Incarnate (21 page)

Her lips were stiff and clumsy. “What do you suggest?”

“Tours of the cells are your specialty, I think.”

He must feel very safe. “I’ve had enough of those, thank you.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I think we all have.” He leaned back, wedging his feet on either side of the well of his desk. “Well, what brings you here this time?”

Suddenly she knew that he thought she was here to inform on Martin, that she’d brought Boycott to ensure she didn’t implicate herself. “Miss Wolfe alleges—” Boycott said, but she cut him off. “What do you think I’ve come for?” she said.

“Could it be to apologize?”

She’d hoped he would say she meant to tell him about Martin, so that she could demand why he should expect anything of the kind. “Why,” she said, struggling to keep calm, “do you think I should?”

“It might seem appropriate to some. Then again, we shouldn’t hold you more responsible than presumably you were. I believe Mr. Wallace is still out of the country.”

He was putting on a show for Boycott, she hoped Boycott realized. “You know damn well he is,” she said, “and you needn’t think I’m here to say anything about him.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Much more of his game and she might fly at him. “What changed your mind?”

“Why, nothing. I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You’ve had so many people down there over the weekend that you can’t remember them all, have you?”

“Miss Wolfe, I do think you should tell me what you want. I really am quite busy. If you have something to tell me, as the prince said, I’m all ears.”

“Inspector Maitland,” Boycott said, “I have a signed statement from Miss Wolfe in which she says you arrested her without due cause and subjected her to harassment in order to force her to accuse Martin Wallace of a crime.”

Maitland gazed levelly at her. If he was hoping she would look away, he would be disappointed. Eventually he sighed. “I can see why you might want to discredit me,” he said, “but all the same, that kind of allegation is very serious indeed. I don’t think you are an unreasonable person, just hasty when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. I should like to ask you to reconsider.”

“I’m sure you would.”

He turned to Boycott. “When is this supposed to have taken place?”

“On Saturday morning between seven and nine o’clock.”

“Indeed.” He reached for an alphabet file on his desk, then looked up at her. She didn’t think his sympathetic expression would fool Boycott. “Could you perhaps have been dreaming?” he said.

“I wonder how I could have dreamed what you said about Lenny Bennett’s cell.”

“Tell me and perhaps we’ll see. No? You’ve nothing to add?” He beckoned Boycott to his desk and flipped open the file. “Please call this number and ask them where I was on Saturday morning.”

Boycott glanced sharply at Molly. “I insist,” Maitland said.

She should have known that he would have covered himself after he had let her go. It didn’t matter, he’d given himself away on Saturday by telling her how the film had been shown to be fake. That was in her written statement, and nobody else could have told her. “I’m calling about Inspector Maitland—Joseph Maitland, yes,” Boycott said as the policeman nodded. Boycott asked his question, listened, said, “Are you sure? Well, of course. No disrespect intended. Thank you.”

When he replaced the receiver he kept his back to Molly. “It must take half an hour to get there from here.”

“Oh, at least,” Maitland said.

Molly’s fists were clenching. “Well, who says he wasn’t here?”

Boycott turned, his large face sad and weary, but Maitland spoke. “Until eight o’clock it was only the vicar who saw me at the organ.” She could see that he enjoyed the pause before he said, “After that it was the entire choir.”

“Well, Miss Wolfe,” Jake Gould said, “you certainly seem to like to keep everyone guessing.”

Beyond the double glazing a glacier of cloud crept across the sky. The smells of leather and cigar smoke caught in Molly’s throat and made her swallow painfully, the air conditioning filled her mouth with the taste of tin. “I’m sorry, I don’t follow,” she said.

“Either you’re just being a woman or you wanted to make up for your behavior with Ben Eccles by being so loyal to Wallace that you’d risk losing your job.”

“I didn’t do it for Martin. When I gave Oliver Boycott that statement I honestly believed I was right.”

“Right for you, maybe, but wrong for us.” He stared at her. “Whose idea was it?”

“Mine. I give you my word.”

“Admittedly it’s difficult to believe it could have taken two people to concoct such an incompetent lie. Just what the eff did you think you were going to achieve?”

“I wasn’t trying to achieve anything. I believed what I said, that’s all.”

