What Men Say (20 page)

Loretta and Digby exchanged anguished looks as Bernard squared his shoulders and entered the fray. “May I remind you, Dr. Calder, that one of the purposes of this exercise is to increase student numbers by making ourselves as attractive as possible to potential sponsors?
If the two-year accelerated degree course is to work, we have to persuade industry that we at Fitzroy College do not have an outmoded, ivory-tower mentality . . . One of the worries most frequently expressed by the companies I've been talking to is whether their management trainees would retain a commitment—” The door opened and Mrs. Whittaker, the department secretary, insinuated herself into the room. Bernard said testily: “Yes, Margaret, what is it?”

The secretary, mortified at having occasioned his anger, turned to glare at Loretta. “Phone call for Dr. Lawson—I did say she's in a meeting but the caller insists it's urgent.”

Bernard tutted. “This is the vacation, Loretta, you're only being asked to sacrifice
one
afternoon to discuss the future of this department. All right, Mrs. Whittaker, you may go. Loretta, could you be as quick as possible?”

Loretta pushed back her chair and left the room, closing the door as Bernard launched into an account of a meeting he'd recently had with senior management at Marks and Spencer.

“Who is it?” she called after the secretary's disapproving back, following her into the department office.

“A Dr. Bennett.”

Loretta seized the phone. “Bridget? What's happened?”

There was a snuffling noise at the other end and Bridget said in a small voice: “I'm at the police station, St. Aldates, they sent a car for me.
Please,
Loretta, you've got to help me.”

“Where's Sam? Your solicitor—is he with you?”

“
No.
I can't talk, I'm not alone. Loretta, can you come?”

Mrs. Whittaker was watching her and Loretta pointedly
turned her back. “They haven't—they haven't said anything about charging you?”

“No.” Her voice got even smaller. “But I'm scared . . . they're listening, Loretta.”

Loretta made up her mind. “OK, the next train's at twenty past four, I might just make it. What about the solicitor? Have you called him?”

Bridget whispered: “No, because of Sam. I don't want him to find out . . .”

“All right, I'm on my way.” She added the only advice she could think of: “Say
nothing,
nothing at all. They haven't changed the law yet and you have a right to silence. I have to go now or I'll miss my train.”

She put the phone down and strode to the open door, turning at the last minute to address Mrs. Whittaker. “I have to go back to Oxford, could you tell Bernard—” She felt for her bag, remembered she had left it hanging over the back of her chair in the seminar room and added: “Never mind, I'll tell him myself.”

She hurried out of the room and along the corridor, sliding into the meeting as quietly as possible and circling the table until she came to her chair.

Bernard glared. “Sit down, Loretta, we're just about to—”

“Sorry.” She grabbed her bag and swung it onto her shoulder. “I have to go back to Oxford.”

“Oxford?”

“I do live there,” she snapped, hardly registering a sympathetic wink from Digby Richards as she backed out of the room. In the corridor she broke into a run, narrowly avoiding a collision with a dark-haired woman as she hurled herself through the swing doors at the far end. Out in the street she spotted a cab bowling along in the wrong direction and waved frantically just the same.

“Paddington Station,” she cried, throwing herself inside and falling back against the worn upholstery as the driver performed a violent U-turn. The taxi sped towards Euston Road and Loretta checked her watch in the hope that she would arrive at the station in time to phone Tracey at his hotel. It did not look very hopeful and she slumped sideways against the window as the taxi stopped at a red light, staring out with a fluttering anxiety which seemed to place an invisible barrier between herself and the outside world. A young couple strolled past, arms entwined in the summer sunshine, and as she watched the boy bent to snatch a kiss with a careless grace which reminded her of a Doisneau photograph.

The light changed to green and the cab lurched forward, leaving the lovers behind. Loretta swiveled her head to catch a glimpse of them through the rear window but they were gone, into a shop or a side turning. An abandoned newspaper skittered across the pavement, blowing against the ankles of a middle-aged man who kicked it aside with hardly a break in his stride. Loretta sagged against the backseat, resting her chin on her out-stretched arm, and only then remembered that her questionnaire was still lying on the table in Bernard's office, her childish attempt at sarcasm visible to anyone curious enough to pick it up.

