Without Consent (27 page)

I can't keep my eyes closed and open them to find myself in the arms of a man who kisses and caresses while I convulse around the neck of an empty cheap champagne bottle.

I wonder if he rinsed it first.

When he removes it, there is the loud and hollow sound of a cork being drawn. Wroop. Louder than the normal sound; a vintage cork, pulled with an echo and a sensation in me like a plaster pulled from a raw and weeping wound.

Breathe deep, you silly bitch. You asked for this; he knew all along and you, you … consented. Now he takes off his trousers like a man settling down for sleep, having done his duty, ready to confide, and I have never felt such hatred in my life.

I reach out to grab what is exposed. A firm fist with the greatest possible intention to cause maximum injury.

In my imagination, it could all come away in my hand. I handle an ugly, flaccid, unarousable piece of rubbery flesh which never ever responded to me. A brief fight for repossession, with one of my eyes drawn to the green bottle he has carefully placed on the window-ledge; him trying to speak, me trying to scream. Unable, but I frightened him. I could see the fear as I lie paralysed and he tries to slink away.

But you did consent, he says. I did what you wanted and I am what I am made, and I do, love, you.

S
illy bitch. The phone was sounding in his ear. Bailey drew himself up onto his elbow, bile hot in his throat. He heard her voice and knew what time it was, the way he did; late for a man whose only recourse was sleep or food, and there was no food. On the edges of London, major capital of the wor!d, and he a sophisticated man in it, there was no food and his stomach heaved. The height of his eyrie, the multicolours of the duvet, all mixed on a palette with this dreadful sadness. A book lay unread on his pillow and he could scarcely hear.

Be there, she said, and I'll be there. Will you?

But the phone was silent. All he had received and all he could remember was the answerphone message from earlier in the day. Silly bitch, too late to say sorry and far too late to care. Then his skinny legs on the floor on the way to the bathroom. So who the hell was that? Colours blurred; voices, too, and his last surviving image was that bitch in the club, her with the spun-gold hair and a face with a scar on the forehead.

And a dim memory, too, of the phallic-looking syringe in his pocket, which the park vagrant had given him out of his own.

‘As to the admissibility, in cases of rape and kindred offences, of the fact that a complaint was made by the victim shortly after the alleged offence and the details thereof, not as being evidence of the acts complained of, but as evidence of the consistency of the victim's account and as tending to negative consent … such complaint cannot be regarded as corroboration and it is a misdirection to refer to it as such.'

W
ait for the morning, Helen said. The morning will shed the light of reason on all this. Neither my Rose nor Anna will answer their phones; why should they at this hour? Ryan could not quite leave it alone. Got to find him, he kept saying, long after two a.m.; got to find him.

What exactly has he done, Ryan?

He corrupts. Like I said, he corrupts. Makes women mad. Kills them; kills their spirit.

What evidence, Ryan? What offence?

Don't know. Got to get inside that clinic. If they've got records of all those women …

You can start a war. But you can't bust in there, can you? Even when we find out where it is?

I can't. You can.

W
hich was why at seven in the morning, showered, dressed and half crazy with fatigue, Helen was walking to Anna Stirland's house on the day she had arranged to be away from the office in order to get married at eleven-thirty. Perhaps that could be retrieved, but this was a priority. She was too tired to think in advance of what she was going to say, feeling an irrational anger against a nurse who lied, and, despite Helen's single effort to phone, failed to answer at antisocial hours, although, on reflection, an answered call might have achieved nothing. It was better to face her, feeling aggressive with anxiety, and say, look, Anna, I don't want all of the truth, only a little scrap of it. Such as, where do you work and what is his name? She would have been happier involving Rose; Rose would be good at this, but involving Rose meant more complication and, besides, Rose did not deserve it.

