What Men Say (28 page)

“Oh, well, as I'm here.” They walked the length of the gallery, the Inspector enlarging on the theme of stress, exhaustion and their effect on efficiency. “I mean, it's macho culture; when I started you couldn't admit you were too tired to question somebody properly or you wanted to be sick after seeing a body. Which way here?”

They were in a wide, high hall with elaborate wall
hangings and a staircase rising to the second floor. “Those are the Raphael and Michelangelo sketches,” Loretta said, gesturing with her right hand to a series of vertical glass cases. “The Pre-Raphaelites are up those stairs if you like that sort of thing, which I don't . . . The Piero's through here, at the far end.”

Talking seemed to have tired the Inspector and she said nothing as they turned into another long gallery. Loretta mentioned one or two pictures as they passed, and pointed out a small bronze relief of a woman in a chariot drawn by two panthers. Finally she stopped and said: “This is it—
The Forest Fire.”

The policewoman leaned forward to examine a fat bird, a partridge or a grouse, which had launched itself from a tree and appeared to be taking deadly aim at a passing cow herd. Beside her Loretta admired the bears, a mother and her cubs, lumbering up a slope guarded by a lion in an attempt to escape the flames devouring the trees behind.

The Inspector said: “I can't see it myself, why she likes it so much. Why have they got human faces?”

“I suppose they're mythological. Don't you like the bears?”

“They're a funny color, aren't they? And those ducks—my aunt's got a set of plaster ones on her wall that look more lifelike.”

Loretta smiled. “So has my mother. Shall I show you the way out?” She led the way through an antechamber, past the portrait of Elias Ashmole in full-bottomed wig and a coat of rose-colored velvet, to the great marble staircase which descended to the ground floor.

“I know where I am now,” the Inspector said at the top of the steps. “No need to come down.”

“I might as well, I think it closes quite soon.” She
added hesitantly: “Are you having any luck with the van? The Transit?”

The Inspector shook her head. “Not my bit of the inquiry. There's a couple of DCs going through all the registrations in Oxfordshire but it's a long job—he may not even be local.” She didn't seem to mind Loretta's question, and they walked companionably through the souvenir shop and out into the open air.

The Inspector stopped on the path, glanced back at the fluted marble columns and said thoughtfully: “Sometimes I wonder why I do this job.” Her gaze traveled up the neoclassical façade to the seated figure with one arm upraised on the apex of the pediment. Loretta waited for her to say more but she merely sighed, and resumed her progress towards the short flight of steps leading down from the courtyard into Beaumont Street. The grass on either side of the path was neatly mowed and bright green, a monument to the efforts of the gardening staff and a wettish summer.

Loretta said: “Presumably it's worth it in the end. Especially in a case like this one.”

The Inspector stared across the road, watching a limousine with a uniformed driver turn out of the garage of the Randolph Hotel into Beaumont Street. A fat man sat in the back, smoking a cigar. “How do you mean?”

“Well—you know. When it's someone who's attacked several women.” There was a plaque fixed to the open gate, listing the museum's opening times in white letters on a shiny black surface. Loretta read: “Tue. to Sat. 10-4. Sunday 2-4. Closed on Mondays.” She thought: Closed on Mondays?

“It'll all be forgotten in a week,” the detective was saying. “Those coppers who caught Peter Sutcliffe, who remembers them now?”

Loretta wasn't listening to her. Bridget said she had
visited the Ashmolean on Monday afternoon, after lunch at Browns with Sam, yet there it was in black and white in front of her—the museum was closed on Mondays. Loretta narrowed her eyes, trying to think of an alternative explanation to the obvious one that she had caught her friend out in another lie. Nothing came, but the fib was so trivial and so pointless that Loretta could not imagine what was behind it.

A car squealed to a halt at the bottom of the steps, unmarked but giving itself away by the squawking of a police radio through the open windows. The passenger door flew open and a man in shirtsleeves leaped out, stopping abruptly when he recognized the Inspector.

“Ma'am,” he exclaimed with a mixture of relief and urgency, “the boss says, can you come at once? He thinks we've got him.”

