What Men Say (6 page)

The three-pound weights Loretta had been clutching in her fists hit the floor with a clang. “Sorry,” she said, sitting up and feeling for her attendance card inside the elasticized neckline of her leotard. She had often wondered why it was impossible to buy a leotard with pockets, an oversight she mentioned as she drew out the wrinkled cardboard rectangle and passed it up.

Karen or Kirsty ignored her. “Oh,
well,
you haven't been for two, no,
three
weeks.” She sounded scandalized. “I'd better come round with you, see what else you're doing wrong.”

The next half-hour took Loretta back to her school-days, to Wednesday afternoons in the gym with Miss
Poulson, except that Gillingham Grammar had been equipped with a vaulting horse and climbing bars rather than the latest hi-tech exercise machines. She felt her-self regressing emotionally to adolescence, building up a stock of silent resentment as Karen urged her to work harder on her upper thighs or put more effort into her press-ups.

“Twenty-six, twenty-seven—come on, nearly there.”

Loretta ignored the exhortation and sank to the floor. Karen's voice was higher and had a less refined accent than Miss Poulson's but it had the same fanatic edge; Loretta rested her cheek gratefully on the soft surface of an exercise mat and inhaled the familiar combination of dust, sweat and foam rubber, trying to summon up a more detailed picture of her old teacher than the middle-aged woman with corrugated hair and a blue Aertex shirt who came to mind. Miss Poulson remained, however, a shadowy figure. Loretta opened her eyes and consoled herself that the gym was almost empty, which meant there were few witnesses to Karen's ruthless exposure of her innate physical laziness.

“Well
done
” Karen beamed as Loretta braced her arms and heaved her torso off the ground three times in rapid succession. “You ought to try Jane's flex'n'stretch class, it starts in twenty minutes, you're much too tense.”

Loretta rolled over, dragged herself into a sitting position and examined an abrasion on her right shin, the result of her foot slipping on the rowing machine. “No thanks,” she said, picking off frayed skin round the edges of the bruise, “I haven't got time this morning—ouch.” She scrambled to her feet and went to the door of the weights room, Karen pursuing her with a stream of unwanted advice.

“You don't want to waste all that effort, you know.
You've got to build it up, it's no good coming every other week—”

“I know. Thanks.” Loretta cut the lecture short and closed the door quietly but firmly in Karen's face. She came to the gym once or twice a month, usually when she was feeling particularly tired or stressed, and she had no time for the familiar spiel about the benefits of regular exercise. She had joined the previous November, seduced by an advert in the
Oxford Times
offering a free trial class, but she had quickly recognized that her fantasy of thrice-weekly workouts and a body like Madonna was exactly that—a fantasy.

Bridget, who astonished Loretta by volunteering to join with her, had lost interest much sooner. Exercise was boring, she announced after a month in which she had tried just about every class on offer from beginners' aerobics to jazz dance and the ungrammatical flex'n'stretch. Then she met Sam Becker at an early Christmas party and abandoned the gym altogether, telling Loretta with a demure smile that she needed all her energy for the best sex she'd ever had. Loretta returned from a dreary New Year's Eve party at her sister's house in Weybridge to find Bridget in even greater raptures over Sam, their amazing love life and the wonderful time they had spent together over Christmas. Going to the gym seemed tame by comparison, but Loretta suddenly had time on her hands; Bridget hardly seemed to notice that she had cancelled several long-standing engagements, or that their weekly trips to the cinema had been replaced by a perfunctory phone call.