Crossing the road, even so early, was dicing with death. In the middle of an intersection where lorries stormed from left and right and she was the only pedestrian in sight, Helen felt anonymous and irrelevant, marooned amongst hurtling metal. A train rumbled over the bridge beneath which she stood; there was too much unsyncopated vibrating noise to allow for thought as she ran for the other side. The road surface was damp with drying rain; the freshness of the day swallowed in alien smells, and she wanted, at every third step, to turn back, go to Bailey, who, Ryan had said, would not listen either. So she also believed, reluctantly, because it
was, after all, Ryan who knew him best. I may miss my own wedding, she thought, but Bailey would want me to do this.

Anna's door was as freshly painted as she remembered, the street quiet, with the traffic a distant backdrop, like the bass sound behind a tune. She knocked and rang and waited, repeated the process and waited again. Come now, she chided Anna in her mind; life is not so unsafe that you cannot open the door at this time of day to what might be a postman with a gift.

There was the rattling of a bolt and the door opened a crack. Enough to show something less than a vision of loveliness. A poached face, pale, puffy, otherwise expressionless and slow to function. Then it trembled into a half smile with lips moving uncertainly, halfway between a grimace and a frown.

‘Oh no,' was what she mumbled. ‘Go away.' And then, beginning to push the door closed, repeating it more urgently. ‘Go away; this is all your fault.' Helen shoved herself forward and found that, despite Anna's bulk, the resistance was weak.

‘I need to know where you work and what the bald-headed doctor's name is,' she shouted, standing in the hall and watching Anna pull her dressing-gown round herself. Anna began to laugh, an ugly sound which she seemed unable to control until the words forced their way through the chortles of someone sniggering at a dirty joke.

‘What?' she asked. ‘What! You, too? Well, well. I would never have guessed.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Another one. Fallen into the trap of Dr Littleton's charms …'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

Hangover, Helen was thinking. Big-time hangover here. She had that disorientated look. This was not a woman who was fit for work today, but Helen could not be concerned with Anna at the moment. She could not even feel vaguely sorry for depriving Anna of an hour or two's sleep which might have made a difference between feeling like death and a state where life was possible.

The kitchen was surprisingly clean for someone who had so clearly been on a binge. Bright, tidy, odour free, not a sign of a bottle or a glass. It took an obsessive character to manage to eradicate any sign of conspicuous consumption. Perhaps Anna was a little that way inclined.

‘What time is it?'

‘Not long before eight.'

‘Oh, shit.'

She sat at the kitchen table and let her head fall onto her crossed arms. Helen prodded her impatiently.

‘Who's Dr Littleton and which clinic?'

Silence.

‘C'mon, Anna. The bald doctor. I need to know.'

‘Wha' for?'

Helen thought wildly of something which would inspire an answer; something which would make the woman talk. The words were out of her own mouth before she had digested them, a natural cunning driven by a rush of adrenalin.

‘Because Rose has been to see him and I don't like it. I need to know who he is, where he is.'

Anna stirred, raised her head and gave a long sigh.

‘Joseph Littleton. The Wilson and Welcome Clinic,
Camden Street. Near the park.' The words seemed to exhaust and amuse her. Then she yawned. ‘Do me a favour, will you? Tell them I'm not coming in to work today. Maybe never,' she murmured to herself. ‘I'm sick of it.' She turned a half smile to Helen. ‘That's why I drink, see?'

H
elen had paused, conscious of some kind of lie, but unable to define it. She was aware of the sweetish taste of red wine still sour in her own throat as she left the house and walked away. She turned left at the end of the road, following her instinct while wondering all the time what to do. Should she go straight into the lion's den, with none of the legal power of a police officer to demand information which they would not give? Pretend to be a patient, asking for the only doctor she could name, and be told to come back next week? Or sit down somewhere and work on her slim talents for subterfuge, and all for what? What, after all, had the man done? Where was the offence, and where would be the proof?