The woman's eyes flickered as she assimilated this startling piece of news, and her whole body tensed. Seconds later she was striding down the steps, firing questions at the excited detective: “OK, Blady, where are we going? Does he know we're on to him?”

Blady hurried forward as the Inspector slid into the seat he had just vacated, briefing her in a voice too low for Loretta to hear. She hung back, thinking she had been forgotten, but at the last minute the woman paused and leaned out of the car. Her eyes glittering with anticipation, she said tersely: “Sorry, Dr. Lawson—you heard.”

The door snapped shut, Blady threw himself into the back and the engine roared into life. The police car accelerated towards the traffic lights at the end of Beaumont Street, swung into the right-hand lane to avoid a tourist bus and veered left into St. Giles as the lights changed to green. It was gone before Loretta had time to think and she walked slowly down the steps, peering
towards the Martyrs' Memorial as though she expected the car to rematerialize; it was like being in a cinema, she thought, on the edge of your seat, and suddenly the projector had broken down at the climactic moment. This time there was no point in waiting for the screen to flicker back into life and she turned away, keeping her head down as she skirted a party of American tourists arguing over the quickest route from Beaumont Street to the Botanic Gardens.

“Hello,” Said Bridget In An Artificially bright voice, “you're talking to an answering machine but please don't hang up. If your call is urgent—”

Loretta cut her off in mid-sentence, seeing little point in adding to the two messages she had left the previous afternoon. The phone's digital display told her she had used up only ten pence of the pound coin she had fed into the slot and she took a piece of paper from her jeans pocket, punched in the number of the Oxfam shop in Summertown and asked whether the woman in charge of pricing secondhand clothes had come in yet. She hadn't and Loretta left another message about the white ball dress, pleading with the shop assistant to make sure no one sold it before she returned from Paris. Then she pressed the follow-on call button, trying to overcome her nerves and ring John Tracey. It was Monday, the Sunday journalist's day off, and Tracey would probably be at home; he might know no more than the two-sentence announcement she had heard on several news bulletins, a terse, legalistic confirmation that Thames Valley Police were questioning a man about the murder of an American tourist and a series of sex attacks
on the Newbury-to-Oxford road, but he would certainly be able to find out more. Someone coughed noisily, reminding Loretta there was a queue to use the phone, and she hastily punched in Tracey's number, biting her lip as she listened to the familiar double burr of the ringing tone.

There was a click, another answering machine: “Hi, John Tracey speaking. I'm also taking messages for Terese McKinnon.” Loretta blinked at this unexpected addition to his usual laconic greeting, the name meaning nothing to her. Tracey was droning on, giving the number of his fax machine at home and his direct line at the office, and when she finally heard the tone Loretta could think of nothing to say. She hooked the receiver back on its rest, abandoning her remaining fifty-four pence, and glanced up at the departures board. The boarding sign had come up against her flight and she hoisted the strap of her carpetbag onto her shoulder, making way for a choleric middle-aged man who brushed up against her in his eagerness to reach the phone.

Loretta headed for passport control, wondering about Terese McKinnon. She might be a stringer on a visit to London, Tracey did occasionally offer his spare room to foreign journalists, but Loretta did not think she had seen the woman's byline in the
Sunday Herald.
She handed her passport to an immigration official, waited while he gave it a cursory glance and joined the queue to have her hand luggage X-rayed. The security staff were as stony-faced as ever, reminding her of a trip to Amsterdam during the Gulf War when the sight of police with automatic weapons patrolling the passenger terminals at Heathrow had made her doubt the wisdom of her spur-of-the-moment decision to go away for the weekend.

“Thanks,” she said, wasting the courtesy on an uncommunicative woman who shoved her bag towards her as it emerged from the X-ray machine. She began the long hike to the departure gate, stepping onto a moving walkway and speeding past returning holidaymakers with patchy suntans and T-shirts announcing they had spent the last two weeks in Corfu and loved every minute of it. Loretta disliked airports, the recycled air and the endless waiting, and she regretted having to spend her birthday in one; the morning's post was in her bag, half a dozen cards stuffed back in their envelopes after she opened them on the coach to Heathrow. Bridget had posted hers on Saturday morning, when she went to buy coffee, with a scribbled apology for failing to find something more suitable than a washed-out flower print, while John Tracey had either forgotten the date or was too angry to send anything.

