A Cry from the Dark (14 page)

“He thought they might hear about it from the other parents. His father's rather hot on manliness—manly sports, manly occupations. Doing solo dances that you've made up yourself isn't manly at all in his book, I wouldn't think.”

“So what did you do?”

“I pushed my way out.”

“Out into the open air?”

“That's right. To get away. To get a breath of fresh air. It was very hot in the hall, but it wasn't just that; it was all the hostility—most of it really childish, and we're supposed to be on the verge of adulthood. It depressed me.”

“So you tried to put a distance between you and them, did you?” asked Blackstone.

“That's right. I looked toward the main street, but there were people around there, and I didn't want to talk to anyone. So I went in the opposite direction.”

“Down toward the river?”

“Yes.”

“You weren't frightened?”

“No,” said Betty, trying to remember back to her days of innocence. “This is Bundaroo. Nothing ever happens here except occasionally men get drunk and have a fight.”

“So you didn't have a sense of anyone following you?”

“No, of course not! If I had I'd have turned straight round. But I wasn't listening, because I didn't feel scared. It was very peaceful. I didn't have any notion of anyone else being there until—”

Her voice faded.

“We'll come to that in a moment,” Blackstone said hurriedly. “Can you tell us exactly where you went?”

“Yes, I went to the primary building, then behind it to the fence that cuts the playground off from the river. It's rather overgrown there.”

“We know. We've been looking at the place. That's where it happened, isn't it?”

“Yes. I was watching there and thinking for some time—five minutes, maybe longer. I thought I heard an animal in the long grass, but…Either he was there already—but why? What would he have been there
for
?—or he followed me, skulked there for a bit, and then—then
pounced.
”

“Did it feel like that? Coming from nothing?”

“
Yes.
That's why it was so
terrifying.
He put his arm around my neck and seemed to be choking me. I tried to tell myself it was a joke, a prank, but I knew it wasn't. It hurt so much. I thought he was going to kill me.”

“Dr. Merton mentioned the bruises,” Blackstone said quietly. “They'll hurt for a while yet. So you say he came from behind, and you couldn't see him then.”

“I couldn't see him at all, ever. There's no light down there. All I could do was feel his arm choking me, and smell his smell.”

“His smell? What do you mean? Body smells?”

“No, beer. Not just from his mouth—I don't think his mouth was ever near enough. But all over…all over.”

She saw this time a look of real significance travel from Blackstone to Malley. Her words had definite meaning for them, and that meaning was something they had already talked over.

“Was there anything else about the attack you could tell us?” asked Blackstone. Betty thought hard.

“He was taller than me. Strong…Please don't ask me about the actual…you know…because I was so terrified and nauseated that it's like a big black hole. I don't
remember
anything, except the pain and the horror.”

“Yes, yes. We do understand,” said the inspector.

Suddenly Malley put in his twopenny worth.

“Didn't your dad give work to a sundowner a few days ago?”

“Al?” said Betty, glad to know the name. “Al Cousens? Yes, but what?—Oh no.
No!
He moved on on Thursday—took the road to Walgett.”

“Nothing to stop him doing a U-ie and coming back.”

“You just want it to be someone who's not from Bundaroo.”

“Well, is there anything wrong with that? This is your home, a nice little place, full of people who know you—”

“Full of your mates, you mean,” said Betty, feeling greatly daring but fired by a sense of justice. “You don't want to find out who did it, you want to rule out most of the suspects from the start, and then find someone from outside the district you can pin it on.”

“Now, now, Betty. You're upset,” said Blackstone. “Nothing like that is going to happen, I can assure you. Nobody is going to be ruled out and nobody is going to have anything pinned on them.”

“Well, you
can
rule out Al. He was probably a hundred miles away, if he got a lift. Anyway they wouldn't serve a sundowner beer in Grafton's, any more than they would an aboriginal.”

“If they've got the money they can drink it outside,” said Sergeant Malley. It was rarely that he got an idea, but when he did no power on earth could knock it out of him. Blackstone shot him a look, and the two men took their leave, the inspector assuring Betty that she had been very brave.

