She always knew the way through that garden.

Antony removed a hand from beneath Christine's shoulder, watched her stir. Oh, God, what have I done? Shouldn't have lost my cool, shouldn't have shown all that disgust when she took off her clothes. Darling, I was thinking of you; the contrast was too awful for words.

Antony felt the marks on his face, almost gone but still noticeable, the stigma of shame.

Christ, what a cat; more like a tiger, hurling herself at him, but all the same, he should never have struck back, never used conduct unbecoming to any kind of gentleman.

Christine readjusted her position, ascending slowly and reluctantly from sleep, muttered, and smiled at him, one eye open. 'Feel like an old lady,' she said. 'Tell me when it's tomorrow and hand me a stick to get upstairs. Can't manage on my own.' The eye closed; she dozed as he stroked her pale hair, movements involuntary to hide the sudden heaving of heart, which was deafening to his own ears. Stick, she had said. Hand me a stick. The word 'stick'

beat against his skull like a gong.

Walking stick, his own, an affectation since teenage years and his first reading of Wordsworth striding about the Lake District and Keats stirring autumn leaves. Milton leaning on one in his blindness. He had clasped his walking stick like a talisman through his student days of floppy bow ties, floppier hair, and caped coats; kept it now to accompany the heavy cords, designer hiking boots, and poisonous French cigarettes he carried to school. The stick was his adolescent symbol, the adult prop to individuality, and the staff room joke.

Stick. Walking stick. He looked around the room wildly. Where was it? Thrust into a corner here? In his own untidy house? In his car? Probably in his car. Surely in the back of his car where it lay whenever he forgot it, as he had forgotten it often since Christine, forgotten it entirely over the last twelve days. Antony had a vision of the stick, the carved wooden handle

— an elephant's head, quite inappropriately — smooth on the top from years of use, with a rubber ferrule that had perished and needed replacement.

Everything he had tried to blank from his mind rose like scum on a pond: he heard the swish of the stick as he walked through trees, remembered gripping it tighter as she had moved toward him, shut his eyes and attempted one more time to see it lying in the back of the Morris earlier that evening, failed. There was no denying the last place he had carried that stick, the last thing he had done with it.

Ten-thirty, dark. Helen bound the files together with white tape, each complete, annotated with notes, consigned to memory in preparation for Monday morning. No matter how much she did in her office, homework always remained for the peaceful hours when she could give scrupulous attention to detail. She never made a conscious demarcation zone between home and work. If you were a lawyer, you were one all the time: nothing stopped when you closed the office door.

She looked at the room and the empty eye of the television, content with the evening's work, peaceful without Bailey. Well, my man, I haven't had a hard week, but I think for once I shan't wait up for you. Surely you're allowed home before midnight after last night and the night before? I understand completely: I'd be the same in your shoes, but it doesn't stop me missing you by this time of night.

Àll depends,' Bailey had said. 'whether we get any leads on this thing or not. Might know who she is, or someone might tell us. She wasn't wearing so much as an earring. No fingerprints left, but there's always the teeth. See how we go.'

To be fair, he had telephoned once about seven o'clock. Someone, he said, had reported a missing wife, same age as this poor body in the mortuary. Nothing, really, only a disappearance coinciding with a death. Well, something perhaps. Oh, and a daughter, tugging his arm, saying Mr Bailey, let me tell you something: she was always going to those woods.

With a man, she went with my teacher, Mr Bailey; I thought you ought to know. My father doesn't know, Mr Bailey. Please don't say I told you. Poor child. Bailey, coolest man in the world, was always a sucker for girl children, especially those the age his own might have been had she lived beyond three months.