What Men Say (27 page)

This was confirmed when Mrs. Stannion asked Ms. Wolf why she was going to Oxford and she replied enigmatically: “To do God's will.” Mrs. Stannion says that trying to engage her in further conversation was like “getting blood out of a stone” and Ms. Wolf soon returned to studying her Bible.

“The traffic was much heavier than I expected and I realized I was going to be late for a TUC meeting in Bristol,” Mrs. Stannion told me, close to tears. “I had intended to take her into Newbury, it's two or three miles south of the M4, but when I saw how late it was I asked her if she'd mind me dropping her at the roundabout. Naturally, if I'd had any idea that other women had been attacked on that road I'd
never have left her there.” Mrs. Stannion arrived at her meeting half an hour late, returned to Geneva two days later and knew nothing of Ms. Wolf's death until she read about it in an English paper on Thursday evening.

The rest of the story was made up of bits and pieces, including the fact that Superintendent Dibden was “exasperated” about the nonappearance of Ms. Wolf's brother at Heathrow on Friday morning. The reason for his failure to get on the flight was “a dispute within the strict religious sect of which he is a member”; Tracey explained that the Imitators of Christ opposed air travel except in the most dire emergency and had overruled Karl Wolf's unilateral decision to come to England and make a formal identification of his sister. The matter would now be decided at a two-day “prayer vigil” involving the whole community over the weekend, and Tracey hinted that this behavior was testing Superintendent Dibden's patience to the limit. Detectives from the Thames Valley force were ready to fly to Ohio, he said, if “communication difficulties” continued. A final paragraph declared abruptly that a bundle of bloodstained clothing found in a foxhole near Thebes Farm during a police search on Thursday was still being examined by forensic scientists, but a connection with the A34 murder had been ruled out. There was a researcher's byline in minute type at the bottom of the story and Loretta guessed it had been cobbled together in the office from various faxes sent by Tracey and last-minute calls to police headquarters in Kidlington.

Just how busy Tracey had been was revealed by a line in bold, awkwardly positioned after the name of the researcher. “Murder, Morals and the Media,” it proclaimed, and urged readers to turn to a feature on page
seven. This splitting-up of single stories across several pages, which Loretta disliked, was a result of the
Herald's
transition from broadsheet to tabloid, coinciding with its physical removal from Holborn to Docklands. She merely glanced at Tracey's feature, an analysis of press reaction to the murder illustrated by a rag-out of tabloid headlines and a mugshot of Superintendent Dibden; it was written in a calmer, more ironic style, and described the way in which news stories were now “processed” to resemble popular fiction by tabloid journalists, sparing their readers the task of thinking for themselves. There was nothing in it that Loretta disagreed with, she could have written much of the article herself, but she found it hard to reconcile Tracey's magisterial rebuke to the popular press with his own obsessive pursuit of what he described as “sexy” stories—a term which referred not to their content but to the almost sexual buzz he seemed to get out of chasing them.

Anyway, Loretta thought, turning the sadly shrunken pages of the
Sunday Herald,
Tracey was now technically a tabloid hack himself. She began reading an article by a member of the shadow cabinet, a nostalgic piece about the heyday of black-and-white films, then lifted her head, suddenly aware that the house was completely silent. Even Bertie had not come home, presumably because the warm weather had lured him into a longer than usual exploration of the canal bank. She shrugged off a little
frisson
of anxiety and reached for the phone, intending to ring Bridget and talk about Tracey's article, then put the receiver back and withdrew her hand; it was Bridget and Sam's first full day together since the discovery of the body a week ago—a week ago
today
—and she felt shy about interrupting them.

