Without Consent (6 page)

Because of Rose, Anna had agreed to meet Helen West. OK, she had liked Helen on one meeting, but she would have preferred another context for the second. Anything to get Rose and Rose's future mother-in-law off her back: she should have kept her mouth shut. Anna was rehearsing the lines to make this less embarrassing, such as, I'm sorry, this is all a big mistake, fuck off. The sheer lack of imagination in her own nervous anger infuriated her all the more, but at the same time, there she was, tidying in
expectation of a guest who would notice. Dusting surfaces already clean, looking at the whole doll's house with a critical eye, as if she were selling it. Some chance – she'd sell it if she could – she hoped that the sound of the doorbell was announcing someone responding to the advertisement. People might think the hasty decision to sell was the reason why she had suddenly taken to spending hours after midnight painting the walls. That was the way it went, she chanted to herself in the same singsong rhythm she used to the agent. Once you make it nice, you don't want to leave, do you?

If the woman on the doorstep had said hello, extended some nice warm paw for shaking and announced herself with platitudes or small talk like the estate agent, Anna might have gone into her pre-rehearsed speech, but the visitor stood sideways on to the door, looking away down the street, one hand extended in Anna's direction, offering a bottle of wine, which, once accepted, left Anna no option but to ask Helen in. A clever ploy, she decided later; they had not even looked at one another's faces before they were both trapped.

She noticed again the scar on Helen's forehead. It curled from one eyebrow into the hairline and could easily have been covered by arrangement of her long hair, but she did not seem to mind it. Anna remembered Rose's verdict on this woman, heard Rose's lecturing voice, telling her: she may look buttoned up, you know, Anna, and she may talk a bit precious, but there isn't much she hasn't done. She didn't get that scar in a road accident and she has been known to bite people.

‘What a nice kitchen,' Helen said, genuine enthusiasm
taking away the polite banality of the compliment. Anna looked around; it was a more than nice kitchen, full of old pine, carefully chosen pictures, dried herbs and flowers lending it a musky smell. A door stood open, leading on to a small backyard laid out with narrow flower-beds in full bloom. Pink and white geraniums prevailed in tubs; roses climbed the wall. The glass panes in the door gleamed.

‘I know what I want in my kitchen,' Helen continued, ‘just as I sometimes think I know what I want in my life, but I never quite seem to achieve it. Something goes wrong between concept and execution. I expect it always will. I'd have thought about hanging dried herbs there.' She pointed to the wooden clothes pulley above her head, holding pans and flowers. ‘And then I would have continued to think about it. Not done it.'

Anna fussed, uncorked the wine clumsily, poured unsteadily, the sound of it comforting. The glass she handed Helen was unusual, heavy and old; the wine cold and pale. Nothing in the kitchen was new; all of it revealed an owner who specialized in thrift as well as taste.

‘I make an effort with my house,' Anna said, choosing words carefully, ‘and I love flowers, because I can't do much with my person. I think I do it to compensate to the world. Or myself. I'm not sure.'

‘I don't think I quite follow.'

‘You should,' Anna stated with a touch of impatience. ‘But then you probably live in a different world. Beautiful people do. I'm a rather ugly woman, in case you haven't noticed. It follows that I feel obliged to create something like beauty around me, so that I can justify my own existence.'

She was plain. Not plain enough to warrant the description of ugliness, but still a slab of a woman, apart from the eyes. The kind of woman who had never quite looked like a girl; too full a figure from the age of eleven. The type who would play wallflower and act chaperone for lovelier, livelier sisters or cousins. A face which had assumed responsibility as soon as other children shed it, but not, Helen thought, as plain as all that. Anna spoke of herself ironically, as if she were birthmarked or disabled to the degree that she was an assault on the human eye, instead of being on the wrong side of ordinary.

‘I think you should get a new mirror,' Helen said honestly.

