What Men Say (7 page)

“He's CID, Loretta. He's here to take my statement but I'm not much help . . . I mean, we got to the part where I started throwing up over the hydrangeas and that was it.” Bridget smiled weakly but she sounded tired and a little despondent. “I slept in,” she went on, plucking at the silk wrap she had borrowed the previous evening. “In fact, I was still asleep when, um, when the doorbell rang. We're just trying to put together a list of everyone who RSVP'd in case they've missed anyone. Oh—” Her eyes, which had been flicking from Loretta to the detective and back again, came to rest on the bottle on the corner of the table. “You've got some milk. I was going to make coffee but there wasn't any . . . Well, there was, but it's gone off. You are
hopeless,
Loretta.” This attempt at affectionate banter simply underlined her nervousness, and Loretta decided to come to the rescue.

“Is this going to take much longer?” she asked curtly, wondering why Bridget had not insisted on getting dressed rather than allowing the interview to take place when she was at such an obvious disadvantage.

The detective, who had wandered over to the mantelpiece, picked up a china cat, one of a pair, and examined it as though he hadn't heard her question. “This original?”

“It's a copy. Look, I think it would be a good idea if Bridget goes and puts some clothes on while I make coffee.”

“No problem, is there, Dr. Lawson?” he asked, putting down the ornament and giving her a frank, open look. He returned to the table, picked up several sheets of paper covered in neat handwriting and counted the names Bridget had given him. “Thirty-eight—must be nearly there. I've got a couple more questions to ask Dr. Bennett—let's see, I should be with you in ten minutes, Dr. Lawson.”

“Me?”

“He wants a statement from you as well, Loretta.”

She had forgotten. “Oh, all right,” she said grumpily. “In that case I might as well go upstairs and get on with some work. You can call me when you've finished.” Ignoring the policeman's hopeful glance at the milk, she strode to the fridge and put it in the bottle compartment in the door. “I'll be in my study,” she announced, and left the room.

She went upstairs, grumbling silently to herself, and turned into the long double drawing room whose back half she used as her study. The blind was drawn and the answering machine blinked at her from a dark corner,
reminding her that she had not checked the machine since the previous evening. Perhaps the police, whose methods she had just been excoriating, had tried to get in touch and sent someone round only when they kept getting a taped message? She crossed the room, pressed the “message play” key and sat down at her desk, rolling her eyes upwards when she heard, interspersed with anxious inquiries from Bridget's friends and colleagues, yet another message from Sam and one from Bridget's mother. She had already counted eight messages for Bridget—none from the police—when, to her surprise, she recognized the voice of her former lover, Joe Lunderius.

“Loretta. You know where I am if you need me.” That was all, not even his name, and Loretta was thinking he was the last person she would turn to for help when the tape began to hiss and crackle.

“. . . a bit of a long shot,” said an unfamiliar voice through the interference, “but I'm trying to get in touch with Dr. Bridget Bennett.” He pronounced the three words with a bouncing rhythm, Doc-tor Brid-get Bennett. “I don't know if you . . .” Loretta reached across to the machine, turned up the volume, but caught only the closing words: “. . . Denis Goodwin,
Daily Mail
” Her thoughts flew to Stephen Kaplan and she wondered if this was his way of squaring his conscience: providing her number without saying for certain that Bridget would be there. Or maybe this Goodwin person was being circumspect; John Tracey had always gone in for a lot of guff about protecting his sources.

The answering machine began to rewind and Loretta allowed it to finish before pressing a key to store the messages it had just played. Then she stood up and leaned over her computer to raise the blind, letting in a soft mid-morning light which gently illuminated the
varnished wood of her desk. She moved her chair into a more comfortable position and switched on the laptop, waiting as it beeped and whirred through its opening procedures; outside, at the bottom of the garden, a narrow boat slid by with a wolflike black dog in the stern. The dog belonged, she was almost certain, to the potter who traveled up and down the canal with a gas-fired kiln on his boat; she had met him waiting to go through a lock the previous summer and bought one of his bowls. The computer fell silent and she keyed in the codes to call up the latest chapter of her book, adjusting the brightness of the screen and scrolling down through the blue letters to the point at which she had broken off on Friday afternoon.