In the departure lounge she found a seat in the nonsmoking section and snapped open her carpetbag. She had bought two papers at the airport bookstall, hoping they might contain more details than the
Guardian
about the man detained for questioning, but the
Independent's
report was virtually word-for-word. The
Daily Telegraph
was more forthcoming, revealing that the suspect worked for a company based in Banbury but had previously been employed as a farm laborer on a large estate only three miles from Thebes Farm. Loretta felt a prickle of excitement, recognizing the unstated implication that the man's local knowledge might have extended to the layout of Bridget's garden; the
Telegraph
went on to report that the search for the dead woman's missing clothes and the murder weapon had switched from woods behind Thebes Farm to the estate where the suspect used to work, concentrating on a number of ramshackle outbuildings. These had been
searched before, a police spokesman admitted rather sheepishly, but extra manpower had been diverted to the area now it was considered central to the inquiry.

Loretta lifted her head, glancing round the departure lounge in search of a phone. She saw one on the wall, next to the ladies' loo, and was plucking up courage to try John Tracey again when an amplified female voice announced that her flight was ready to board. Loretta hesitated, wondering if there was time to leave a message on Tracey's answering machine, but a flight attendant was already collecting boarding passes. Feeling a slight sense of reprieve, she folded the newspapers, slid them into her bag and promised herself she would try Tracey again as soon as the plane landed in Paris.

A still photo filled the small screen, a line of armored vehicles rolling down a wide street. The voice-over was fast and urgent, so fast that Loretta was thankful she had been speaking French part of the day and her initial rustiness had worn off. She leaned forward to turn up the volume, then supported herself on her elbow on the hotel bed and listened to a report that Mikhail Gorbachev, contrary to reports yesterday, the first day of the Soviet coup, was alive and being held prisoner with his family at a resort in the Crimea. The screen switched to a picture of Boris Yeltsin, who was still holding out against the conspirators in the Kremlin, while a correspondent in Moscow phoned in a report about the response to Yeltsin's call for a general strike. The next item was a studio discussion with a French trade-union official who had once met the leader of the conspirators on a trip to Moscow; his French was guttural, more difficult than the Parisian accent of the anchorman, and Loretta's brow creased with the effort to understand. A
single long ring from the phone startled her and she stuck out a hand to grab it.

“Yes?
Oui?”

“Loretta? Is that you?”

“Bridget? How did you get hold of me?” She was expecting a call from John Tracey, in reply to the message she had left on his machine the previous evening, and she was astonished to hear Bridget's voice. “I mean, where are you ringing from?”

Instead of a straight answer Bridget burst into tears: uncontrolled, choking sobs which alarmed Loretta so much that she jerked forward to turn down the volume of the television. The curly telephone cord twisted itself round her arm as she returned to the bed and she struggled impatiently to extricate herself. “Bridget, what is it?”

Bridget tried to speak, broke down again and sobbed out unintelligible half-sentences. Loretta remembered an occasion when the situation had been reversed, when all that stood between her and imminent dissolution was Bridget's voice at the other end of a telephone line. “It's all right,” she said quietly, “I'm here. Cry as long as you like.”

It took a full minute for Bridget to regain control. “I'm sorry,” she said weakly, and Loretta heard her blow her nose.

“What's happened? Can you tell me?”

“It's Sam. He knows about the baby.”

“The baby?”

“I almost told you that day in the Duke of Cambridge, when we had that stupid row, but I just couldn't bring myself . . . I didn't want to admit it, even to you.”

“What's wrong with the baby?” Bridget had had the usual test for Down's syndrome, the risk was higher because of her age, but she had assured Loretta that the
result was negative. Loretta thought of other conditions, spina bifida and anencephaly, and did not immediately register what Bridget was saying. Then she gasped: “Not the father? What do you mean?”