Instead she folded the newspaper, tossed it onto the
floor and reached into the top drawer of her desk, where the agenda of the
Fern Sap
editorial meeting had been lying unopened for nearly two weeks. She had had advance warning, in phone calls from Paris and Munich, that the magazine was facing yet another financial crisis and she had put off reading the details as long as she could. Now she tore the envelope open and pulled out a thick wad of paper, the top sheet a prickly statement from the treasurer in defense of her unpopular proposal to double corporate subscription fees. The next sheet consisted of a counterproposal from two American academics, a superficially attractive prediction of how the magazine could be saved by selling advertising space, but a moment's glance at the figures told Loretta they were wildly optimistic; she simply could not imagine hard-nosed commercial organizations, department stores and airlines, jumping at the opportunity of advertising their products to a group of intelligent but for the most part impoverished academics. She moved automatically through the other items on the agenda, making an occasional mark in the margin, then felt she had done her duty and worked on her book for a couple of hours.

It was a brilliantly sunny day and as time wore on she was more and more frequently distracted by the antics of weekend boaters. At one point she heard shrieks, lifted her head and saw a teenage girl collapse into giggles as her boat bumped the bank and sprayed her companions with brackish water. Loretta watched them with envy, regretting the demise of her rowing boat and remembering that the oars, propped against the wall of her small garden shed, were all that remained of it. She began to feel a fool for working, struggling to reorder her thoughts on
Shirley
without even Bertie for company when everyone else was out having a good time. Her shoulders ached and she slipped off her chair,
stretched out her arms and did a couple of the warm-up exercises she had been taught at the gym, her movements restricted by the risk of knocking ornaments off the mantelpiece or hitting her hand on the filing cabinet. When she had finished she looked at her watch and saw that it was only half past two, with the long hot afternoon stretching emptily before her.

She decided to walk into the city center and see if any of the bookshops were open, needing to buy copies of the
Frost in May
trilogy before she attempted to review Antonia White's diaries. Reviewing was always like this, she thought, fetching her bag and checking that her sunglasses were inside; you agreed to look at one book without realizing how long it had been since you read the author's other work. Loretta opened the front door, thinking she could read at least a bit of
Frost in May
on the plane to Paris, and stopped dead on the threshold. A lavish bouquet of summer flowers, enclosed in cellophane, completely covered the step.

There were Longine lilies, flawless and creamy as vellum, stargazers with orange stamens bursting from mottled pink flesh, half a dozen stems of an orchidlike flower whose name she knew but could not remember and three or four white roses. The bouquet was tied with a double bow of white ribbon—real satin, not the artificial kind favored by most florists these days—and Loretta bent with a sense of wonder to pick them up. It was an extravagant gesture on its own and her astonishment was compounded when she saw, underneath, a carrier bag from a smart shoe shop in Little Clarendon Street. Balancing the flowers in the crook of her left arm, she lifted the bag and heard the rattle of tissue paper inside, obscuring its contents.

Downstairs in the kitchen Loretta slid the flowers onto the table and opened the carrier bag. The tissue paper
slid apart to reveal her jeans and T-shirt, neatly folded, and an envelope bearing her name and a scribbled sentence in ink of a different color. “Sunday, 8:45 A.M.,” it said, “bell doesn't work. Please ring me about collecting dress, number inside.” Loretta tore open the envelope, which contained a ten-pound note and a postcard reproduction of Rossetti's
Beata Beatrix.
Barely glancing at the familiar image, Loretta turned the card over and read in a neater version of the same script:

Dear Ms. Lawson,

So sorry about Friday night and for rushing off without seeing you—please give your friend the enclosed ten-pound note. Hope you didn't mind me borrowing your clothes, they've been washed and ironed. Apologies also for coming so early, I've got a lift to Dorset.

Yours,
Caroline Wilson

Loretta stared at the telephone number in the top right-hand corner of the card, almost comically dismayed. She had been certain that she would not hear from Caroline Wilson again—so certain that she had taken Bridget's advice and dropped the white dress off at the Oxfam shop in Summertown the previous afternoon. There was time to return to the shop the following morning, before Loretta set off for Paris, but would the shop simply hand it back? Even charities were shrewd these days, and the time was gone when designer dresses could be found for a fiver among the washed-out cardigans and C & A tat. Loretta grunted, threw down the card and turned to go upstairs when she
remembered she had not looked out a vase for the blameless flowers.