Anna rose and placed the wine in the fridge. She had the light-footed step of the heavy woman who had somewhere learnt to dance, a grace and economy of movement which also cast doubts on her own bitter self-deprecation. She did not seem a person who accepted defeat lightly, nor one who had looked at her world without issuing a challenge. If anything, she would be obsessive about making the best of what she had, Helen guessed; not today, perhaps, but on other days. She felt uncomfortingly obtrusive, warning bells telling her to leave because Anna was right to resent the presence of anyone who could not mend her fractured self-esteem, least of all someone who did not want to try. Am I a man's woman or a woman's woman? Helen asked herself, remembering teenage years in which she had eschewed the company of either sex, but especially the female, for the sole unspoken reason that they were the ones most likely to expose her deficiencies. She had been a beautiful reserved child, features which,
taken together, had isolated her so much she had envied the big, fat, fearless and competitive girl who led the class and was the doyen of all their opinions. Anna could have been one of the same kind, who took her bulk and her dimples and turned them into virtues, moved on to another popular persona. Becoming one of the boys; something Helen had never been.

‘You would suit lace,' Anna said, her face suddenly breaking into a grin which did indeed show dimples, hollowed into the cheeks, bunching the flesh of her face into a picture of good nature. ‘You could get away with lace and ribbons. Rose tells me you're getting married.' She could deflect conversation away from herself with suspicious ease, Helen observed; she did it as to the manner born. They could quite easily have sat as they were and discussed the wedding garments.

‘I hate lace, ribbons, buckles and bows,' Helen said. ‘And Rose tells me you were attacked and can't talk about it. Can't, won't. Rose talks a lot, about other people.'

‘So does my aunt. I didn't swear her to secrecy. Obviously not,' Anna said, quick to defend Rose. ‘I've been dripping on people, that's all. I shouldn't have. Rose is too young and too happy, it isn't fair.'

She leant back in her chair, which creaked under considerable rather than formidable weight. Shapely weight, as if all her proportions were exaggerated. Not fat, simply too much. Not a lady for wearing Lycra, that was all.

Helen liked her. She had liked her on first sight. For all her reserve, she could fall into instant and profound liking and, all of a sudden, it was imperative to help. She put to one side the thought of Bailey's terse phone call with the news
about Ryan; also the daily cases which made it seem that rape was an epidemic, sexual assault an everyday occurrence which she judged by a set of well-established, horribly objective criteria. The questions here were different.

Anna Stirland shrugged and let out a sigh.

‘I'm a nurse,' she said. ‘A midwife. A competent caring person with professional skills. I've been wiping bums since childhood.' She hesitated. ‘In other words, I'm one of nature's sensible people and I'm ashamed of how I've dealt with this so far. And yes, I can talk to you; I have to. Perhaps you could regard it as a piece of dictation. Take it down like a lawyer. That way it might make sense.'

‘I shan't fall into a fit of the vapours,' Helen said.

‘Because you've heard it all before?' Anna asked mildly. ‘You haven't, you know. I bet you haven't.'

A
t six-thirty in the evening, Detective Sergeant Ryan was formally suspended from duty, denied access to his office and instructed to go home and await the result of enquiries. His own detective chief inspector did this with Todd as witness, Bailey lurking on the sidelines. Ryan looked as if they were sending him out into the world naked, Todd thought with some satisfaction. The DCI thought the same, albeit with greater sympathy. Ryan had been so indefatigably popular, a man's man with a taste for women; the sort they admired. It was Bailey who arranged the car to take Ryan away; no one else had formed Bailey's conclusion that if left unattended, Ryan's departure from the station would demonstrate the shortest route between the back door and the nearest public house. Ryan looked at him wryly, each of them second-guessing the other.

Bailey watched the car disappear, driven by a woman constable. He wondered what, if anything, the two of them would say to one another and reminded himself to ask her later, slightly ashamed of the subterfuge. The pursuit of truth was all, was it not? All legitimate means were allowed. Or perhaps the pursuit of some niggling ambition that Ryan would let slip in private to the driver, some definitive clue to his own innocence. Rape is a crime which calls for vengeance, Todd had said portentously, revealing a churchgoing tendency.

Barring Bailey's progress in the carpark stood a blonde girl, hands on hips, looking at him belligerently. He recognized her as a detective, one of Ryan's sexual offences team. It occurred to him that, so far, the irony of Ryan's current work taken in conjunction with the offence they would likely charge him with, had escaped him. Yesterday, Bailey had been giving Ryan advice on the diplomacy of dealing with incredulous parents; today, he was
en route
to see another set, the ones who belonged to Ryan's own victim. It was all offensively circular.

‘Sally Smythe, sir. What are we supposed to do with Ryan's cases?' It was an accusation, spat out with minimal pretence at politeness.