“Emily's radical vision simultaneously awed and terrified Charlotte,” she had written, “and this ambivalence manifested itself both in her repudiation of Heathcliff in the posthumous Preface to the 1850 edition of
Wuthering Heights
and in the novel
Shirley,
which she wrote as a tribute to her dead sister. Shirley Keeldar, its eponymous heroine, is Emily as she might have been in more fortunate circumstances—rich and influential instead of poor and unknown. Yet the novel, for all its apparent celebration of Shirley/Emily's androgynous power, nevertheless concludes with—”

It was unusual for Loretta to break off in mid-sentence but she had been interrupted at this point on Friday by a phone call from a former colleague who wanted her to speak at a weekend conference in Manchester in November. By the time she had turned him down with sufficient expressions of interest and regret to avoid hurting his feelings it was nearly six, barely time to get to the cinema in Magdalen Street for the early-evening screening of
Thelma & Louise.
She had
simply saved what she had written, grabbed her bag and rushed out of the house.

“—a conventional happy ending,” she typed, picking up her train of thought, “whose effect is to obliterate the heroine; our last view of Shirley, mediated through the eyes of a minor character—”

The phone rang. Loretta let out a little gasp of annoyance and, with her eyes still on the screen, lifted the receiver to her ear.

“Mmm?”

“DC Sidney there?”

“Who?”

“DC Sidney.” He repeated it impatiently, as though she was being deliberately obtuse.

“Just a minute. Who's speaking?”

“Thames Valley Police.”

“All of them?” He did not reply and Loretta placed the receiver crossly on her desk. She clattered down-stairs, making so much noise that Bridget and the detective looked up with startled expressions as she appeared in the doorway.

“Phone,” she said tersely, and Bridget pushed back her chair.

“No, it's for—” She indicated the policeman.

“O-kay.” He got up and went to the kitchen extension, ignoring her obvious irritation. “DC Sidney—Oh, hello, Sarge.”

Loretta shot a wry glance at Bridget, who pulled a face in return, and went back upstairs. At the door of her study she heard a tinny sound coming from her desk and remembered that she had not replaced the receiver. She stretched out a hand towards it, frowned, and on impulse lifted it to her ear. Holding her breath, she heard the Sergeant's voice: “. . . watch what you say till we know for certain, we don't want to alarm her, not
yet. Just make an excuse and get back here pronto. Phil, you there?”

“Yes, Sarge. I thought I heard—”

Loretta froze. Then, in slow motion, she lowered the receiver back onto its rest. A few seconds later she heard the double chirrup which told her that the policeman had finished his call, and leaned towards her computer screen in an attitude of deep, though bogus, concentration.

“Dr. Lawson?”

“Yes?” She didn't have to fake a start as the detective appeared in the doorway.

“Something's come up,” he said casually. “I'm off now.”

“Oh, right.”

“Thanks for the co—” He broke off, obviously recalling that both she and Bridget had offered to make coffee without actually doing so. “Don't bother to see me out.”

“What about—” She was going to ask about her statement, but he was gone. Seconds later the front door slammed and she got up from her desk, hurried to the other end of the room and saw him getting into an unmarked red car parked in front of her Golf. The engine roared into life, then died as he thrust open the door, half got out and snatched a parking ticket from under one of the windscreen wipers. Loretta jumped back as he threw it contemptuously onto the passenger seat, but he was too intent on making a quick exit to look up and catch her watching him. The car pulled out, too fast for the narrow street, and Loretta shook her head. “Someone's been watching too much
Miami Vice
” she murmured, making light of his abrupt departure and wishing she had not given in to her urge to pick up the phone; eavesdropping was as underhanded as going
through a lover's pockets, and the material you turned up as useless. She retraced her steps, trying without much success to focus her thoughts on the forces undermining the authenticity of female characters in fiction, and was for once rather relieved when the phone rang.