The young man had a surly, uncongenial expression; there was something about him which suggested he was watchful, suspicious, even that he resented her looking at him at all. Loretta had a feeling he expected someone else, someone who certainly wasn't a woman, yet she was unsure whether his reaction would be hostile or erotic. She took a step back, deliberately distancing herself, yet his eyes continued to hold hers. His nose was bulbous, his lips fleshy, and it was easy to imagine his stubby fingers moving from the musical instrument they presently held to grasp a glistening fig from the table in front of him, squeezing it until the purple skin split and the jammy seeds spilled out.

Loretta nearly laughed out loud, recognizing the way in which her own suggestibility had colluded with the painter's intention. It was all to do with mood, with the brooding horror she had been trying to push to the back of her mind ever since Paula Wolf's body was discovered in the barn in Bridget and Sam's garden a week ago; why else should she be so affected by a picture she had passed without a second glance on previous visits to the Ashmolean? She leaned closer and peered at the inscription in small letters along the bottom of the frame to discover who had unsettled her so much.

Still Life with a Young Man playing a Recorder,
she read, and the artist's name: attributed to Francesco (Cecco) del Caravaggio. Loretta's smile faded and she moved back, thinking of her discussion with Janet Dunne earlier in the week and wondering whose argument was validated by her unexpected reaction to the painting. The sinister undertones had been plain to her
before
she knew the identity of the painter, obviously a
follower of the more notorious Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, yet she was already looking at it with a fresh eye, reading even more sinister things into it. A recorder could easily double as a club, especially one as thick and heavy as Cecco del Caravaggio had chosen to paint, and the unidentified vegetable on the table, next to the straining figs, bore a marked resemblance to an exposed human brain.

“I wouldn't like to meet him on a dark night,” said a voice somewhere behind her left shoulder, uncannily echoing Loretta's own thoughts. Red hair flashed past her as the police inspector, the woman whose name Loretta could never remember, bent to read the inscription on the frame. “Car-a-vagg-io,” she said, pronouncing it with a hard
g
as though the name was unfamiliar. She straightened and moved back to stand next to Loretta. “Big place this; I've seen hundreds of Greek vases but not that picture your friend was raving about.”

Loretta, who was astonished by the policewoman's presence in the museum, remembered her indignant questions to Bridget about what she had been doing on Tuesday—no, Monday—afternoon. “Are you—is this official?” she blurted out.

The Inspector, who had been glancing at pictures on the end wall of the gallery without much interest, turned to look at her as though she was mad. “Official?” she repeated.

“Well, I mean, aren't you on duty?”

The Inspector's eyes narrowed. “I got home at midnight last night after spending most of yesterday at the hospital interviewing a very distressed woman who was beaten unconscious just over a week ago. I came in at seven this morning and I don't suppose I'll get home before midnight tonight. All I've had to eat is a succession
of sandwiches and a lot of canteen coffee. Don't you think I'm entitled to a short break?”

“Of
course
” Loretta said quickly, aware that the policewoman had raised her voice and people were looking at them. “I'm sure it must be terrible for you—no, I mean it. I didn't expect to see you here, that's all, in an art gallery.”

“It's been recognized as an occupational hazard, stress. Everyone knows policemen retire early, but do you know how many of them actually get to the official retirement age? My first superintendent, he retired and set up his own security firm, he dropped dead at fifty-seven.
Fifty-seven.”

“OK, you don't have to convince me.” Loretta had been misled by the woman's smartly pressed suit and bright lipstick, but now she saw the taut skin below her eyes, the pallor of her cheeks beneath her tinted foundation. “Why don't I show you, if you're still interested, the painting Bridget was talking about? It's through here.”

The Inspector pulled back her cuff and looked at her watch. “I don't know, I ought to get back to the station.”

“It's the quickest way out, from here.” Loretta took a couple of steps towards the far end of the Weldon Gallery, uncertain whether the policewoman would accompany her.