 

They had had two very tiring days. The first had been given up to the most obvious tourist destinations, and Bettina had decided you could never have enough of the Royal Mile. It was all of fifteen years since she was last in Edinburgh, so she enjoyed the great promenade at leisure, with frequent stops. Ollie was one of those tourists who, knowing he is having a once-in-a-lifetime experience, is determined to see everything there is to be seen, and see it through the lens of a camera. This left Bettina and Sylvia with plenty of time to sit and chat together.

“I'm all in favor of Mary, Queen of Scots,” said Bettina, gazing down over the lower parts of the city, “and I'd be even more in favor if she'd had John Knox quietly poisoned with a potion recommended by her mother-in-law, Catherine de' Medici. But I must say David Rizzio was an unwise piece of self-indulgence. Anyway, what was a charming, sophisticated Italian doing in this rainy, windy country going mad with fundamentalist religion?”

“Nowadays the Italians seem to sell ice cream,” commented Sylvia.

“Then, it was traveling guitar. To be fair, Scotland seems to have had more need of love songs than of ice cream, but I still think Rizzio was a mistake. Not to mention Bothwell. OK, she may have felt the need of a ruffian to keep the awful Scottish nobles in order, but to sleep with him! Marry him!”

“I suppose after the French court she appreciated something a bit more earthy.”

“Earthy is one thing. A total thug is another. You do see it today: a woman gets shot of one hopeless husband—and Darnley really was the pits, and you see his type everywhere in England today—and then crashes straight into another marital disaster. At least after Cecil Cockburn I learned the obvious lesson: no more marriages.”

“Is he still alive?”

“I have no idea. I wouldn't know him if I sat opposite him in a train.” A quick look at the woman sitting beside her told Bettina that her brusque dismissal of the man she had married had been a mistake. “I'm sorry. I should have thought. He was your father, after all.”

“Don't worry. I know it was a very short marriage. What was he like?”

“He was twenty-five. He thought the world owed him a living, a good lifestyle, a cushy job once the war was over, admiration, deference, the best of everything. And this was in half-starving, war-ravaged Italyin 1945. Whether he'd got that way because his parents spoiled him or at his minor public school I never found out.”

“You were both in the services?”

“Yes, the army. He was a transport officer, and he was brilliant at it. It was the rest of life he couldn't manage, but he hadn't realized this at the time. I was twenty-three. I'd been in Italy fifteen months; I should have been worldly wise, but I wasn't. I'd hitched a lift to Europe in a way—come as assistant to a well-known Australian war correspondent. After three months in Italy I knew the language well enough to be useful to the British Army, which was advancing up from the south, so they let me join up.”

“But why did you want to? Journalism was much more your thing then, wasn't it?”

“I didn't want to report on other people's experiences, I wanted to have them myself. Even at twenty-three I knew what sort of experiences would be useful, and direct ones of war were among them.”

“You knew that, but you didn't know what type would make a good husband.”

“Definitely not that. But unlike Scottish Mary I only made the mistake once. That's enough about Cecil. You've put the idea in my mind that I might meet him again, and I couldn't bear that.”

The next day they split up. Sylvia and Oliver went their various ways around Edinburgh, and Bettina went to Glasgow. She had decided years ago, when she was in the city on a publicity trip, that the Burrell Collection was second-rate, so she went to the Kelvin-grove Art Gallery, had a long and delightful lunch on her own with the
Times
crossword still to do, then went back to the gallery and looked for a second time at the pictures which really interested her. When she got back to Edinburgh neither Ollie nor Sylvia was in their room. Theater or a concert, she decided. Sylvia had worked most of her life as a teacher, but her great love was arts administration—coordinating the work of hundreds of amateur bodies in Australia. Bettina didn't want another big meal, so she awarded herself an early night. She was, after all, nearly eighty.

She got down to breakfast late and decided to have the works—the full English, or British, breakfast, starting with porridge and continuing with a fry-up. It was a long time since she had eaten, and she made up for it. She was on to the toast and marmalade when Sylvia came into the breakfast room, looked around for her, then came over and bent over her table, her voice urgent.