Suddenly in February, her affair with Sam seemed to be over. She turned up in Southmoor Road wearing dark glasses and sniffling into a crumpled handkerchief, saying the break had taken place a week before and she still could not bear to talk about it. Instead she plunged
into a hectic round of activity, accepting every party invitation that came along, signing up for French conversation classes at the Alliance Française in Polstead Road and begging Loretta to accompany her to a new dance class at the gym. Then, abruptly as he'd disappeared, Sam came back on the scene. Loretta could hardly believe her ears when, three or four weeks later, Bridget bought her dinner at Browns and announced that Sam had asked her to marry him; this revelation was soon followed by another, a telephone call in which Bridget gasped that she had just done a home pregnancy test and the result was positive. Unable to gauge from Bridget's voice whether this was good news or bad, Loretta asked noncommittal questions which elicited that Bridget did not seem to know. She and Sam had
talked
about having a child, but nothing like as quickly; she had no idea how she was going to cope with getting married, moving house, editing a new edition of
Clarissa
and having a baby . . . She hadn't even told him yet, she added—had rung Loretta first to get her own thoughts in order before she broke the news.

Sam's reaction, in the event, was unalloyed delight. He instantly accelerated their house-moving plans, taking Bridget on an exhausting tour of seven or eight addresses in and around Oxford each Saturday and Sunday until they settled on Thebes Farm. Money did not seem to be a problem—Loretta was astonished when Bridget showed her the details of a large detached house with a swimming pool in Rawlinson Road—and they signed a contract without even a hint of a buyer for Bridget's solid but unexceptional semi. It had now been standing empty for several weeks and looked like remaining that way until there was a dramatic improvement in the housing market.

It was nearly half past nine when Loretta emerged
from the gym and ran lightly down the stairs into Park End Street. She felt and looked much better after a hot shower, her hair hanging in damp curls to her shoulders and the grubby jeans she had worn earlier replaced by flowered leggings and a big white shirt. In the deli two doors down she bought fresh white bread, unsalted butter, quince jelly and, as an afterthought, margarine and the least unappetizing brand of muesli she could find. Bridget had been fast asleep when she left—at any rate, there were no sounds of movement in her room when Loretta listened at the door just before eight—but would presumably have woken by now and discovered the complete absence of bread and other essentials. Loretta put her change in her purse, came out of the deli and turned right past the old jam factory, striding towards a busy intersection until she remembered that the newsagent's shop was in the opposite direction, back towards the railway station. The
Guardian,
which she had leafed through before leaving Southmoor Road, had dealt with the discovery of a body in a couple of paragraphs under News in Brief but she doubted whether the tabloids would have shown similar restraint.

She retraced her steps and pushed open the door of the shop, reacting with instant and almost comic dismay to the giant black type of the front pages. “Party Dons in Dead Blonde Probe,” she read, and “Nude Blonde: Cops Quiz Partygoers.” Underneath the latter, in smaller letters, a sub had inserted the imaginative but inaccurate strapline “Something Nasty in Oxford Woodshed.” Loretta drew closer and saw several very similar photos of police vans parked outside Thebes Farm; one enterprising photographer, quicker than the rest, had snapped a picture of a furious Stephen Kaplan getting into his car, hands thrown up to shield his face like a film star pursued by
paparazzi-
Even the
Daily Mail
and the
Daily Express
had considered the story worthy of frontpage treatment, although it was not the lead item in either paper.

Loretta breathed out heavily, her involuntary “hah” attracting the attention of a middle-aged shop assistant who had previously been immersed in a copy of
Hello!
Oblivious to the woman's mildly curious gaze, Loretta seized a copy of each tabloid, balancing them on her left arm as though to avoid both physical and moral contamination. She completed her collection with one broadsheet, recalling her ex-husband's frequently expressed opinion that page three of the
Daily Telegraph
was to violent crime what page three of the
Sun
was to scantily clad women. By this time the pile of newsprint had become unwieldy and she had to ask for a carrier bag, stuffing the papers inside the flimsy plastic and almost running out of the shop in her haste to reach the privacy of her car in the Worcester Street car park.

The first thing that struck her as she speed-read one paper after another, propping them against the steering wheel, was the sheer inventiveness of the journalists assigned to the story. Their reports contained no new information, other than a line in the
Daily Telegraph
about the post-mortem being conducted that morning by a Home Office pathologist whose name Loretta vaguely recognized. The tabloids got round this problem, as the policewoman had predicted, by exploiting the
Inspector Morse
angle, breaking up the text with mugshots of John Thaw and Kevin Whateley, the actors who played Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis. One paper had even roped in its TV columnist to list the “eerie parallels” between the discovery of the body at Thebes Farm and a recent
Morse
episode about a corpse in the potting shed in the fellows' garden of a mythical Oxford college.