The Concourse At Oxford Station Was teeming with people, the automatic doors from Platform One blocked by a party of teenagers whose luggage, flung down in a sprawling heap, constituted an obstacle course of bulging holdalls and trailing straps. Loretta picked her way through it, skirted the small group of people clustered below the TV monitor displaying departure and arrival times and made her way to the phones. Most of them took cards, not cash, and the few pay phones were in use, with half a dozen people waiting impatiently to use them. Loretta screwed up her face, debating whether to join the queue or go to the newsagent's at the far end of the cavernous station building and buy a phone card. A hand seized her arm and she twisted away, incomprehension replacing alarm as she exclaimed: “John! What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you.” He took her arm again, gently but firmly, and started to lead her away from the polyglot babble of voices explaining why they were late, issuing instructions to their secretaries and cooing into their loved ones' answering machines.

She hung back, protesting: “I don't understand, I was going to call you.”

“If you're worried about Bridget, she's all right. I gave her a lift to your place.”

“You did?” It took Loretta a moment to adjust to this new situation, in which the rescue mission she had nervously rehearsed on the hour-long journey from Paddington was no longer needed. Relief flooded through her and she began eagerly: “Does that mean—”

Tracey stopped her. “Not here. Let's find somewhere to talk. There's a snack bar place at the other end, it doesn't look much but at least we can get a cup of tea.” He propelled her through the crowds, his expression grim, and relaxed his grip only when she made it clear she was not going to bolt out of the building. As they joined the short queue in the snack bar he looked about him and said: “What happened to the old station?”

“What? Oh, they pulled it down.”

Tracey inspected the few bits of food remaining in the glass display cabinets, a couple of plastic-wrapped sandwiches and some lurid pizza portions. “Two teas,” he said doubtfully to the woman at the till, “One black. And a packet of biscuits.”

“What sort?”

Tracey shook his head. “Doesn't matter. I missed lunch,” he explained to Loretta, feeling in his trouser pocket and drawing out a couple of pound coins.

“I'll grab a table,” she said as a train drew into the station and there was a stirring among the blue Formica tables. She zigzagged through the seating area, threw her bag down on a seat and cleared the table of a random assortment of empty cups, hamburger containers and a half-eaten chocolate brownie. She looked for a bin, couldn't see one, and had no choice but to heap the rubbish on one side of the small table.

“Christ,” said Tracey, joining her, “what a dump! But we can't talk at your place and I didn't think you'd want to go back to the Randolph.” He sat down, tried to move his chair nearer to the table and discovered it was fixed to the floor. An expression of disgust crossed his face and he eased the lid from one of the Styrofoam cups he had brought with him, tossing it to one side and tearing open the packet of biscuits. “Brontë?” he queried, reading the manufacturer's name on the cellophane wrapper. “I didn't know they made biscuits. Want one?”

Loretta shook her head. “Has Bridget—did she ask you to come?”

The biscuits were friable and he wiped crumbs from his mouth before answering. “Not exactly. I'd arranged to see this DS who's dealing with the press and when I got to the station she was just coming out of the main door. White as a sheet and looking like she might keel over any minute, so I got her into the car and took her back to your place. Has she seen a doctor lately? I don't know much about pregnant women but for a moment there I thought we were looking at a miscarriage . . . I tried to get a message to you, save you rushing back, but that old bat who answers the phone—” He paused for her to fill in the blank in his memory.

“Mrs. Whittaker.”

“That's the one. She informed me in her usual dulcet tones you were no longer in the building so I went back to the nick, then set off to meet you. I'd forgotten about that bloody awful one-way system.” He remembered something and his forehead creased anxiously. “By the way, those notices in the car park, the ones that say twenty minutes only on station business. They don't wheel-clamp you or anything? I don't mind the odd ticket but I haven't got time to hang around getting the car undamped.”