“Bettina, you're wanted at the desk.”

Bettina wiped her mouth.

“At the desk? What on earth can that be for?”

“I don't know. I was just coming in from a morning walk when they hailed me because they know we're together. It's someone on the phone from London, and I think I heard the word ‘police.' ”

“Oh Lord, Mark can't have been up to his tricks again, can he?”

“Surely they'd want Ollie if he had, wouldn't they?”

Bettina was beginning to be worried. Leaning a little on Sylvia's arm, she left the breakfast room and went out to reception.

“I can put the call through to the box over there if you like,” said the receptionist. “It's more private.”

Bettina nodded and she and Sylvia went over.

“Yes? Bettina Whitelaw speaking,” she said.

“That is Mrs. Whitelaw of Thirteen Holland Park Crescent, is that right?” asked a young male voice.

“Yes, that's right.”

“I'm afraid there's been a break-in at your flat, Mrs. Whitelaw.”

“Oh Lord. What's missing?”

“That we don't know. Nothing obvious. We'll need your help on that. But I'm afraid the lady in the flat—”

“Katie? What's happened to Katie?—”

“I'm sorry, but she's in hospital. She has bad head injuries. She's not expected to survive, I'm afraid.”

Bettina whispered, “I'll be there. I'll come as soon as I can,” and put down the phone.

Bettina sat in the plane, shaking her head at all the offers of food and drink, deep in thought and memories. She was glad to be on her own with them. Sylvia had volunteered to come with her, but that was not what Bettina wanted.

“No, you stay for your last day, as we'd intended. I wouldn't want Ollie left on his own. I haven't got my old brain around what has happened yet. If I need support and comfort it will be after I've grasped the details, and decided whether I'm—”

“You don't think you're responsible, do you?” said Sylvia, a schoolmistressy note in her voice. “That it was your fault? You said yourself that she volunteered—”

“I know, I know. Let's wait and see, shall we? Just come with me to the airport and find out if there are any spare places. The police are contacting the airline to ask them to give me priority. I do so want to be home
quickly.
”

So here she was, almost without registering what was happening, on the ridiculously short flight from Edinburgh to Heathrow. The thought of Katie fighting for her life in hospital—if she hadn't already lost that fight—tormented her. Why hadn't she simply refused her offer? Katie would have been offended, but it wouldn't have altered their friendship—their barbed friendship, in which Katie rejoiced in the office of the candid friend. She'd always made it clear that she preferred Peter, and perhaps she'd been right. He was one of her own, spoke her language, and perhaps was the nicer person.

But Peter, so relaxed and kind on the surface, had always put his own needs and well-being first. And selfishness always increased as a person got older. Probably her own acceptance of Katie's offer had been selfish—to save herself further trouble. Easy options got more attractive the older you got, the more effort every action involved. And the more it didn't seem to matter whether they turned out well or not.

Bettina put herself in the dock. She had known that there was some kind of threat to the flat, and thereby possibly to herself. Someone had been in before she left for Edinburgh. Why hadn't she—rather than accepting Katie's offer—employed a security firm, or a flat-sitter? Why hadn't she asked someone like Mark to stay there for the four nights that she would be away? He had a mobile, and would not have been out of the reach of any of his potential employers.

But then she grimaced. She disliked the thought of Mark having the freedom of her flat. She disliked the thought of Mark full stop. She knew Sylvia considered she was unfair to him, and admitted to herself that she might be. But the truth was that he was associated in her mind with Sam Battersby, with Sergeant Malley, and men of that type. Even if he got the Nobel Peace Prize, or for that matter the prize for astrophysics, those were the associations that would remain around him in her mind, the men she would class him with.

“I blame myself,” said Bettina, after she had settled into the car in the police compound at Heathrow and had begun the drive through hideous suburb after hideous suburb toward central London. Being met at the airport by a young policewoman had given her a feeling somewhere between being a VIP and being a prime suspect.

“Why is that?” the capable young woman asked, keeping her eyes on the road.