‘I don't know. Carry on. He won't be back for some time.'

The blonde looked at him as if he was solely responsible for the doubling of her workload, the demise of her life and the appearance of her first grey hairs. Bailey began to walk towards his car, away from Todd; there was an implicit invitation for her to fall into step beside him.

‘Which was his biggest case?'

‘They're all big. Indecent assault, buggery, you name it. And he had an ongoing thing … Oh, shit.' She was gabbling, on the verge of tears. ‘How could he do it, sir? How could he?'

‘To you? To me? To the victim?' Bailey asked lightly, touching her arm with the slightest gesture, enough to suggest commiseration, but not camaraderie.

‘He was good,' she said fiercely. ‘Really good. Getting better. I know none of us liked the appointment at first, but he had this case, eighteen months ago. Broke his heart. After that, he seemed, well, he seemed able to identify with the victims. If we can't, he said, who can?'

‘Tomorrow at ten,' Bailey said, watching Todd catching up, ‘I'd like to look at all his casework. There might be a clue to his alleged behaviour. It is only alleged, you know.'

She nodded dumbly, peeled away and left him to watch her plodding footsteps with regret. If Ryan's career was blighted, then so, by infection, was hers.

T
he evening sun raised a pink haze as they drove north, Bailey at the wheel with no need to consult a map. Vague directions would do equally well; he had known these streets since childhood. They were in the no man's land where Islington merges with King's Cross in a series of used-car dealerships, traffic lights and treeless thoroughfares which hide from view the pleasanter, leafier roads of a mixed hinterland. They sat behind a belching bus, watching it shiver with fumes in the heat, Bailey longing for the privilege of a fast vehicle with a siren to move everything from their path. Traffic cried for vengeance, as
well as rape. He scorched past the bus and into the side-streets, put on a turn of speed through a series of back-doubles. He flung the car round corners on a small industrial estate, took it up a cobbled alley-way, round the back of a parking lot and back on to the main route again, tyres screaming. When they arrived at number fourteen Roman Court, Todd was pale and Bailey felt calmer, not ashamed for shaking his passenger's composure.

They would not be talking to the victim. She was resting in her own flat, her mother said, and that was not, in any event, the purpose of the visit. Bailey had seen her statement already, it was background he wanted. Something to make the girl more than a silhouette and a name on paper. Something, perhaps, to stop himself disliking her.

The parents were not of the kind accustomed to being deferential to the police. Middle years, old enough to have watched
Dixon of Dock Green
on TV and then read three decades of newspapers detailing the destruction of that avuncular image. Mr Pelmore had twice been stopped for speeding and Mrs Pelmore had once been the victim of an overzealous store detective, so both of them were experts on the law. They saw themselves as minority honest citizens; fully employed, subject to harassment. Shelley, their daughter, was one of three children. Looking around, Bailey imagined he could guess an enthusiasm to leave home, even, as in Shelley's case, to live with a boyfriend less than two miles away.

‘She's a good girl,' the mother said, as if anyone had yet suggested otherwise. ‘A sweet girl. Quiet.'

A parent would always claim a girl was good. Bailey had
waited years for one to boast that his or her child was gloriously, colourfully bad. The father was silent. Both sat in their living room, defiantly occupying their regular oatmeal fabric covered chairs with uncomfortable wooden arms. Two dining chairs had been produced for the officers to sit facing them, perhaps to emphasize the fact that the interview was on sufferance. Tea was not offered. The room itself personified contemporary gloom: dark-blue carpet, patterned blue curtains, light-blue wallpaper with heavy borders near the ceiling, fittings of orangey-coloured wood. The shelves housed no books, but contained instead carefully arranged china figures of ladies in crinolines, shepherds and shepherdesses, dogs, cats and horses, all prancing together in sterile contemplation of a large loud clock on the opposite wall. Everything was depressingly tidy. Bailey remembered that his own flat had been given a similar description by Helen some time since, but his flat was different. It was eclectic. There was another passing thought, as he let the words flow over and around him, while he arranged his own face in an expression of rapt and kindly concentration. Would he and Helen sit thus, in chairs like this, when they reached the stage of Darby and Joan? The thought made him shudder. He never wanted to be fastidious. Not about emotion; not about anything.