Blood Brotherhood (25 page)

She was gone a long while, but James Grimwade, chomping his way through a mixed grill and the
Evening News,
did not notice, or make any attempt to catch what she was saying when her voice floated back from the hall. Eventually she came back into the dining-room, with a very puzzled expression on her face.

‘That was funny,' she said.

‘What was?' grunted James.

‘That. It was the police. They're coming here.'

‘Eh?' said James, starting forward out of his lethargy.

‘Nothing to do with us,' said his wife soothingly. ‘It was about that au pair girl we had — I'd almost forgotten her. You remember, the Norwegian.'

‘The lovely Randi?' said James, licking his tongue around his greasy mouth. ‘How could I ever forget? The anticipation aroused by the name! The disappointment of the sight of her at the front door! Is she back putting the damper on some other household?'

‘No. You remember that time when she went missing for the night, and came back home the next day all hysterical, and swearing she'd been raped?'

‘Oh, I remember. Swore she'd been raped but wouldn't go to the police. Don't tell me she's gone along and told them now! She's been a while about it!'

‘Don't be silly, Jim. It wasn't like that at all. They were asking me whether anything odd or out of the ordinary happened while she was with us, and I racked my brains and couldn't think of anything. Then suddenly I remembered this, and told them.'

‘I don't know that you should have done that,' said James Grimwade. ‘After all, it was only her imagination.'

‘Well, we don't
know
that, do we?'

‘Oh, come on! Wouldn't go to the police — what does it look like, eh?'

‘Well, of course that's what we thought at the time. But often they
won't
go to the police. There've been lots of articles about rape recently on the women's pages — it's the in subject — and they all say that.'

‘I don't believe a word of it. She just wanted attention, but wasn't willing to make it official. She'd been seeing too many X films — all the films about that time had subjects like that, and her story sounded just as if she'd lifted it from one of them.'

‘Randi didn't go to the cinema. She wouldn't even take the children to the revival of
The Sound of Music.
Anyway, what
was
the story? I forget the details. Wasn't it some young man she said she'd met at the SPCK Bookshop, or something?'

‘That's it. They'd met there the week before and arranged to meet for coffee. And the story was that he drugged her and took her off somewhere and — wait a bit: didn't she say that it wasn't him that raped her but someone else?'

‘That's right — I remember now. It did sound a bit fantastic, I must admit. On the other hand, Jim, you've got to admit that she did
seem
in a terrible state. It took us ages to piece the story together, I remember.'

‘But why on earth should it come up again now, for heaven's sake?'

‘Goodness knows. But there's a police inspector coming here to ask questions about it. Flying down from the North of England.'

‘Good God,' said James Grimwade. ‘We'd better sit down over coffee and remember some of the details.'

• • •

For some the journey home was almost over. Philip Lambton was in a train nearing Liverpool, where he would find his rectory taken over by a gang of his young friends, complete with their pot, their bikes and their amplifying equipment. Rapture! Stewart Phipps was drawing up outside his front gate, sweaty and nasty after the ride, and within minutes he would find the note on the kitchen table — for the week's rest and spiritual relaxation in congenial surroundings which his bishop had charitably recommended Stewart Phipps to take had served to show his wife just how blissful life could be without him. Simeon Fleishman sat in his hotel in the Arab quarter of London and wondered whether to take advantage of a temporary improvement in the position of sterling against the dollar and cash in all his remaining travellers' cheques.

The Bishop of Peckham, tucked into his taxi and enjoying his first trouble-free sleep for nearly a week, was in a confused dream of enthronement on the highest spire of Canterbury Cathedral, of addresses to the nation which
The Times
would say brought wit and learning back into the Established Church after an absence of three hundred years, and of avuncular bonhomie at Anglican garden-parties with overseas bishops. With a start he jerked himself awake. No. Not overseas bishops.

And on a crowded train to Newcastle, with the glories of Durham Cathedral shrouded in the mist of a hot day glowing in the distance, the two delegates from Norway were nearing the end of the first stage of their journey home. Randi Paulsen had spent most of the trip working out what she would say to her parishioners when she reached Svartøy: ‘A
most
unpleasant experience in every
way,' she would say. ‘I wouldn't have dreamed it possible. I think it better
not
to talk about it all.'

Now she was wondering whether she dared sink off into a little sleep. Sleep had been very difficult recently. When it had come — and how she had
prayed
for it to come! — it had been hag-ridden sleep, and always before dawn there had crept upon her this new nightmare of the man struggling on the bed as the knife —

She put the thought from her energetically, looked with polite interest at the landscape, and then, overcome with tiredness, let her head drop back against the seat.

But when sleep had possessed her for no more than a few minutes there came upon her not that new nightmare, but the old one, where she was half awake and half asleep, and trying desperately to wake, to do something, to resist, but feeling a great weight of numbness pulling her down, and knowing that people were around her, near her, touching her, and struggling to open her eyes, to scream, and feeling a shape, a person, a man, with his face close to hers, on her, seeing beyond him — the
other
face, that fair-haired young face, and knowing he was holding her down, and then trying to scream, trying so hard to scream, and nothing coming, and feeling —

In her sleep she let out a scream of fear and nausea, and jerked herself awake. She felt instinctively for the knife she had kept with her since — and then remembered. Had she really screamed? Out loud? She looked around the carriage, at Bente Frøystad and the solid Northern families beginning their holidays; she looked into their eyes and scanned them for signs that she had given herself away. Then, seeing nothing, she relaxed the iron rigidity of her shoulders one iota, and smiled around the compartment her terrible forgiving smile.

Robert Barnard (1936-2013) was awarded the Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Nero Wolfe Award, as well as the Agatha and Macavity awards. An eight-time Edgar nominee, he was a member of Britain's distinguished Detection Club, and, in May 2003, he received the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing. His most recent novel,
Charitable Body
, was published by Scribner in 2012.

Copyright © Robert Barnard 1977
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electric or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

All the characters and events portrayed in this story are fictitious.

First published in the United States of America in 1978 by the Walker Publishing Company, Inc.

ISBN: 0-8027-5387-6

ISBN: 978-1-4767-3396-8 (eBook)