“And now?” When she didn’t reply at once, he said, “You’re surely not still trying to insist there was something in what you said?”

Because there was no point in telling him there was, she said, “No.”

“I should jolly well think not. It’s incredible to me that you could have behaved so stupidly and thoughtlessly. You’re good at your job when you want to be, I don’t understand how you can be so unstable. Frankly, Miss Wolfe, after the business with Eccles and now this, it’s no longer a question of keeping people guessing about you, it’s a matter of your being all too dismayingly predictable.”

She only wished she could predict herself. “And really, all this nonsense about a policeman called Randy,” he said. “I can only hope your relationship with Wallace helps you work out these problems you seem to have with men.”

She wanted to know what MTV intended to do about Martin, but there was a limit to the insults she could take. “Would you like my resignation right now?” she said, and cursed herself.

“It certainly might seem appropriate. I should be interested to hear if you can think of any reason why I shouldn’t lire you, other than that it’s nearly Christmas.”

“Only that Martin has got used to working with me.”

“You really must have very little grasp of the situation, or else you want me to think so.” He glanced at his watch, at a desk diary, at her. “No, the only thing I can find to say on your behalf is that it seemed rather spiteful of the police to leak the story to the press after you had withdrawn your accusation.”

Of course she’d had to withdraw it, if only to give herself time to think.

Gould closed his diary with a loud snap. “I’m not firing you,” he said, “but I would strongly suggest you start looking for another job, maybe one less demanding. Even if Wallace continues, and I can’t decide that until I’ve talked to him, it’s hard to see who you might work with once he finishes. I’m giving you leave of absence until he comes back. Try and rest.”

He was being compassionate in his own terms, but she would rather have stayed at work: she would already be alone over Christmas—the trains were virtually at a standstill, she would never be able to get to her parents. She was at the door when he said, “There is one more thing.”

She turned and was dismayed by his expression. “It’s a pity,” he said, “but I think you ought to realize nobody would have suspected Wallace of anything if it hadn’t been for your attempt to discredit the police.”

It seemed pointlessly vindictive of him. Happy Christmas to you too, she thought. She took the lift down to the eighth floor.

Nell was squatting by a low shelf, indexing the books on cards. Molly realized she had never noticed the walls, which were green, for the disorder Nell had tackled by herself. “You’ve done well,” she said.

“I enjoy it.” Nell stood up, dusting the knees of her plaid skirt. “I like things to be in order. It occupies my mind.”

“Will you be staying in town over Christmas?”

“We’ll have to. We can’t go home—I mean, where we used to live.” She was sorting the index cards onto her desk as expertly as a casino dealer. “My daughter’s disappointed, I think.”

“I was going to say if you don’t know many people yet you might like to come over for a Christmas meal.”

“We’d love to. All—” She faltered and looked puzzled. “All
right
,” she said, somehow inappropriately. “Both of us would love to come.”

“How about Boxing Day?” Molly wrote her address on a blank index card and went down to her office to collect her binoculars. She’d done a good turn for herself as well as for Nell. Nell could keep her in touch with events at MTV.

As Molly walked blobs of snow dripped from trees in Hyde Park under the darkening sky. A fat woman sat down in the snow and laughed helplessly at herself, a businessman picked himself up quickly, pretending someone else had fallen, not him.

She stared at the police station as she passed and felt not at all vulnerable. The sight of a policeman’s helmet bobbing in the crowd ahead no longer seemed threatening— until she saw the policeman’s face.

For a moment panic grabbed her stomach like a hook. It was the skinhead policeman, striding into a hotel. When he emerged, marching a young woman who wore a jacket covered with zippers, Molly strolled forward, heart jerking. He glanced at her as he shoved his captive into the police car. He didn’t recognize her—he had never met her! But she recognized him.

He sat by the young woman and squeezed the zippered pocket over her right breast, squeezed the breast too. “Girlie, what you’ve got in there is going to put you away for years,” Molly heard him say as the car door slammed. Even if his name weren’t Randy, she thought, her dream had been right that it ought to have been.

She watched the car as it swung into the forecourt of the police station a few hundred yards away, then she walked home.