The world was, by now, thoroughly awake, the traffic heavier, the noise greater and the adrenalin less. She wanted direction and she wanted Bailey. Instead, she walked to the unpretentious front door of the Wilson and Welcome Clinic, to read a sign which said it opened at ten-thirty. On the other side of the road was a café of supreme grubbiness, where Helen sat and waited, after she had struggled with the question of whether to phone Bailey. Ryan had pleaded with her not to do so; would she be able to phone Bailey, make the peace, make some explanation which would convince him without mentioning Ryan? She
doubted it, but knew she had to try. Summon up more subterfuge. So she stood in a phone box which stank of last night's booze and listened, three times, to the polite message which said he was not there.

I am going to miss my own wedding. But I am doing what Bailey would want me to do, aren't I? And my feet are cold.

W
hen Bailey phoned Todd in the early morning to say that he was too ill to come to work, it was scarcely an exaggeration, but he still felt a frisson of guilt. He did not mention he had booked the day as leave; it would have meant nothing. But then if neither Todd nor any of the others had been wise enough to question the vagrant in the park, they hardly deserved him either. Especially since they were operating at cross purposes. His only hope as he knocked on the door of the South Molton Street shop, admiring the window display of silk, and thinking how a certain colour of chocolate brown would suit Helen, was that the manageress would be less brittle in the morning than the evening, or at least she would look her age. He received the credit-card slip from heavily ringed fingers; the thing presented like a lottery prize, with a brilliant celebrity smile. Maybe it was the effect of himself, looking so much less attractive and so much more sinister in daylight.

It was no trouble, with the use of a little official muscle, to worm out of the credit-card company the address of a suspected felon, who, it transpired, rarely used the facility and always paid his bills. Bailey found himself going back to King's Cross; floating out of the station, carried by the crowds who celebrated rush hour with absent faces and
copious luggage. It would be nice to take the train. Up to Scotland or some deserted part of the Yorkshire moors; anywhere cooler and greener than here. He passed the red brick of the monolithic British Library, saw the cars grid-locked as he detached himself down a side-street and found the place.

It was a dusty old mansion block, with a scroll above the door, spelling out in stone that it had been built in 1914; time not favouring the place, but unable to diminish a certain dignity to the solid door, despite the lack of paint and the grime of the first-floor windows. Still, a block for renters rather than owners. A placard on the left wall announced that for ‘Passports Inc', press the entry buzzer and follow directions to the third floor, while for ‘Graficko', he should act similarly and go to the second. Small businesses, hoping to grow big; scarcely a sign of a resident, despite the plethora of other bells, and nothing showing the name of Littleton. Nevertheless, when he buzzed the business bells and the door opened without any challenge, the foyer smelt of old cooking, overlaid, somewhere, with a fresher scent of bacon. Bailey knew he should have eaten
en route.
Helen never understood his hypoglycaemia.

Eleven-thirty, the register office. Ah well, she was not at home or at work; he had tried in call boxes, checked his own messages; best not to think about it. Easy come, easy go, you can't deal with neurosis. But down in the heart of him, a terrible misery made him hate the man he had come to find for his oblique part in all of this, or more aptly, for his part in Ryan's imagination and the need for Ryan's exoneration. Foolish of him ever to think that
Ryan's rehabilitation would be achieved by the death of that girl, Shelley. Her death had only put everything else into a melting pot. Bailey had accustomed himself to believing that the sometimes volatile Ryan could be capable of rape, but he knew he could not murder in cold blood. Hot blood, yes, he thought, as he climbed the stairs and looked through the gloom of dark corridors, wishing his spectacles helped to read in dim light the small printed cards in brass fittings on the mahogany-coloured doors. Not a calculated killing, planned over days; Ryan would never carry it through. Which left the bald man, this creature of a dozen fantasies, suddenly more substantial. There he was on the label at the fifth out of six floors; Bailey resented him, even for that.

T
he door was opened by a Filipino girl, whose pear shape, adorned with pink overalls and the hose of a vacuum cleaner gripped in her hand as she led it behind her, startled him. Likewise her disingenuous response, which was so unworldly wise as she smiled and explained about cleaning the place on this day of the week, and no, he was out, at work, she supposed, like he usually was, and of course his cousin could come in.