“So you're really going to go?” Bridget demanded as she poured milk over the muesli Loretta had brought back from the deli.

“Yes—I told you.” Loretta, feeling her cheeks grow red, dipped her knife into the jar for more quince jelly.

“About time,” said Bridget, whose spirits had risen noticeably since the detective left. “You've spent far too much time moping after Joe Lunderius.”

“I have not.”

“God, what do they put in this? It's like soggy cardboard. Here, let me have some of that bread.” She hacked off a slice, pulled a tub of margarine towards her and lifted the lid without enthusiasm. “What's he taking you to?”

“
Ariadne auf Naxos
at the Apollo.” The call from Christopher Cisar, asking her to go with him to the opera in Oxford on Friday evening, had been utterly unexpected. He had offered the invitation so smoothly, apologizing for the short notice and regretting that their conversation at the party had been overshadowed by the grisly discovery in the barn, that it would have seemed bad manners to refuse.

“Ariadne what?”

“
Ariadne auf Naxos.
Richard Strauss.”

Bridget shrugged, admitting her ignorance of opera, and heaped jam on the thin layer of margarine she had spread on her bread. “What do you think all that was about?” she asked, changing the subject. “First they send someone along at twenty past nine in the morning,
then they ring up and call him back when he hasn't even finished taking my statement.”

“Dunno.” Loretta lifted the cafetiere, unwilling to admit, even to Bridget, that she had almost been caught listening in to the detective's conversation. “More coffee?”

“Go on then—half a cup. I did say, you're being very thorough, and he said, Oh, we take hundreds of statements on a case like this. I suppose they're under pressure, especially with all this . . .” She picked up one of the newspapers which Loretta had reluctantly brought downstairs when Bridget suggested they share a late breakfast. “It's Stephen,” she exclaimed, looking at it more closely. “I hardly recognized him.”

“The best report's in the
Telegraph
” Loretta said hastily as Bridget reached for
Today.
She could not now remember which tabloid had run the piece about the row in the English faculty, but she did not want Bridget to see it.

“Fancy you buying the
Torygraph
” said Bridget, feeling for it near the bottom of the heap. “Right, let's have a look.”

“Inside. Page three.”

“Got it.” Bridget finished her bread and licked jam off her fingers. “Blimey, I'm glad I don't read this stuff every day. Fourteen-year-old girl strangled by stepfather to conceal sex abuse . . . Masked gunmen sought after gangland shooting at south London pub . . . Police seek van driver after stranded woman motorist attacked on the A34. You know, Sam's been on at me to carry a can of what's it called—mace. He's always reading out pieces about sex attacks in the
Oxford Times”

“Isn't it illegal in this country?”

“Quite possibly, but the police aren't exactly full of good ideas. They gave a talk for freshers this year, this
WPC came along who's been trained to deal with rape victims, and it was all about not walking home alone at night. One of my students got up and said how was she supposed to afford taxis with an eight-hundred-pound overdraft?” She shrugged her shoulders, grimaced and returned to her study of the paper. “Nothing here we don't know already,” she said a moment later, throwing it down.

“Except for the post-mortem—it's this morning.” For the first time it occurred to Loretta that the two things might be connected, the pathologist's report and DC Sidney's recall to St. Aldates police station. Then she realized she had no idea how long a post-mortem lasted, which made speculation futile.

“Time I got dressed. OK if I have a shower, Loretta? Sam should be here soon.”

“You've spoken to him?”

“Yes. I wasn't telling the truth, actually, when I said I was asleep when he—when PC Plod banged on the door. I was a bit embarrassed, opening the door like this.” She gestured towards her night clothes. “Anyway, Sam's taken the day off, they keep thinking up new questions and he said it seemed easier not to go in . . . I wonder how long it's going to go on. It couldn't have come at a worse moment, he's so busy at work.” Her mood changed abruptly and her face crumpled. “Isn't that callous? When that poor woman . . .” Her hands ranged over her hips, searching unsuccessfully for pockets and a handkerchief.