As she unlocked the apartment door, she consulted her watch and decided to call Chapel Hill.

“Am I taking you away from breakfast?”

“That’s okay, we’re just finishing. How are you, Molly?”

“Sorry that you won’t be here for Christmas. I know you can’t be, don’t worry. How are things with you?”

“Oh, pretty good. Yes, pretty good, I think.”

“Martin, this is complicated but you ought to know. I told you the film you were sent was fake. Now I’m convinced that it was faked in order to show what actually happened.”

After a pause he said, “What makes you think that?”

This might be the hard part. “Do you remember what I said about my dreams?”

“Sure, I remember.”

Did he sound disappointed? “You did believe me, didn’t you?”

“Sure, why not? It wasn’t so hard to believe.”

“Well then, Martin, listen to this. I dreamed the police took me in for questioning and Maitland gave away that he’d helped kill Lenny Bennett. It was so vivid that it was only afterward I realized it had been a dream. And then, not half an hour ago, I saw proof it was more than a dream. They killed Lenny Bennett, Martin, I’d stake my reputation on it,” she said and realized that wasn’t much of a wager just now.

“Can you prove they did?”

“Well, no, that isn’t what I meant. I know they did but I can’t prove it.”

“Then I don’t see what it changes.”

“Only that you were right to go on screen about the film.” The clarity and optimism she’d felt on realizing she had cheated the future were fading. “At least you know you were justified. Mrs. Bennett wasn’t upset for nothing after all.”

“I guess that’s so. Well, Molly, you’ve given me a lot to think about.”

“Yes …” She’d meant to relieve him of some of his worries, but wasn’t sure she had. “Call me over Christmas if you like,” she said.

Later she went down to Bayswater Road for a Chinese takeaway. The plastic tray burned her hands as she toiled home, the hardening slush froze her feet. She played a Tom Waits cassette while she ate from a serving tray on her lap. The sad, gravelly voice filled the room, a black voice from a white mouth, and she wondered what on earth she was going to do with her time. She’d build the extra kitchen cupboards she kept wishing for.

It’s a Wonderful Life
was the first of television’s seasonal treats, James Stewart throwing himself in the river and then being redeemed by a vision of how his town would decline without him. She was enjoying it for its sentimentality and for its odd appropriateness to her until she thought: suppose Maitland had leaked the story to the press so that nobody would believe her if the police interrogated her now? Surely he wouldn’t take the risk. Nevertheless, before she went to bed she double-checked all the locks on the doors and windows.

She lay in bed and watched the beginning of a new snowfall. The small flakes floating past the gap between the curtains looked gentle as sleep. Perhaps her dream of the police cell had been so intense because it had involved Martin and her unacknowledged fear for him. It didn’t bother her so much now that she couldn’t tell where the dream had begun or ended, for she thought she could guard against that in the future by telling herself to wake. She dozed and then woke for a moment convinced she had already dreamed something into being, but what? Sleep seemed altogether more reassuring. She dreamed for the first time in eleven years of a red door that had once been painted green, a red front door with a canted dog-faced knocker. The door was ajar, but she managed to wake screaming, bathed in sweat, a moment before she would have had to push it open. The worst thing was that she couldn’t remember how she had got there in the dream.

19

W
HEN
Geoffrey looked up it didn’t help. He ought to have known not to stare at the stamps for so long, even though they fascinated him. It wasn’t as if they were worth very much, though the teenager who’d sold them to him had thought they were. “These are special, they’re 3-D,” he’d said proudly, and Geoffrey had had to point out that they would be worth more if he completed the set. He must have outgrown stamps when he’d taken up motorcycling, for he’d shrugged at Geoffrey’s price as he’d unstudded his pocket to lock up the check. It had taken quite a while for the smell of leather to follow his jingling and creaking out of the house.

Now Geoffrey looked up from the stamps that seemed embedded in the page and wandered into the bedroom for a change of scene. He sat on the bed and gazed out toward Hampstead Heath, where tiny skiers glided across the dazzling snow under a bright blue sky, and wondered how long the weather would keep him away from the auctions. The breathing seeped back into his consciousness, and he remembered it wasn’t the weather that was keeping him in the house.