Loretta found some of these flights of fancy quite amusing, but her expression darkened when she discovered a reference on an inside page to an eighteen-month-old row between Bridget and another don over course content in the English faculty. The latter, who was famous in Oxford for his scowl and his exclusively male student fan club, had turned a private disagreement into a public slanging match, accusing Bridget in a Sunday newspaper of attempting to impose political correctness on her colleagues. This caricature of Bridget's view outraged her friends and alarmed the warden of her college, whose reactionary views meant that he and Bridget were unlikely to see eye to eye. Loretta was horrified to find the argument revived in print, certain that the article would upset Bridget far more than the wild speculation in other papers about how long the unknown woman in the barn had been dead, and the current market value of what one of them had thoughtfully dubbed “Death Farm.”

She collected the papers into an untidy pile on the passenger seat and fastened her safety belt, wondering how long the intense press interest was going to last. It only needed another big story to come along, a threat to “out” a soap-opera star or Princess Diana wearing the same dress two days running, and the reporters laying siege to Thebes Farm would leap into their cars and disappear. In the meantime, they would be riffling through their contacts books in a determined effort to find someone who knew Bridget's temporary address. They might even have discovered it—Loretta pictured Bridget, half-asleep and her hair uncombed, hurrying downstairs to answer the front door and finding herself confronted with half a dozen snapping cameras and a crew from Central Television. They had managed to make Stephen Kaplan, who had no more than a walk-on part in the
story, look like the First Murderer; Bridget in her nightie would probably come out of it like Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking scene. Regretting that she had left Bridget alone while she worked off the previous day's stress at the gym, Loretta twisted the key in the ignition, reversed out of her parking space and drove hurriedly round to the exit.

In Southmoor Road she breathed a sigh of relief: the sole evidence of human activity was a traffic warden idling along the street in the brilliant sunshine, glancing at car windscreens to make sure their residents' parking permits were in place. Loretta, who had renewed hers the previous week, nodded to the warden as she struggled out of her car with her bags and the newspapers, which seemed to have doubled in volume since she had bought them. A woman with a ponytail came out of a house on the other side of the road, wheeling a bike, and waved to Loretta, reinforcing the illusion that it was an ordinary Monday morning. Inside the house she dropped her leotard and plimsolls on the floor, dumped the shopping and the papers on the hall table and returned to collect a pint of milk from the doorstep. Suddenly she stiffened, her hand tightening on the neck of the bottle, as she became aware of voices from the floor below. One was Bridget's, there was no difficulty about that; the other, a man's, was unfamiliar. It did not sound like Sam—Loretta moved quietly towards the stairs, straining to hear, and confirmed her impression that the visitor did not have an American accent. A reporter? The conversation sounded amicable, desultory even, and Loretta found it hard to believe Bridget was having a cozy conversation with someone from the
Sun
or even one of the local papers. A puzzled look on her face, she
seized the bag of shopping in her free hand and hurried downstairs.

“Linda Hall—no, you've already got her.” Bridget was slouched at the kitchen table, supporting her head with one hand while she drew invisible patterns on the pine surface with the index finger of the other. She sighed heavily as Loretta walked into the room and recited more names in an uncertain voice: “Brian Baker, Janet Dunne—Loretta!” Her face lit up. “I wondered when you'd get back. This is Detective Constable—” She gestured to a man with dark curly hair sitting opposite her. “Sorry, I've forgotten your name.”

“DC Sidney.” He put down a ballpoint and got up. “Dr. Lawson?” He had a cocky grin which Loretta immediately distrusted. “Nice place you've got here.” He extended his hand, forcing her to look for a place to discard her shopping.

“There wasn't—I don't remember seeing a police car.” His hand was damp and she drew hers away, glancing surreptitiously at her other wrist as she did so. Five past ten—they'd wasted no time.