“How stupid can you get—asking an old woman to flat-sit for you when you're away?”

“Mrs. Jackson is a friend of yours, isn't she?”

“So she's still alive?”

“Yes, but very poorly.”

“She's a fighter. Please God she pulls through…Yes, she is a friend of mine. And that makes it stupider, and nastier too: how
could
I get Katie involved in something like this, when I knew that someone—God knows who it can be—had been showing an interest in the flat?”

“Yes—we'd had a hint of that from Mrs. Tuckett.”

“Oh, was it Clare put you onto my being in Edinburgh?”

“Yes. Mr. Seddon put us onto her, and Mrs. Tuckett told us where you were staying.”

Bettina looked at her, her forehead creased.

“Mr. Seddon? Peter? How did you get in touch with Peter? I thought he was in Bournemouth.”

“No, not at all. It was he who went round to your flat, and thought there was something wrong when he couldn't get an answer. He went back a second time a few hours after, and when the same thing happened, he called us.”

“I see.”

But she didn't really see, and they remained largely silent until they pulled up in front of Bettina's apartment building in Holland Park Crescent. It was a substantial nineteenth-century house with five apartments carved out of it, and at the top of the four-step flight up to the front door there stood a policeman. He was witness to the fact that the powers that be at Scotland Yard had recognized that Bettina was a pretty well-known novelist, and the media could well get interested in the news that an intruder of some kind had battered an old woman who had been sleeping in the distinguished writer's bed.

“Is Murchison here?” the policewoman asked the uniformed guard. He nodded.

“Arrived back ten minutes ago. Waiting for you.”

The policewoman led Bettina up her own stairs and into her own flat. Bettina had just time to register that there were savage cuts around the lock when she was introduced to a man pushing fifty, with a little graying mustache, rimless spectacles, wearing a smart, dark blue suit.

“Mrs. Whitelaw? I'm sorry to have to bring you back from—”

“How's Katie?”

“Holding her own, but only just, I'm afraid. Her age is against her. You mustn't hold out too many hopes—”

“That's just what I must do. Where was she attacked? In bed?”

“No. She was found in the doorway there.” They were inside the flat now, and he pointed to the door between the sitting room and the study. “She was—hit around the head.” Bettina had a strong sense of his holding something back, but for the moment she let it pass.

“I noticed that the main door from the landing had been forced.”

“Yes,” said Murchison, and Bettina had that feeling of caution once again. “We're having an expert in to examine that. If you were just to look around the flat, at the most obvious things, is there anything you notice that is different? Moved, for example, or maybe missing?”

Bettina's eyes were such that she had to walk around the sitting room, looking at chairs, tables, cupboards, and walls. Then she did the same in the study and the two bedrooms.

“There is some disturbance on the desk in the study,” she announced when she had concluded. “And one picture missing.”

“Yes—we'd noticed a gap, and the brighter wall-paper,” Murchison said quietly. They went over to the place near the door out to the landing. “What was there?”

“An Australian aboriginal painting by John Mawurndjurl. I'll write the name down for you. A bark painting—very intricate and geometrical—but not an abstract: more and more shapes emerge the more you look at it.”

“But not especially valuable, surely?”

Bettina raised her eyebrows at the assumption.

“Not the
most
valuable I have, certainly. But I bought it some time in the mid-eighties—because I liked it, but also on Hughie's advice. Hughie is my friend who's an art critic. He says it must be worth now many times what I paid for it. You should talk to Hughie—that's Eugene Naismyth. You can contact him through the
Sunday Telegraph,
or I could give you his home address.”

Murchison nodded, taking everything in and filing it.

“Right, I will. First things first, though. Do you know of anyone who would want to kill you, or injure you, or steal from you?”

“No to the first two. But steal—”

“Mrs. Whitelaw mentioned to me someone showing an interest in her flat,” said the policewoman. Bettina looked at her approvingly.

“That's what it was. Shortly before I went to Edinburgh I was sure someone had been in here. Nothing was missing, but things had been moved in the study.”

“Sure?”