Loretta shrugged, unaware that there was such a notice; she rarely drove to the station and almost never parked there. Tracey shook his head and finished his second biscuit, washing it down with tea and taking out his cigarettes. He saw her face and added: “Sorry, Loretta, but it's so smoky in here another one won't make any difference.”

She looked away, her gaze coming to rest on a youth of eighteen or nineteen at a nearby table. He was gaunt and unnaturally pale, his pallor emphasized by an all-black outfit of jeans and leather jacket, and his hunched posture reminded her of the boy in a government antiheroin poster. Across the table Tracey inhaled deeply and she turned back, observing his half-closed eyes and the almost sensual look of pleasure which came over his face as smoke filled his lungs. She shifted uncomfortably, disturbed by this unsought exposure to other people's addictions, and reached across to touch his arm. “But you said—they have at least let her go.”

Tracey didn't answer at once but peered round for an ashtray, eventually tapping a trembling column of ash into an empty hamburger box. “They're building a case,” he said in a flat voice, not looking at her. “They're not there yet but what they have got . . .” He paused, examining the glowing tip of his cigarette as though it was an object of rare interest. “They didn't bring her in just for the fun of it,” he began again. “They've got a witness who was in the Bodleian that day and he says she was there for an hour at most.”

“What?”

Tracey ground out his cigarette and produced a spiral notebook, turning back through pages covered in a mixture of longhand and his own eccentric shorthand until he found what he wanted. “Marc Testard,” he read in an Anglicized French accent, “he saw her arrive in the Upper
Reading Room about quarter to twelve. He says she was there about an hour and hurried off looking upset.”

“Never heard of him,” said Loretta. “And I don't see how—they can't have interviewed every single person who was in the Bodleian that day. How would they know who was there, for a start?”

“Routine detective work,” Tracey said, “the boring stuff you don't usually read about. First they checked she really did request a book, something about vampires?” Loretta nodded. “Actually she asked for it earlier in the week and it was waiting for her. So they have a look and it's only what, fifty or so pages?
And
big print. I mean, unless she's a
very
slow reader . . .” He paused. “So then they go through all the request forms, everyone who asked to look at a book in the Upper Reading Room that morning—”

“Which must run into hundreds.”

He nodded. “I wrote it down somewhere if you really want to know.” She shook her head. “OK, so once they've got a list they divide it up by subject, assuming arts people are a better bet than, I don't know, zoologists. This Testard bloke, he's a postgrad in the English faculty so they sent a DC round to his flat and asked, do you know Bridget Bennett, and he said—”

“Shit.”

“He didn't, actually. He said he knew Bridget by sight and he remembered her arriving because it was just after he got there himself. He waved but she wasn't looking in his direction and it's hardly the sort of place you call out.”

This was perfectly true, Loretta admitted to herself, thinking of the slightly menacing hush of an academic library. Tracey watched her for a moment, then added: “You also ought to know they have no sightings of her, the victim I'm talking about now, after that Thursday. No
hotels with a missing guest, no friends who thought she'd gone off for a few days in the Lake District.”

“The Lake District?”

“I meant, for example.”

“But she's not exactly your average tourist, is she? Do they know what she was doing here, by the way?”

“No, but her brother's arriving tomorrow. There's been some difficulty talking to the family, they won't use the phone so they're having to send messages back and forth through the local cops . . . Anyway, they've apparently overcome their objection to modern technology long enough to send this guy over and he gets in to Heathrow first thing tomorrow morning.”

Loretta turned her head away, not knowing what to say. The thin boy was gone, his place taken by a very old man whose name and address were inked in enormous capitals on the side of a shabby suitcase, “WALTER WEEDON,” she read, and the name and number of a house in Staverton Road, north Oxford.

Tracey said, still in the same matter-of-fact voice: “What was she up to, Loretta? Has she told you?”