“Absolutely sure.” Murchison nodded. He trusted her, she thought. She was pleased at gaining the trust of a calm if limited mind that could weigh evidence.

“Now what about keys to the flat?” Murchison went on.

“But surely he—” Bettina stopped short. She mustn't imagine she could teach him his job. “Well, Katie had one for a start.”

“Anyway? Not just given her while she was flat-sitting for you this week?”

“Anyway. She still did work for me now and then. And Clare has one—Clare Tuckett, my agent.”

“Yes, she's told us that. I'm a bit hazy about agents. Why would your agent need a key to the flat?”

“She's a friend as well as my agent. I probably gave her one when I was away but wanted her to do something here, or collect something.”

Murchison practically tut-tutted.

“Anyone else?”

“Mark, my nephew. He stayed here for a bit when he arrived from Australia, and I had one cut for him then.”

“And in all these cases you never asked for the key back?”

There was despair in his voice that decades of trying to educate the overtrusting public had had such meager effect.

“No, I—” began Bettina weakly.

“And all these people had a key to the front door as well as to the flat?”

“Well, one of them would be no use without the other.”

“And all these keys could have spawned other sets of keys, if anyone close to the holder thought it was worthwhile to get one made?”

“Yes, I suppose so. You think I've been silly…Oh, Peter may still have one. Peter Seddon. He was my partner many years ago. Partner as in lover.”

“He didn't use it when he came round. He called us.”

“Well, maybe he'd lost it, or given it back to me sometime. I'm afraid I don't remember.”

She saw, plain as the back of her hand, a thought going across Murchison's face: maybe Peter thought it unwise to show the police he had his own key. It had become obvious that the police thought the marks on the front door were a blind—a red herring. But perhaps they could explain why anyone close to her would want to steal one of her aboriginal paintings—worth something, certainly, but far from the most valuable paintings in her collection.

There were footsteps on the stairs and a knock on the door. A police rider was there, helmet under his arm, a parcel of books in one hand. It made an odd picture, but Murchison merely nodded his thanks and closed the door.

Bettina's eyes went to the pile of books. Immediately she recognized
The Heart of the Land.
Murchison saw her recognition and looked a little shamefaced.

“When we found out who lived here—yesterday afternoon it was, when I talked to Mr. Seddon—I asked the library to put together anything they could get hold of about you. That's one of yours, is it?”

“That's right. One of my Australian ones. About to be filmed. I had to stop writing about my own country because I was getting too remote from it…And this is a book of interviews by a man who specializes in interviewing women. It was the only time I've ever enjoyed being interviewed, as a matter of fact…And here's a history of Australian literature. I think they gave me all of a page, which is probably more than I deserve…” Bettina paused, surprised. “What on earth is this?”

She was looking at a copy of
Hi!
magazine, a cheap weekly that specialized in celebrities and paid good money for home interviews with them, lavishly illustrated. Film and television stars, footballers and other athletes in photogenic sports, aristocrats, rich businessmen, and game show hosts—these were the usual grist for their mill. It was a magazine that did not aim high.

“What can a common little mag like this have to do with me?” asked Bettina, looking disgustedly at a cover picture of Joan Collins, happy at last with a new man. Superintendent Murchison took the magazine up.

“Joan Collins, of course,” he said, flicking through the pages. “Andy Cole, the Duchess of Westminster, that Australian barmaid from the Queen Vic, Princess Michael of Kent—”

“The Queen Vic? Is that
EastEnders
?”

“Yes. She's out of the series now. What's her name?”

“Is it Kerry Probyn?”

“Yes.” He'd found the place and opened up the magazine. “About to start filming
The Heart of the Land.
”

On the first page there was an Armstrong-Jonesy portrait of Kerry herself. On the second page there was a picture of Kerry and Bettina around the coffee table, as close as Bettina ever allowed herself to get in the course of the interview. “About to star in a major film,” said the rubric at the top of the page. Murchison flicked over. There was another picture, of Kerry standing at the very door they were now standing by, and to her left was the bark picture by John Mawurndjurl where now there was a mere gap.